This was pretty amazing; I had never heard of this! In 1927, when Henry Ford was one of the richest people in the world, he bought up over 5000 sq. miles of Amazonian jungle, near a river that fed into the Amazon, near its mouth on the Atlantic Ocean. The purpose was to establish a rubber plantation; that being one of the raw ingredients that he needed for his autos that he couldn’t obtain domestically. At the time, most of the world’s rubber production was located in southeastern Asia (ironically started from seeds brought in from Brazil). Ford was looking to produce it in a country that was free from colonial control, and closer to his factories in Detroit. But although he sunk massive amounts of funding into it, it never worked, and his heirs sold it off after WWII. And as with all things Ford, it got all a little weird.
Now Ford was a past master at analyzing an industrial process and fine-tuning it to perfection. He approached this whole rubber situation in the same way but never thought to consult any agricultural experts. Big mistake. Rubber trees grow in the wild in a disbursed layout for a good reason. They are very susceptible to spreading leaf blight and insect pests to each other if they are growing too close together. The neat rows in the Malaysian plantations didn’t have that problem since very fortunately for them, they had left all the pests behind in Brazil. And lumber that he was going to sell as they cleared off the land? Too soft for most practical uses, ending up being pretty much worthless. But none of Ford’s underlings could have given him any practical advice, should he even listen to it, and God forbid he should ask a local.
But that wasn’t the weird part. Ford, hugely racist, had been dabbling up in Michigan with model American display villages, a la Williamsburg. And he thought Brazil deserved those too, but American style, not Brazilian. So the villages for his workers that he built in the Brazilian jungle were ridiculously unsuited to their location. Cape Cod style homes with no ventilation, absolutely unsuited to the local climate. And good Lord, the man’s fetish for square dancing. Ever the control freak, he also dictated their diet. It wasn’t until the workers rioted and destroyed most of the settlement that he finally gave in on force-feeding them whole wheat bread. And needless to say, alcohol was strictly prohibited.
Talk about your money pits.