The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (75 page)

On January 11, 1919, Henry Ford presented a new publication to the American public. In 1918, as noted earlier, he had purchased the Dearborn
Independent,
a small community weekly, when financial difficulties were about to kill it. Now he launched the newspaper into the national arena. It became a forum for bringing his views directly to the American people unadulterated by a press, in his view, “owned body and soul by bankers. When they tell it to bark, it barks.” True to his populist principles, he vowed, in the words of an associate, to use this publication for “giving the average citizen a truer and better analysis of matters which now reach him only from one point of view.” Ford hired Edwin G. Pipp from the Detroit
News
as editor and built circulation by hiring people to sell subscriptions door-to-door and pressuring his automobile dealers throughout the nation to buy subscriptions and hand out copies.
³

Ford also put his personal stamp on the Dearborn
Independent.
“Mr. Ford's Own Page,” an editorial expressing his views, appeared in every issue. Although penned by William J. Cameron, the pieces resulted from daily conversations where Ford would talk, sometimes with his feet propped on Cameron's desk, expounding his philosophy while the ghostwriter took notes. Cameron would take Ford's epigrammatic, even cryptic declarations, and transform them into essays that would capture the speaker's meaning.

The
Independent
also carried an interesting mix of articles. Some addressed social and economic questions, such as “Speculation vs. Production: Which Creates Wealth?,” while others urged Americans to be informed consumers. Many articles sounded a reformist note by promoting the League of Nations, supporting the 1919 Southern Race Congress, or advocating government ownership of telephone companies. General-interest stories examined foreign countries, offered cultural criticism of jazz and the movies, or reported on the evolution of the airplane. History articles sought to uncover the “real” John Wilkes Booth, and fiction appeared from writers such as Robert Frost, Hugh Walpole, and Booth Tarkington. Ford's newspaper proved popular. By 1924, circulation had climbed to 650,000; in 1926, it reached 900,000.
⁴

A little more than a year after beginning publication, however, Pipp abruptly resigned as editor. In part, he was bothered by the growing intrusion of company politics, with its bureaucratic maneuvering and malicious competition, into the newsroom. Pipp described it as “the most depressing place I was ever in. There was so much intriguing and backbiting that one could feel only uncomfortable in the atmosphere.” The editor also grew weary of Ford's obsession with using the newspaper to gain vengeance upon the victor in the 1918 election, Senator Truman H. Newberry, who Ford believed had stolen the count.

Most disturbing to Pipp, however, was Ford's plan for a new initiative in the
Independent.
He was preparing to mount a campaign against a group he considered to be the most dangerous in the world, and Pipp wanted no part of it. He spent much of March 1920 agonizing over his position. “I put in that month getting material ready for several editions ahead and on the first of April, resigned,” he recalled later. “It was in May that Mr. Ford commenced printing his attacks on the Jews.”
⁵

On May 22, 1920, the Dearborn
Independent
began a controversial series that would forever be linked with the newspaper and its publisher. Appearing on the front page week after week for over two years, “The International Jew: The World's Problem” examined a purported conspiracy launched by Jewish groups to capture social, cultural, and economic power and achieve domination around the world. It began with a racial definition:

Following this list of stereotypes and slurs, the essay argued that the growing influence of Jews in financial, political, and social life since the end of World War I had raised concerns. “The Jew's” formation of a “money aristocracy,” a “corporation with agents everywhere,” and a movement “linked in a fellowship of blood” needed to be brought before the public gaze and examined. After ninety-two such articles had appeared in the
Independent,
they were collected and published in book form under Ford auspices.
⁶

“The International Jew” castigated Jewish influences around the world but focused on American manifestations of this supposed campaign for power. The titles of individual essays suggested its basic thrust:

After exploring these corrosive manifestations of the “Jewish problem” in nearly every aspect of American life, the series concluded with two broad essays. Their contents were chilling.

The penultimate piece, entitled “Candid Address to Jews on the Jewish Problem,” urged Jews to mend their ways and “bring their misbehavior to an end.” It expressed the hope that criticism would “arouse a sense of social responsibility among the Jews” so they would end their social isolation. In other words, the essay suggested that Jews should control their own worst instincts before others stepped forward to do so.
⁸

The concluding essay contained another veiled threat. Entitled “An Address to Gentiles on the Jewish Problem,” it offered an agenda to those who wished to curb Jewish influence. Though it explicitly disavowed violence, it urged vigilant citizens to open their eyes to Jewish subversion and stop it peacefully but firmly. It pressed responsible Americans to scrutinize commercial practices in their communities, identify shoddy goods and inflated prices, and reject these “Jewish” practices. “Let the business men of the country adopt the old way of the white man,” it declared. The essay encouraged citizens to look carefully for degenerative themes in movies and books, to scrutinize those who stirred up social unrest, and to remain sensitive to “the subversive influence” in civil institutions such as schools and government. Eternal vigilance against such Jewish inroads was the price of American freedom. The essay concluded, “It is perfectly obvious that the cure for all this is to become awake, alert, to challenge the foreign influence, and to seek out again the principles which gave us our greatness…. The church must be un-Judaized and Christianized. The Government must be Americanized.”
⁹

The blatant anti-Semitism of “The International Jew” caused an uproar. The articles gained support from journalists and critics such as W. J. Abbot, John C. Chapman, and C. Mobray White, and the financier J. P. Morgan reportedly expressed approval. Evidence also suggests that the
Independent
's subscriber list began to grow after publication of the anti-Jewish pieces. Anti-Semitism, as historian Leo P. Ribuffo has pointed out, appealed to powerful traditions in American life, such as nativism and several variants of Protestantism. Moreover, by the 1920s other ideological impulses had come into play. Conservative critics of the Russian Revolution frequently identified Bolshevism as a Jewish doctrine. Progressives insisted that a conspiracy of economic powers worked behind the scenes to oppress ordinary American citizens. Many of these reformers, such as the critic Burton J. Hendrick, the muckraker Jacob Riis, and the sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that Jews had played a significant role in such corruption. Thus the paranoia of left and right found a convenient convergence point in anti-Semitism.
¹⁰

Yet many Americans were appalled by the crusade of the Dearborn
Independent.
In December 1920, the Federal Council of Churches adopted a resolution condemning the “International Jew” series. In early 1921, over one hundred prestigious Americans—the group included Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, and Cardinal William o'Connell—signed a statement entitled “The Perils of Racial Prejudice” that repudiated “vicious propaganda” against Jews. Officials in several large cities considered removing the
Independent
from public libraries; certain automobile dealerships,
such as the Barish Brother Company in Sioux City, Iowa, were so incensed by the “prejudice, hatred, and intrigue” of the articles that they canceled their contracts with the Ford Motor Company. Jewish leaders such as Louis Marshall and Herman Bernstein denounced the bigotry of “The International Jew” and supported rebuttals in books such as
The History of a Lie.
E. G. Pipp publicly broke ranks. “I regard Henry Ford's attack upon the Jews as absolutely without reason, unfair, cruel, bigoted, and contrary to the American spirit,” he wrote. “Condemning 3,000,000 in this country for the acts of a few is not right, and I didn't want to be a party to it.”
¹¹

As controversy swirled around “The International Jew,” its genesis remained something of a mystery. William J. Cameron had succeeded Pipp as editor of the
Independent,
and he wrote most of the articles. He based them in part on a reading of books and essays such as Werner Sombart's
The Jews and Modern Capitalism,
and in part on a notorious manuscript entitled
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
which claimed to detail an international Jewish conspiracy to capture global political and economic power. Cameron also relied upon a team of agents whom the Ford organization paid to investigate every suspected strain of Jewish influence in American life. Headquartered in New York City under the direction of C. C. Daniels, a former lawyer for the Justice Department, this group forwarded rumors, newspaper clippings, and documents to the
Independent.
¹²

Clearly, however, Henry Ford's own ideas and proclivities fueled this project. He visited the offices of the
Independent
nearly every day and consulted with Cameron about the two projects at the newspaper that most interested him—“Mr. Ford's Own Page” and “The International Jew.” Ford's ideas about Jews were certainly no secret. He spoke freely to associates, journalists, and other visitors about his hostile sentiments. “I never had a visit with him, at lunch or dinner, when he did not talk about the Jews and his campaign against them,” noted writer James Martin Miller. Allan Benson, author of the
The New Henry Ford,
had a similar experience. “Ford often talked to me about the Jews,” he reported. “He gave me two leather-bound books composed of articles printed in the
Independent
and asked me to read them.” When Benson confessed that he did not share those views on the subject, Ford threatened to shun him.
¹³

In his public statements on “the Jewish question,” Ford was equally candid. “The Jews are the scavengers of the world,” he declared in 1923. “Wherever there's anything wrong with a country, you'll find the Jews on the job there.” Two years earlier, Ford had defended
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
contending that “they fit in with what is going on. They are sixteen years old, and they have fitted the world situation up to this time. They fit it now.” In
My Life and Work,
he noted a “marked deterioration in
our literature, amusements, and social conduct” that was attributable to “not the robust coarseness of the white man … but a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression—and to such an extent that it was time to challenge it.”
¹⁴

Although the nature of Ford's anti-Semitic views was clear, their inspiration was much less so. His intense dislike of Jews had various sources. There is no evidence of any telling personal episode involving him or his family with Jews. Nor is there any record of intellectual conversion, in which Ford read a tract or heard a speech that sent him down the path of bigotry. Instead, typically, his anti-Semitism lay entangled in a web of half-formed ideas, vague perceptions, and impulsive yet deeply felt readings of the world around him. This web, one suspects, was more than anything the product of his famous “hunches.”