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Book Reviews 109 transcript—readers might well decide to consult that document, which is not greatly expanded by Glazer’s narrative. We end up being well acquainted with the case, but not with the defendant. The rest of Swainson’s story is told comparatively briefly, with no more attention to analysis than Glazer provides for the trial. He relates Swainson’s alcohol abuse, his efforts to enter the field of public-interest lobbying, the pity positions given to him by friends, his unsuccessful attempts to appeal his case, the time he was caught with a marijuana joint in his pocket, and finally his success at landing what is sadly presented to readers as Swainson’s dream job—a seat on the Michigan Historical Commission, which he held until his death. At the end of Wounded Warrior, the reader cannot help but feel sorry for John Swainson; one only wishes that Glazer had allowed us to know him better. John Robert Greene Cazenovia College Greg Grandin. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Picador, 2010. Pp. 416. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $16.00. In this vividly written and thoroughly researched book, a wonderful example of the emerging genre of “transnational” history, Greg Grandin recounts the epic tale of Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s failed attempt to bring plantation-scale rubber production to the Amazon jungle. As rubber’s genetic homeland, the lower Amazon region had enjoyed great prosperity before 1912, when the rise of British and Dutch rubber plantations in the Far East sent the area’s economy into a tailspin. When a new cartel arrangement threatened to increase the price of this crucial commodity in the early 1920s, Ford entered secret negotiations that culminated in the 1927 acquisition of 2.5 million acres—an area roughly the size of Tennessee—on the Tapajós River, a major tributary of the Amazon. With great fanfare, the company announced that it intended to transform its new holdings into a vast commercial rubber plantation that would dwarf its competitors in the Far East. By the early 1930s Ford had razed thousands of acres of jungle, planted tens of thousands of trees, and constructed an entire midwestern-style town, replete with trim bungalows, a state-of-the-art 110 The Michigan Historical Review hospital, schools, a dance hall, and even tennis courts and a golf course. An industrial sawmill, a logging railroad, a power plant, and a massive water tower (outfitted with a factory whistle) completed its picture-perfect appearance. Yet serious problems lurked behind the orderly paved streets and well-kept gardens. Mismanagement, internal dissension, serious labor problems, and especially relentless attacks by mites, lace bugs, caterpillars, leaf funguses, and various other diseases endemic to the rain forest ultimately brought the ill-fated endeavor to an end. Despite investing some $20,000,000, Ford quietly walked away from the project in 1945, selling everything to the Brazilian government for $244,200. In a story like this, there is a strong temptation to invoke Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, yet Grandin insists that the tale is more Mark Twain than Conrad. Despite all the requisite ingredients of madness, pestilence, and brutality, in Grandin’s interpretation Fordlandia is best understood as a manifestation of both Henry Ford’s ideological commitments and his megalomania. More than anything else, Grandin suggests that Fordlandia reflected Ford’s ill-fated efforts to put the genie of industrial capitalism, which he himself did so much to release, back into the bottle. To support this interpretation, Grandin finds analogies to Fordlandia not in Charles Marlow’s colonial Africa, but in other parts of Ford’s vast business empire of the late 1920s and 1930s. A good example can be found in Ford’s various “village industries,” which dotted the Michigan countryside and, like Fordlandia, tried (and failed) to harmonize industrial and agricultural pursuits. He finds another analogy in “historic” Greenfield Village, Ford’s attempt to capture and preserve small-town American life in amber. Fordlandia only makes sense, Grandin suggests, if it is understood as a “mission of civilization,” ultimately both the most ambitious and the most flawed of Ford’s many attempts to...

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