MOTOR CITY JOURNAL: Ford's Hatred of Jews Explored
Henry Ford: Hero or Villain (1)
MOTOR CITY JOURNAL: Ford's hatred explored
November 21, 2001
BY BILL McGRAW
It was inevitable, given the intense interest in the Holocaust and other aspects of Jewish history over the past two decades, that someone would delve into the story of Henry Ford's anti-Semitism.
Someone has.
"Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate" is by far the most thorough examination of the one side of the multifaceted Ford that isn't on display at HenryFordMuseum and GreenfieldVillage.
The portrayal of Ford by New York author Neil Baldwin is devastating, and is likely to have an impact on the way future generations of Americans think about the Dearborn farm boy whom Fortune magazine named the “Greatest businessman of the 20th Century.”
Baldwin's research makes clear that Ford's attacks on Jews were not just another one of his famous idiosyncrasies, like square dancing or soybean research.
While Ford was not alone among American businessmen of his day in hating Jews, Baldwin writes, the "difference was that Ford willfully set about to acquire an outlet with which to express his philosophy: the Dearborn Independent newspaper. Ford had the determination and money to spread his views and made a conscious decision to do so, and no one was permitted to stop him.”
Baldwin places Ford's beliefs on a “Timeline of anti-Semitism” that started in medieval times and continues to the present in the Aryan Nation movement of “Skinheads” and the current Ku Klux Klan..
Ford launched his anti-Semitic campaign as the United States prepared to enter World War I and continued it into the mid-1930s, when Adolf Hitler, leader of NAZI Germany and his followers, partially inspired by Ford's anger, were on the rise.
Among the works Ford published were the infamous, "The International Jew" and 91 consecutive weeks of hate-filled essays in the Dearborn Independent.
To Ford, Jews were "parasites . . . sloths . . . lunatics and apostles of murder."
Various authors have told brief versions of the story of Ford and the Jews in books on the auto pioneer and his family. Perhaps the most authoritative is a 25-page chapter in the 1976 book, "The Public Image of Henry Ford" by David Lewis.
Baldwin is the first author to tap into a number of sources from people involved in the Ford story, including family memoirs and oral histories. In detailing the complicated response to Ford's attacks by the local and national Jewish communities, Baldwin brings to life Rabbi Leo Franklin, a well-known leader of Detroit's Temple Beth El and a Ford neighbor and friend.
This was Franklin's response to reading the first issue of the Dearborn Independent: "Such venom could only come from a Jew-hater of the lowest type," Franklin wrote in his diary. "And here it was appearing in a newspaper owned and controlled by one whom the Jews had counted among their friends."
Baldwin said a Detroiter, Mary Einstein Shapero, Franklin's granddaughter, shared Franklin's papers.
"She unlocked the door," Baldwin said. "If it wasn't for the people at the Temple Beth El archives, this would be a very different book."
Baldwin also explores the strange career of William Cameron, a longtime Ford friend who was one of the Dearborn Independent's chief writers. Cameron was affiliated with a group known as British Israelites who described themselves as God's "chosen people" and believed Jews were inferior, with no claim to God's inheritance.
Baldwin got the idea for the Ford book in 1997, when he read that Ford Motor Co. was sponsoring a broadcast, with no commercials, of Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List," a searing drama about the Holocaust.
Baldwin writes in his book that the broadcast appealed to his "sense of irony."
Baldwin praised Henry's descendents, saying that Henry Ford II and "enlightened succeeding generations of Fords have sought to put an end to Henry Ford's dark legacy."
And he complimented archivists at the FordMuseum and Ford Motor for being gracious and helpful with records.