Summary of Greg Grandin's Fordlandia

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In the 1920s, America’s thirst for rubber helped strengthen European colonialism, as revenue from rubber was used to pay off England and France’s war debt.
#2 The rubber industry was already dependent on oil, and by 1924, Ford had considered growing his own rubber in the muck lands of the Florida Everglades. Rumors of his interest in Florida prompted speculators to organize the Florida and Cape Cod Realty Company to buy up and subdivide large tracts of land in Labelle.
#3 Ford did not like collective action. When Firestone tried to organize the rubber industry, Ford refused to participate. He decided that the best place to grow rubber was in the Amazon, where it originated.
#4 The southern half of the Amazon basin, which is home to the Hevea brasiliensis tree, was the site of the world’s rubber boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. With their Beaux Arts palaces, neoclassical municipal buildings, electric trams, and wide Parisian boulevards, the cities of Manaus and Belém competed for the title of tropical Paris.

Sujets

• Colonisation
• History
• United States
• Histoire
• 20th Century

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 05 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822502178
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Greg Grandin's Fordlandia
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19 Insights from Chapter 20 Insights from Chapter 21 Insights from Chapter 22 Insights from Chapter 23
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In the 1920s, America’s thirst for rubber helped strengthen European colonialism, as revenue from rubber was used to pay off England and France’s war debt.

#2

The rubber industry was already dependent on oil, and by 1924, Ford had considered growing his own rubber in the muck lands of the Florida Everglades. Rumors of his interest in Florida prompted speculators to organize the Florida and Cape Cod Realty Company to buy up and subdivide large tracts of land in Labelle.

#3

Ford did not like collective action. When Firestone tried to organize the rubber industry, Ford refused to participate. He decided that the best place to grow rubber was in the Amazon, where it originated.

#4

The southern half of the Amazon basin, which is home to the Hevea brasiliensis tree, was the site of the world’s rubber boom in the second half of the nineteenth century. With their Beaux Arts palaces, neoclassical municipal buildings, electric trams, and wide Parisian boulevards, the cities of Manaus and Belém competed for the title of tropical Paris.

#5

The production of rubber that made such affluence possible was based on a system of peonage, in which tappers were compelled to spread out through the jungle and collect sap.

#6

The rubber trade was a system that produced enormous riches when Brazil had a monopoly on the world’s rubber trade, but the wealth it created was fleeting and unsustainable. The tapping system could quickly deplete man and tree.

#7

The boom in rubber production in the Amazon was due in part to the actions of another Henry, who arrived in the Amazon in the late nineteenth century to commit what observers today call bio-piracy.

#8

The seeds Wickham collected and shipped to London provided the genetic stock of all subsequent rubber plantations in the British, French, and Dutch colonies.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Ford was born in 1863, and he created the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1913. He was forty years old when he introduced the Model T, and fifty when he began to pay workers a wage high enough to let them buy the product they themselves made.

#2

The economics of Ford-style mass production were simple. In 1911, it took just under seven thousand Ford workers to make 78,440 Model Ts. The following year, both production and the workforce more than doubled. By 1913, the number of cars the factory produced doubled yet again, while the labor force decreased from 14,336 to 12,880 men.

#3

The second stage of Ford’s revolution was to make people stay put. He announced that the Ford Motor Company would pay an incentive wage of five dollars for an eight-hour day, nearly double the average industrial standard.

#4

The Ford Motor Company used inspectors from its Sociological Department to probe into the most intimate corners of its employees’ lives. They wanted to know if workers had insurance, how they spent their money, and whether they had a bank account.

#5

Ford’s Five Dollar Day and the Sociological Department’s promotion of spending helped him turn his company into a closed, self-regulating circuit that increased production and expanded consumption.

#6

Ford was a pacifist and suffragist who believed in man’s perfectibility. He took credit for ending society’s reliance on the horse, and he wanted to do away with all barnyard animals. He was a radical pacifist who once conceded that one last great war might be needed to finally bring about world disarmament.

#7

The 1920s was an age of competitive redemptions. Socialist: the Russian Revolution, led by Lenin, was built on the promise of a new heaven and earth. Nationalist: the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire was fought in the name of a new heaven and a new earth. Fundamentalist: Billy Sunday held 40,000-strong revival meetings in Detroit, vying with Ford for the press’s attention.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

The Golden Age of Ford arrived in early 1914, with the promise of industrial peace and prosperity. But World War I tested Ford’s optimistic creed. The battle of Verdun alone consumed close to forty million artillery shells and over 300,000 lives.

#2

Ford’s failure to keep the United States out of World War I initiated a series of political defeats and compromises that left him without any major success apart from the considerable ones that bore his name.

#3

Ford’s vision of a world made whole and happy by trade and industry is captured in his favorite poem, Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Locksley Hall. It was not gunboats or marines that would tame the world, but his car.

#4

Ford was eager to charter an ocean liner to float a people’s delegation to Europe to negotiate an end to the conflict. He assembled a group of dissenters, vegetarians, socialists, pacifists, and suffragists, who seemed more at home under a carnival tent than in the halls of diplomacy.

#5

The mission of the Oscar proved a bust. In the middle of the voyage, President Woodrow Wilson announced that he would call on Congress to increase the size of the standing army, a policy shift that split the delegates into competing factions.

#6

Roosevelt and Ford represented two different traditions of Americanism, with Roosevelt being the more militaristic and Ford being the more heartland-centered. Ford’s pacifism, however, represented a threat to many Americans, both dissenters and mainstream Christians.

#7

Roosevelt’s visit to Detroit was to promote national identity, not just national defense. He had learned that it was much easier to focus on external threats to achieve unity than to fight for fairness at home.

#8

In 1917, the United States entered World War I, and Ford made a bid for Michigan’s seat in the US Senate to support Wilson’s proposed League of Nations. He lost that election, though he did come within a few thousand votes of winning.

#9

Ford’s internationalism was rooted in constructive, rationally ordered activity. He believed that if the world was to be saved, it needed to look for solutions rooted in the small-town values of America’s past.