Fordlandia by Greg Grandin

more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city’s factories with New York banks). 7
    In Fordlandia, industrial regimentation entailed a host of other initiatives besides whistles and punch card clocks. The paying of set bimonthly wages, based on those punched cards, was the most obvious. So was a conception of the workday that made as little concession as possible to the weather, keeping workers “on the clock” when rain poured down in sheets and the temperature soared past 105 degrees. The effort to rationalize life reached into the smallest details of a worker’s day. As in Dearborn, plantation employees were required to wear a metal Ford badge, embossed with their ID number and an industrial panorama that included a factory complex, an airplane, two ships (the Ormoc and Farge ?), and a water tower. The fieldhands who cleared the jungle and tended to the young rubber trees often took off their shirts in the heat, and so they pinned their badges to their belt buckles. The cost of a lost badge was deducted from wages.

    Men line up to receive their pay .

    A worker’s badge depicting the Fordlandia ideal .

    Regimentation also extended into hygiene and health. The company required workers to submit to blood draws to test for disease and injections to vaccinate against smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, and diphtheria. When workers went to punch out at the end of the day, they were met at the clocks by members of the medical team, who gave them their daily quinine pill. They were often reluctant to take it, though, as the high dosage prescribed by Ford’s doctors caused nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, skin rashes, and nightmares. Hiding the pills under their tongues, the workers, once out of sight, would compete to see who could spit theirs the farthest. Plantation doctors also insisted that all workers take the antiparasitical chenopodium, without, as one employee complained, examining them to see if the medicine was required. “The Americans suppose that we are all full of worms,” he said. 8
    AT DAWN, WHEN the whistle gave its first blast summoning workers to their stations, Fordlandia was often still shrouded in mist. Its managers would soon learn that the fog that wafted off the Tapajós early in the morning accelerated the spread of the rubber-destroying fungi. Yet in those early days, before the blight hit, they thought it beautiful, especially when the mist mingled with light’s first rays through standing trees. The undulating hills and hollows of the planting area no longer looked like a wasteland, as over two thousand acres of six-feet-tall rubber trees, lined up in neat rows, had begun to sport young crowns of leaves. The estate was especially enchanting around the American compound. Though it was set back from the dock about a mile and a half, the row of houses nestled on a rise above a bend in the Tapajós, gave its residents a panoramic sunset view of the broad river. Behind the houses, as a buffer to the rest of the plantation, Archie Weeks had left a stand of forest, creating what residents described as a “nature park.” With most of the jungle’s dangers removed, it was easier to contemplate its pleasures. Paths raked clean of the rank, rotting leaves that normally cover the forest floor meandered through ferns, tropical palms, false cedars, and kapoks garlanded with climbers, bromeliads, bignonias, and other tropical flowers; large morpho butterflies flitted over the blossoms, their wings shining blue and black. And that December, Dearborn had sent down about a dozen live pines, to be used as Christmas trees in the American houses, so its homesick American staff could have a proper American holiday.
    Slowly, before the second whistle signaled the official start of the day, the morning sounds of the forest would give way to the noise of waking families, women grinding manioc, and the chatter, first subdued and then playful, of assembling men. Most came from the bunkhouses or the plantation