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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
Yes. A tour of the Munich Technical Museum in the late 1980s was instructive. They could have dominated Europe and the world economically, technically, rather than militarily. They had a prototype long range passenger aircraft a decade before us, as I recall it. Their chemical engineering was world-leading. Thankfully, this advantage was subverted by Hitler and his gang wildly misdirecting resources.
Lindbergh was right on the prewar technical assessment, and reflected a very widely shared view that we should not be drawn into another European war. It was Tojo that changed the American public will, along with the evil/insane Hitler foolishly declaring war rather than leaving FDR pinned to putting all our resources into defeating Imperial Japan.
Lindbergh was cut off from official government recognition when we went to war, such that only Ford was willing to use his enormous talent in aviation design and performance troubleshooting. Eventually, the Marine Corps almost smuggled him into the Pacific Theater, where he made a huge difference as a civilian “consultant” flying combat missions. He, the original great distance flyer, squeezed an extra 400 miles of range out of the P-38 Lighting, allowing our forces to suddenly expand fighter attack and bomber escort operations from their island air strips. The book to read: The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight.
An excellent set of facts, Clifford. 1940 was a strange time, a real hinge of history that could have gone any number of ways. Reading books of that era now, it seems like “everyone knew we weren’t going to war in Europe”, as the polls reflected, mostly because by then we’d been thoroughly indoctrinated/convinced that WW1 was a basically needless bloodbath caused by European warmongers, financiers, and industrialists. Certainly Ford thought so.
One thing I found defective in The Darkest Hour is the (off-screen) depiction of Roosevelt as a weak, fair weather friend of Britain at war. I’ve got a collection of cassette tapes of one entire day of CBS radio’s Washington affiliate, the week after the European war began in 1939. FDR was clearly on the British side and everyone knew it. Whatever you think of Roosevelt, the blunt fact is he was the employee of a democratic nation that, in the campaign of 1940, he insisted was not going to war.
Suddenly the historical accounts jump a groove. By 1941, apparently, although we weren’t at war, “everyone knew” that we’d be involved soon. Maybe Germany would try to grab the Panama Canal. Maybe they’d arrest and execute US diplomatic personnel across occupied Europe. The gray area between “everyone knew we wouldn’t” and “everyone knew we would” is a little fishy even to this day.
Yep. Lufthansa was ready to inaugurate transatlantic service with four-engine airliners. Strange to think how far they could have gotten if they hadn’t pushed their 1950 war into 1939.
Jews tell different self-derogatory jokes. Because the stingy stereotype is related to the days when Jews, not Christians, could lend money at interest. The reality is that Judaism trains us to be insanely generous with financial charity.
Some people tell alleged “jokes” that are little more than dressed-up insults. But not all ethnic jokes are like that. A lot of these jokes are not true of all people in the group, and are in fact quite true about some people not in the group. Nonetheless, there’s something familiar enough to validate a laugh.
A schoolboy arrives home. “Mama, I’m in the school play!” “That’s wonderful! Who do you play?” “I’m going to be the Jewish husband!” His mother frowns. “Now, you go back there and demand a speaking part”.
A waiter comes over to a table of women. “Is anything all right?”
I could tell equivalent, and equivalently innocuous jokes about Catholics, the Scots and the Irish, needless to say. Not slurs, not negative stereotypes.
A man arrives in heaven, but it’s at night, and most of the staff is off duty. Nonetheless, an angel agrees to take him around, show him the place. “This is the room with the Catholic souls”, the angel explains, “So be as quiet as you can. They think they’re the only ones up here”.
Here’s an old McVey family favorite. “You know how copper wire was invented? A penny was lying on the sidewalk, and two Scotsmen spotted it at the same time”.
A Scot at lunch finds a fly in his soup. He lifts it out by its wings and starts pounding on its back. “Come on, come on, spit it oot”.
Musician jokes are better. Because musicians are better than other people.
Q: Why are drummer jokes so short?
A: So the flute players will understand them.
An Irish 7 course meal:
A six pack of BEER and a potato.
I like the tenors joke best.
How many tenors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One. He holds the bulb and the earth revolves around him.
I am of both Irish and Scot descent, as well as being Catholic, and all of these jokes are funny. I wish the rest of the world wasn’t overly sensitive.
Also, I accept we first Christians won’t be the only ones in heaven, but surely they won’t let in the Baptists????? (If they do, I sure hope they get over their beliefs about not drinking wine.)
I think this is an important observation. The Boomer experience of racism and anti-Semitism was very different from growing up 15 years earlier. Spurring that change was WWII: it’s hard to hate the guy who’s fighting by your side; more likely he’ll become a best friend for life. The “Greatest Generation” saw to it that anti-Semitism wouldn’t be passed on in their families, schools, or churches.
Growing up around there and in parish-based schools mid-1950-60’s, I’d seen German pastry shops and restaurants, but my dad detailed the local history. Hans Jaeger’s, a German restaurant at 85th and Lex, had been the site of German-American Bund meetings back in the day. An inconspicuous brownstone on 93rd Street just west of Park (since demolished) had hosted a Nazi spy ring trying to steal U.S. atomic bomb secrets, as later depicted in the fascinating 1945 movie The House on 92nd Street.