Showing posts from category: Regional History
The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 2: Choosing Peace Without Honour and the Seeds of the Brits’ “Doing it My Way”
At a critical junction in the escalating crisis in France, Churchill and de Gaulle met at the Carlton Club in London on 16 June 1940. With an acute recognition of just how close and tangible French annihilation by the Nazi war machine was, the two men from each side of the English Channel agreed that union of the two countries was the necessary way forward. The agreed plan was for de Gaulle to take the British offer for an “indissoluble union” back to the French Council of Ministers (henceforth FCOM) for approval.
⬇️ Charles de Gaulle
Given the broken morale of the French army, an out-weaponised “spent force” utterly helpless to stop the Nazi Germany military machine from overrunning the country, surely the cabinet, as distasteful as the notion of a merger with Britain might sound to many patriotic French men and women, would endorse the proposal for a Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) as the only viable, rational move available?
General Weygand – ‘minister’ for the opposition
The senior military officers back in France however were working to a different agenda. The opposition to an alliance between France and Britain was led by General Maxime Weygand. Weygand, the senior military man in France, used his influential position with members of the cabinet to intervene into the political sphere. Going beyond the limits of his (military) authority✻, Weygand made a concerted effort to undermine the case for union spearheaded by the premier Paul Reynaud.
Général d’armée
Weygand engaged in bullying, abusing and threatening of the undecided politicians until they acquiesced and rolled over into the camp of those favouring a separate armistice with Hitler [Philip C. F. Bankwitz. (1959). Maxime Weygand and the Fall of France: A Study in Civil-Military Relations. The Journal of Modern History, 31(3), 225-242. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1875584].
⬇️ The powerbroker (Weygand)
Weygand V Reynaud
Weygand resorted to various dirty tricks to overcome Reynaud’s efforts to get FCOM to accept Churchill’s offer, such as wiretapping the French premier’s phone which allowed the general to know what Reynaud was scheming with the deliberating ministers and stay one step ahead of him. Weygand also resorted to brandishing the spectre of a communist takeover if France didn’t sue for peace with Germany [Shlaim, A. (1974). Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(3), 27-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/260024].
Tactically Weygand has it all over Reynaud in their head-to-head contest to sway the minds of the ministers. He exploited French fears and mistrust of forming an alliance with the English. Weygand could also count on the support of the vice-premier, the influential Marshal Pétain, to help defeat Reynaud’s plans. The Third Republic’s president (Albert Lebrun) was another unhelpful factor in the crisis’ equation – a stronger figurehead may have provided firm support to the government’s alliance objective, but Lebrun’s weak and ineffectual recourse was to merely try to appease all sides of the political crisis [ibid.].
Premier Reynaud for his part made a number of tactical errors that contributed to the failure of his objective. His omission in not inviting the British PM to the key FCOM meeting, denied the wavering ministers the opportunity to hear Churchill put the British pro-union case directly to them and let them gauge how genuine he was about FBU. While Weygand was actively busy rallying ministers to his side, Reynaud prevaricated way too long without taking decisive action◈ (ie, pushing FCOM at the earliest instance to reject the armistice path). Lacking the resolve to act, he tried to “manoeuvre and temporise” rather than tackle the issue (and Weygand) head on [ibid.]. The longer the cabinet crisis went on, the more the situation tilted towards the pro-armistice party.
An accumulation of Gallic doubts
As the military situation worsened daily in June 1940, the ministry found more and more reasons to reject the FBU route. De Gaulle detected an “extremely acute Anglophobe feeling” within the armistice collaborators, a feeling heightened by the French public’s anger at the fallout of the Dunkirk operation (viz the British abandonment of a large number of French POWs).
British motives were increasingly questioned by the French ministers …national pride was at sake for some like former PM Camille Chautemps who feared that agreeing to FBU would relegate France to the status of a British dominion, it was thought that the scheme was a ruse to allow Britain to get its hands on France’s colonial empire [ibid.]. There was a sense among the armistice party that if France made an early request for armistice with Germany, it would enhance the republic’s chances of receiving favourable terms. The mindset was typified in the ominous words of minister of state Ybarnégaray: “…better be a Nazi province; at least we know what that means”※[ibid.].
There was also a belief within the proponents of armistice, fostered by the French military hierarchy, that Britain itself was doomed, that the island’s demise at the onslaught of the Nazi juggernaut was inevitable…as Pétain put it, union with the UK would be committing France to “fusion with a corpse”. Another key advocate of armistice and German collaboration, Pierre Laval, (later vice-premier of the Vichy state) “fear-mongered” freely – disseminating the speculation that when the eventual peace negotiations came (after the defeat of FBU), it was France that would have to pay for the war! [ibid.].
⬇️ Marshal Pétain boards the Hitler train
The burden of swelling ‘defeatism’
As each day passed and with France’s military defence now non-existent, a wave of defeatism descended over the French people and the government. With the pro-armistice camp holding the dominant hand, minister Chautemps’ proposal that FCOM request a separate peace with Germany was effortlessly passed. The despairing Reynaud, sensing that further efforts for FBU were futile and also concerned at the prospect of a divided republic, fell on his sword, resigning immediately. Marshal Pétain hastily assumed the reins of government, thus beginning four years of Vichy proxy rule of France on behalf of Herr Hitler [ibid.].
Footnote: The road to Brexit?
When FBU failed to crystallise in 1940, Britain was left with the full realisation that it had to go it alone against Germany. To survive against such odds the UK looked west to the USA, not to Europe. Churchill and his government thereafter channeled its diplomatic energies towards enticing America into joining Britain’s war against Nazism๏.
Dominic Tierney has drawn a connecting line from the recent Brexit phenomena back to the events of 1940, a commonality of the impulse to go solo. Tierney sees the ‘Brexiteers’, those conservative proponents intent on exiting from Europe, as invoking the “spirit of Dunkirk” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
PostScript: an alternate history of the “Anglo-French Confederation”
The unfulfilled ‘destiny’ of FBU is a boon to the “what if?” school of history buffs who revel in imaginative reconstructions of past seminal events✥. Theoretical questions abound about FBU had it become a reality…eg, how would the new super-state reconcile the British monarchy with the French republic? Where would real power lie within FBU? How would the Napoleonic legal code mesh with the very different Anglo-Saxon legal system? What would the entity’s ‘indissoluble’ union (Churchill’s very problematic term) really mean in the long run? And so on and so on [‘What if Britain and France unified in 1940?’ (David Boyle), in Prime Minister Corbyn and other things that never happened, edited by Duncan Brack & Iain Dale, (2016)].
The notion of FBU, though stillborn in 1940, did raise its head yet again years later – see the following blog in this series The Franco-British Union Redux …Mach II
╺╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╼╾ ╼╾╺
✻ to the point of directly and flagrantly disobeying the government’s directives, such as refusing point-blank to relocate to North Africa if a French government in exile was to be re-established there [Barkwitz, op.cit.]
◈ and the element of surprise had been lost for the FBU camp with the army tapping Reynaud’s conversations
※ in his postwar memoirs Reynaud soberly wrote: “Those who rose in indignation at the idea of union with our ally, were getting ready to bow and scrape to Hitler”
๏ later Churchill and Attlee governments both distanced themselves from the suggestion that they revisit the idea of union with France [Shlaim, op.cit.]. And the Eden government during the Suez Canal crisis flatly rebuffed a request from France for the two countries to ally
✥ the bona fide aficionado of “alt-history” salivates over the prospect of “what if happened” scenarios. There has been something of a tradition of detective novels hypothesising on different historical events, eg, Robert Harris’ Fatherland which rewrites the postwar world based on the premise that Hitler did not die and the Third Reich won the Second World War
The Incroyable Political Union of 1940, Part 1: Questions of Pragmatic Necessity and the Remoulding of a Future Europe
”The Governments of the United Kingdom and the French Republic make this declaration of indissoluble union and unyielding resolution in their common defence of justice and freedom, against subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves.”
~ British offer of Anglo-French Union, June 16, 1940
[Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 365. House of Commons Official Report Eleventh Volume of Session 1939-40, (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1940), columns 701-702.]
ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ–ლ
I first heard of this astonishing plan to politically unify Britain and France in WWII – to make French citizens British and British citizens French – in a television documentary broadcast on SBS – Churchill’s Bodyguard (2005)✻. The thought that these two Anciens rivaux of Europe nearly became one country seems, from this vantage point looking backwards, a simply incredulous thing to contemplate❂.
⍗ WSC (Source: PA)
The catalyst for the June 1940 proposal to fuse the two European allies was France’s military debacle: Nazi Germany launched a massive offensive into France in May and French forces offered scant resistance as the German Wehrmacht steamrolled on towards Paris with alarming speed. In late May the British Expeditionary Forces were evacuated from France, however the British left some 90,000 French troops in Dunkirk, abandoned to the fate of the conquering German army.
Before the crisis in the UK: Laying the groundwork for a federation
In the late 1930s, with threats to European stability and democracy emerging from both the Right and the Left, federalist ideas and sentiments started to gain currency within the UK. There was a thriving literature on the subject…liberal and socialist thinkers like William Beveridge, Lord Lothian and Lionel Curtis, were disseminating federalist ideas which were supported by many prominent politicians from both sides and by members of the Anglican Church. Andrea Bosco has drawn attention to the activism of a grass-roots movement known as the Federal Union which functioned as “a catalyst for (Federalist) ideas and behaviours“, generating popular backing in GB for the federal idea. French political economist Jean Monnet, as chair of the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee based in London, had the most developed perspective of the “Pan-Europeans”. Monnet took some of his inspiration from the vibrant British federalist movement and even discussed federalism with the then UK prime minster, Neville Chamberlain (more of Monnet later). Before the war a bill✫ was drafted at Chatham House◘ anticipating the Franco-British Union (henceforth FBU) [‘Britain’s forgotten attempt to build a European Union’, (Andrea Bosco), (London School of Economics & Political Science), 20-Jan-2017, www.blogs.lse.ac.uk].
M. Monnet ⍗
Proponents of FBU: the British
British PM Churchill, though harbouring doubts about the viability of the proposed union, was in the vanguard of the initiative. Churchill and the all-party UK war cabinet were desperate to stop the French capitulating to Hitler (failing that the PM deemed it imperative that the French fleet not fall into Nazi hands) [Shlaim, A. (1974). Prelude to Downfall: The British Offer of Union to France, June 1940. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(3), 27-63. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/260024].
The British offer of union, described by Shlaim as a deus ex machina, came when it did, as an attempt to mend the deteriorating relations between GB and France. Westminster, by making a “spectacular gesture of solidarity” with the beleaguered French, was hoping to silence the criticism within France of British motives. It was also intended to shore up the position of French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who was the key political figure on the French side most in favour of the Union. By making common cause with France, the British were trying to raise French morale to stay in the fight against Germany and to discourage the Nazis. At the same time, by securing FBU with France, it hoped to entice to its side the “weak neutrals” of the Continent, away from the pull of the Third Reich. It would be wrong to assume everyone associated with the government in Britain was on board with Churchill’s scheme to fast-track an Anglo-French union…top Whitehall civil servant Sir Orme Sargent for instance felt the UK public was not ready for a union with France and urged it be delayed to after the war [ibid.].
Proponents of FBU: the French
Reynaud was the political face of the pro-FBU cause within the French ranks, but behind the scenes the concept was largely the brainchild of the aforementioned Jean Monnet. After the war Monnet’s untiring efforts at unification saw him identified as the “father of European integration”. In early 1940 as the war began to encroach closer and closer to France, Monnet was preoccupied with finding a way of avoiding the excesses of nationalism and militarism plaguing Europe. FBU was intended to be the “prototype of complete union” (Shlaim)…Monnet saw the surrender of national sovereignty by France and GB as the first step on the road to greater Europe’s supranational integration⌺. The incorporation of the two countries and economies was a starting point for the ultimate political unification of Europe. Monnet’s relentless advocacy of the merits of a “United States of Europe” postwar, helped to bear fruit with the creation of the Common Market and the European Community. 
Although, for the British participants in the drama, eventual European unification was not the rationale for making FBU happen, there were some on the English side of the channel who endorsed M Monnet’s integrationist ambitions, such as Professor Arnold Toynbee and Sir Arthur Salter. Even Churchill’s private secretary at the time was eyeing off the prospect of new openings and a shifting role for the UK – even going so far as to affirm that a union with France could be a “bridge to Europe and even World Federation” [‘When Britain and France Almost Merged Into One Country’, (Dominic Tierney), The Atlantic, 08-Aug-2017, www.theatlantic.com].
The consensus in the British block did not endorse Monnet’s visionary role for FBU, the hard-nose pragmatist view of Westminster was that, at that time of extreme and extraordinary peril, the union was purely one of expediency. The British offer was, in Avi Shlaim’s words, “no more than a last and desperate effort to keep France in the war against the common enemy” [ibid.] – a short-term objective only.
French military leader General de Gaulle (despite like Churchill harbouring some reservations about the concept) threw his weight behind FBU, believing it represented “a grand move to change history” [ibid.]. The linchpin for the Union’s success or otherwise came to hinge on secret talks between Churchill for the British and de Gaulle for the French. It was indeed an irony that on this occasion the “two patriotic statesmen, the symbols of independence and nationalism” (of their respective nations) were in synch with each other in seeking a supranational entity (Shlaim).
Like PM Reynaud, de Gaulle (still at this stage a junior minister in the French government) advocated FBU as the sole way forward because he wanted to fight on against the German invasion forces. Unfortunately for them (and the stricken French republic), the military high command and the majority of the French cabinet had other ideas. In the second part of this blog, we will look at how the events of June 1940 planned out and discover the fate of FBU and it’s postwar reverberations for Britain and France and for contemporary Europe as a whole.
Richard (the Lionheart) Plantagenet
Postscript: Incredible or incroyable as the prospect of an Anglo-French union in 1940 might seem, it would not have been without precedent. The Norman and Plantagenet monarchs in England in the 11th through 13th centuries ruled what was an Anglo-French state.
┼────┼────┼────┼────┼────┼
✻ based on the memoirs of Winston Churchill’s long-time bodyguard, Walter H Thompson
❂ although the idea of an Anglo-French Union didn’t simply emerge out of thin air in 1940. The military alliance between the two countries in the face of the menace of an encroaching fascism in Europe had been taking shape since 1936…which in turn had built on the 1904 Entente cordiale, agreements which formally ended centuries of on-again, off-again Franco-English conflict [Mathews, J. (1941). The Anglo-French Alliance and the War. The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 21(4), 351-359. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/42865013; ‘Franco-British Union’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ Act of Perpetual Association between the UK and France
◘ a London “think tank” known officially as the Royal Institute of International Affairs
⌺ M Monnet was an unapologetic Anglophile, having lived and worked in London for part of his career he admired the British welfare system and had a sincere appreciation of GB’s assistance to France in two world wars
New York – Once was (Briefly) “Nieuw Oranje”
America’s greatest city, the vast metropolis of New York, can claim an interesting and varied history of nomenclature. Until the English hold on New York was established permanently in the late 17th century (permanently that is until the American Revolution!), the settlement changed hands and names several times.
⇩ Manhattan Island 
Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.
⇧ 17th century map of Nieuw Nederlandt
The English already had a foothold on Long Island and were keen on securing New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves…the English king Charles II granted his brother James, Duke of York rights to a large chunk of land on the Atlantic Seaboard. James duly launched an invasion fleet in 1664. Under pressure, the unpopular Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant failed to muster any significant support for its defence and was forced to surrender the settlement without any bloodshed. The occupying English force renamed it New York in honour of the Duke and future king of England and Ireland, James II. Richard Nicholls became the New York colony’s first governor.
A much less familiar fact is that New York was known by two other names at different periods in its history. The first European to set eyes on New York harbour was Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 …. Verrazzano named the place New Angoulême after his patron Francis I of France (formerly the Count of Angoulëme). Verrazzano never attempted to establish a settlement there✥.
Manhattan Transferred
In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a sizeable Dutch fleet led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest AKA Keesje de Duivel (“Little Cornelis the Devil”) and Jacob Benckes, turned up in New York harbour, demanding the city be surrendered to it. Evertsen knew from intelligence gathered that the English governor (Francis Lovelace) was absent and the settlement’s defences were in a shabby state with Fort James being poorly garrisoned. After a brief military flexing of muscle by the Dutch, the English acting commander surrendered without resistance – in a reversal of the events and results of 1664! [‘The End of New Netherland’, (American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond’), www.let.rug.nl].
New York was renamed Nieuw Oranje (New Orange) in honour of the Prince Willem of Orange (ironically the future King William III of England and Ireland). The officer commanding the Dutch land forces, Captain Anthonij Colve, was appointed governor-general of the restored Dutch colony. The Dutch coup was short-lived however, within a year the English had regained the settlement through the Treaty of Westminster – by which the Netherlands received Suriname in South America as a swap. New York was New York again – this time for good!
PostScript: New York by metonym✪ or other informal name
Aficionados of mainstream American popular culture know Gotham or Gotham City as the supposed abode of the superhero Batman, courtesy of the long-running DC comic strip-cum-TV and film series (Gotham City is modelled on NYC albeit evoking the darkest possible manifestation of the city). The original attribution of ‘Gotham’ to New York however long predates the Batman phenomenon (the first Batman comic hit the book stalls in 1939). Its genesis was a creation of the mind of celebrated 19th century writer Washington Irving…Irving first referred to Gotham/NYC in a satirical periodical on New York culture and politics, Salmagundi, in 1807, and the association caught on with the public [‘Gotham City’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
There are a host of other nicknames for New York but by far the most popular, the most affectionate, is “the Big Apple”. The term gained currency on provincial racecourses circa 1920 and was made popular by newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, [‘Why is New York City nicknamed the “Big Apple”?, Elizabeth Nix, 23-Jul-2014, www.history.com].
As The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts remarked of the city’s Dutch name of 1673/1674:
(New York) “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple”! [quoted in ‘When New York was officially named New Orange’, Ephemeral New York, 07-Mar-2011, www.ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com].
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✲ the colonists followed this later by naming the adjacent island, present-day Long Island, Nieuw Amersfoort
✥ leaving aside the undocumented and speculative claim made on behalf of Norseman Lief Ericsson who may conceivably have been the first to visit the site of New York over 1,000 years ago
✪ metonym: the use of a (descriptive) name in place of the proper) name because it is closely associated (eg, the “White House” in lieu of the US Presidential Palace)
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.]
Messengers by Appointment to Her Majesty – the “Silver Greyhounds” Service
The Brits are nothing if not traditionalists. Take one of the primest examples of their fidelity to tradition – royalty! Putting aside the interregnum of the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649-1660) as an aberration, the people of GB have faithfully stuck with the monarchy as the preferred form of rule for the long haul. Kings or queens have ruled Britain, or at least England, since the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert unified various regions of England and Wales around 830 to be recognised with the title Bretwalda (“ruler of the British/Anglo-Saxons”) [‘Kings and Queens of England & Britain’, (Ben Johnson), Historic UK, www.historic-uk.com].
Despite the small island in the North-eastern Atlantic not having been the most ‘united’ of kingdoms of late (witness Brexit, Scottish secessionist moves, etc), the British monarchy still possesses a very healthy pulse indeed. There remains a British queen, though now a nonegenerian, one with a clearly defined line of succession to follow her. The contemporary Windsors seem determined to uphold the prediction of Egyptian king, Farouk I, who upon being deposed from the Alawiyya dynastic throne in 1952, remarked with graveyard humour: “Soon there will be only five kings left…the king of spades, the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds…and the king of England!”
So given that Britain has the stability of a long-reigning queen and the institution of monarchy is firmly rooted in Anglo-Celtic soil, then it should not really come as a surprise to discover that the queen retains a team of “secret mission” messengers who are at her beck and call 24/7. The title queen’s (or king’s) messenger does have an anachronistic ring to it – when you conjure up images of darkly-clad couriers (perhaps spies), secretly scurrying from castle to castle across Medieval Europe on royal business.
A long tradition of HM service
The role of messengers as part of the English monarch’s contact network appears to stretch back a whole millennium. The 13th century monarch, King John, younger brother of the more flamboyantly heroic Richard the Lion-Heart, apparently used his messengers for less orthodox missions (such as transporting part of the dismembered body of Norwich traitor Henry Roper). The earliest recorded King’s Messenger was one John Norman, appointed by Richard III in 1485 to deliver his private letters [Marco Giannangeli, ‘Queen’s Messengers face the axe, heroes who resisted all tyrants, honeytraps and pirates’, Daily Express (UK), 05-Dec-2015, www.dailyexpress.co.uk].
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‘Silver Greyhounds’
The royal messengers are colloquially known as “silver greyhounds”, a name bestowed on them by the Stuart king Charles II who to aid their identification at their scheduled destinations, gave each of his messengers one greyhound figurine which he had broken off from a silver breakfast platter [’The Silver Greyhound – The Messenger Service’, (Keith Mitchell), 25-Mar-2014, (History of government blog), www.history.blog.gov.uk ]. These days the tradition continues with the appointed QMs being issued with silver greyhound badges or tie-clips.
After the establishment of the British Foreign Office in 1782, the role of the King’s Messenger took on an enhanced importance, and from 1795 with the resumption of war with France, a greater hazard for the couriers. Journeying through enemy France on secret mission was especially frought with danger for the messenger…one such silver greyhound, Andrew Basilico, when caught by the French, had the foresight to eat the part of the paper containing the covert message to ensure the integrity of the message [‘Queen’s Messenger’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
In the 19th century royal messengers could claim expenses for their journeys on behalf of the Crown. Some canny messengers supplemented their earnings on the side by selling the empty seat in their carriage (a practice the government tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to outlaw in the 1830s) [Mitchell, loc.cit.].
In the 20th century with East-West political tensions on the rise, KMs and QMs continued to play an important role against a backdrop of tense Cold War espionage encounters. George Courtauld, a retired silver greyhound, in his memoirs recounts some of the hazards of smuggling the confidential messages of Queen Elizabeth through communist countries, including the tricky business of dealing with Eastern Bloc “femme fatales” (the ‘honeypots’) [Giannangeli, loc.cit.].
A QM vade mecum: apparently the book of choice for aspiring King’s and Queen’s Messengers in the 20th century (Courtauld) ⇩
The modern day Queen’s Messenger
QMs (officially in Whitehall protocol known as the Corps of Queen’s Messengers) in Britain today are employed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Despite the glamourous image of the world of international spies, as portrayed in popular culture, today’s QMs live a decidedly “un-James Bondian” lifestyle, no luxury accommodation in the Bahamas, no first-class travel, nor the trappings, thrills and supposed sexual exploits of jet-setting secret agents!
A peak under the dusty sheets of the service
The QMs Corps, as with all “cloak and dagger” official organisations with a culture of high security, functions on a “need-to-know” basis. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to Whitehall did shed some light (but no insights into the inner workings) of the obscure world of QMs. The FCO communique revealed that the QMs dress in plain clothing and are not particularly well remunerated, being paid at only C4 officer scale (£25,200-£33,250); at that time the QMs were 18 in number and all males in the age range 40 to 70✴. The FCO in true intelligence protocol would “neither confirm or deny” if QMs were armed✲. The requisite skill-sets of QMs stated in the document include the capacity to travel on short notice; work overseas for extended periods; work independently or within a team; think quickly on one’s feet; and remaining calm under pressure (occasionally extreme pressure)⌽ [FCO written reply, FOI Ref: 0315-15 (27 April 2015), http://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk].
‘Queens Messenger’ (2001): a modern attempt to use the QM motif to make a James Bond style post-Cold War action flick ⇩
Is there still a role for the Queen’s Messenger in the 21st century?
The “hands-on”, person-to-person couriering of QMs seem out of place in the world of modern state communications, a “snail mail” approach compared to the instantaneous transference of information via electronic platforms. Unsurprising then, that in recent times, whenever a critical eye is routinely turned to British government spending, the microscope fixes its gaze on the QM service – which thus far survives despite seeming to habitually “fac(e) the chop (from) cost-cutting Foreign Office mandarins…(viewed as a) “legacy of a by-gone age” [Giannangeli, op.cit.].
An uncertain new world of unsecured information
The mechanism of modernity, those same communication innovations of the online world also create the very justification for the continuance of the QM service. Today we are awash with online crime, cyber-hacking, code-breaking and security interceptions by groups like Wikileaks. In such an environment Buckingham Palace is faced with a choice – trust those who you trust, the loyal silver greyhound retainer, or take the odds on the random anonymity of the vast, ungovernable cyberspace. On an ad hoc basis the royals will continue to find merit in relying on QMs, “safe-hands” who can get the task done seamlessly, rather than always leaving it to the quicker but potentially more chancy method of transferring the message electronically [ibid.].
Footnote: the official case carried by the silver greyhound, presumably containing “the message”, has its own diplomatic passport and therefore cannot be opened, x-rayed or inspected by airport staff when transiting customs – although the QM himself and his personal luggage are subject to the normal airport procedures [‘Her Majesty Queen’s Messengers – History and Current Status’, (Passport-collector.com, 22-Mar-2016), www.passport-collector.com]
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✴ in the main, in practice QMs tend to be men and recruited from the ranks of retired army or police officers
✲ these days QMs almost certainly would never carry guns on missions. Apocryphal or not, it has been suggested that the greyhounds are however ‘armed’ with an excellent, aged bottle of Scotch on their travels [Giannangeli, op.cit.]
⌽ QMs receive core training which comprises induction, mentoring, security, IT and SAFE training
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