Volume 56, Number 15 · October 8, 2009
The Price of Paradise
By Joshua Hammer
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
by Greg Grandin
Metropolitan, 416 pp., $27.50
In the summer of 1927, a thirty-seven-year-old Ford Motor Company executive named Willis Blakeley arrived in the Brazilian port of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River, following a tedious, two-week boat journey from New York City. Employed as a personnel manager in Henry Ford's Services Department, a union-busting operation run by Ford's chief enforcer, Harry Bennett, Blakeley had been sent to Brazil on a secret mission. He was to negotiate concessions with the Brazilian government and establish a rubber plantation and settlement on land the company had identified along a tributary of the Amazon, the Tapajós, six days and 650 miles upriver from Belém.
Review, 3842 words
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