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    Esch, Whitened and Enlightened

    Uploaded by

    Josefina Lewin
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    © All Rights Reserved
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    90 + FERNANDO TELXEIRA DA SILVA de Santos" (PRD diss, Universidade de S20 Paulo, 2007). cHarre! Whitened and Enlightened The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon ELIZABETH ESCH ‘Shades of Tarzan! Youll never guess these bright, happy; healthy school ile lve in a jungle ity that didnt even exis few years ago —"The Ford Rubber Plantations” ‘A look atthe world of the Ford Motor Company in the decades after World ‘War I reveals jst how thoroughly the company had been able to create what it described as an “empire” The war had, of cours, played a massive role in this, spreading not just Ford’s products and production methods across the globe, but also those of the United States. As Ford workplaces appeared around the assembly shops, manufacturing plans, and car dealers—so too did fantasized would one day inchude all ame to be called first in Michigan, hey were increasingly part of a global geography. By the mi te 19308 an expanding and border-crossing net- ‘work linked Ford City, California, to Ford City, Tennessee, both “Ford towns"; Pequaming, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and purchased by Ford in 1933, igan, where Ford owned and ran a timber jst advanced sawmills; further south but ‘a country to the north of the United States was Ford City, Ontario, Canada, I geography and company schemes to Port Elizabeth, -knamed the “Detroit of South Africa” where would- 92 + BLIZABETH ESCH Pethaps the most startling example of the international “Ford town” is to bbe found at Fordlindia, the first of two plantations the Ford Motor ‘operated inthe state of Ps ‘grow and process rubbi that, by the middle of Fo ‘ompany Brazil, Here the company linked the imperative to the imperative to create new people, urged by state tenure in Brazil, had linked its ideas of modernity and progress to those promoted by the company in the Northern Amazon and across the globe. While the history of Fordlandia can be used to reveal narra tives of many kinds, some more fantastic than others, itis particularly useful for thinking about the relationship of racial engineering to social engineering and the relationship ofeach to the built environment of the plantation? In his wonderful reflection on the relationship(s) between social and spatial engineering included inthis volume, Andrew Herod skilfully directs us o con- sider the — perhaps obvious but nevertheless often overlooked — significance of built environments to relations of power. Most importantly, Herod draws attention to the dialectic tha links workers and their struggles tothe landscapes they inhabit, considering company towns in the continuum of housing and lv- ing arrangements that are both imposed on workers and created by them. He ‘writes, “The physicality of landscapes is a reflection of the social interests of those who construct them but also... [the way in which landscapes are made shapes how socal relations subsequently unfold (the social and the spatial, in other words, are mutually constituted and co 5 To Heroxts essay adds a further consid tis the desire for and commitment to racial improvement that allowed the Ford Motor Company to build common cause with modernizersin Brazil. In pursuit of what Ann Laura Stoler has called ization” company men and Brazilian elites saw in the very ma teriality of plantation living possibilities for social engineering.” DIEGO RIVERA'S DREAM Institute of Arts to cover the four In 1932, when he was invited by the Det walls ofits courtyard with frescoes ofhi River Rouge plant as the ce sent the idea that industry’ “development” of the natural world would provide Whitened and Enlightened + 93 the basis for human liberation. These two large and detailed frescoes of the work process are surrounded by twenty-five other, smaller frescoes depicting the bounty and beauty of the natural world, the worlds of science and inven- tion, and several characters who represent what Rivera called the “four elements of the world” These elements formed the basic ingredi Rivera was the key to modern manufacturing poss ly as repre sented by skyscrapers and cars. Of these differently colored figures Rivera ssi: “The yellow race represents the sand, because is most numerous. And ‘ace, the first in this country, is like the iron or, the first thing necessary for the steel. The black race islike the coal, because ithas a great native aesthetic sense, a real flame of feeling and beauty in ts ancient sculpture, its native rhythm and ‘music. So its aesthetic sens is lke the ire, and its labor furnished the hardness Which the carbon in the coal gives to steel. The white race is like the lime, not only because itis white, but because lime isthe organizing age making of steel. It binds together the other elements and so you see the white race asthe great organizer ofthe world”* ‘The explicit link between race and in roduction that Rivera ticulated verbally and through his art was Henry Ford made as ‘Writing in his first memoir that his company’s product was not so much cars asimen, Heney Ford had gained notoriety through his multifaceted attemps to “rebuild” human beings. Most was his five-dolla duced in 1914, which required immigrant workers to prove the to becoming American through a range of behaviors they pr of the workplace. Sobriety, cleanliness, ing in ‘wage. Though it lasted only about a decade, of behaviors and norms as those to the regime of pro duction practiced in his factories would soon be applied not jus ‘of the world as they came to Ford but also to the peoples ofthe came to them. By 1925, the company had expanded to more than twenty coun- tries, and its particular involvement in Latin America was seen by Rivera as having significance other than as an imperial power in the region. The future of the Americas —its modernity —for Rivera was found in the unique eom- ing together of the technoculture of the hyperdeveloped north, or the United States, with the resilience of traditional indigenous cultural production across the Americas, ‘Though the enormity of Ford impact on the in Rivera's {rescoes, in speaking about them he emphasized not the troubling emergence ‘of US. industrial dominance but instead the emergence of a new world, The 94 + ELIZABETH esc red from trees, smoothly ‘Ocean up the Rouge Rouge plant by water, rubber on one side b transported from the Amazon River across River, where it would be transformed into tr pers represent the process Rivera wished to celebrate in which human labor to goods whose use would be ionalism, learned in the sur- ‘movements, which saw industry as bringing liberation restingly, however, the rubber tappers find no place of the Brazilian state and its homegrown commitment to turn “savages” and other “substandard” people into real Ford men. We cann derstand the decision to build the; if we do not understand the world economic circumstances that led to it. This chapter describes how techniques that are often described as “Americanizing” were used in Brazil in order to ‘of new men? HENRY FORD'S DREAM ‘When Ford launched the project that would result in two rubber plantations being carved out of the Amazon region of Brazil, only one part ofits ideal was to grow and process rubber. Company records reveal an intense interest—and belief —in racial progress, which it relied on as it attempted to “prolet ” they also did not function merely as smma. These two towns should be seen as attempts by Ford to accomplish in an extractive industry —not ‘economy — while bringing to bear a peculiar com supremacy in making workers. Whitened and Enlightened » 95 In the summer of 1928 the Ford-owned Lake Or the newly founded Fordlindia in the state of Par, Bra a barge carrying to two years and for laying its own rail the company brought wit dock construction equipment ... medical supplies ... power house engine room saw mill equipment... road machinery... tugs and workboats”” Though the ‘Ormoc's cargo suggests an extraordinary degree of foresight, subsequent events inthe Amazon reveal that the company was absurdly ill-prepared forthe project itwas undertaking. Approaching Brazil with the same commitment to social engineering it sanage both in Para seem all too often like a prequel to Werner Herzog classic study of colonial overreach in Brazil, Fitzcarraldo. Carl LaRue, a botanist who scouted plantations for Ford, recommended Brazil because, although “labor is somewhat more expensive than in the East labor is also more intelligent than the average labor in the East” LaRue spelled out a solution to the problem of expenses for the company, arguing that the use of machines on a modern pla offset any advantage thatthe plantations of the Amazon Valley are = -admixture has gone on so long that is dificult to distinguish the different types. The mixture isnot a particularly good one from a racial standpoint but itis by no means a bad one... the fate ofthese people is more tragic because they are not possessed of the stliity of the oriental, but have enough of the white race in them to suffer keenly and long intensely forthe beter things. Asit is, their condition is worse than that of any of the coolies in the East far worse ‘even than that ofthe average lave in the old days” 96 + eLIzanErH esc. slightly less draconian model ‘would lead to the degradation of those whites who participated in different expressions of white supremacy that Ford embraced in differen lenge the company’s overrii hierarchies. Indeed the idea that the company believed it could tap the desire for consumer goods they believed flowed in the veins of “Amazonian people” res in the region and the labor of rategy by the United States to gain control from the British ofthe rubber market. As the overwhelming consumer ‘of the world’s rubber, US. industry had a par te when he received in 1923 a letter from H. F the development of mn.” Revealing of the globality of the most nation-based realities, low world prices for rubber would matter in a new way to those who, consumed cars in the United States. The halting democratization of consump- tion of automobiles thus could undergird calls for low world market prices of the commodities from which they were Within five years of Firestone’ appeal, US. firms had acquired land for rub- ber production across the globe: Firestone launched the Liberian plantations to remake the ecology, society, economy, and people of ed an industrial presence in Brazil through its as- [sembly plant in Sao Paulo, built to supply the steadily growing Latin American Whitened and Enlightened + 97 ‘market. Ford’ expansion into the North Amazon occurred alongside a social | debate that was underway in Brazil about the relat agement and social progress In her examination of iio Paulo, | Barbara Weinstein demonstrates how this debate had been developing, “per colating among indu ial hygienists and educators essary to understand engineers, and educators claimed for themselves the professional author- ity and technical expertise necessary to modernize Brazilian society” These professionals were highly interested in Fordist process: “advocates of Fordism, while transformation of the workplace required attention to aspects of industri beyond the production process."* Ford’ arrival in the Amazon could not have been more well-timed from the point of view ofthese reformers. As modernizers who seemed to have tech sy and science on their side, Ford's “American staff” was welcomed by Bra elites who hoped to use the company’s commitments to men-making to fur- ther their own goals and to address the wreckage in the countryside caused by the changing rubber market. The experiment in the Amazon reveals the inner workings of the corporation, and the connection between the economic and social, the natural and the global, realms it sought to dominate. i ‘As part of its agreement with the state government in Pard, the company was required to plant at least a thousand trees within one month ofthe start ofthe ‘operations. Ford managers had arranged to have these rubber seedlings planted_| along the river so that production would be underway before the construction ~ ofthe plantation began. After their arrival, however, the crew was informed the seedlings had actually been-p the state of Amazonas, where Ford had been given permission to cukvate rubber. Loc a prevented the transport ofthe trees from one state to the next. Although they to reverse this decision in court, the company filed to secure release of the trees. So they began again, The frst manager of the plantations was replaced, atthe Lrging of Henry Ford, whose hands-on attention bespoke the symbolic import 45 well asthe economic potential ofthe experiment, by Einard Oxholm, Though Oxholm, captain ofthe Lake Ormec, knew literally nothing about growing rub- ber, Fords arrogant belief that “anyone could learn anything” led to his being put in charge of Fordlindlia. Oxholm remained at Fordlandia until the end of 1929; his tenure there reflected the swagger of @ company intent on absolutely 98» ELIZABETH ESCH he very ecology that had nurtured the trees it was there to exploit. ignorance in the face of decades of local knowledge of rubber 7 the indigenous people Ford Ford had selected was compl toa mono-

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