henry ford and the jewish question part 1

7/29/2019 Henry Ford and the Jewish Question Part 1

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Henry Ford and the Jewish Question

Henry Ford and the Jews:The Mass Production of Hate

Neil BaldwinNew York: Public Affairs, 2001$27.50 US

416 pp.

The International Jew:The World's Foremost Problem

Henry FordDearborn, MI: Dearborn Independent, 1920-1921

416 pp.

Reviewed by Kevin MacDonald

Part I: The Education of a Midwestern

Industrialist

Neil Baldwins book on Henry Ford begins bysketching the McGuffeyland world of Fords

childhood a world of courageous, honest,abstemious, hard-working boys. Fords belovedmother read the McGuffey readers to her favorite son,and in his adult life Ford became an avid collector notonly of McGuffey first editions but of other
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Americana as well. This bespeaks Fords strongidentification with the mid-western culture of hisyouth, and, in Baldwins view, that is a big part of the

problem, because part of that mid-western culture wasa subtle anti-Semitism. The McGuffey readerscontained passages from The Merchant of Venice inwhich Shylock is described as an inhuman wretch,incapable of pity, a man filled with irrational hatredfor the Christian Antonio. Baldwin implies that givensuch a culture, it is a small step to Fords massproduction of hate.

Beginning in 1881, this perceived idyllic Anglo-Saxonculture of Fords youth began to be invaded by a waveof Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Thisprovided an additional impetus to anti-Jewish feelings,culminating in the immigration restriction legislationof 1924. In Baldwins view, the nativism andxenophobia of the period were

the results of the compulsion to find astereotyped other against whom endangeredChristians could measure themselves. In thestrange, nervous netherworld blurring the end ofone century and the beginning of the next, withthe American economy continuing to sufferbewildering fluctuations and booms followed bydepressions, there was a vague sense that unseen,hidden, and irrational market forces weredetermining the course of personal destiny.

Christian identity was under siege in the rapidly


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changing modern Promised Land. The Jew wasconveniently at hand, enabling the character ofearly-modern racism in America to be formed on

the notion that people who were different couldbe actual instruments of change and thereforecould be held accountable for otherwiseinexplicable trends in the culture of modernity.Once that blame was affixed, antisemites hadlatched upon a real reason to criticize, contain, oreven control the Jews. (pp. 3435)

Baldwin thus proposes that Fords anti-Jewish animusderives from the need for a scapegoat upon which toblame all disapproved forms of modernism. As istypical of writing on such topics these days, there is nohonest assessment of the extent to which Jews were infact responsible for the changes deplored by Ford andhis ilk. Instead, Baldwin traces the anti-Jewish tenor ofthe series of newspaper articles on Jewish issuessponsored by Ford and published as The InternationalJew: The Worlds Foremost Problem, solely to athousand-year continuum of Jew hatred, thick taprootssunk deep into the archetypal, richly poisoned soil ofmedievalism. (p. 106)

Medieval, religious Jew-hatred evolved intomodern anti-semitism . . . They should berecognized as different factors within the sametradition. Both passions are infused with apathological requisite to find someone to resent(p. 107).


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As we shall see, this is neither a fair nor an accuratedescription or analysis of the contents ofTheInternational Jew.

Ford is presented as an assimilationist, not a racialist.He eagerly sought immigrant labor for his automobilefactories, but also wanted a culturally homogeneouscitizenry, seeking to impress upon these men thatthey are, or should be, Americans, and that theirformer racial, national, and linguistic differences are

to be forgotten (p. 41; emphasis in text). In the early

part of the century, Ford workers from a wide range ofEastern and Southern European countries (including12,000 Jews recruited to work in the automobileindustry in Detroit) were required to attendAmericanization schools aimed at impressing uponthem a common American culture. In a 1919 columnin the Dearborn Independent, the writer complained,

The problem [with the melting pot] is not . . .with the pot so much as it is with the base metal.Some metals cannot be assimilated, refuse to mixwith the molten mass of citizenship, but remainugly, indissoluble lumps. How did this base metalget in? . . . What aboutthose aliens who havegiven us so much trouble, these Bolshevikimessing up our industries and disturbing our civillife? (p. 80; emphasis in text)

Baldwin terms this a disturbing euphemism (p. 80).

A major intellectual influence on Ford was DavidStarr Jordan, first president of Stanford University and


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a prolific writer on racial and cultural issues. (LouisMarshall, president of the American Jewish Congress,considered Jordan to be the main source of Fords

insane prejudice [p. 50].) Jordan was a eugenicistwho advocated peace for racialist reasonsthat wardecimated strong people from the gene pool. Jordan,writing in 1912, also developed the view that financialmanipulators, mainly Jews, were driving Europeans towar. (Ford became a leader of the peace movementduring World War I, stating to another peace activistthat the German-Jewish bankers caused the war [p.

59].) Jordan (1912) described an unseen empire ofinternational finance, largely composed of Jewishbanking firms originating with the Rothschilds.Behind these firms were Jewish families allied to oneanother by so many close ties of blood, marriage, andbusiness (pp. 1920), including Bischoffheim(France), Bleichrder (Germany), Camondo (Italy),

Goldschmid and Stern (England, Portugal), Gnzberg(Russia), Hirsch and Wertheimer (Austria), Cassell(Europe, Egypt), Sassoon (Rothschilds of the Orient),Mendelssohn and Montefiore (Australia).

According to Jordan, because of massive nationaldebts, the financiers effectively controlled thecountries they operated in, either by threatening to

withhold loans or by making conditions on loans.Ultimately Jordan blamed the borrowers for theirprofligacy and shortsightedness. As a pacifist, Jordanwas deeply concerned that the military spending of hisday would bring about an Armageddon. In general, he


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saw the financiers as eager to loan money forweaponry but opposed to actual war. His clearmessage, however, is that this unseen empire of

finance has a very large influence on the ability ofgovernments to wage war. He presented severalexamples where wars ended because financiersrefused to loan any more money for the effort. Giventhis intellectual environment, and given the gruesomereality of what was then called simply the GreatWar, Ford presumably inferred that Jewish financiersmust at least have allowed it to happen, and indeed

this is the argument made in The International Jew(TIJ).

It is noteworthy that ideas of eugenics, raciallymotivated pacifism, and belief in the power ofinternational financiers were entirely respectable at thetime. Baldwin recounts Fords journey to the WestCoast in 1915 to attend a Race-BettermentConference in San Francisco. Speakers includedLuther Burbank, the renowned plant breeder; Jordan;and Charles Eliot, president of Harvard. Attendeesincluded Thomas Edison, and millionaires like JohnHarvey Kellogg (of the cereal company) and HarveyFirestone (of the tire company). Edison had fairlymoderate views on Jews: Jews held to a very clannish

social structure that separated them from otherpeoples; they were also very intelligent, keenbusinessmen with a penchant for becoming wealthy,and this sometimes provoked hostility.

There was considerable intellectual interaction going


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on among nativists during the post-World War Iperiod, including some of the military intelligencefigures portrayed in Joseph Benderskys The Jewish

Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army. Forexample, Houghton Harris, a military physician,worked closely with Boris Brasol, the Russian refugeefrom Bolshevism, in producing an English version oftheProtocols of the Elders of Zion. In turn, Brasolimpressed himself on the editors ofThe DearbornIndependent, Fords newspaper, which published anarticle by Brasol depicting the horror of the Bolshevik

takeover of Russia.

The two people who actually wrote TIJwere ErnestLiebold and Billy Cameron. Liebold was a college-educated bank president before he became Fordspersonal secretary and alter-ego. Cameron was ajournalist who subscribed to an early version of theChristian identity movement, which holds to the viewthat the Anglo-Saxons descended from one of the losttribes of Israel. The British were therefore the trueChosen People, destined by God to rule the world, andGreat Britain and the U.S. were Holy Lands given byGod to his Chosen People. (The corollary that todaysJews are not really descended from the peopledescribed in the Bible appears in TIJ. The Jews are

not the Old Testament People. . . . They are aTalmudical people [3/12/1921].) The main forcebehind the articles, then, besides Ford, was Liebold,but he was careful to give credit to Cameron as theperson who compiled the data and actually wrote the


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articles.

Typical of the period, the Jewish response to the seriesof articles appearing in The Dearborn Independent

was formulated by prominent and wealthy Jewishactivists associated with the American JewishCommittee: Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and CyrusAdler. Schiff, the consummate Jewish activist of theperiod, had carried on a personal campaign against thetsarist government for years, including financing theJapanese war effort against Russia in 1905, financing

anti-tsarist revolutionaries, and supporting Germany inWorld War I until the tsar was overthrown in thespring of 1917. Schiff worried that waging a high-profile attack on TIJmight backfire: If we get into acontroversy we shall light a fire, which no one canforetell how it will become extinguished, and I wouldstrongly advise therefore that no notice be taken of[the articles] and the attack will soon be forgotten (p.112). However, Schiffs death on September 25, 1920,signaled a change to a more proactive stance, led byLouis Marshall.

In an event reminiscent of the pressure exerted on St.Martins Press to rescind publication of David Irvingsbiography of Goebbels, Baldwin recounts the pressureby Louis Marshall to rescind publication ofThe Causeof World Unrest, a commentary on theProtocols thathad originally appeared in theLondon Morning Post.The publisher, Major George Haven Putnam, caved inafter originally arguing in favor of publication on thebasis of free speech, the books opposition to


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Bolshevism, and prior publication by a respectableBritish publisher. At the same time, the AmericanJewish Committee purchased copies of John Spargos

book attacking Ford, The Jew and American Ideals,in lots of 10,000 (p. 150). Spargo, who was notJewish, was a well-known socialist and advocate onlabor issues who had developed a reputation as amuckraking journalist. Spargo also composed astatement titled The Perils of Racial Prejudice andsolicited signatures from over 100 prominent citizensof Gentile extraction and Christian faith, including

presidents (Taft, Wilson, Harding), secretaries of state,ecclesiastical dignitaries, businessmen, and writers.Among the signatories was David Starr Jordan, whosewritings on the unseen world of Jewish internationalfinance had been a major influence on Ford. ThePerils of Racial Prejudice was published innewspapers across the country on January 16, 1921

with the headline President Wilson Heads ProtestAgainst Anti-Semitism.

In early 1922, Ford, while not disowning them,abruptly put a stop to the articles. His reasons fordoing so remain mysterious. Baldwin suggests thatFord was concerned about negative repercussions ofTIJon his auto business and that he harbored political

ambitions that would be compromised by the series. Inany case, there was no change in Fords attitudes, andanti-Jewish references and articles continued to appearoccasionally in theDearborn Independent. Forexample, Julius Rosenwald, chairman of Sears,


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Roebuck, was criticized for encouraging blackmigration from the south to Chicago by providinginexpensive land and housing. This linkage between

Jewish money and the Negro problem resulted incorrupting the neighborhood, driving away olderowners, and leading to the race riots of 1919 (p. 201).

Ford eventually apologized forTIJin conjunction withsettlement of a libel suit brought by Aaron Sapiro, aJewish activist on farming issues, who was the subjectof several articles in 1924. (The first article was titled,

Jewish Exploitation of Farmers OrganizationsMonopoly Traps Operate Under Guise of MarketingAssociations.') In 1927, after a mistrial had beendeclared because of allegations that a juror had beenbribed by a Jew, Ford declared an end to TheDearborn Independentand settled his lawsuit withSapiro. Again, the reasons for this sudden changeremain uncertain, although Baldwin suggests that itwas motivated by the upcoming introduction of theFord Model A prompted by lagging sales of the ModelT. It seems unlikely that the prospect of losing a libelverdict for a relatively trifling sum to an immenselywealthy man would be sufficient motivation for soabrupt a move, especially since the article was not partof the originalInternational Jew series. According to

Gerald L. K. Smith, the anti-Jewish politicalorganizer, Ford himself claimed that he did it becauseof an attempt by New York Jews . . . to take over theFord Motor Company (p. 306). A similar claim wasalso published in 1927 by the Vlkischer Beobachter,


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Hitlers newspaper, edited by Theodore Fritsch (seeReznikoff, 1957, p. 387), but there is no independentcorroboration for this theory.

Ford signed an apology for the articles that had beendrafted by Louis Marshall in which he issued acomplete retraction and asked for forgiveness. Theapology also stated that he was fully aware of thevirtues of the Jewish people as a whole, of what theyand their ancestors have done for civilization and tomankind and toward the development of commerce

and industry, of their sobriety and diligence, theirbenevolence and their unselfish interest in the publicwelfare (p. 239). Ford signed the letter withoutreading it, and there can be little doubt that he did notchange his mind about Jewish issues. (In his letters,Marshall recounts a personal meeting in 1928 withFord in which Ford showed that he sincerelyrepented. He expressed his readiness to do anythingthat I might at any time suggest to enable him tominimize the evil that had been done. Marshall alsowrote that Ford told him that Cameron was out of ajob and had indicated his willingness to write on theJewish side of the subject. I replied that we did notneed his help [in Reznikoff 1957, 388]. )

In 1938, Ford received the Grand Cross of the GermanEagle and kept it despite a wave of protest from theJewish press. (Another recipient was CharlesLindbergh, whose conversations with Ford dealtmainly with Jewish issues.) Ford later providedfinancial support for Gerald L. K. Smith, who


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continued publishing TIJwell into the post-WorldWar II period. After the closure of theDearbornIndependent, Ernest Liebold, Fords alter ego, fed

information on Jewish issues to Charles Coughlin, theCatholic priest whose radio broadcasts andpublications during the 1930s carried on many of thethemes ofTIJ.

After Ford died, his company distanced itself from hisanti-Jewish writings. The Ford Motor Companybecame a generous supporter of Jewish charities and

the state of Israel, and in 1997 the Ford MotorCompany sponsored a commercial-free telecast ofStephen Spielbergs Schindlers List.

Baldwin discusses how he started writing thebiography of Ford as an aspect of his own awakeningJewish identity. The book shows a strong emotionalengagement between the writer and his material, and

there is an apologetic stance regarding anti-Jewishattitudes. For example, Baldwin notes that early in theseries, TIJclaimed that the behavior of the Jews hadgiven rise to

the Jewish Question, but not once is there anyreference to a single, well-defined question. Byinvoking the Jewish Question in this reactive

manner, without defining itor for that matter,asking ittheDearborn Independenttookanother giant step into antisemitic rhetoricaltradition (p. 130).

This is an exaggeration at best. As described below,


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TIJdiscusses a great many Jewish issues inconsiderable detail. Indeed, a reader of Baldwinsbook would have almost no idea of what TIJactually

claimed about Jews or about the quality of theevidence used to support the claims. Instead, Baldwinquotes a Yiddish newspaper which had the followinganalysis of Jewish activism:

One hears from Jewish leaders in everymovement because they are the most talented;therefore one hears from Jewish activists in every

new trend because they are the more feeling,idealistic, andpurer. And precisely because ofthis, they hate us. Only because of this!!! (p. 132;emphasis added).

The comment is completely in line with Baldwinsimplicit analysis throughout: There are no conflicts ofinterest between Jews and non-Jews. Indeed, Jews

have no interests at all; they are completely dividedamong themselves and unable to act coherently on anyissue. When they do act, they act out of purelyidealistic motives, for the good of all. Anti-Jewishattitudes and behavior must therefore be completelyirrational.

Amazingly, Baldwin argues against the idea that Jews

were unified by showing dissension within theAmerican Jewish Committee (AJC) on how to respondto TIJ: Should the AJC distribute copies of a recentbook titledJewish Contributions to Civilization?Advocate a consumer boycott of Ford products?


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Compile a dossier of anti-Jewish incidents possiblyinstigated by the series? But the broader issue ofJewish influence and whether Jews are unified on

certain issues is much more complicated thansuggested by Baldwin. TIJdoes indeed overestimatethe extent to which the Jewish community was unifiedat the time, particularly in its discussions of theProtocols of the Elders of Zion in which Jews areportrayed as consciously seeking to subjugate the non-Jewish world with a very detailed plan of conquest.However, theProtocols are only one aspect ofTIJ.

There are a great many areas where TIJdocuments agreat deal of unanimity within the Jewish community,as in campaigns to remove public displays ofChristianity or language suggesting the United Statesis a Christian nation, withdrawing literature and othercultural artifacts deemed anti-Jewish (e.g., thecampaign to remove The Merchant of Venice from the

high school curriculum), open immigration, U.S.foreign policy toward countries perceived as anti-Jewish (e.g., toward Russia prior to the fall of the Czarand the Bolshevik Revolution; toward Poland andRomania after World War I). These remain areas ofbroad Jewish consensus in the contemporary UnitedStates (Goldberg, 1996; MacDonald, 1998b, Ch. 8).Moreover, the issue of Jewish influence is notdependent on Jewish unanimity. For example, eventhough there was a split in the Jewish community ofthe period over the issue of Communism and supportfor the Soviet Union, this does not imply that JewishCommunists were not critically important to the


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success of Bolshevism, nor does it imply that JewishCommunists were not typically motivated by theirJewish identity, as indeed they were (MacDonald,

1998b, Ch. 3).TIJmakes its case for Jewish unity primarily by citingJewish sources advocating the need for Jewishorganization on Jewish issues and by arguing thatduring this period the New York Jewish communitywas organized as aKehilla, the traditional form ofJewish social structure in the Diaspora. As TIJnotes,

the Kehillah was organized in response to thecomment by General Bingham, the chief of police ofNew York City, that Jews were responsible for 50% ofthe crime in the city. TIJstates that The Kehillah is aperfect answer to the statement that the Jews are sodivided among themselves as to render a concert ofaction impossible (2/26/1921). TIJshows that theKehillah had strong links to the main national Jewishorganization, the American Jewish Committee, andhad representatives from a wide range of Jewishorganizations. The membership of the Kehillahconsisted of all gradations of Jewish religiousobservance, from Orthodox to secular leftists. TheKehillah divided the city into eighteen districtscomprising one hundred Jewish neighborhoods. In

addition to attempting to prevent Jewish crime, theKehillah served as an activist organization inadvancing Jewish causes. For example, the Kehillahwas a prominent force in the attempt to removeChristian symbolism from public placesa major


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irritant in the eyes ofTIJ.

In general, the less said of Baldwins book the better.It is an apologetic work with a depressingly familiar

and predictable take on the anti-Jewish attitudes of theperiod. Baldwin writes that TIJdescends into theantisemitic rhetorical tradition, but his bookdescends into another tradition, a tradition in whichthe anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior of earliergenerations are ascribed entirely to irrationalpathologies having nothing to do with Jewish

behavior. It is a tradition based on caricature,exaggerations, and misrepresentations of what thesepeople actually believed.

This review will be continued with "Part II: theDearborn IndependentSeries in Perspective" in theWinter 2002 issue ofThe Occidental Quarterly.

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology,California State University -- Long Beach, and theauthor of author of a trilogy on Judaism as anevolutionary strategy:A People that Shall DwellAlone (1994),Separation and its Discontents (1998),and The Culture of Critique (1998), all published byPraeger 1994-1998.

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