As much as we endeavor to be creatures of rationality and logic, there is yet room in our scientific world for curses. For how else can one explain the inexplicable failures, the improbable collapses, or the unimaginable outcomes that spring up to dog our actions and our dreams? Yes, we are all prone to errors and these can certainly possess the power to undermine our efforts, but what of the disasters that occur despite our meticulousness, our thoroughness, our expertise? Perhaps some things are simply not meant to be. Perhaps the energy to force their actualization is such that it makes them inherently unstable. Perhaps the collective will, or cynicism, of people involved in a venture can have a deleterious effect on the outcome. Or perhaps hexes are real, deciding what shall and shall not be. Henry Ford must have pondered this very question after 1930 and the failure of his grand experiment. Mr. Grandin illuminates.
Carved out of the Amazon rainforest, fordlandia was meant to be a place of power and promise. The dream of Henry Ford, one of the world's most influential industrialists, it was a planned community hacked out of the Brazilian jungle, a beacon of civilization that would beget others of its kind while helping to foster the ideas and the practices of the modern world in a Brazil lagging well behind the developed West. Created in 1928, its purpose was to revitalize Brazil's rubber industry, after it had been stolen and transported to Asia by ambitious Europeans eager for profit and control, while granting Henry Ford a controllable supply of rubber and an opportunity to spread his philosophy, a marriage of agriculturalism and industrialism that promised to happily marry man and his work in a union that would bring peace and prosperity to the the newly mechanized world.
And yet, despite all the expertise of the Ford Motor Company, despite the willingness of its founder to lavish Fordlandia with funding, despite the determination of successful men to make the prefab town a going concern, and despite the handsome wages offered to its Brazilian workforce, Fordlandia was an unmitigated disaster, plagued by bad management, bad science and bad relations with both the men who worked it and the government that sanctioned it. It was beset with riots and ruined harvests, a toxic brew that mercilessly destroyed its industrial capacity and made of the promising town nothing but a playground of broken dreams.
How could something so promising turn sour so swiftly? In Fordlandia, Mr. Grandin, an author of non-fiction, explains this failure by introducing the reader to the first few heady decades of the 20th century. He illuminates a world rapidly evolving out of the labor-intensive 1900s and into a world of efficiency and productivity, factories and mechanization. He describes how the men who catalyzed this transformation naively imagined that it would bring about a future free of war, starvation and tyranny, that it would engender a sense of universal brotherhood that would knit humanity together in ways inconceivable to any prior generation. And then, devastatingly, he reveals the extent to which these men were wrong by highlighting what might well be the most enduring lesson of that most bloody century, that the promise of the future can never be a cure-all for what ails society, that society's ailments are, in substantial part, caused by the failings of its own members, and that no amount of technology can bestow upon humanity morality or wisdom. As long as we are humans, there will always be greed and envy, jealousy and avarice, failings that have more-than-ample power to make nightmares of the dreams of great men.
Fordlandia is excellent work. For it not only captures the false optimism of the period; it examines, in some depth, the incredible contradictions in the life of Henry Ford. It chronicles his rise to prominence, his influence upon the world, and his confusing array of values which range from the the admirably universal to the shamefully narrowminded. Most importantly, it captures the central irony of Ford's life, that, in contributing mightily to the creation of the modern world, he destroyed the very existence he championed, one that combined the rural and the mechanical, the farm with the factory. He showed the world how to be productive like never before and, in exchange, the world left him behind. There can be few fates crueller than knowing that your own creation helped to make strangers of you and the world around you.
Yes, Mr. Grandin, at times, is, here, heavy-handed. But as much as his touch sometimes fails him, his thoroughness is admirable, recreating the cultures, the habits and the hopes of a world now lost to us by the passage of some eight decades. An enjoyable lesson in historical forensics... (4/5 Stars)
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