Author(s): Greg Grandin

Biography & Memoir

In 1927, Henry Ford, then the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square mile-tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he was going to build a rubber plantation. But Ford wanted more than just rubber. To the unkempt rainforest he would bring order, efficiency and productivity - the principles of mass production. And across the United States, small-town America was giving way to consumerism and crass, brash new society. Ford wanted to create an America in his own image - Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. But Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins. Greg Grandin tells the powerful fable of the pride and arrogance of the man who thought he alone could tame the Amazon. It is the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature; it is the struggle too within Ford himself, the man who despised the new America that he himself had set in motion, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, "Fordlandia" portrays a man suffering under the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.