Henry Ford's anti-Semitism

[Nye Bevan]

Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Semitism in America saw a change in expression and virulence when increased immigration from Europe brought millions of Jews to the U.S. during Ford's childhood in the latter half of the 19th century. It reached its peak during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million, Prohibition restricted alcohol consumption, and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world.

A close friend recalled a camping trip in 1919 during which Ford lectured a group around the campfire. He "attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists," the friend wrote in his diary. "The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…"

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled "The International Jew," and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.

......

Ford also republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- what is that?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a notorious forgery that originally came from Russia, and [was] translated into English. [It] claimed the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy -- that a group of Jews got together and basically planned the fate of the world, be it financial catastrophe, be it war. The world was controlled by this little cabal of Jews. [This forgery was] printed in The Dearborn Independent as a factual piece. And so someone reading it would take this to be the news.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interview/henryford-antisemitism/

[SummerSnow]

1. Never knew this...guess you learn something everyday

[mn9driver]

2. Henry was a real weirdo.

He was obsessed with the model T, and Ford lost a lot of ground to competitors who put out models that people actually wanted as the car industry developed. He was a teetotaling health nut who alienated and dismissed people he suspected of having even an occasional drink.

He had company inspectors visit the homes of his workers to look for bad housekeeping and "unamerican" things. He required all of his immigrant work force to take company classes to become "American". The graduation ceremony involved descending into a giant "melting pot" and emerging in "American" garb.

His anti union activities were historically brutal and violent. He was not a nice man, and crazy to boot. There are still vestiges of that crazy at Ford, although his great-grandson Bill is a closet progressive. His implementing green practices and worker empowerment programs cost him his job as CEO, although he remains chairman of the board.

[Nye Bevan]

3. Interesting. Thanks for the reply. (nt)

[question everything]

9. Now I know who is Michele Bachmann's model

shudder.

[Ken Burch]

12. Much of what Hitler wrote in MEIN KAMPF was plagiarized from Ford's antisemitic columns.

Would have been weirdly funny if he'd sued Schicklegruber over that.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. It is amazing how so few actually know these things about Ford.

What is more amazing is how his ideas are still promoted today, and not just by wing-nuts who name their children after Nazis. Some are quite clever about it.

[libodem]

5. Sorry to hear this

I'm disgusted.

[Fridays Child]

6. Evidently, a fundamental contempt for the rights others runs deep in the Ford family DNA.

They moved from England to Ireland, in the late 1600s to take over property confiscated by Elizabeth I. They could not have been ignorant of the efforts of murderous bastards like Cromwell to exterminate Irish Catholics. But displacing the rightful landholders seemed not to generate a moral dilemma for the Fords.

[Festivito]

7. Like blaming all Arabs for al Qaida

Perhaps the Rothschilds are Jewish and are as bad as suggested, to extrapolate their behaviors on all Jews is like saying a poor Saudi shop owner is as guilty as the rich Saudi funders of 9/11, or that some red-neck gas station attendant is as guilty for spying on US citizens as a director of the NSA.

Ford was a avowed anti-semite. He would also fire any non-Italian stone mason for not being Italian since only Italians could shape stone -- (NOT SO!). So, we put a deli in his mansion which by the way is a mansion with a flat roof patio that connects the Ford bedroom to the window of his secretary.

I think he was just prone to the same mistakes we still see in people today.

He just had more money than his mind could handle. Also the same problem we still see in people today.

[question everything]

8. I wonder whether Ford ever met a Jew

or, like many, it was fantasy to perpetuate to... diverge attention from something else?

[Behind the Aegis]

11. That is an interesting question.

There are cases today of countries with rancid anti-Semitism, but nary a Jew in the country. Of course, it is also interesting to see people call exposing his (Ford's) anti-Semitism is considered "killing the messenger."

[YoungDemCA]

10. Sociopathic and evil

But I repeat myself.

[reddread]

13. you know who else was anti-jew?

"According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy's embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as "kikes or sheenies". Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that "[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch."[34] When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assaults on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded, "Well, they brought it on themselves."[39]
On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. [Kennedy] himself fully understood our Jewish policy."[40] Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.[41]
Kennedy had a close friendship with Viscountess Nancy Witcher Langhorne, wife of Viscount Waldorf Astor of the Astor family. The correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic statements.[42] According to Edward Renehan:
As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase)..... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world".

I think it would be more useful to point out the foul hypocrisies of contemporaries, rather than applying modern cosmetic mores to the dead and buried of the past.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. So no one is counfused by your remarks....

Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr