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Engineers in 1922. Ford responded by justifying his antiunionism not in the language of reaction or even primarily in that of efficiency but rather by assigning to it the essence of true “freedom”: “The safety of the people today,” he said, also in 1922, is that they are “unorganized and therefore cannot be trapped.” But if most of his employees had been reduced to cogs in the greater machine called Fordism, for a few mobility was more than a promise. 1

    Charles Sorensen—handsome as Adonis, thought a colleague, and “masculine energy incarnate,” wrote a historian—started out working at Ford’s foundry pattern shop in the old Highland Park plant. By the 1920s, his engineering intelligence had combusted with a “burning passion for advancement” to catapult him to the pinnacle of company power. Sorensen jockeyed for position with Ford’s other lieutenants, including Edsel Ford and Harry Bennett, and became the executive force behind Rouge production, as well as assuming a large role in the running of Fordlandia. 2
    Others who didn’t make it that high nonetheless had new vistas opened to them. Victor Perini, a twenty-year-old son of Sicilian peasant immigrants, was apprenticing as a toolmaker with the Richardson Scale Company in Passaic, New Jersey, when he heard from a friend that the Ford Motor Company needed workers. So he and his wife, Constance, headed for Detroit. It was 1910, and the company was still operating out of its first plant on Piquette Avenue, then producing a hundred Model Ts a day.

    “Can you use a toolmaker?” Victor yelled through the plant’s gates. “Oh yes, we can use a toolmaker,” came the answer. He was hired at thirty-five cents an hour. 3
    As Perini’s engineering know-how matured into a reserved yet meticulously observant managerial style, he was promoted to help run Ford’s copper radiator factory and hydroelectric dam on Green Island, in the Hudson River near Troy, New York, then sent to Manchester, England, where he oversaw the manufacture of the British Model T, and on to Iron Mountain, where he built an airstrip before becoming manager of Ford’s state-of-the-art sawmill.
    “We covered a lot of places during the years that my husband was at Ford’s,” Constance recalled of Victor’s career. “The company was more than generous in arranging accommodations for our comfort and convenience. We always went first class.” She remembered with gratitude that “because of this the entire family has had experiences that are not often duplicated.” But there was one not-so-comfortable place Ford sent them.
    VICTOR FIRST LEARNED about Fordlandia from Henry Ford himself, when his boss visited the Perinis at their home in Iron Mountain in late 1929. “You would think that he owned everything around here,” said Henry to Constance as he surveyed the photographs of Ford factories that hung on their living room wall. Over their kitchen table, Ford, having himself been recently debriefed by Cowling, told Victor about the mess Oxholm had made of things in Brazil and asked him to check on the sea captain and relieve him of his duties if necessary. Perini immediately said yes.

    The first thing Perini did was tap other workers he wanted to bring with him, and he did so with the same kind of informality that got him his first Piquette Avenue job. One morning a few weeks after Ford’s visit to his home, Perini, along with another Iron Mountain manager named Jack Doyle, ran into the tousle-haired second-generation Irish sawyer Matt Mulrooney on his way to work. 4
    “What would you give for a good job, Mulrooney?” asked Doyle.
    “A cigar,” Mulrooney responded without missing a beat.
    “Come on and give it to me.”
    “I haven’t got the cigar on me. Mr. Perini, you’ve got some in your pocket. Lend me one.”
    Perini did and Mulrooney handed it to Doyle, who “sprung this proposition” on him “about going to South America.”
    “What do you say?” they asked