herpes - read on, idiot
'Henry Ford And The Jews: The Mass Production Of Hate' by Neil Baldwin
Books in Brief
Thursday, December 13, 2001
Henry Ford And The Jews: The Mass Production Of Hate
By Neil Baldwin
Public Affairs $27.50
Neil Baldwin offers a crisp account of Henry Ford’s obsessive belief in a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Other than people with a special interest in the details of Ford’s mania, however, readers looking for a compelling history of ideas or perhaps just a useful moral might be disappointed.
Baldwin offers no overarching theme to explain Ford’s prejudices or why in this regard he is important to history.
A notable biographer of Thomas Edison, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams, Baldwin does fully detail all the weird facts of Ford’s essentially psychotic fear of Jews and his support of various anti-Semitic groups and individuals, including the Rev. Charles Coughlin.
Through most of the 1920s, Ford devoted a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to spreading the gospel of the world Jewish conspiracy.
After bowing to the pressures of a defamation suit, Ford apologized for his ranting, but he happily accepted the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from Hitler’s ambassador.
Even in his own day, however, Ford’s ideas never really took hold in the United States. For the most part, they were not accepted by contemporary elites, who, despite whatever prejudices they might have held, blanched at Ford’s loony extremism. ****************************************************** HENRY FORD
When Henry Ford printed the articles known as the "International Jew", the Talmudists went into hysteria. If you are interested in the gloatings on how Ford was brought to his knees presumably, and made to publicly apologize, one interesting source is Volume I of "LOUIS MARSHALL — Champion of Liberty — Selected Papers and Addresses", put out by the Jewish Publication Society of America in 1957.
LOUIS MARSHALL was one of Jacob Schiff's cohorts in founding the AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE of world financial and industrial Jewish powers. A book could be written on the powers wielded by him and his sons and their communistic Marshall Foundation. In the "House Committee on Un-American Activities Dies Report: Communist Front Organizations", there are no less than 27 listings. Back in 1938 and 1939 when I did considerable speaking in Detroit, I used to be entertained at the executives' table at the Ford plant.
Harry Bennett, personnel director for Henry Ford (who afterwards was cowed and wrote a pro-Jewish screed) showed me the picture of the Jews in a huge picture he had in his office of the Ford Riot they stirred. A truck load of typewriters and used tables was sent me for my office by the Red Squad, at Ford direction. Bennett described how the Jews had driven Ford off the road in his car in an effort to kill him and how his wife had plead with him to cease his Jewish exposures and live for her sake. For this reason he retracted
"THE CRAWL"?
Gloatingly, on p. 376 of Vol. I of the Marshall book, is the statement extracted from Henry Ford. It is preceded by Marshall's communication with Sam Untermyer, etc. Ford's apology includes his plea that he had been too busy to know what was being printed in his Dearborn Independent and had delegated such duties to men he trusted but that he had "no idea that the general nature" of the data on the Protocols had been so repulsive to Jewry. "Had I . . . I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment's notice, because I am fully aware of the virtues of the Jewish people as a whole. . . . " (and more praises).
Ford's statement goes on to state that: "I deem it my duty to make amends for the wrong done the Jews . . . by asking their forgiveness . . . by retracting the offensive charges laid at their door by these publications. . ." The publications are to be "withdrawn from circulation" and "that henceforth the Dearborn Independent will be conducted under such auspices that articles reflecting on the Jews will never again appear in its columns.
Finally, let me add that this statement is made on my own initiative and wholly in the interest of right and justice."
This "retraction" was dated June 30, 1927. ************************************************************* A Titan of Industry--and a bigot
HENRY FORD AND THE JEWS The Mass Production of Hate By Neil Baldwin PublicAffairs -- 416pp -- $27.50
On the occasion of his 75th birthday, in 1938, Henry Ford received a medal, the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, from Adolf Hitler. Such was Hitler's regard for the carmaker that at one time he kept a portrait of Ford in his office and expressed his admiration in the second volume of Mein Kampf. Some of this sentiment had to do with Ford's automotive achievements, which the Fuhrer mimicked with a grand plan for German motorways filled with "people's cars--inspired by the American model." But autos aside, the two men also shared an idée fixe: that Jews were responsible for the evils of the world.
For much of the 20th century, Henry Ford was America's most notorious anti-Semite--something that's largely forgotten today. Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation and author of Edison: Inventing the Century, redresses that with Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. It is a provocative, carefully wrought history that is far from the diatribe suggested by its subtitle. Baldwin's publisher had proposed a full biography of Ford, who was an Edison protégé. But Baldwin could not set aside his distaste for Ford. Then came a major media event: the 1997 television broadcast of the Holocaust film Schindler's List, sponsored solely by Ford Motor Co. (F ) The irony of this sponsorship inspired Baldwin to write a book tightly focused on what he calls "an inadequately told story in American history."
Ford wasn't alone in being biased, of course. Baldwin shows that anti-Jewish attitudes were common in Ford's "tightly circumscribed world of post-bellum midwestern America."
But Ford took anti-Semitism a step further than most of his contemporaries by personally stoking a powerful propaganda campaign. His chief instrument was The Dearborn Independent, an obscure Michigan weekly that Ford built into a national presence beginning in 1919. The publication carried news of the world, photo displays, and a variety of features. But even though Ford car dealers were required to meet a quota for subscription sales, the paper was $284,000 in the red by 1920 and circulation was languishing. Ford and his right-hand man, Ernest Liebold, resolved upon an "educational" campaign to build interest. Thus began a series of 91 successive articles slugged "The International Jew: The World's Problem."
The portrait that emerged there, says the author, "fit squarely into a thousand-year-old continuum of Jew hatred." It depicted a group of perpetual aliens, united by race and busy employing their financial sophistication to further a program of world domination. The series was collected and published as a book around the world, with notable success in Germany during the 1920s and '30s. The Dearborn Independent also reprinted The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a document purporting to be a blueprint for Jewish world domination that was actually created in the 1890s by the Russian secret police.
Ford's campaign had an unintended consequence. It galvanized an anti-Ford movement among Jewish leaders--including Louis Marshall, a lawyer and president of the American Jewish Committee--who were already beginning to organize around such matters as war relief. Baldwin paints an engaging portrait of these men and their counterattack, which in time drew support from prominent Christian executives, scholars, and three U.S. Presidents.
By the mid-1920s, Ford confronted two related crises: His unchanging, no-frills, black-bodied Model T was losing sales to the innovative line of autos produced by a nimble, decentralized General Motors Corp. And Ford's anti-Semitic campaign had left him isolated and under fire. Most important, he was hit with a $1 million libel suit by agribusiness executive Aaron Sapiro, whom Ford had characterized as part of a malign, international Jewish cabal.
Ford initially responded to both problems by defiantly refusing to change. On several occasions, for example, he was drawn into public screaming matches with his son, Edsel, who argued for styling and engineering changes in the cars. But in the end, says Baldwin, Ford "understood the necessity for a `clean slate' in both instances." In 1927, he shut down Model T production and began the retooling that would result in the Model A. That same year, Ford issued a public apology for his anti-Semitic words and settled the Sapiro lawsuit. The newspaper then ceased publication.
The apology didn't signify a change in attitude. Ford's private notebooks show that he continued to view Jews as part of an anti-Ford Motor Co. conspiracy, involving "financiers," the New Deal, labor unions, and his major auto competitors. These antipathies, as Baldwin sees it, "rose and fell in tandem with the chronically uneven fortunes and missteps of his automobile business." For the rest of his days, Ford would indulge in an occasional outburst against "the Jews," while demagogues such as radio evangelist/politician Gerald L.K. Smith circulated Ford's anti-Semitic texts. By the 1940s, American Jews were engaging in a near-complete boycott of Ford vehicles, prompting yet another apology from the old man, in 1942. Five years later, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Baldwin ends on an upbeat note, asserting that overt anti-Semitism has been relegated to "the distant fringe" of U.S. life. Even if that's true, no one should be surprised to find the old bigotries popping up elsewhere--stimulated even today by Ford's writings, which are available on the World Wide Web.
