Fordlandia
March 2, 2010 – 7:51 pm
Some would say our church is located in “Fordlandia,” and in some ways that would be correct. However, “Fordlandia” was the name of Henry Ford’s “Quixotic attempt to re-create small-town America in the heart of the Amazon,” and it is also the title of a book about this attempt by Greg Grandin called Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
The title caught my eye both because Ford Motor Company is in our back yard, and also from a missiological/cultural perspective. I thought it would make for some good evening reading anyhow, so I picked it up. So far, I have found it very interesting and somewhat troubling.
Over the next few weeks, I may make a few comments on the book. Following is a quote about Ford’s attempt to Americanize the immigrants who came to work in his Detroit factories.
The majority of the Ford Motor Company’s workforce were immigrants, from Poland, Russia, Italy, the disintigrating Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the Middle East, Japan and Mexico. . . And though ecumenical in his hiring practices, Ford still charged his Sociological Department with Americanizing immigrants, conditioning ongoing employment on their attending English and civic classes. These courses were intentionally mixed by race and country so as to ‘impress upon these men that they are, or should be, Americans, and that former racial, national, and linguistic differences are to be forgotten.’ (38)
And, note this–seemingly unimaginable picture in today’s America:
Commencement from the Ford school had the graduating workers, regaled in their native dress, singing their national songs and dancing their folk dances and climbing up a ladder to enter a large papier-mache ‘melting pot.’ On the stage’s backdrop was painted an immigrant steamship, and as Ford teachers stirred the pot with long ladles the new amalgamated Americans emerged in ‘derby hats, coats, pants, vests, stiff collars, polka-dot ties,’ singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ (38-39).
In the next post, we will talk about Fordlandia in Brazil, part of which is seen in the picture below.
