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on the crew’s nerves, yielding to “nasty accidents” and scuffles. On the last day of the cargo transfer, “Sailor Stadish” was on the deck of the Ormoc operating a steam winch and teasing “Fireman Patrick,” who was in the hold supervising local workers in a final cleanup. Stadish said something he shouldn’t have, or at least not to someone in the hold of a ship on a day when the thermometer had well passed ninety degrees. He looked up and saw Patrick coming after him with an iron bar. Taking a step back, Stadish fell into an open hatch twenty-five feet, fracturing his skull and breaking a few ribs. 18
    It was not an auspicious beginning for a company that hoped to, as Edsel Ford put it, bring “redemption” to the Amazon. It took nearly until the end of January to finally get the ships up to Boa Vista and fully unloaded. And then the trouble really began.
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    * Though an improbable amount, both the Times and the Los Angeles Times reported this six billion figure, most likely provided by a company press release.

    * It was Spruce who identified and delivered to London a potent variety of cinchona, used to begin cultivation in India to make quinine—described by one official with the East India Company in 1852 as the most valuable medicinal drug in the world, “with probably the single exception of opium.” At Santarém, where Spruce lived for over a year, he documented the local use of guarana—a caffeinelike stimulant prescribed for nervous disorders and thought to be a prophylactic for a variety of diseases—believing it could be introduced into European pharmacies, perhaps as a supplement to tea or coffee (Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria , London: Macmillan, 2003, p. 5; Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes: Being Records of Travel on the Amazon and Its Tributaries , London: Macmillan, 1908, p. 452).

CHAPTER 13
    WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE
    FOR A GOOD JOB?
    HENRY FORD, EVER READY TO CHALLENGE COMPANIONS TO A foot race or a fence-jumping contest, represented, as both icon and huckster, the freedom of movement that distinguished American industrial capitalism from its European equivalent. “All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century to describe the revolutionary potential of capitalism to break down feudal hierarchies and the superstitions that justified them. But Europe took a considerably longer time to thaw than the United States: in no other country had national identity become so closely associated with movement—whether horizontal, that is, the march west and then overseas, or vertical, the idea that those born to the lowest ranks could climb power’s peaks.
    There would be inventors of faster machines than his motor car. Yet nobody could claim to have transformed, at least in such a noticeable way, nearly every realm of daily life, from the factory and field to the family. And for capitalism’s sake he did so in the nick of time. Just as industrial amalgamators like John D. Rockefeller were declaring that “the age of individualism is gone, never to return,” Ford came along to put the car—a supreme symbol of individualism—in reach of millions. “Happiness is on the road,” Ford said. “I am on the road, and I am happy.”

    Ford peddled change as if he were the head not of a motor company but of the Metaphysical Club. “Life flows,” he remarked in his cowritten autobiography. “We may live at the same number on the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.” The myth, of course, didn’t come close to matching the reality, for what some came to call a “new industrial feudalism” intensified existing prejudices and created new forms of exclusion and control, including those perfected by Ford himself. “The Ford operators may enjoy high pay, but they are not really alive—they are half dead,” mourned the vice president of the Brotherhood of Electrical