Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

Henry Ford is a prime example of a company unsuccessfully attempting to expand overseas. Ford realized that producing his own supply of rubber materials would drastically cut down on expenses and therefore make his own business much more successful. While Ford may not be the nicest or fairest man towards other people, everyone can agree that he has lived a very successful life, becoming famous for single-handedly revolutionizing the automobile industry. However, despite his success in America, his Fordlandia project abroad was a complete failure due to many reasons. As Fordlandia never justified its existence economically, increasingly it was billed as a civilizing mission to take American values to another country and its people.

By 1927, Ford was a very successful industrialist, who had made a fortune out of manufacturing cars and displayed a new model of industrial production. He paid his workers much higher than average wages and offered various other incentives to encourage them to live the lives he thought they should. However, he was not a totally honest employer. He was violently anti-union and employed thugs to intimidate anyone who tried to organize and represent his workforce. Ford's generosity as a boss was dependent on letting the company make decisions for the workers, not just in the factories but in the way employees lived their lives, spies were actively out and about observing workers' off duty lives. Ford thought he could create a vast rubber plantation in Brazil, thus ensuring a reliable supply of latex for his new Model A as well as for his Ford trucks and tractors. In the process, he intended to show the world that his system of production would also elevate the lives of his workers.

There were lots of mist...

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...prey on rubber, Grandin says.

The great carmaker himself witnessed none of this. He never set foot in the town that bore his name, yet his powerful, contradictory personality influenced every aspect of the project. As disaster after disaster struck, Ford continued to pour money into the project. Not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford car. But the more it failed, the more Ford justified the project in idealistic terms. "It increasingly was justified as a work of civilization, or as a sociological experiment," Grandin says. Despite the obstacles faced, Fordlandia did establish some brief success. The area had red fire hydrants on neat streets, running water, a sawmill, a water tower and weekly square dancing. However, the complexity of a jungle, changes in world economy and ongoing war entrenched Fordlandia’s failure as inevitable.