The Way You Are
For two years the neighbors had grown use to strange sounds and even stranger sights emerging from the garage behind the brown house at 58 Bagley Avenue. The owner was an inventor after all employed by the famous Thomas Edison, so it was expected he would be the type to tinker in his garage. Neighbors had long become accustomed to bangs, pops, and even explosions. On June 4th 1896, a different sound emerged from the garage. A strange, rhythmic humming. It was that rhythmic humming that caught the attention of several neighbors who began to gather to see what was making the racket.
The sound continued as anticipation built among the onlookers. At last, out of the garage emerged a contraption unlike any they had ever seen. The owner of the home rolled out of the garage, perched in a lone chair precariously positioned between four bicycle tires. Under his chair was a small metal device he called an engine, which astonishingly contained the power of four horsed. Above that engine was a three-gallon tank of pure ethyl alcohol. The neighbors were awestruck as the machine cruised up and down Bagley Avenue at an astonishing 20 miles per hour.
The machine was called a quadricycle. And the man perched on top, was Henry Ford. He would ultimately sell only three quadricycles before he moved on to found the Detroit Automobile Company. His first business lasted only two years before it failed. Soon after the failure he and a partner formed the Henry Ford Company. He lasted there just over a year before leaving the company that bore his name. With Ford out of the picture, that company quickly rebranded to Cadillac. It was the third try that worked for Henry Ford. The Ford Motor Company, while it did have a turbulent start, would become one of the most valuable businesses of the century, and make Ford, one of the richest men in the world.
By the late 1920s the Ford Motor Company was producing hundreds of thousands of cars per year. Those cars needed millions of tires. In the 1920s rubber had one source. The South American tree Hevea Brasiliiensis who’s sap is natural latex. In the 1870’s Dutch and English settlers had smuggled some saplings out of Brazil and used them to establish enormous rubber plantations in East Asia. Their plantations soon smothered the output of Brazil, and by the 20th century they had a stranglehold on the world rubber market.
Henry Ford was not afraid to dream big. By 1929 he had the knowledge and the resources to bring his dreams to reality. Frustrated with the rubber cartels, he hired a native Brazilian named Villares to survey and select a site for a massive undertaking in the amazon. On Villares’ advice Ford purchased 25,000 square kilometers of Amazon rainforest. He hired thousands of locals, and sent barges up the river carrying excavators, piledrivers, steamrollers and prefab buildings.
His vision was called Fordlandia. It was to be an entire city in the Amazon devoted to the production of rubber. In just a few months city as American as apple pie sprung up in what was jungle mere months prior. It included a power plant golf course, hospital, and rows of suburban houses. Soon after came all kinds of business including butchers, tailors, bakeries and restaurants. It quickly became a thriving community. A community filled with black Model T’s.
The city in the Jungle was so perfect, it seemed almost too good to be true. Local Brazilians were hired to staff the fields and factories. They were given a high wage of 37 cents a day which almost doubles the going rate for that type of work. It was all part of Ford’s Vision to transplant the American way into Brazil. The American way was not just high wages and comfortable homes. It meant eating in a cafeteria that served American Food. Attending American style festivities on weekends. Square Dances, poetry readings, and English classes. It also included strict prohibition of alcohol, a violation of which was grounds for immediate dismissal.
The ”American Way” as Henry Ford understood it, was very new to the locals. Very new, and very different. But like a child who is bribed by candy to complete their homework, the locals put up with the requirements in order to earn the high wages offered by Ford. Fordlandia existed in peace for almost a year. Then the problems started.
Ford hadn’t bothered to hire botanists to plat the tree saplings. He had plenty of engineers on staff. And they could easily research the Asian plantations to see what processes to use. The saplings never stood a chance. Those that managed to survive the heavy rains, were soon afflicted with a leaf fungus rendering them stunted. His employees fought the fungus with everything they knew, but in the end, engineers proved incapable of growing rubber trees.
As unproductive months passed, workers grew discontent. Workers that were accustomed to working before sunrise and after sunset to avoid the heat, were forced to work “proper” American hours of nine-to-five. Malaria became a serious problem as workers struggled through pooled water in the heat of the day.
In December of 1930 tensions boiled over. In the cafeteria, having suffered one too many bouts of indigestion due to the foreign food, a Brazilian man stood on a table, and announced that he would no longer tolerate the conditions. A chorus of voices soon joined him. The sound of voices was soon joined by smashing dishes, and breaking windows. Fordlandia managers quickly fled to their home. Three days later the Brazilian Military arrived to restore order. Workers returned to work. But the rubber issues were still persistent. The plantation would never produce an ounce of rubber. Eventually Ford hired a botanist, who quickly determined that damp, hilly terrain was terrible for growing trees, but excellent for growing fungus. Unfortunately for Ford, nobody had paid attention to the fact that the lands previous owner was a man named Villares… the very same man whom had been hired by Ford. Henry Ford had been sold a piece of land that was never going to be able to grow rubber, and Fordlandia was a complete failure.
When it comes to personal finance there are two types of people. “Savers”, and “spenders”. Neither one is better or worse than the other. But what happens all too often, is people who are spenders, try to tell themselves they are savers. Becoming something you are not is a hard task. Ford’s engineers could not become botanists. His local Brazilian workers could not become “Americans”. And his hilly swampy land could not become fertile farmland.
If you are a spender, that’s great. It does not mean you will die broke. It does not mean you won’t ever retire. It doesn’t even mean that you can’t manage to accomplish your savings goals. You can do all of that. But the first thing you need to do is stop telling yourself that you are a natural saver. Savers will naturally put everything they can into accounts. You aren’t going to do that. Stop telling yourself you are going to change. Start adapting to who you are. Spenders can do things like set up automatic savings deposits on the day their paycheck arrives. You can raise the amount of your pay that gets deferred to your 401k. You can automate transfers to a Roth IRA. What’s most important, is you can set all of that up to happen before you ever have a chance to spend anything. By the time the money shows up in your checking account, you have already saved what you need to. You don’t have to change who you are. You just need to control it.