Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Was Henry Ford a Nazi?
A lot of people already think they know. Such a stark, blunt question deserves a direct answer: No, he wasn’t. Ford did not support Hitler or his ideology. He wasn’t a Nazi, officially or unofficially. What Ford was, however, was pretty awful without ever getting near a swastika armband. He was one of the most powerful, influential anti-Semites in history, and did immense harm all over the world by lending his once-golden name to vicious lies. Ford didn’t go around quoting Hitler, but Hitler was grateful that “a great man like Ford” was sounding the alarm.
Ford’s notorious publicity campaign against the Jews began after World War I when he bought a local newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and turned it into a heavily subsidized powerhouse of anti-Jewish agitation. That campaign largely ended by the end of the Twenties, by which time he had other, more pressing problems. Hitler didn’t come to power until 1933. But the effects of Ford’s pseudo-history lingered for decades to come, for the millions of Jews he slurred, and for the reputation of Henry Ford himself.
People who’ve never seen it often think it’s got to be an exaggeration or a case of over-sensitivity. Not at all; the Independent was proud to publish anti-Jewish forgeries such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and republished its 92-part series on the evils of Judaism as four pamphlets called The International Jew. They are still circulated today.
Yes, even today, there are places where scans of century-old articles in The Dearborn Independent are treated like hallowed internet samizdat. Shakespeare called it right: “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones”. That ancient hatred that flourished for centuries in eastern and central Europe found renewed strength in new homes all over the globe. And some part of its bogus claim to legitimacy is the backing of Henry Ford, who in worldwide prestige was the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of his day.
By 1938 it was obvious to most Americans, including Ford, that Adolf Hitler was something markedly less benevolent than Europe’s outstanding anti-Bolshevik. Henry Ford accepted a medal from Germany on the occasion of his 75th birthday, but he didn’t (as is often claimed) receive it from Hitler himself, but in his office from two minor German officials. “My acceptance of a medal from the German people does not, as some people seem to think, involve any sympathy on my part with Nazism. Those who have known me for many years realize that anything that breeds hate is repulsive to me”.
We should point out here that the Ford Motor Company, like the General Motors Corporation, had factories in Germany, which they bought and built when Germany was still a democracy. Those factories were essentially taken over by the regime by 1939 and no blame for their wartime production is due to their American parent companies. Ford’s vast plants in the US performed valuable and honorable services for this country.
How much of Ford’s anti-Semitism was generally known at the time? All of it; he wanted it known. If it hadn’t been, the millions he put into it would have been wasted. To take an apolitical example from that era, the giddy 1930 musical Just Imagine was set in the distant, futuristic world of 1980. The movie has basically the same story as Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) and the animated Futurama (1999), and they both got it from H.G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, revised 1910). In Just Imagine, a man who’s been in a coma since 1930 wakes up to discover that New York is a city of 250 story skyscrapers, conveyor belt sidewalks, Zeppelin mass transit, jumbotron-sized television screens, and vending machines for “drunk pills”.
Since the 1930 guy has no government-assigned ID number, he’s “Single O”.
Single O: Boys, I wouldn’t know the old town! Where are all the automobiles?
J-21: Hardly anyone drives a car now. They all use planes.
Single O: Is that so?
RT-42: Yeah, I drive a Rosenblatt. J flies a Pinkus for his personal use, but all the airliners are Goldfarbs.
Single O: Goldfarb!
[laughs uproariously]
Single O: It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!
I saw Just Imagine in the summer of the actual 1980, in one of those theaters near a college campus that showed old movies. Everyone in the audience laughed. Clearly, half a century later, they still knew who they were making fun of, and what the joke was about.
The evil that men do does live after them. And so does the lasting damage that men do to their own reputations.
Published in General
We should make tee-shirts an bumper stickers and stuff.
“How can you be such a Deutsh-bag!”
Wait a sec before ordering the shirts. Racists practice racism. What exactly do jackassists practice? Jackassism?
Prejudice agin jackasses.
The only “ism” that Hollywood really believes in is plagiarism.
I actually enjoy letting loose random Jewish quips to Jews who do not know that I am a landsman. They always get a little shocked, and I get a kick out of it.
Bad Dobby.
I won’t take this personally.
Gentlemen’s Agreement in reverse, eh? Nine years ago I was in Vilnius, Lithuania, having lunch with the American embassy’s DCM, deputy chief of mission (that is, assistant ambassador; not a political appointee). In conversation, it turned out that our daughters had attended the same college. Then he said, “And my daughter was on the board of the Jewish students group”. He was giving me this look, like he was testing my reaction to this allegedly startling news. I smiled. “Yeah? Mine too”. Now it was my turn to examine his reaction.
Oh!
I am gratified beyond measure that someone else saw “Just Imagine” and noted that particular scene. It’s a deft piece of knife-work. The entire movie is bizarre – you can imagine some Hollywood moguls watching “Metropolis” in a private screening room, chewing on their cigars, then saying “okay, we’ll do one of those, but make it funny, with songs.” The opening scenes have some remarkable miniature work, with modernistic vistas of skyscrapers, airships, grand broad parks, elevated trains.
Heck, the government-assigned marriages ought to merit a column or two–
This is something that is lost on a lot of people. But we have moved on, and team unity is best described as fear and loathing over being dimed out to HR.
Coughlin remained a leftist, even though he was definitely an anti-Semite.
I really enjoyed this post, though I still admire Henry Ford. I am fully aware of his disgusting anti-Semitism, but I long ago got good at compartmentalizing different parts of a man’s legacy when assessing his overall contributions to humanity. I do not know if I am right to do so or not, but I would have to trash almost all of the people from the past if I didn’t.
For example, today I am lecturing on that lovely mainstream idea that such lauded men as Theodore Roosevelt embraced, though this “science” would inspire Hitler: eugenics.
I return again and again to something Gordon Wood said about good students of history. It’s not as useful to judge the actors of the past as it is to try and understand them. That can be a struggle for sure, but there you have it.
I think that is key. The reason we have heroes is because they acted heroically despite the fact that they are as flawed and fallen as the rest of us. It gives us something to aspire to, and motivates us to rise up above the common weal.
If anyone wants to watch, it’s available on YouTube. Here.
Agreed, but with a proviso: We do need to compartmentalize how we feel about people in the past. But we also have to make some distinctions between them. That’s the purpose of this post: Don’t call Ford a Nazi. It’s unfair and untrue. But don’t excuse what he did because, after all, it wasn’t like he was a Nazi or something.
There’s a difference between “Old Gramps used to use some bad words about the family down the block, words we wouldn’t use today”, and “Old Gramps spent millions of dollars claiming the family down the block was plotting to take over the world”.
Thanks, Caryn! Just Imagine, being made in 1930, is “pre-Code”; made before the 1934 pact between the studios to clean up the movies, the Production Code. An extra glimpse of stocking was nothing shocking in pre-Code days. One gag that would have never passed the censors four years later: IIRC, the queen of the planet Mars has a huge bodyguard, who is totally effeminate. The men from Earth notice right away: “She’s not the queen–he is!”
Fair enough. But per the full measure of the man, I still come out absolutely hating Ford’s anti-Semitism and admiring Ford.
Some are saying that this is mere fallout; the spike protein immunizations are the priming half of a binary bioweapon, the second half of which will be an(other) engineered virus. This is presently a conspiracy theory. It is disturbing to recall that “it came from a lab” was called a conspiracy theory in the MSM until very recently.
But don’t worry. A high altitude EMP event would be much easier to arrange, and probably cheaper. Russia and China obviously have the capability, but if, say China didn’t want to be obvious, its “rogue” North Koreans have the capability. Iran will soon have its own nukes, already has which has a footprint in the Americas from which to deliver them, and is rumored to have a containerized intermediate range ICBM that can be launched from a ship.
Accuracy is not a big deal on this one. Anywhere in a several hundred mile radius, and 40 or 50 miles up and you could take out all but hardened electronic devices in a big part of the US.
The electric grid “could” be protected if steps were taken, according to the Electric Power Research Institute’s report a couple of years back.
That wouldn’t protect the refrigeration in the food distribution system, the pumps and valves on the pipelines that distribute petroleum products and drinking water, the banking system, the computers in cars and airplanes, or in phones, and every other device you can think of. Estimates are that an attack using 2 0r 3 such devices could put the US back to an early 19th century technology level without the necessary skills and result in the death of 90% of the US population within a year or two.
These events are a mainstay of “doomer” fiction; Newt Gingrich wrote the forward to one William Forstchen wrote a number of years back. It’s pretty grim reading.
I’m writing this about 5 miles as the crow flies from an upscale housing development that broke ground a few years before the Fair Housing Act. Its papers included a restrictive covenant banning sales to Jews and Asians, and of course what were then known as Negroes.
I passed through Munich on the way back to the US from a conference, and I can tell you it gave me a turn to sit in a cafe whose building had survived the war and seeing people seated at their tables with their dogs (not service dogs) lying nearby. I had the thought “50 years ago a dog would have been welcome here and I wouldn’t.”
I wrote a paper on this, which I got an A on, for a class on American Jewish History.
Fine work, Kylez! I’m sure it was well deserved.
My Roommate Was a Nazi. Sounds like a sitcom premise for Epix or Hulu, right? But it was true…sort of. When he was my roommate, at the NYU film school a half-century ago, he was merely a George Wallace supporter, pretty rare in Greenwich Village. I’d never seen his favorite film, Gone With the Wind, so we went to see it together during one of its revivals. He had a glass eye and slept with a Luger under his pillow. When you opened the door from the hall, the light would spill in, glinting off his dead eye, and you knew his hand was tightening around the Luger.
The following year, he had his own private room (his family was rich) and something had happened inside his head over the summer. Now he was a Nazi; I don’t mean in the colloquial sense (“Wow, man, he believes in capitalism? What a Nazi!”), I mean brown-shirted, armband-wearing, portrait of Hitler enshrining member of the American Nazi Party. At this point in the story, most people expect me to say, “And of course I never spoke to him again”. But the weird thing is, I kept talking with him and so did just about everyone else. He didn’t have a whole lot of friends, and most of us felt sorry for him. It’s not that we thought being a Nazi was okay; it’s that we didn’t take it seriously. He was a nut but he didn’t scare us.
His film school training in image and presentation was solid. Once, he critiqued a Nazi handout for me. This was a leaflet made to be handed out at factory gates in sympathetic areas. “What’s this doing up here?”, he said, pointing to a swastika on the masthead. “Rockwell (the dead leader of the US Nazis) knew better than that. Take it off. It only scares away newcomers”.
He left school shortly thereafter and I never saw him again. I looked him up; the only later reference was he wrote a book on poster art of German films of the 1930s.
Me And The Glass Eyed Nazi
I saw that movie! Emil Jannings. Norma Shearer. Lupe Velez as the South American spy.
Sounds like a movie starring Mike Meyers.
I once new a guy who was so precocious that he was speaking in full sentences by age 1. In first grade he was punished by his teacher for reading ahead in his text books. He was an avid reader and read while walking the hallways at school. By the early 70s he’s grown so tired of being slapped in the belly when walking from one class to the next and being tripped down flights of steel and concrete steps that he started wearing original nazi tunics (not the arm bands) and carrying a knife. All the harassment stopped. I never knew what on-lookers thought of his dress, and it wasn’t thirty years after the war, but I never heard any complaints.
He too, went to on to a degree in film, but gave up the nazi regalia and became a sculptor and designer instead. Sometimes the outward presentation is just a protective shell.
That’s probably true of the guy I knew in college. To combine two cliches, he was far too much a fish out of water there socially, and it drove him around the bend. He never acted angry, never wore regalia in public, didn’t seem to have any trouble interacting with Blacks on campus. As eighteen-year-old “expert psychiatrists”, we each seemed to decide he was a nut acting out a fantasy, not a potential killer. How were we to know? And we lucked out; we were right. Nowadays the calculation would be different.
It’s true. Jewish kids had a pretty sad plight at Hanukkah time. On Christmas morning we’d get stuff like a slot car track, a model railroad, an accessorized Man From U.N.C.L.E. gun with silencer and shoulder stock, a Visible V-8, a bicycle and a Polaroid Swinger. My friends got shiny shoes, two pairs of creased pants that would “wear like iron”, some chocolates wrapped in foil, and maybe, if they were lucky, a small chess set with magnetized pieces for car trips.