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Toxic Emissions
Stuart Schoffman
As talk of Jewish conspiracyhas gone global, Henry Ford�s 1920s anti-Semitism roars anew
BETWEEN 1920 AND 1922, the legendary auto magnate Henry Ford published a series of four paperbound books entitled "The International Jew: The World�s Foremost Problem." These amounted to a collection of anti-Semitic articles from his privately owned newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, a mouthpiece whose independence was ensured by the fact that Ford, the richest man in America, neither needed nor accepted advertising. The paper and the anti-Semitic anthologies were obediently hawked by Ford dealers.
"The International Jew" was translated into 16 languages and millions of copies were circulated. It was based largely on the notorious "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" concocted by the Russian secret police in the late 19th century, and ultimately became the chief conduit for propagating these toxic fabrications about Jewish designs to control the world. The measure of the series� influence is incalculable; after all, Ford, the father of the Model T, was an American folk hero who had given the common man the great, liberating gift of vehicular mobility. As ex-president Theodore Roosevelt remarked at the time: "Many, many persons hardly as ignorant as Ford think him wise in all things and allow him to influence their views."
Furthermore, Ford insisted he was not a bigot. What "antagonists" describe as "�the attack on the Jews,�" he wrote in his 1922 autobiography "My Life and Work," "is offered as a contribution to a question which deeply affects our country... There had been observed in this country certain streams of influence which were causing a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct; business was departing from its old-time substantial soundness; a general letting-down of standards was felt everywhere. It was not the robust coarseness of the white man, say, of Shakespeare�s characters, but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression -- and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it... [T]he question is wholly in the Jews� hands. If they are as wise as they claim to be, they will labour to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jewish." This from a man who in 1922 was seriously considering a run for the presidency of the United States.
On December 31, 1927, following a libel lawsuit filed by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish organizer of farmers� cooperatives, Ford journeyed to New York to meet with attorney Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee. As Neil Baldwin recounts in his timely, richly detailed study of Ford�s anti-Semitism, the automaker had lately signed, apparently without reading it, a letter of apology drafted by Marshall in consultation with Ford�s representatives. In it Ford purported to be "deeply mortified" by his newspaper�s attacks on the Jews, the particulars of which, he claimed, had been scripted by underlings without his approval. At their closed-door session, Ford assured Marshall that he had destroyed every copy of "The International Jew" that he could find. Needless to say, this was a fatuous claim.
Two copies that got away -- Volumes III and IV -- sit on my desk as I write. I purchased them, out of morbid scholarly curiosity, from an antiquarian bookseller in California about 20 years ago. Nowadays, of course, you need not spend $13 a pop as I did for my original copies of "The International Jew." If you type in the title plus "Henry Ford," your search engine will instantly offer you a smorgasbord of websites, from the neo-Nazi www.aryan-nations.org to the viciously anti-Semitic Radio Islam at www.abbc.com, where the material is readily available in an abridged 16-chapter edition -- sort of "Henry�s Greatest Jew-hating Hits" -- compiled by one of Ford�s devoted successors, Gerald L.K. Smith, in 1951.
Smith�s chapters include "Bolshevism and Zionism," "The High and Low of Jewish Money Power," "Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music," and so on ad nauseam. The full four-volume shebang, including choice morsels that are lost in abridgment -- "Jewish Degradation of American Baseball," "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold," "The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in the United States" -- is offered on-line by the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, the "Church of True Israel," and others of such ilk.
As Baldwin demonstrates, Ford did his greatest damage by serving as an inspiration to Adolf Hitler. Back in 1922, when the Nazis were small beer, visitors to Hitler�s headquarters in Vienna "immediately noticed a large table covered with multiple copies of �Die Internationale Jude: ein Weltproblem.�" In Hitler�s private office, a large portrait of Ford adorned the wall. In 1923, Hitler told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune: "We look to Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America." Whether Ford helped bankroll Hitler remains uncertain. Circumstantial evidence indicates that he did; but not surprisingly, no documentation (if any ever existed) has survived. What is certain is that in 1938, his various apologies and recantations notwithstanding, Ford accepted a medal, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, from Chancellor Adolf Hitler, by then a well-established persecutor of German Jewry. The Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, a gold cross tastefully flanked by four small swastikas, was pinned to Ford�s chest by Karl Kapp, the German consul in Cleveland.
Ford died in 1946, at age 82, without ever sending the medal back. Albert Lee, author of an earlier book on Baldwin�s subject, tells of an unpublished manuscript entitled "Poor Mr. Ford," by one Josephine Gomon, the company�s first woman executive and a personal friend of Henry Ford. Gomon wrote that in May 1945, footage of Nazi atrocities filmed in the liberated Maidanek death camp was screened at the Ford plant. It was while watching the film, she claimed, that Ford suffered the massive stroke from which he never recovered. "If Gomon�s story is true," wrote Lee, "and considering her credentials there is no reason to believe it is not, then Ford may have come to realize the ultimate outcome of the hatred he had helped project onto an entire people."
Albert Lee�s book, published in 1980, is also called "Henry Ford and the Jews," and is now out of print, which is a shame; it is smoothly written and quite fascinating. Baldwin explains that early in his research he read Lee�s book, which was "a significant impetus," and put it back on the shelf, "where it remained for the next four years while I wrote my own Henry Ford and the Jews." This too is a shame. Lee, who had worked as a writer for in-house Ford publications, had access to company archives and "occasion to talk frequently with Ford old-timers," assets that greatly enriched his book. Baldwin supplies a detailed account of how he was given a runaround by the managers of the Ford archives in Michigan and in the end was unable to draw on them. Had he utilized Lee�s work as a source, and changed the title of his own, Baldwin would have surely written a better book.
THE NEW "HENRY FORD AND the Jews" is a handsome volume, enhanced by many photographs. The prose is solid but sometimes hard to follow, with the attribution of quotations not always clear. But the sordid story is all here, and well spun. Baldwin begins his tale with a description of the McGuffey Readers, the compendia of homey wisdom designed to educate Christian youngsters, in which Ford first became acquainted with the character of Shylock. The author skillfully frames Ford�s prejudices in the context of American Protestant nativism, and offers a fine summary of Ford�s quixotic "Peace Ship" project, designed to forestall World War I. In all, he gives us Henry Ford as the bizarre, enigmatic, rigid, foolish and powerful figure that he was.
Baldwin is a popular biographer who has previously written about poet William Carlos Williams and Ford�s mentor Thomas Edison. Where he has broken new ground in Ford studies is in his excellent account of the actions and reactions -- often cautious or ambivalent -- of Jewish leaders, including Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Cyrus Adler, and most interestingly, Rabbi Leo Franklin, Ford�s neighbor and personal friend. Baldwin explains that Ford�s antipathy to the Talmud followed a tradition of Jew-hatred going back to the Middle Ages, and emphasizes that William Cameron, the newspaperman who actually penned "The International Jew," was an adherent of the British-Israelite ideology that claims the Anglo-Saxons as God�s chosen folk. Today, such fantasies fuel White Power extremists in the mold of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Words kill. This is why it�s important to rehearse this story, even though the Ford company has long since done penance: Ford�s grandson Henry II supported Jewish causes for decades. In 1997, the company was the sole sponsor of NBC�s broadcast of "Schindler�s List," though a Ford spokesman, as Baldwin notes, denied this had anything to do with atonement for the founder�s sins. Last December, the company published an exhaustive study of the operations of its German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, under the Nazis, who supplied the company with slave labor. "The use of forced and slave labor in Germany, including at Ford-Werke, was wrong and cannot be justified," declared the company�s chief of staff, John Rintimaki. The company had already donated $13 million to a $5 billion fund created by Germany to compensate slave and forced laborers, though without admitting guilt. In 1999, a class-action lawsuit filed by former Ford-Werke slave laborers was dismissed by a Federal judge in New Jersey on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out.
What have not run out, unfortunately, are the insidious streams of Jew hatred that course through the American continent, often underground. At the close of his book, Baldwin characterizes his story as "beginning to take on an antique patina as an object lesson representing a bygone era in our country�s dark underside... [S]imilar behavior on the scale of Henry Ford�s, manifested today by a figure with equal public visibility is well-nigh inconceivable." Maybe so, maybe not. Consider the chilling conversation that took place in 1972 between Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham, two figures of immense visibility and influence, that has just been made public along with other taped Nixoniana. The two agreed that the Jewish "stranglehold" on the media was something that needed to be dealt with in Nixon�s second term. The Jews, said Graham to Nixon, "don�t know how I really feel about what they�re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them."
By putting the case of Henry Ford back in the limelight, Neil Baldwin has performed an important public service. But it is Albert Lee�s concluding words that seem more on the mark in our post-9/11 world, when talk of Jewish conspiracy has gone global, when anything, again, seems dangerously possible: "Had Henry Ford not been such a timid soul, had he been able to face microphones and crowds, he might well have been elected president of the United States, despite his already well established prejudices. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that all that stood between Ford and the power of highest office was the lack of a Dale Carnegie course in public speaking -- and that is a sobering thought to be left with."
(April 8, 2002)
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