"I didn't know Ford was an anti-Semite."
Henry was a bit of an odd duck by modern American standards. On the one hand, he realized that by paying relatively higher wages to his employees so they could afford to buy his cars, he had a larger market for his products, something that many modern CEOs don't understand, and yet he was in that whole "Protocol of the Learned Elders of Zion" thing to his eyeballs.
Still, I don't think the latter should overshadow the former. While his anti-semitic activities resulted in some propaganda, his other activities changed things for the better. So in the battle between noise and actions, I think his actions come out on top.
In his favor
Henry Ford was a pioneer of "welfare capitalism" designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers. On January 5, 1914, Ford announced his five-dollar a day program. The revolutionary program called for a reduction in length of the workday from 9 to 8 hours, a 5 day work week, and a raise in minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers.[8]
Ford had been criticized by Wall Street for starting the 40 hour work week and a minimum wage. He proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing, and therefore be good for the economy. Ford labeled the increased compensation as profit-sharing rather than wages. The wage was offered to men over age 22, who had worked at the company for 6 months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Sociological Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking and gambling. The Sociological Department used 150 investigators and support staff to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for the profit-sharing.
Ford was adamantly against labor unions in his plants. To forestall union activity, he promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to be the head of the Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, in 1937, was a bloody brawl between company security men and organizers that became known as The Battle of the Overpass.
Ford was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the United Auto Workers union (UAW). A sit-down strike by the UAW union in April 1941 closed the River Rouge Plant. Under pressure from Edsel and his wife, Clara, Henry Ford finally agreed to collective bargaining at Ford plants, and the first contract with the UAW was signed in June 1941.
Overall, a good record.
OTOH
In 1918, Ford's closest aide and private secretary, Ernest G. Liebold, purchased an obscure weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, so that Ford could spread his views. By 1920 Ford had become virulently antisemitic and in March of that year began an anti-Jewish crusade in the pages of his newspaper.[10] The Independent ran for eight years, from 1920 until 1927, during which Liebold was editor. The newspaper published "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which was discredited as a forgery during the Independent's publishing run by The Times of London. The American Jewish Historical Society describes the ideas presented in the magazine as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic". In February 1921, the New York World published an interview with Ford, in which he said "The only statement I care to make about the Protocols is that they fit in with what is going on". During this period Ford emerged as "a respected spokesman for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice," reaching around 700,000 readers through his newspaper.[11]
Along with the Protocols, anti-Jewish articles published by The Dearborn Independent were also released, in the early 1920s, as a set of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem. Vincent Curcio writes of these publications that "they were widely distributed and had great influence, particularly in Nazi Germany, where no less a personage than Adolf Hitler read and admired them. Hitler, fascinated with automobiles, hung Ford's picture on the wall; Ford is the only American mentioned in Hitler's book. Steven Watts writes that Hitler "revered" Ford, proclaiming that "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany," and modelling the Volkswagen, the people's car, on the model T."[12]
Denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves.[13] None of this work was actually written by Ford, who wrote almost nothing according to trial testimony. Friends and business associates say they warned Ford about the contents of the Independent, and that Ford probably never read them. (He claimed he only read headlines.)[14] However, court testimony in a libel suit, brought by one of the targets of the newspaper, stated that Ford did indeed know about the contents of the Independent in advance of publication.[15]
A libel lawsuit brought by San Francisco lawyer and Jewish farm cooperative organizer Aaron Sapiro in response to anti-Semitic remarks led Ford to close the Independent in December 1927. News reports at the time quoted him as being shocked by the content and having been unaware of its nature. During the trial, the editor of Ford's "Own Page", William Cameron, testified that Ford had nothing to do with the editorials even though they were under his byline. Cameron testified at the libel trial that he never discussed the content of the pages or sent them to Ford for his approval.[16] Investigative journalist Max Wallace noted that "whatever credibility this absurd claim may have had was soon undermined when James M. Miller, a former Dearborn Independent employee, swore under oath that Ford had told him he intended to expose Sapiro.[17]
Michael Barkun observed, 'That Cameron would have continued to publish such controversial material without Ford's explicit instructions seemed unthinkable to those who knew both men. Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman, a Ford family intimate, remarked that "I don't think Mr. Cameron ever wrote anything for publication without Mr. Ford's approval"'.[18] According to Spencer Blakeslee,
The ADL mobilized prominent Jews and non-Jews to publicly oppose Ford's message. They formed a coalition of Jewish groups for the same purpose, and raised constant objections in the Detroit press. Before leaving his presidency early in 1921, Woodrow Wilson joined other leading Americans in a statement that rebuked Ford and others for their antisemitic campaign. A boycott against Ford products by Jews and liberal Christians also had an impact, and Ford shut down the paper in 1927, recanting his views in a public letter to Sigmund Livingston, ADL.[19]
Grand Cross of the German Eagle
Grand Cross of the German Eagle
Ford subsequently became associated with the notorious anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, who commented upon meeting Ford in the 1930s that he "was less anti-Semitic than Ford." Smith also remarked that, in 1940, Ford showed "no regret" for the Independent's anti-Semitic views, and "hoped to publish The International Jew again some time."[20] In the same year Ford told The Manchester Guardian that "international Jewish bankers" were responsible for World War II.[21]
In 1938, the German consul at Cleveland gave Ford the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner,[22] while James D. Mooney, vice-president of overseas operations for General Motors, received a similar medal, the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, First Class.[23]
Distribution of International Jew was halted in 1942, but extremist groups often recycle the material; it still appears on antisemitic and neo-Nazi websites.
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