Henry Ford's Anti- Semitism; Admiration by Hitler
Last edited Thu Aug 22, 2019, 09:06 PM - Edit history (4)
-"Ford's Anti-Semitism," PBS, American Experience WGBH, 2012: Interview with Hasia Diner, Professor of American Jewish History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies, New York University. - EXCERPTS:
Henry Ford's (1863-1947) anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Anti-Semitism in America saw a change in expression and virulence when increased immigration from Europe brought millions of Jews to the U.S. during Ford's childhood in the latter half of the 19th century. It reached its peak during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million, Prohibition restricted alcohol consumption, and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world..
In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. [In the 1920s] The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled "The International Jew," and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.
- "Henry Ford was the only American mentioned in Adolph Hitler's 1925 manifesto, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle/Fight).
- Interview with Prof. Diner, Excerpts: - What is the climate of anti-Semitism in America during the late 19th century? By the 1870s in Europe and the United States, the argument shifts to the Jews as defective. Not Judaism as defective, but the Jew as a particular social type who had defective mental and moral abilities. All sorts of attributions were made to "the Jews." The Jews killed Christ, the Jews do not want to accept the truth of Christianity, the Jews made money off the war, the Jews are profiteers, the Jews cheat you in business..Anti-Semitism came from the top down from elite sources, and from the bottom up from populist sources. It came from the right, and the left. Small towns were no more hotbeds of anti-Semitism than large cities. It could be pretty much anyplace...
- What kind of things did Henry Ford blame on Jews? Throughout The Dearborn Independent, Ford published articles that would refer to Jews in every possible context as at the root of America and the world's ills. Strikes: It was the Jews. Any kind of financial scandal? The Jews. Agricultural depression? The Jews. So "the Jew," in a way, became the symbol of a world that was being manipulated and controlled. To me, that's one of the really crucial forces in this rhetoric -- that things didn't just happen; but rather somebody is orchestrating these developments, and it's the Jews who are doing it for their benefit. They're doing it in order [to] gain the twin-linked goodies of power and wealth.
- Ford also republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- what is that? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a notorious forgery that originally came from Russia, and [was] translated into English. [It] claimed the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy -- that a group of Jews got together and basically planned the fate of the world, be it financial catastrophe, be it war. The world was controlled by this little cabal of Jews. [This forgery was] printed in The Dearborn Independent as a factual piece. And so someone reading it would take this to be the news.. What Henry Ford says, people stop and listen. There are people who talked about him as a potential presidential candidate in the 1920s...
What did the Jewish community think about Ford's paper? For the Jews who are reading Ford's rants in The Dearborn Independent, this is very frightening. Jewish publications in English and in Yiddish are reporting on the material that comes out in The Dearborn Independent. They're really tracking this. They're frightened..They see the rise of the National Socialist Party, and they're tracking that at the same time. And while it's at a very early date in Hitler's career, they are really paying attention to what's happening..And Ford is just about the most popular American, certainly one of the wealthiest; here's the person whose money and whose influence commands tremendous attention, spewing stuff that's no different than what Hitler is saying in his beer hall meetings in Munich at the same time..
- PHOTO: In July 1938, before the outbreak of war, the German consul at Cleveland, OH gave Ford, on his 75th birthday, the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. (James D. Mooney, VP for overseas General Motors, received the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, 1st Class medal).
- In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the "Grand Cross of the German Eagle." How do we make sense of this award? What does it mean? The Germans honor Ford, we could say, for a couple reasons. For one thing, they're very taken with the whole assembly line technological modernization. The Model T and Volkswagen are sort of similar cars..From the point of view of anti-Semitism, Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was -- let's call him an age-mate. They were both in the 1920s beginning to write and disseminate information about what they both considered to be this great powerful threat, "the Jew."..
Read More, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/
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- WIKI, HENRY FORD: In Germany, Ford's antisemitic articles from The Dearborn Independent were issued in four volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem published by Theodor Fritsch, founder of several antisemitic parties and a member of the Reichstag. In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler described Ford as "one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters".
> Ford is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, although he is only mentioned twice: Adolf Hitler wrote, "only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence ... [from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions."
> Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his "inspiration", explaining his reason for keeping Ford's life-size portrait next to his desk. Steven Watts wrote that Hitler "revered" Ford, proclaiming that "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany", and modeling the Volkswagen, the people's car, on the Model T. Max Wallace has stated "History records that ... Adolf Hitler was an ardent Anti-Semite before he ever read Ford's The International Jew." Under Ford, the newspaper also reprinted the antisemitic fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Read More, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
- PBS, "THE EUGENICS CRUSADE," Documentary (2018), American Experience. The pseudo science of 'eugenics' peaked in the 1920s. During the 1920s while imprisoned, Hitler said the book that was 'his bible' was "The Passing of the Great Race" (1916) by prominent American eugenicist Madison Grant.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/
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