The entry tells the riot of December 1930 in a paragraph. This piece tells the week, because the riot was the first instrument on the Tapajós that spoke in plain words, and because the two accounts that reached the outside world described two different events. The company’s own version survives in the files of the Companhia Ford Industrial do Brasil at the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, read by the historian Greg Grandin for his book of 2009; what follows draws on his reading of them, with the Associated Press report of December 24 beside it.

The dining hall

Fordlandia had a new dining hall that December, built of concrete with a low roof of asbestos, tar and galvanised iron, replacing a thatched hall with half-open walls that had at least let the air through. The food was Henry Ford’s: oatmeal and tinned peaches from Michigan for breakfast, unpolished rice and whole wheat bread for dinner, chosen in Dearborn for the workers’ health. From the middle of December the cost of meals was deducted from pay, which meant that clerks stood at the door writing badge numbers in a book, and that a man could no longer spend his money where he liked. Common labourers sat at one end of the hall and the skilled men, the mechanics, masons and carpenters, and the foremen, at the other, and waiters served both.

On December 20 a foreman named Chester Coleman arrived from the River Rouge plant to oversee the kitchens. Before he had spent a day on the estate he proposed doing away with the waiters and having the men line up for their food, as they did at the Rouge. John Rogge, the manager, agreed, and the change took effect on Monday the 22nd. Rogge put the deductions and the new arrangement in the hands of Kaj Ostenfeld of the payroll office, a Dane who had worked at the Ford dealership in Rio and had some Portuguese, and whom the workers already disliked.

For the first hour about eight hundred men went through without trouble. Then the skilled men came off work expecting to sit down and be served, and found a line. “We are not dogs,” someone said, “that are going to be ordered by the company to eat in this way.” The hall was an oven. The cooks could not keep up, the clerks were slow with the badge numbers, the line bunched at the door and the men inside crowded the servers. A brick mason from Rio Grande do Norte, Manuel Caetano de Jesus, thirty-five years old, pushed into the hall and confronted Ostenfeld. There was history between them. De Jesus took off his badge and handed it to him. Ostenfeld laughed; it was, de Jesus said afterwards in evidence, “as if he was making fun”. Ostenfeld’s own account was that de Jesus turned to the crowd and said, “I have done everything for you, now you can do the rest.”

What followed was, one witness said, like “putting a match to gasoline”. The pots, glasses, plates, sinks, tables and chairs went first, and the noise brought the rest of the estate. Ostenfeld and Coleman, who had understood none of it, got into a truck and drove to Rogge; behind them someone shouted, “Let’s break everything, let’s get hold of Ostenfeld.” The crowd went from the dining hall to the office, the power house, the sawmill, the garage, the radio station and the receiving shed, and destroyed what could be broken. They cut the lights. They put a truckload of meat into the river, broke the pressure gauges, tried to pull the pilings from under the pier, set fire to the machine shop, burned records and emptied the commissary. Then they went for the things that were most Ford: every truck, tractor and car on the estate, windscreens and lamps smashed, tanks holed, tyres cut, several pushed into ditches and one rolled down the bank into the Tapajós. And then the time clocks, the pendulum clocks placed about the estate at which a man punched in and out, which they broke to pieces.

The night on the river

Rogge, about to sit down to his own dinner in the American compound, sent a Brazilian he trusted to cable Belém for help before the crowd reached the radio, and told Curtis Pringle to get the Americans out, the women first, who were “in a very nervous condition”. They went by the launch Rogge had kept ready, and by canoe, motor boat and horse. Rogge and the men who stayed walked out to meet about forty workers coming up towards the American houses.

“What are your grievances?” he asked.

“We are mechanics, masons, and carpenters, not table waiters.”

Rogge said he would hear them if they would go and calm the others, but by then the men sent to the bars at Pau d’Água had come back with drink, and he heard a group chanting “Brazil for Brazilians. Kill all the Americans.” He ordered his staff to the tug. Two of them, David Riker and Archie Weeks, were cut off and spent two days in the forest. Weeks had already driven a touring car into a crowd with clubs and knives and had his rear window put in by stones. The rest spent the night anchored in the middle of the river, listening to the noise of the estate being broken, which went on into the morning.

The two reports

The company’s Belém agent, James Kennedy, wired that night to Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways in New York, whose new line between Belém and Manaus stopped at Santarém to refuel, and asked for a plane: the place, he said, would be “a total wreck in 24 hours”. Trippe agreed at once. On Tuesday morning Kennedy, a Brazilian lieutenant named Ismaelino Castro and three soldiers took off from the Belém waterfront in a twin-engined Sikorsky flying boat, flew seven hours, and landed at Aveiros, just below Fordlandia, where Rogge met them. They spent the night there and on Wednesday heard that the plantation had woken quiet.

That was the day the second event happened. The concession had included land already settled when it was granted, and the company had given notice that holdings on its edge, an orphan asylum among them, were to be cleared by December 31 for new planting. On Wednesday the people of Pau d’Água and the other villages round the estate, with guns and machetes, marched on the office. Kennedy and Castro had the Sikorsky’s pilot fly low over them, and they scattered. It was this march, or word of it, and not Monday’s riot, that the Associated Press reported from Rio on December 24, dating it a day earlier than the company’s files do: “trouble over an eviction order broke out on the Ford rubber plantation in Para yesterday,” settlers “armed with guns and other weapons, determined to halt the move to evict them from their homes,” and the state commandeering a Pan American plane to fly police to the spot. The New York Times printed it on Christmas morning under the heading “Armed Brazilians Raid Ford Rubber Plantation; Police Are Sent by Plane to Enforce Evictions”. From Detroit the company said it had received no information. The same despatch gave the concession as 6,000,000 acres, more than twice its size, and said the rubber would one day yield 6,000,000,000 pounds a year, about five times the world’s production. The riot over the cafeteria line, the badge and the clocks did not reach the wires at all.

The clean-up

On Christmas Eve a boat with thirty-five soldiers “fully armed and equipped with machine guns” tied up at Fordlandia. They went through the estate confiscating knives, guns and anything else that could be used as a weapon. Kennedy then had them evict the inhabitants of Pau d’Água and the other settlements round the plantation and close the bars, restaurants and brothels, which the company had wanted gone for two years: “Entirely clean them out,” he told them. The houses were pulled down, the sanitation squad burned the latrines and poured quicklime in the pits, and in time the landowner, Francisco Franco, was made to sell for what a relative later called the price of a banana.

Kennedy had told Lieutenant Castro that he would not meet the workers’ demands “under any circumstances”. The demands had been put to the lieutenant by a delegation on the Wednesday: that Ostenfeld be dismissed; that men be allowed to eat where and what they chose, rather than whole wheat bread and unpolished rice “for health reasons”; that they be free to go to the cafés outside the gate and to board the river steamers without a permit; and that single men not be bunked fifty to a house. In the following weeks the Belém papers printed more. De Jesus told the Estado do Pará that the clocks were hated not only for what they were but for where they stood, too far from the work for a man to punch in on time “under penalty of losing wages”. Another man said the food was charged for when it had not been part of his contract, and that the fish was “not fit for a dog kept hungry for three days”. Others said that pay was often short and made up in company “cards” that were hard to exchange for money on leaving; that men on the outer roads and clearings still died of beriberi and fevers; that snakes still struck at the hands of men clearing undergrowth.

The riverboat Zeantunes arrived on New Year’s Day with cash from the Bank of London in Belém. Kennedy assembled the labour force under the soldiers’ guns, paid every man “for all time up to and including December 22”, and dismissed all but a few hundred. The damage was put at more than $25,000. Within a month the estate had hired again; the 1932 visitor from Pernambuco found about 2,000 people there, a band, a cinema and a dry law, and nobody told him about the clocks. The Henry Ford’s collections in Dearborn hold a photograph catalogued as “Fordlandia Time Clock, Destroyed in the Riot of December 1930”.

Sources

• Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Metropolitan Books, 2009, chapters 16 to 18, from the Companhia Ford Industrial do Brasil records, the Kennedy and Rogge reports, de Jesus’s testimony, and the Belém press of January 1931 at the Benson Ford Research Center. In copyright; the quotations from the company’s documents above are at second hand through it. archive.org
• “Armed Brazilians Raid Ford Rubber Plantation; Police Are Sent by Plane to Enforce Evictions,” Associated Press, in The New York Times, December 25, 1930. archive.org
• W. G. N., Fordlandia, ou a descrição da cidade maravilhosa que Henry Ford está edificando no interior do Estado do Pará, Garanhuns, 1932, for the estate fifteen months later. archive.org
• The Henry Ford, “Fordlandia Time Clock, Destroyed in the Riot of December 1930,” object 64.167.74.5. thehenryford.org