Henry Ford’s Antisemitism
And how his family tried to make amends
In last week’s article I referred briefly to Henry Ford’s antisemitism. Some readers have asked to know more so I thought I would follow up on him this week.
In many ways Henry Ford was a remarkable man. He revolutionised car production and paid his employees well, setting new standards for manufacturing industries. But his heirs knew that all the good he had done was obliterated by a fierce, unyielding antisemitism that resulted in him being the only American honoured by Hitler. His descendants have put tremendous energy in trying to make up for his behaviour. But they cannot change the man he was.
Ford set up his car manufacturing company in 1903. Ten years later he revolutionised the production line, reducing the time it took to produce a car from 12.5 hours to just over an hour and a half. By 1925 he was producing 10,000 vehicles a day. It allowed him to slash the price of his cars and give ordinary working people the chance of owning their own vehicle.
However, his new production line made his workers’ jobs monotonous. He found it hard to retain staff. Realising that it was cheaper to pay them more to keep them than to train replacements, he doubled their wages, to $5 a day. Suddenly a job at Ford’s was one every factory worker wanted.
The pay rise came at a price though. In order to qualify, workers had to allow Ford’s inspectors into their homes. If the inspectors found that their houses were dirty, or if their wives worked or the workers drank or gambled, they were denied the pay rise. Immigrant workers were obliged to attend classes to Americanise themselves and black employees were only allowed to perform the most menial and dangerous tasks. Henry Ford had strong, unconscionable views on social structures and hierarchies.
Ford was a confirmed pacifist. During the 1st World War he chartered a ship to sail to Europe with a delegation of pacifists. Known as the Peace Ship, the idea was given to him by a Jewish peacenik, Rosika Schwimmer. She agreed to sail with him on the peace mission, even though he had told her that he had evidence that the war had been caused by German-Jewish bankers. The peace mission achieved nothing. But Ford’s antisemitism grew steadily worse.
Over the next few years, Ford continued to harp on about the theme that Jewish bankers were responsible for the First World War, telling one employee that they organised it to make money.
He bought a local newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, because he wanted a publication that would promote his views uncritically. He distributed the paper through Ford dealerships, with dealers being set sales targets for the paper, just as they were for cars. On May 22, 1920, the newspaper appeared displaying the headline “The International Jew: The World's Problem.” It ran articles on a similar theme for the next 91 issues and subsequently published the articles in a book. Many Jewish Ford dealers refused to stock the paper, dumping their bundles of copies as soon as they arrived. Nevertheless, sales of The Dearborn Independent eventually reached 700,000 each week.
The source for Ford’s articles was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery purporting to expose a Jewish plan for world domination. Henry Ford declared “The only statement I care to make about The Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on.. .They have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.” When the New York Times got hold of a copy it asserted, “The Protocols are about the strangest jumble of crazy ideas that ever found its way in print.”
Ford’s right hand man in his campaign against Jews was his personal secretary, a dour, militaristic German immigrant named Ernest Liebold. Liebold’s antisemitism was even more vicious than Ford’s. When asked about The Dearborn Independent’s campaign about the Jews, he replied “When we get through with the Jews, there won't be one of them who would dare raise his head in public." He had a box of 100 swastika pins imported from Germany.
In mad pursuit of his obsession, Liebold set up a detective agency in New York, funded by Ford, to look into the lives of prominent Jews and of non-Jews who were suspected of having Jewish backers. It was a haven for cranks and obsessives. One of the ‘detectives’ who worked for the agency was Boris Brasol, a former member of the antisemitic Russian Black Hundred, who had arranged for the Protocols to be translated into English. Boasting that he would organise pogroms in America, in due course he became a Nazi agent.
Other employees of the agency were even more deranged, they included one who travelled to Mongolia, apparently to find additional protocols written in the original Hebrew, and another who was sacked after putting in an expense claim for a fur coat so that he could move around in Jewish society without being spotted.
The vicious articles in Ford’s newspaper damaged the lives of several Jews. Captain Robert Rosenbluth was put on trial – and acquitted- after the paper accused him of murder. A theatre producer, Morris Gest, sued Ford for $5 million after they ran an article accusing him of abandoning his Russian parents, calling him “a Russian Jew who has produced the most salacious spectacles ever shown in America" Ford, who had enough money to resist litigation, successfully saw Morris Gest off.
It didn’t take long for a backlash to form against Ford. One of his critics, E.G. Pipp, who had briefly edited The Dearborn Independent, resigning before the first antisemitic article was published, set up a newspaper specifically to expose Ford and his activities. In the cities, Jewish leaders spoke out against him, synagogues held meetings to discuss how to respond to him and Jewish customers boycotted his cars. Politicians, public figures and Christian preachers issued statements and made speeches condemning Ford. A Jewish film producer, William Fox, told Ford that he had footage of accidents involving his cars that were caused by manufacturing defects. Fox said he planned to put the best clips into newsreels and shown them in the cinemas. Ford remained resolutely unbowed. Even though, as E.G. Pipp reported, sales of his cars were dropping dramatically in Jewish areas.
In many rural communities however, Ford was taken seriously. The absurdly named Ku Klux Kan proposed him as President, an ambition Ford was known to harbour himself.
In 1924 Ford was trying to buy a valley in Tennessee. To gain public support he needed to get the local farmers onto his side. He published a series of articles in The Dearborn Independent under the headline “Jewish Exploitation of the American Farmer's Organization”, praising the American Farmer and telling them that they were being exploited by the Jews. In fact, rather than being exploited by Jews, the farmers were being assisted by a Jewish lawyer, Aaron Sapiro. Sapiro had come up with a plan to assist farmers, by organising them into cooperatives so that they could sell directly to the public, cutting out the wholesalers and maximising their profits. 890,000 farmers had already signed up to his plan. Foolishly, Ford’s articles in the newspaper attacked Sapiro directly, accusing him of leading a “conspiracy of Jewish bankers”, turning “millions away from the pockets of the men who till the soil and into the hands of the Jews and their followers.” Unsurprisingly, Sapiro sued.
A few weeks before the case was due to go to court, Ford contacted the prominent Jewish lawyer and community leader, Louis Marshall. He told him he wanted to make amends and asked Marshall to write an apology for him to sign.
The apology that Marshall wrote was not as devastating to Ford as it could have been. It claimed that Ford had known nothing of the antisemitic articles and that he had been mortified when he found out what was being said in his name. “To my great regret, I have learned that Jews generally, and particularly those of the country, not only resent these publications as promoting anti-Semitism, but regard me as their enemy. . . . Had I appreciated even the general nature, to say nothing of the details of those utterances, I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment's hesitation."
The apology made no mention of the many interviews that Ford had given attacking the Jews, and his statements accusing them of an international conspiracy. Nevertheless, the press, and most of the Jewish newspapers, uncritically accepted the apology. The Jewish New York Tribune expressed "profound satisfaction”; the American Hebrew declared that the statement breathed “honesty and sincerity." Ford was invited, and warmly received, at Jewish events and receptions.
Louis Marshall was amazed. “Only last week Henry Ford was regarded as a Haman, and they are almost willing now to declare him a Mordechai.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency agreed, wondering why the apology had been met with such a hysterical outburst.
Despite his apology, Ford did not abandon his antisemitism. Indeed, he made it worse. When the Nazis came to power the Ford Motor Company became a haven for Nazi sympathizers. The German Ford Company sent Hitler a gift of 50,000 marks on his birthday as a mark of loyalty. And when Ford turned 75, Hitler awarded him the German Eagle Order, one of only five people and the only American, to be similarly tainted.
Henry Ford’s son Edsel spent much of his life trying to restrain his father and to compensate for his activities. He had tried to invest $1,000,000 in mortgage securities issued by the Zionist movement, but they had refused his money. When World War Two broke out he cleaned out the Nazi sympathisers and converted the Ford factory into an arms producer for the allies.
Edsel died in 1944, three years before his father. His own son, Henry Ford II, took up the baton on his father’s behalf. He contributed regularly to Jewish organisations. In 1951 the Anti-Defamation League awarded him their Medallion for his work for human rights. His grandchildren now sit on the Board of Trustees of the Henry Ford Museum, which, among its many activities, hosts collections and runs educational programmes on Jewish and human rights topics.
Many Jews today still do not buy Ford cars. But they mainly recognise the effort the family has gone to put things right. As one older man explained “I did have an unlimited hatred of the Henry Ford . . ., but certainly the grandsons have given every indication of being enlightened, of making every effort to return for the sins of that contemptible, old bastard ignoramus.”
Much of this article is based on Power, Ignorance, and Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford and His War on Jews by Jonathan R. Logsdon, https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html
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