Fordlandia isn’t just the story of a plantation; it’s a story about Ford’s ego. 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. One newspaper article even reported that Ford’s intent wasn’t just to cultivate rubber, but to cultivate workers and human beings.
In the end, Ford’s utopia failed. Fordlandia’s residents, ever in hope their patriarch would someday visit their Midwestern industrial town in the middle of the jungle, gave up and left.
These days, Fordlandia is quite beautiful, Grandin says. The “American” town where the managers and administrators lived is abandoned and overgrown. Weeds grow over the American-style bungalows, and bats roost in the rafters, and little red fire hydrants sit covered in vines.
In a somewhat similar vein, Ransom E. Olds, founder of the
Oldsmobile company, purchased tens of thousands of acres
near Tampa, Florida, in the 1920’s. His grandiose scheme
for [b]Oldsmar[/b] envisioned a thriving metropolis of 100,000
inhabitants, but in the 1930’s, the economic hard times forced him
to abandon Oldsmar. At that time, it had 400 inhabitants; today it
has 13,000 – 14,000 – still a far cry from his vision.
Check out Firestone Liberia for a different account and result.