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The Pan Am Journey – the Singular and Boundless Vision of One Man, Juan Trippe
Pan American World Airways, or as it was universally known in its peak, Pan Am, is a name that is no longer displayed on the flight indicator boards of international airports across the globe. However up to the Eighties it was one of the premier names in the international airline industry. At the top of it’s game the airline was completing up to 214 flights from the US to Europe a week (1964) [‘Juan Terry Trippe, Founder of Pan Am World Airways and InterContinental Hotels’, Stanley Turkel (PDF, 2006), www.ishc.com].
From the ground up
Like quite a few young, middle class American men during the Great War, Tripp gravitated towards a future in the air, at first aspiring to be a navy pilot. After the war he transitioned from running a failed taxi service into a small regional air transport company. Trippe’s drive to succeed led him within a few years to merge his group with two other similar-sized ones to form Pan American Airways Inc.
The New Jersey-born businessman came up with a steady stream of novel ideas for innovation in the airline industry – which however required money. Prospects were bright though as new airline ventures were a good selling point. As William Stadiem explains, flying in the “Roaring 20s” was “the high-tech startup of its time!” Financiers, including members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt families, were all too willing to bankroll Trippe’s burgeoning airline industry ambitions [William Stadiem, Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance, in Aviation’s Glory Years (2014)].
By 1927 Trippe had started to assemble the rudiments of a fleet of aircrafts, initially with a brace of tri-motored Fokkers supplemented by some ageing surplus floating boats which he converted into the Pan American Flying Clippers (Trippe was a pioneer of these multi-engine seaplanes). Thus modestly began Pan Am’s first air mail service to the Caribbean (maiden flight in a 65-horsepower Seagull – Key West Florida to Havana) which paved the way for further Pan Am incursions into the region. Expansion followed innovation – from the West Indies he moved into Central and South America, and the foundations were laid for a global transport business✲.
Eschewing managerial orthodoxy
As textbook BUS101 management orthodoxy goes, Tripp was far from the desired model. His inclination was not to delegate and he was given to making unilateral decisions without consulting – much to the chagrin of his boards of directors [‘Juan Trippe and Pan Am’, (Richard Branson), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.content.time.com]. What he was really exceptional at though, was anticipating the market in air travel, working out usually before anyone else what the next big thing was going to be…and going for it totally!
Business transparency was not part of the Trippe management style…his early inroads in the industry owed a lot to his “stealthy lobbying for U.S. mail licences”, which gave Pan Am a precious legup! [Harold Evans, Gail Buckland & David Lefer, They Made America, (2004)]. Trippe took a ruthless approach to competition and was not adverse to doing secret deals to outmanoeuvre his airline rivals [‘Juan Trippe Revolutionized Trips By Air With Pan Am’, (Scott S Smith), Investor’s Business Daily, 09-Oct-2014, www.investors.com].
Pan Am at times resorted to outright bribery to stay ahead of the pack, eg, offering several 100 thousand dollars to a Mexican president to block rival American Airlines’ bid for landing rights in the US’ southern neighbour [‘Juan Trippe’s Pan Am’, (Ann Crittenden), New York Times, (Archives), 03-July 1977, www.nytimes.com].
Thoroughly innovative Juan
By continually expanding the scope of Pan Am’s operations, creating many new routes, Trippe opened up both the Atlantic and the Pacific to air travel❂. Trippe’s list of innovations in the industry are legion – including the pioneering of round-the-world commercial flights; the introduction of cockpit electronics allowing Pan Am pilots to fly in any weather; he also came up with “fly now, pay later” plans; his personnel came up with an advanced (computerised) reservations system first [Stadiem, op.cit.; ‘Dead Airlines And What Killed Them’, (Jean Folger), 25-Jun-2010, Investopedia, www.investopedia.com].
Before Laker Air there was …
Perhaps Trippe’s greatest legacy however was the pivotal role he played in making affordable air tourism a reality to everybody. When Trippe and Pan Am entered the still embryonic industry, seats were expensive and airline passengers tended to be exclusively from the well-off sectors of society. The airline ‘biz’ was run by a cartel called IATA (the International Air Transport Association) who contrived to maintain airline prices at a high level [Scott, op.cit.].
The first discount king of airlines
The Pan Am boss’ idea was to introduce a new class of passenger, “tourist class”, slashing the round-trip fare from New York to London by half (to US$275). The cartel reacted by trying to impede the US maverick’s move. British airports were closed to all Pan Am flights with tourist seats (Pan Am was forced to switch its European flights to remote Shannon Airport in Ireland). Pan Am managed eventually to get round the cartel’s net, it’s tourist class proved so popular that IATA caved in and accepted the reality of it [Branson, loc.cit. ; Smith, op.cit.]. Trippe’s actions thus brought air travel within the reach of ordinary people.
Airline entrepreneur and “friends with benefits”
Part of Trippe’s success owed a lot to influential people in high places…he benefited from a personal rapport with presidents like FDR and Truman. In fact, far from it being exclusively a triumph of free enterprise, federal government cooperation and support were integral to Pan Am’s overall success in the business [Crittenden, loc.cit.].
⍔ JT Trippe & CA Lindbergh (Source: The Trippe Family)
Juan Trippe had the nous to surround himself with the right people from the start…in 1927 he ‘headhunted’ the (then) most marketable figure in world aviation, famed pilot Charles Lindbergh, to work for Pan Am (Lindbergh’s Continental survey flights helped establish the company’s early trade routes✥).
Another key figure within the company was its chief engineer Andre Priester who wrote the specifications for Pan Am’s flying boats. Priester set and maintained the airline’s meticulous safety standards [‘Pan Am Series – Part XLVIII: Skygods’, (Jpbtransportation: the Blog and Website of James Patrick Baldwin), 15-Feb-2015, www.jpbtransconsulting.com]. Staff training and airline safety were things Trippe refused to take shortcuts with – insisting on a high level of training for his pilots, flight crews, mechanics and support staff [Folger, loc.cit.].
With a little help from his (fellow capitalist) friends
Trippe in retirement freely acknowledged the help he received from United Fruit Company…the powerful US banana multinational assisted Pan Am early on to establish a presence in Latin America, thanks to United Fruit’s unique(sic) insider knowledge of the region’s states and its capacity to open doors to various governments [ibid.]. Trippe and Pan Am also prospered from cultivating a good friendship and working relationship with long-time Boeing head Bill Allen.
Enter the jet age
By the 1950s the heyday of “prop-liners” (propellor-driven aircraft) had come to an end. Jet liners were the future, trouncing ‘props’ for both aircraft speed and carrying capacity…and as ever Trippe got in at the ground floor! Trippe immediately bought up big on Boeing 707s and the first 707 Pan Am commercial flight took place in 1958 (NY-Paris)✮. He then got to work on making it more economical by figuring out how to reduce the jet’s seat-mile cost [Branson, op.cit.].
While going full-tilt into 707s Trippe was already looking beyond…to the 747, the jumbo-jet. As Evans et al observes, Trippe had “an almost clairvoyant grasp of the future (and a) determination to find aircraft to fit that vision” [Evans, Buckland & Lefer, op.cit.]. Unfortunately for Trippe, the antennae didn’t work as desired every single time and a few missteps had serious ramifications for the long-term future of Pan Am (see below).
⍔ 1st InterContinental: Belém (Brazil)
Pan Am ‘accommodates’ – airport to hotel…
Inevitably, the holistic approach Trippe brought to the airline industry✢ led him to capitalise on the airline ‘s success by directly entering the hospitality field… connecting the dots between passenger transportation and accommodation. With government encouragement from US president FD Roosevelt, Trippe began InterContinental Hotels & Resorts in 1946 as a subsidiary of Pan Am…the first international hotel was situated in Belém, Brazil. Between 1946 and 1996 there were 222 I-C Hotels doing business worldwide (>90% of them outside the US) [Turkel, loc.cit.]※.
Changing fortunes
Pan Am – once a ‘Titan’ of the airways – is no more, what then led to its demise? Some observers trace the seeds of its eventual fall to the late 1940s – years before the company had reached the peak of its powers. Earlier in the Thirties, during Pan Am’s formative first decade, Trippe lobbied the US government, advocating his “chosen instrument” theory (by which Washington would designate a single air carrier for all foreign flights). Pan Am in fact secured this special status, initially with the awarding of a 10-year mail contract by the US Postmaster-General. Eventually though other carriers were green-lighted to enter the overseas field and started to claw back Pan Am’s advantage [Smith, loc.cit.]. Postwar, competitors such as Howard Hughes’ Trans-World Airlines (TWA), Braniff and North West Orient were allowed to enter Pan Am’s routes in South America and Asia, and contest it’s semi-official monopoly✧ over those regions [‘Pan-American World Airways: the rise and fall of a 20th century cultural icon’, (06-Jan-2017), www.seanmunger.com]. The “catch-up” had commenced.
However when Pan Am sought to establish a competitive foothold domestically in the late Forties, the US government flatly rejected its request to start a connecting domestic route network [‘Lots of Reasons Why Pan Am Failed’, (Robert J Byrne), Washington Post, 25-Jan-1992, www.washingtonpost.com]. This setback proved a critical handbreak on Pan Am’s expansion into the profitable US internal passenger market.
⍔ Pan Am logo, the “blue meatballs”
In 1968 Juan Trippe stepped down as company president, however he remained active and influential in Pan Am’s executive decision-making, maintaining an office in the company’s headquarters. Pan Am still looked in solid business shape, it has 40,000 employees and was flying seven million passengers a year to some 86 countries. Trippe’s unflagging desire and capacity for change and innovation was to be a “two edged sword”, sparking Pan Am’s upward trajectory but also contributing to its ultimate decline. Not content with the revolutionary 707, Trippe cajoled the jet manufacturers to design a new “jumbo jet” capable of carrying in excess of 180 passengers⊡. The 747 answered this ‘need’, with the first commercial flight of a Pan Am 747 taking place in 1970. Trippe employed a similar stratagem with the Kennedy Administration which was reluctant (because of the exorbitant cost involved) to embrace the next level up, the SST-2707 supersonic jet. By signalling that he intended to purchase five Anglo-French Concorde planes, Trippe pressured President Kennedy into launching the American Supersonic Transport project. But this was one instance where Trippe’s ‘hunch’ was badly off target. The Boeing 2707 proved so problematic (and costly) that the project was dropped altogether in 1971.
⍔ Two Pan Ams, 707 & 747 (source: Boeing)
The ill-timed expansion into 747s: Capacity overload
Trippe, always striving to be ahead of the curve, placed his order for the new 747s before they were designed, let alone off the assembly line! On this occasion the economy brought him and the company unstuck. The timing of the introduction of 747s, 1970, was not great – coinciding with a recession! Trippe didn’t foresee the 1973 oil crisis, which blew out the costs for maintaining the fleet of jumbos – fuel prices skyrocketed after the Middle East energy backlash [Folger, loc.cit.].
The state of Pan Am’s finances in the early Seventies was not propitious for taking on something of the magnitude of the 747. Commencing from 1969-70 Pan Am experienced seven straight years of losses. By 1977 the company’s long-term debt amounted to a disquieting $727 million! The financial burden on Pan Am was too much – and the problem was compounded by one of Trippe’s successors as company head (Najeeb E Halaby) who bumped the order of 747s from Trippe’s original 25 up to 33 aircrafts [Crittenden, loc.cit.].
Other developments in the world added to the company’s woes. The spate of terrorist incidents involving Pan Am, culminating in the 1988 Lockerbie tragedy, damaged the company’s reputation and precipitated a decline in travel numbers [Folger, loc.cit.].
Deregulation
Another setback for Pan Am came in the late 1970s with industry deregulation. The legislation of course brought more competition for Pan Am into the game, but this time coming from the big international airline players. Deregulation also meant that Pan Am could now at last enter the American domestic market, and it acquired National Airlines which unfortunately failed at a time Pan Am was in need of a financial “pick-me-up” [Smith, loc.cit.].
When the end came for Pan Am, it came fairly abruptly – in 1991. Pan Am offices everywhere simply closed their doors, virtually overnight. Rising costs of operation, falling market share, a trough in passenger numbers (a further blow in this respect was brought on by the 1990 Gulf War which led to a fall-off in international travellers) [Folger, loc.cit.]. There was a failure to make preparations for a smooth transition for Pan Am after the head’s departure. Trippe, having been so dominant and instrumental in the company’s success over four decades, was negligent in not planning for a long-term successor to himself [Byrne, loc.cit.]. This hurt Pan Am during the rocky days ahead when it was in desperate need of clear-headed, astute leadership.
Footnote: in the 1920s and 30s Juan Trippe was one of a handful of great US airline pioneers – the elite list also included CR Smith (American Airlines), WA Paterson (United Airlines), Eddie Rickenbacker (Eastern Airlines) and Collett E Woolman (Delta Airlines).
PostScript: Pan Am’s broader role
Under Trippe, Pan Am’s planes could be called upon when required to provide service outside it’s core commercial role. This happened in war, both hot and cold (eg, active role of Pan Am Clippers in WWII; humanitarian trips during the 1948-49 Berlin evacuation; collecting “refugees from communism” in Cuba during the early years of the Castro regime). Trippe also came to the rescue of his fellow “captain of industry” Henry Ford in 1931, by flying the Brazilian military into the remote Amazon to put down a worker revolt in the Fordlândia rubber plantation.
﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎
✲ in addition to a purely business opportunity, Trippe’s focus on this region was to help forestall the establishment of a German (and possibly also a French) airline service to the Panama Canal (in which the US held a strategic interest), [Sean Munger, op.cit.]
❂ by the 1970s the Pan Am publicity arm was able to boast that it was “the World’s Most Experienced Airline”
✥ often taking him to inassessible places in South and Meso-America where Trippe’s workers would follow, having the arduous job of hacking out landing strips from the dense jungle [Smith, loc.cit.]
✮ in very quick time BOAC, QANTAS, Air France and Lufthansa, among others, rushed to embrace 707s. In 1959 the Douglas company debuted its DC-8, virtually a copy of the 707 [Stadiem, loc.cit.]
✢ in the early years Trippe had even helped build airports in the jungles of Latin America to fit in with the new air routes planned for Pan Am
※ the hotel chain was sold to an English conglomerate, Grand Metropolitan, after Trippe’s death in 1981
✧ Pan Am’s role at that time has been described as the US’ “unofficial flag carrier”, [George C Larson, ‘Moments & Milestones: Birth of the Clippers’, Air & Space Smithsonian, Nov 2010, www.airspacemag.com]
⊡ skillfully Trippe played the big manufacturers (Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed) off against each other, manipulating them into commiting to an even larger jet before they were ready to build it! [Smith, loc.cit.]
Belterra and the Demise of Henry Ford’s Brazilian Rubber ‘Empire’
By the 1930s it was apparent to all concerned that Fordlândia, Henry Ford‘s rubber plantation in the Amazon, had been a costly, massive underachiever. Ford however, to the unending frustration of his family, doggedly refused to pull the plug and walk away from the Amazon fiasco counting his losses. In 1934, instead of ditching the failing Fordlândia operation altogether, he retained it and at the same time poured a fresh pile of money and resources into a second Amazonian rubber plantation site.
Learning from failure The new rubber plantation, at Belterra, was better positioned geographically in relation to the main regional city of Santarém (just 40 km south of it). The plantation site selected this time was a more judicious choice, unlike the uneven ground of Fordlândia, the site comprised a flat topography, much better terrain for moving equipment around and for planting✱. The more favourable physical conditions at Belterra meant that Ford’s agrarian labourers were over a period of several years able to cultivate some 19 square miles of land for the planting of rubber trees (not a gigantic quantity by any reckoning, but a significant advance on the pitiful returns from Fordlândia) [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Improvements in local agronomy
The horticulturalists at Belterra were conscious of the need not to replicate the monoculture prevailing at Fordlândia – which had made the rubber plants vulnerable to infection. By planting hardwoods this time and employing new breeding methods which used local varieties, the planters were able to avoid the scourge of Fordlândia – the Amazon leaf disease. The downside of this method however was that it was very labour-intensive and expensive [ibid.].
Infrastructure, variety and man-management One of the clear lessons of Fordlândia was that living conditions for migrant workers in the camp were not conducive to creating a happy workforce. Again, as at Fordlândia, the migrant employees (based on the precedent of Ford’s American plant workers) were paid much higher than the going rate elsewhere in Brazil…but the company had learnt from the Fordlândia plantation that this was not enough of itself to get the desired worker performance. This time Ford’s managers delivered an enhanced town infrastructure…the drawing board for Belterra included three well-staffed hospitals (a critical area of shortage at Fordlândia) and three major (and two minor) schools◊. The sanitation system was much improved on the earlier settlement (arguably it was better than anywhere else in rural Brazil at that time). The street layouts were better planned and more uniform (straighter streets, more systematic street grid and more effort put into ‘greening’ the environment). The Belterra management gave workers more options for their leisure time – construction of football fields⍟ and playground equipment, movie and dance nights (exclusively folk dancing, another obsession of Henry Ford!). The upshot was to give the plantation town something akin to a suburban feel [‘Dearborn in the Jungle: Why Belterra Flourished Where Fordlandia Failed’, Past Forward: Activating the Henry Ford Archive of Innovation, (blog), www.thehenryford.com].
Whereas Fordlândia had catered exclusively for single men in its Brazilian work force, the Ford managers (eventually) adopted a more realistic, far-sighted policy, recruiting an increasing number of migrant families to the plantation…showing that Ford (or his management team) were serious about addressing the staff problem that had plagued Fordlândia, a high rate of turnover of the work force [ibid.].
Some relaxation of Ford’s tight reins Other efforts were made to appease the plantation’s migrant work force to make them more compliant with company target objectives. The imposition of American food on Brazilian work force, which had been the bane of (a large slice of) the dissension in Fordlândia, was lifted. The Brazilian tappers and labourers were allowed to retain their traditional, local eating habits. In addition, in a further relaxation of conditions, musical instruments (an integral part of the Brazilian lifestyle) were allowed in the camp [ibid.].
Ford’s American ‘civilising’ mission for the “undeveloped world” Despite a relaxing of some of the rules governing the running of Ford’s new industrial town in the Amazon, there were certain things Henry would not compromise on. Ford was always big on “moral education”…part of his rationale for getting into the Brazilian jungle was to fulfill a mission to realise a peculiarly idiosyncratic idea of his concerning “racial progress’. As Elizabeth Esch describes it, driving Ford was a patronising impulse to “proletarianise and civilise” the uneducated rubber tappers of Amazonia, to make them into “something better”※. In the carmaker’s eyes, melding the workforce into an more efficient unit went hand-in-hand with educating them.
Belterra school girls and boys in Ford’s uniforms, ca.1940 | THF56937 | by the Henry Ford (Flickr) 🔽
Midwest “old school” values School was compulsory at Belterra – for all! Adult workers had to attend night school classes. Schoolchildren were strictly schooled and imbued with discipline along American lines of education…all workers’ children were issued with uniforms (which made the boys look like boy scouts or cadets). Every school day started with the ceremonial raising of the US flag. Some observers have noted how Ford’s installing of rigid educational and moral discipline at Belterra mirrored his own value system…to whit, tantamount to a kind of sociological experiment to “Americanise Belterra youth” along the lines of a “Mid-western small town model” [‘Dearborn in the Jungle’, loc.cit.].
Global war, disruption and end-game Ford established a tyre manufacturing plant in Dearborn in 1937 which by 1940 had the capacity to build 5,000 tyres, unfortunately for Ford NOT ANY of the raw rubber was sourced by that time from the company’s Brazilian plants [Ford Richardson Bryan, Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford, (1997)].
🔽 Henry Ford tinkering (Photo source: The Ford UK Co)
The Amazonian rubber venture by 1941 nevertheless did seem to be making some headway, there was in excess of three-and-a-half million rubber tree planted (mostly at Belterra), which by the following year had yielded 750 tons of latex [ibid.]. The Ford Company was optimistic enough to announce that it expected to produce 30 to 40 million pounds of high quality rubber from the Amazon by 1950 [Esch, op.cit.]. One thing in its favour, as a consequence of the world war extending to the Pacific, was that British, Dutch and French Far Eastern rubber plantations were now in the hands of enemy Japan and no longer commercial entities.
Ultimately though the war rebounded on the Ford Company as on commerce generally with an increasing drain on the US economy for the war effort. The motor company’s finances were not in great shape during the war years…incredibly the increasingly ‘flaky’ Ford Senior had axed the global company’s Accounting Department! [G Grandin, Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2010)]) . The domestic situation in Brazil was not helping Ford’s rubber plants…although powerful Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas had given approving nods in the public eye to the company’s presence in Brazil, labour law reforms in the country were not advantageous to Ford. The Brazilian government also restricted the export of lumber during the war. To exacerbate matters even more, the rubber plantations were hit with a return bout of the dreaded leaf blight infestation [Bryan, op.cit.].
Synthetic rubber – the future!
Ford’s son Edsel✜ and grandson Henry II had for several years been badgering the bewilderingly stubborn and by now ailing and declining industrialist to bring the wasteful Amazon fiasco to an end. What possibly clinched it in the end was a technological breakthrough, by 1945 synthetic rubber production was a superior and more economical method of getting latex than natural rubber. Moreover, with WWII now over, Britain and the other European powers had regained control of their lucrative Far Eastern rubber estates, and would once again provide the Ford rubber plants with very stiff competition [ibid.]. In December 1945 Ford finally sold the Fordlândia and Belterra plantations back to the Brazilian government, losing over US$20 million in the deal [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The dragged-out, ill-fated Amazon venture of Ford, which perpetually “had teetered between failure and farce” was over [Esch, op.cit.].
PostScript: Fordlândia and Belterra redux Belterra today is in much better nick than Fordlândia, this is largely because the Brazilian government has kept the Belterra plant operational, although it has never been particularly profitable. Fordlândia on the other hand bears many of the characteristic scars of a ghost town. When Companhia Ford Industrial Do Brasil ceased operations in 1945, the Americans cut and ran, leaving things pretty much as they were…pieces of equipment and machinery abandoned, left lying idle, to rot or to be stolen or to be vandalised (contemporary Fordlândia has been described as a “looters’ paradise”◘), furniture, door knobs and other fittings, whatever that was movable, was taken. Most of the original buildings though have survived✥, as well as the plantation sawmill, the generator and such industrial relics, left rusting in the jungle for the past 73 years.
The most striking physical industrial remnant at Fordlândia today is the Torre de água – the 50m-high Water Tower…it still stands, like a symbol of the lost town, and like most of the fixtures at Fordlândia, built in Ford’s Michigan and shipped to the Amazon. Greg Grandin describes its still erect form as a reminder of what it once personified, “a utilitarian beacon of modernity for Ford’s ‘civilising’ project” [Grandin, op.cit.].
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✱ botantist expert James R Weir, brought in to ‘troubleshoot’ the company ‘s dismal performance in trying to grow rubber at Fordlândia, came up with the idea of a second plantation in the Amazon (and then promptly left the project altogether!)
◊ named after Henry Ford’s three grandsons, Edsel, Benson and Henry
⍟ Ford had banned the playing of football (soccer) at Fordlândia
※ there was lots of talk at Dearborn about “taming savages” and more disturbingly, of pseudo-racial categories – creating a “Latin-Saxonian unity” that supersedes the ‘Indian’ and mestizo groupings, E Esch, ‘Whitened and Enlightened’: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon’, in OJ Dinius & A Vergara [Eds.], Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working Class Communities, (2011)
✜ Ford heir Edsel predeceased his father, dying in 1943
◘ Simon Romero, ‘Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exhibiting the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland’, New York Times, 20-Feb-2017, www.nytimes.com]
✥ but not the crumbled mess of the town hospital
Fordlândia: The Dearborn Carmaker’s Amazon Folly
Pioneering American industrialist Henry Ford built his first commercial automobile in 1901, and went on in the years following to revolutionise the motor vehicle industry with his eponymous Model T Ford and his innovative assembly line production techniques✲. With the advent of Fordism (a system involving modern technological machinery and standardised production in high volumes) Ford was paying his auto industry employees an (at the time) unprecedented $5 a day! However it came with very consequential strings (a dehumanisation of the workplace and the loss of workers’ individual autonomy).
By the 1920s Ford was pursuing a plan to harness the waters of the Tennessee River to power a proposed 75-mile long mega-city, which the car-maker proclaimed would be a “new Eden” in northwest Alabama. A concerted campaign by political opponents within the US however blocked Ford’s efforts to get the scheme off the ground ‘[‘Valley of Visions’, (Adam Bruns), Site Selection Magazine, May 2010, www.siteselection.com]. Vexated but undaunted, Ford turned to the remote Amazon jungle for his next big project.
The rubber market and “latex gold” Rubber was in high demand by car manufacturers like Ford and his American rivals General Motors and Chrysler. Rubber is the source of latex, which is vulcanised to create car tyres and for a range of other vehicle parts (eg, valves, gaskets, hoses, electrical wiring). The problem for Ford and other manufacturers was that the European colonial powers, France, the Netherlands and (especially) Britain, had an established monopoly on the production of rubber through their profitable South-East Asian colonies (Malaysia, the East Indies, Vietnam, Ceylon). Ford was particularly concerned that the British, spearheaded by its secretary for colonial affairs Winston Churchill, was intent on creating a rubber cartel to further monopolise the valuable product for the Europeans. The industrialist therefore was looking round for a cheaper way of sourcing rubber…he briefly considered planting rubber trees in the Florida Everglades but that didn’t turn out to be promising. His focus eventually fixed on Brazil and its vast Amazon Basin (see also the Footnotes).
Eyes on Brazil
From 6,000 km away in Ford’s Dearborn car ‘empire’ headquarters, the Amazon looked a logical location for a rubber plantation. It was after all the original (and therefore seemingly the natural) environment for producing latex, being the home of the plant Hevea brasiliensis, used to make the most elastic and purest form of latex!
Ford’s idealistic and ideological vision Clearly Henry Ford saw the long-term business advantages of securing a consistent supply of latex at the most favourable prices, but in his public pronouncements he let it be known that he viewed the Brazilian project as something grander than an attempt to corner a resource market – “a civilising mission” no less! Ford regularly couched his intervention in Amazonia in terms of it being an act of “benevolence to help that wonderful and fertile land” [‘Lost cities #10: Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford’s utopian city in the Amazon’, (Drew Reed), The Guardian, 19-Aug-2016, www.theguardian.com]. While some of the car manufacturer’s overblown utterances may have been an indulgence in PR, the Amazonian venture (and the fact that he persisted with it long, long past its use-by-date) suggests that the idea of Fordlândia represented something in his core that was deeply idealistic. Greg Grandin in his epic study of the Fordlândia experiment, has noted that despite the runaway success of his Detroit-based business empire, Ford had become increasingly disatisfied with modern American society and culture as he saw it, there was a whole catalogue of things that he abhorred…including war, unions, alcohol, cigarettes, cow’s milk(!), modern dance, Wall Street financiers, Jews, the creeping intervention of government into business and into American life as a whole [Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2010)].
A blinkered idealism Ford saw in the challenge of carving a viable city out of the Brazilian wilderness, a potential antidote to all he disliked about his homeland – a way to recreate “a vision of Americana that was slipping out of his grasp at home” [ibid.]. Another driver in Ford’s Amazonian quest was the unflinching faith in his capacity to replicate the Dearborn business success elsewhere, including the Amazon jungle. This idealism led Ford, even when things went “pear-shaped” in Fordlândia “to deliberately reject the expert advice” and blindly cling to his peculiarly personal notion of trying “to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination” [ibid.]. Moreover, Grandin notes, that the greater the reverses of Henry’s rubber enterprises in the Amazon, the more the carmaker would describe his ‘mission’ in Brazil in idealistic terms – Fordlândia would, he stressed repeatedly, bring economic stability and increases in the standard of life to the impoverished people of the Brazilian interior; the new city would support 10,000 people, etc [ibid.].
Initially, the government and it seems, the Brazilian people in the main, welcomed Ford’s Amazonian industrial city. Brazilian officials, especially consul José de Lima, went to great pains to woo the American carmaker once his interest in the Amazon became known. Some Brazilian officials even heaped overly-lavish, religiously evocative praise on Ford , calling him the “Jesus Christ of Industry”, the “Moses of the Twentieth Century” and “the salvation of Brazil’s long-moribund rubber industry” [ibid.].
By the terms of the business deal, Ford would pay the Brazilian government about US$125,000 for 5,625 square miles of land and the company was to be exempt from taxes✣. Under the concessions Ford’s city was to be granted an autonomous bank, police force and schools, to many observers it was a violation of Brazilian sovereignty…”it was as if Ford had the right to run Forlândia as a separate state”. The sceptical Santarém (local) press mockingly referred to the Dearborn (Michigan) car manufacturer as “São Ford” (“St Ford”) [ibid.].
The blueprint for Fordlândia Ford poured a massive amount of resources into his (new) utopian ‘dream’ city. The plant was equipped with “state-of-the-art” processing facilities. No expense was spared on constructing the American village (known locally as Vila Americana) which was reserved for American management. It was equipped with a swimming pool, a golf course, tennis courts, a library, schools and a hospital. Not surprisingly, the de luxe conditions of the Americans’ village was in grotesque contrast with that of the Brazilian workers whose rudimentary houses lacked even running water [ibid.].
Setbacks and drawbacks The jungle site picked out for Ford’s prefabricated industry town was Aveiro on the River Tapajós, in the state of Pará. From the get-go in 1928 things did not go well! First off, clearing the dense jungle for the site was really hard (and dangerous) work✪…even with Ford’s promise to pay high wages to the locals, labour was in short supply. The project’s logistics provided another headache, the location’s communications and transportation had serious shortcomings, The location was hilly and there were no roads to Aveiro so movement was by boat up and down the river, and seasonal climatic conditions tended to impede access (also latter on hindering the cargo vessels trying to reach Fordlândia to load up the latex).
“Agri-ignorance” The task of planting rubber trees was thoroughly error-ridden. Ford’s managers used antiquated planting techniques, the team lacked basic knowledge of tropical agriculture. A fundamental flaw that proved critical was the company’s practice (ignoring the advice of Brazilian botanists) of planting the rubber trees too close to each other, this resulted in making the plantings susceptible to disease (enabling the destructive South American leaf blight to move easily from tree to tree) [ibid.].
Illness caused by the harsh tropical location wreaked havoc with the work force (especially the migrant workers but also affecting the American staff). Workers went down with various ailments (malaria, VD, yellow fever, beriberi, parasites, snake bites, etc) placing a strain on the already overwhelmed company health services [ibid.].
Subverting worker morale Ford imposed strict conditions of behaviour on the work force – in keeping with his personal puritanical code. A prohibition ban was imposed (to match the prevailing injunction on alcohol in the US at the time). In light of the severely harsh conditions they were working under, Ford’s “absolutely no tolerance” liquor policy was totally unrealistic⊡. Workers were forced to endure a regime of rigid conformity – regimentation of plantation life, adhering to strict standards of discipline and hygiene. And to make things even more onerous, Ford introduced the same, notorious heavy-handed yolk of enforcement he employed in the River Rouge automobile plant in Detroit. Ford’s “Big Brother” like Service Department men were employed to carry out highly intrusive spot searches on workers’ quarters to ensure compliance with the edicts.
Americanisation overkill
Ford insisted that the migrant workers at Fordlândia adhere to Americanised conditions of work and services which ignored the local realities and cultural norms. This meant everyone got American-style housing with metal roofs which were conductors of the already intense tropical heat (in preference to the more sensible natural thatch roofs they were used to in Brazil). Another “First World” error by Ford was to build workers’ houses close to the ground…the locals in the Amazon knew to build high up on stilts so that they didn’t get overrun with animals and insects! Ford was insistent on interfering with the Brazilians’ diets, workers were fed unfamiliar food like hamburgers, whole-wheat bread and unpolished rice, and they were encouraged to plant flowers and vegetables on their plots. The American managers, with scant regard for the workers, forced them to work in the middle of the day in full tropical sun. Inevitably, the migrant workers staged a revolt against the management practices, known as Quebra-Panelas (the “Breaking Pans”). They rioted in late 1930, protesting against Ford’s imposed conditions, and the Brazilian army had to intervene to restore order (with management making some concessions with regard to the food) [ibid.].
Erratic managerial direction Part of the problem with Fordlândia was with the management. They’re was a rapid turnover of managers in the first two years of the settlement. Ford’s often wrong-headed policies were not easy to implement, but some managers were not up to the task and others just couldn’t hack it in the extremely challenging and arduous Amazon and quit. Unsurprisingly, with mismanagement morale plummeted, the American staff increasingly engaged in wild parties and drunken revelry. It wasn’t until Scot Archibald Johnston was put in charge at the end of 1930 that progress started to be made at Fordlândia. Johnston was able to improve the infrastructure, enhance the lifestyles of employees’ – new entertainments and recreations – film and dance nights, gardening, football games (overturning Ford’s earlier ban) and more education options. Grandin feels that under Johnston’s management, the city “came closest to Ford’s original ideal”. But still the yields of latex didn’t come remotely close to the company’s anticipated returns.
With the lack of commercial success, the original Brazilian government enthusiasm for Ford’s project waned badly. Even from the start there had been critics of the done deal that was vague on many details and required Ford to use only 40 % of his land grant for the production of latex♉. Eventually, there was a loss of credibility for Fordlândia – with the situation showing little improvement, the Brazilian middle classes ultimately could not square Ford’s “self-promoted reputation for rectitude and efficiency” with the reality of the plantation’s dismal track record [ibid.]
FN 1: British ‘Bio-piracy’ The European monopoly on rubber had its origins in the unscrupulous actions of British botanist Henry Wickham who clandestinely pilfered Hevea seeds out of the Amazon in the late 19th century. These were propagated successfulyl in Asia✧, putting the three colonial powers in a frontline advantageous economic position in the trade. The sale of latex, especially to the US auto industry which needed rubber for the expansion of the burgeoning industry, helped Great Britain and France pay off its (WWI) war debts [Grandin, op.cit.].
FN 2: The “latex lords” Before the rise of the Asian rubber plantations, Brazil was the dominant world supplier…in the second half of the 19th century, processed rubber accounted for 40% of Brazil’s total exports. The Amazon’s big towns, Manaus and Belem, profited spectacularly from the rubber boom as witnessed by the magnificent BeauxArts palaces and grand neoclassical municipal buildings that sprang up. By the early 1920s however, the country’s rubber industry had bottomed out and Brazil was bankrupt [ibid.].
••••——••——•••——••——•••——••———••——•••——••——••——••——•••———••——••——•••• ✲ so successful that the Ford Motor Company had captured over half the US auto sales market by 1921 ✧ rubber cultivation thrived in South-east Asia due to a combination of factors – the parasites (insects and fungi) that feed off the rubber in Brazil were not present; the cross-breeding of trees led to increased yields of sap. The plantations were close to ports (cf. Brazil), reducing the transportation costs. Lastly, the cost of labour (principally derived from China) was significantly lower [Grandin, op.cit.]
✣ as it transpired, the deal was not as great as the Detroit carmaker thought …”swindled by a Brazilian con artist” Ford paid around three-times the value of the land [G Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)]
✪ a hardship compounded by the company providing the clearers with very poor housing conditions ⊡ and impossible to fully enforce…plantation workers got round the prohibitions (Ford’s ‘puritanism’ extended to bans on women in the town, on smoking and on the playing of football as well) by establishing illicit bars, nightclubs and brothels on the so-called “Island of innocence”, [‘Fordlândia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org] ♉ leading some Brazilians to speculate that Ford’s real motives for intervening were to seek oil, gold and political leverage [Grandin, op.cit.].
Robinson Crusoe, the Making of a Universal and Versatile Myth
Robinson Crusoe Tercentenary, 1719-2019
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
A multiplicity and diversity of readings Robinson Crusoe is a multifaceted work of fiction, viewable from a number of different perspectives. On a straightforward level its an adventure novel and a travel book (rather than a guide) tantalising the 18th century Englishman and woman with a sense of faraway “new worlds” which were still undergoing a process of discovery and exploration.
The personality of the protagonist Crusoe himself is an Everyman figure, representing a cross-spectrum of contemporary English societal types – above all he is the archetypical survivor prompting untold numbers of readers to identify with the despair of his plight and “embraced his myth of struggle, survival and triumph against all odds” [Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, Frank, K (2011)].
⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale
Crusoe as “economic-imperialist” and coloniser There is the hero of romantic, bourgeois individualism, the Englishman who turns his dire circumstance to his ultimate financial advantage. When others appear on the island (Friday, the boy slave Xury, the ‘savages’, the Spanish sailors and English mutineers), Crusoe reacts with a sensibility typical of the “natural superiority” of a coloniser and uses the others as ‘commodities’✥. James Joyce described Robinson Crusoe as the “true symbol of the British conquest”, embodying “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” [quoted in ‘An introduction to Robinson Crusoe’, (Stephen Sharkey), 21-Jun-2018, www.bl.uk].
A spiritual voyage On another level Robinson Crusoe can be read as a kind of spiritual autobiography (popular in Defoe’s time). Crusoe’s journey from one exotic land to another can be seen as the “spiritual voyage” of Bunyanesque Puritan Christianity. Crusoe’s long, long sojourn on the island is a test of his faith. Being alone with infinite time on his hands he devotes himself to intense self-scrutiny, questioning the Providence that landed him in his predicament (ie, his relationship with God). Some critics have noted that Crusoe’s thought processes on the island entailed a progression from rebellion, acknowledgement of mortal sin, atonement and religious conversion [‘Robinson Crusoe Theme of Religion’, (shmoop), www.shmoop.com].
DIY Robinson Crusoe and the Conduct book Defoe provides a very detailed description of how his hero goes about making the most of his enforced stay on the island. As Katherine Frank observes, DeFoe’s novel is the “ultimate how to book: a step-by-step guide on how to live in a particular tricky situation”, ie, a method for surviving alone on a desert island◘ [Frank, op.cit.]. On the ship and again on the island Robinson spends copious amounts of time cataloguing items and making lists of everything that comes into his head.
The novel’s preoccupation with DIY touches on something else close to Defoe’s heart, the “Conduct book”✪ (a kind of user’s guide for life in the 18th century). The self-help component in Robinson Crusoe gives a sample of the writer’s broader interest in instructional works…Defoe spilled a lot of ink in writing a series of published texts telling people how they should live their lives – with titles like The Family Instructor, The Compleat English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman.
A Defoe conduct book on the Robinson Crusoe theme
Always look on the bright side of life
Defoe’s faith in the individual’s capacity for self-improvement comes through in his novels as much as in the didactic Conduct books. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s central character refuses to give up and submit to his fate no matter how glum his prospects look. With each new challenge he faces on the island, Crusoe time and again evokes the “power of positive thinking”…in his solitude he learns “to look more upon the bright Side of my Condition and less upon the dark Side” (Defoe imbues the protagonists of his later novels like Moll Flanders with this same positive disposition) [ibid.]. Defoe really had to be a glass half-full kind of guy to keep bouncing back from all the reversals life was lobbing on him (viz. a succession of self-inflicted, calamitous business ventures he managed to embroil himself in, doing gaol time for failure to pay his debts, etc).
PostScript: Cashing in on the “golden egg” The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was an instant commercial success with four editions printed in 1719. Defoe, always with his mind fixated on how to enrich himself, was quick to follow-up Robinson Crusoe with a sequel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the same year, proved to be almost as much a hit with the public. The Farther Adventures (usually today called the Further Adventures) was intended to be Robinson Crusoe’s swan-song, but Defoe couldn’t resist going to the well one time too many with a third book in 1720 entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick. Serious Reflections ‘bombed’ badly and the less said about it the better⊡. ═══════════════════════════════―═══════════════════════════════ ✱ it was commonplace for 18th century texts to be published either anonymously or using a pseudonym…Defoe was especially inclined to obscure textual ownership to try to cover himself when raising polemical questions [‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, (Gillian Paku), (Literature, Literary Studies – 1701 to 1800: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.37 www.oxfordhandbooks.com] ✥ Crusoe’s mercenary nature (equating with that of the money-obsessed Defoe) is best illustrated with Xury who Crusoe is happy to sell back into slavery when he is no longer required and by so doing fetch a tidy sum for himself ◘ novelist EM Forster once remarked that Robinson Crusoe reminded him of a “Boy Scout manual” ✪ Conduct books, today’s self-help guides, in Defoe’s day took the form of sermons, devotional writings, familiar letters, chapbooks and instruction manuals offering advice on social mores and manners, spiritual guidance and practical information on state and household duties, [Batchelor, Jennie. “Conduct Book”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 July 2004 https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=216, accessed 29 December 2018.] ⊡ the Farther Adventures had the same trademark derivative framework as the original novel – Defoe borrowed heavily once again from Robert Knox’s autobiography and seems to have modelled the last part of Crusoe’s journey on a 17th century Moscow Embassy secretary’s travel journal (Moscow – Peking), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Frank, op.cit.]
Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale
A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.
A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.
Alexander Selkirk’s adventures For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Selkirk’s Island 🔽
Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.
Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].
Aside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.
Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe? One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].
The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].
‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].
PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.
﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎ ✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)] ♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe” ❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena
Sainsbury’s, Caution and Quality in Business: A Sure but Steady Passage from Solitary Dairy Grocer’s Shop to a Major Supermarket Chain
Next year, Sainsbury’s, which has long maintained a place on the podium of Britain’s leading supermarkets will reach its sesquicentennial milestone – 150 years in the grocery retailing trade. Over the last 20-plus years the company has had to content itself with the runner-up position in the market leadership ladder of supermarket chains, trailing the seemingly ubiquitous and dynamic Tesco which has swept all before it. Nevertheless, Sainsbury’s has carved itself a distinctive and impressive notch among the titans of modern British retailing since it first opened for business in the Victorian era.
Foundation years, butter and establishing the Sainsbury style In 1869 the newly wed John James Sainsbury, founded Sainsbury’s in partnership with his wife, Mary Ann Sainsbury (née Staples). The two opened their first dairy goods shop at 173 Drury Lane, Holborn (London). Mrs Sainsbury played an active role in the business, in the early years she effectively managed the Drury Lane shop, making it “famous for the quality of its butter”. As Sainsbury’s built its formative business reputation largely on product quality, Mary Ann (the daughter of a dairyman) insisted on fresh milk on the shop’s shelves, as well as, that the Dutch supplier of Sainbury’s butter date-stamp every unit item it supplied [‘The History of Sainsbury’s – Trying Something New for 147 Years’, (Darren Turner, 11 Nov.), www.s4rb.com]. The freshness and purity of Sainsbury’s butter gave it a commercial edge over the competition in an era known for widespread food adulteration (eg, it was a common practice for milk to be watered down) [Judi Bevan, ‘Battle of the Supermarkets’, RSA Journal, Vol. 152, No 5517 (June 2003)].
In the 19th century Sainsbury’s rivals in the grocery game were shops like Lipton’s and Home and Colonial Stores. Early on John J Sainsbury developed a business model which made the shops stand out from the other grocers by doing things differently. Appearance was important to Sainsbury, the shops were clean and hygienic, on offer were “high-quality products and fresh provisions at prices even London’s poor could afford” (an early shop slogan was “Quality perfect, prices lower”).
A gradualist approach to growth John J Sainsbury, whose motto could well have been “Make haste slowly”✱, was in no hurry to expand the business. From the Drury Lane foundations he gradually added a shop in Kentish Town and then two more in the new railway suburb⊡. It wasn’t until 1882 that Sainbury made his first move outside London, establishing a shop in Croydon, one that specifically sought to cater for a middle-class clientele, selling comestibles which were in the luxury range (foreign cheeses, poultry and game birds, cooked meat delicacies, etc) [‘Sainsbury family’, (Bridget Salmon), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (23-IX-2004), www.odnb.com].
Even well into the 20th century century each new Sainsbury’s store was a matter of measured deliberation…the company continued “to place the highest priority on quality, taking the time to weigh each decision, whether it meant researching suppliers for a new product, assessing the reliability of a new supplier, or measuring the business potential of a new site” [‘J Sainsbury plc History’, Funding Universe, www.fundinguniverse.com].
During John J Sainsbury’s tenure in charge, the company established what was to become the Sainsbury’s “house style”, stores which were elaborately decorated in contrast with the other (typically drab) grocers of the day. The key to the company’s success was covering all of the bases…John James would price-match the competition while at the same time offering higher standards of quality, service and hygiene. Moreover, the likes of Home and Colonial and Lipton’s, while having numerically more shops, could not match Sainsbury’s range of products [ibid.].
Sainsbury’s “Own Brands”
Although “own brands” are thought of as a modern phenomena in retail merchandising, Sainsbury’s first introduced the concept as early as 1882! The shop’s first own brand was its staple commodity – butter. Sainsbury’s continued this practice and by the 1950s there was a host of such offerings on the shelves: ‘Sainsbury’s Cornflakes’, ‘Sainsbury’s Snax Biscuits’, ‘Sainsbury’s Cola’, ‘Sainsbury’s Peas and Carrots’, etc, etc. [‘The History of Sainsbury’s’, loc.cit.]. By 1980 half of the products Sainsbury’s sold were under its own label [Bevan, op.cit.].
Modernising Sainsbury’s
In 1950 Sainsbury’s refitted one of its earliest shops, in West Croydon, creating what was Britain’s first supermarket proper, one of the country’s earliest to operate as fully self-service. Some customers were at first put off by the innovation, thinking it impersonal and “anti-social”, however the convenience factor of not having to wait to be served eventually won out…Advertising and Marketing magazine reviewing the new store concluded: “From the point of view of the customer the chief advantages of self-service shopping are the speed with which shopping can be done and the ease with which one is reminded of things needed…these advantages substantially outweigh the disadvantages of not getting the personal attention of the assistant.” [‘Sainsbury ‘s return to site of first self-service supermarket’, (Graham Ruddick), The Telegraph (UK), 30-Aug-2013, www.telegraph.co.uk].
Although under its founder Sainsbury’s had been reluctant to get too big too quickly, once the company passed to his successor, son John Benjamin Sainsbury✫, the number of stores grew (though still at a trademark cautious pace). Under the strong leadership of a string of postwar CEOs (such as (John) Baron Sainsbury of Preston Candover), this trend was maintained❂.
Although Sainsbury’s followed a typically cautious approach to its business model, the company couldn’t be accused of dragging its feet when it came to embracing new technology. In the early Sixties they were the first retailer in Britain to develop a computerised distribution system and their stores were among the first to turf out electronic cash registers in favour of scanners in the late Eighties [‘J Sainsbury plc’, www.company-histories.com].
In 1973 the company went public under the holding co name J Sainsbury plc after being floated on the stock market. The 1970s witnessed increasing competition from discounters and a squeezing of profit margins, prompting an escalation in diversification…non-food items started to appear on Sainsbury’s shelves. It also innovated with the advent of ‘Savacentre’ hypermarkets and ‘Homebase’ house and garden centres. Overseas expansion was concentrated in the US – Sainsbury’s acquired Shaw’s Supermarkets, Giant Food Inc and Star Markets (its holdings in Shaw’s were unloaded in 2004).
Stumble and renewal
During the Nineties, Sainsbury’s, hitherto accustomed to being the premier supermarket chain, was relegated to second place by Tesco which became supermarket “top dog” in the UK in 1995. A change-up was required at Sainsbury’s and further diversification was sought. In 1997 the company ventured into in-store banking (in partnership with the Bank of Scotland – before going it alone in 2014). During this period the 130-year direct involvement in running the company of the Sainsbury family came to an end with the retirement of David (Lord) Sainsbury. The acquisition of Bells Stores in the early 2000s signalled a move into convenience stores, adding to the variety of its retail outlets.
Sainsbury’s – status quo in 2018 and future fortunes?
In the contemporary British retail landscape, Sainsbury’s, with a healthy slab of the market, is the second largest chain in the country✥ with ≻1415 stores (2017) and ≻186,900 employees (2018). Despite having long conceded first place to Tesco, this state of play is a fluid one…no longer dominated by the Sainsbury family (though it retains 15% of shares in the company), these days the majority shareholder is the Qatar Investment Authority (note comparisons with Harrods). 2018 has seen Sainsbury’s unearth a bold attempt to unseat Tesco’s hegemony through a planned merger with ASDA which would give the merged entity around 30-31% of the UK market – as against about 27.5% for Tesco (Source: Kantar). Approval of the controversial merger is still pending but could depend upon Sainsbury’s and ASDA offloading 463 of their stores to win over the competition ‘watchdog’ (CMA) [‘Walmart’s Asda agrees to UK merger deal with Sainsbury’s’, (Silvia Amaro) 30-Apr-2018, www.cnbc.com; ‘Sainsbury’s and Asda may have to offload 460 stores to seal merger’, (Sarah Butler), The Guardian, 28-Sep-2018, www.theguardian.com].
Footnote: A “leg-up” for UK supermarkets As the age of postwar austerity and scarcity gave way to an era of abundance and growth in the 1960s, supermarket heavyweights like Sainsbury’s and Tesco led the way. The supermarket chains on their expansionary arcs was facilitated by legislative changes affecting the retail sector. The abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM)✧ by the British Board of Trade in 1964 was a total game-changer! RPM had allowed (especially large) manufacturers to dictate terms to retailers, the law change shifted the balance in favour of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and co, who now could lord it over even the largest of manufacturers like Unilever and Procter & Gamble [James Buchan, Review of Trolley Wars by Judi Bevan, The Guardian, 30-Apr-2005].
PostScript: How Tesco outmanoeuvred and outgunned Sainsbury’s One of the key moves made by Tesco was to take careful note of what the older retailer was doing right (eg, offering quality in goods and service) and copying it! (in “Tesco-speak” this is called ‘benchmarking’ the opposition) [Bevan, op.cit.]. As Tesco grew incrementally it benefitted from a “virtuous circle” of business⊙. The sheer, monolithic size of Tesco allows it to buy merchandise more cheaply and accordingly sell it more cheaply. Ergo, they turn over more customers and make greater sales, and so the cycle is sustains itself [Buchan loc.cit.]. Tesco has a reputation for following intuitive hunches…being less risk adverse than other major supermarkets like Sainsbury’s it happily ventured into lower class, ‘brownfield’ areas that its competitors wouldn’t touch [Bevan, op.cit.].
—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧—‧ ✱ Festina lente – the motto of Roman emperors Augustus and Titus, et al ⊡ a calculated, gradual approach to expansion suited John James who had a very hands-on management style, by temperament he was a “micro-manager”, immersing himself in the minutiae of the shops’ everyday transactions ✫ known for his focus on staff welfare and remembered by one of his senior staff as a “benevolent dictator”, [‘Sainsbury family’, loc.cit.] ❂ there have so many Sainsbury family members involved in the company, in British politics, in art patronage and philanthropy, to almost necessitate a scorecard ✥ although it briefly conceded second place to the Walmart owned ASDA in 2003/2004 ✧ Resale price maintenance (or retail price maintenance) is a practice where the distributor agrees to sell at a price set by the manufacturer ⊙ a business scenario the Financial Times described as “hard to create, but (also) hard to disrupt”