The murky legacy of Henry Ford—who would’ve been 150 today—centers around a few familiar ideas like the assembly line and the $5 workday. Less familiar is Ford’s biggest failure: Fordlandia, a city in the rainforest that was abandoned as quickly as it was built. Ford was a farm boy who went on to establish 20th century consumerism as we know it, but he had plenty of missteps, too, ranging from his virulent anti-semitism to his attempts to engineer whole communities around his ideas about labor practices—including the one he built on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest. So, whence Fordlandia?...