One Summer: America, 1927 by Bryson Bill

Author:Bryson, Bill [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385537827
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Considering that Willis Blakeley had three thousand workers at his disposal, his achievements were slight. A small section of road was graded and paved. A clinic and dining hall were built. Accommodation was provided, though it was mostly rough and substandard. Superior houses for American managers were sent in kit form from America, but these had been designed by architects in Michigan and showed a complete lack of understanding of jungle conditions. All were provided with heat-retaining metal roofs instead of the traditional thatch, which made them like ovens. No one at Fordlandia was ever comfortable.

Blakely, having proved largely incompetent, was replaced by Einar Oxholm, a Norwegian sea captain who was described by one impartial observer as a big man with a small mind. Like Blakeley, Oxholm knew nothing about botany, agronomy, the tropics, rubber, or anything else that would help him run a large agricultural operation in the jungle. He was a better human being than Blakeley, but not a more competent one, and merely extended the run of ineffectual management.

During Oxholm’s unhappy time there, four of his own children died from fevers. Oxholm’s maid went bathing in the river one evening and emerged in wide-eyed shock with an arm missing. A caiman had bitten it off. The unfortunate woman bled to death.

Morale, never good, plunged further under Oxholm. Workers were deeply disenchanted over pay and conditions, and mystified by the American foods like oatmeal and Jell-O that they were served in the dining hall (though mercifully Ford did not insist on his workers following his soybean diet). Wages were a particular sore point. Most estate employees had assumed that they would be paid $5 a day, as Ford workers in America were. Instead, they found, their pay was 35 cents a day, and from those meager wages money was deducted for food whether it was eaten or not. The limitations placed on personal freedom—in particular, strictures against drinking—were also much resented, especially when the plantation managers could be seen enjoying cocktails on their verandas of an evening. The upshot was that the employees one night cracked and rioted, running through the camp with machetes, belaying pins, and other dangerous implements. Many of the managers had to escape by boat or flee into the jungle until things calmed down.

Eventually, Ford appointed a Scottish-born manager named Archibald Johnston, who was intelligent and able and made many belated improvements. Shops and a school, better housing, and a clean water supply were all provided. He and his estate managers even managed to get seven hundred thousand rubber trees growing, but only at the cost of keeping them constantly fumigated against insects and diseases. Even so, workers had to be sent out to pick caterpillars off the trees by hand. The costs were out of all proportion to any possible profits. At the same time, the onset of the Great Depression meant that demand and prices both slumped; then, during the Second World War, artificial rubber was developed. In 1945, after nearly twenty

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