Henry Ford And The Jews

Drawing upon oral history transcripts, archival correspondence, and unpublished family memoirs, independent scholar Baldwin describes Henry Ford's rabid anti-Semitism and the Jewish American community's response to him. Topics include Ford's hateful essays in The Dearborn Independent, his publication of treatises on the alleged international Jewish banking conspiracy, and his impact on the anti- Semitic movement in Europe in the years leading up to World War II. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Why discuss the Jewish Question? Because it is here, and because its emergence into American thought should contribute to its solution, and not to a continuance of those bad conditions which surround the Question in other countries. The Jewish Question has existed in the United States for a long time. Jews themselves have known this, even if Gentiles have not. There have been periods in our own country when it has broken forth with a sullen sort of strength which presaged darker things to come. Many signs portend that it is approaching an acute stage. Not only does the Jewish Question touch those matters that are of common knowledge, such as financial and commercial control, usurpation of political power, monopoly of necessities, and autocratic direction of the very news that the American people read; but it reaches into cultural regions and so touches the very heart of American life. This question reaches down into South America and threatens to become an important factor in Pan-American relations. It is interwoven with much of the menace of organized and calculated disorder which troubles the nations today. It is not of recent growth, but its roots go deep, and the long Past of this Problem is counterbalanced by prophetic hopes and programs which involve a very deliberate and creative view of the Future. This little book is the partial record of an investigation of the Jewish Question. It is printed to enable interested readers to inform themselves on the data published in The Dearborn Independent prior to Oct. 1, 1920. The demand for back copies of the paper was so great that the supply was exhausted early, as was also a large edition of a booklet containing the first nine articles of the series. The investigation still proceeds, and the articles will continue to appear as heretofore until the work is done. The motive of this work is simply a desire to make facts known to the people. Other motives have, of course, been ascribed to it. But the motive of prejudice or any form of antagonism is hardly strong enough to support such an investigation as this. Moreover, had an unworthy motive existed, some sign of it would inevitably appear in the work itself. We confidently call the reader to witness that the tone of these articles is all that it should be. The International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization, are not spared, nor is that unthinking mass which defends anything that a Jew does, simply because it has been taught to believe that what Jewish leaders do is Jewish. Neither do these articles proceed upon a false emotion of brotherhood and apology, as if this stream of doubtful tendency in the world were only accidentally Jewish. We give the facts as we find them; that of itself is sufficient protection against prejudice or passion.

Henry Ford is remembered in American lore as the ultimate entrepreneur—the man who invented assembly-line manufacturing and made automobiles affordable. Largely forgotten is his side career as a publisher of antisemitic propaganda. This is the story of Ford's ownership of the Dearborn Independent, his involvement in the defamatory articles it ran, and the two Jewish lawyers, Aaron Sapiro and Louis Marshall, who each tried to stop Ford's war. In 1927, the case of Sapiro v. Ford transfixed the nation. In order to end the embarrassing litigation, Ford apologized for the one thing he would never have lost on in court: the offense of hate speech. Using never-before-discovered evidence from archives and private family collections, this study reveals the depth of Ford's involvement in every aspect of this case and explains why Jewish civil rights lawyers and religious leaders were deeply divided over how to handle Ford.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is almost certainly fiction, but its impact was not. Originating in Russia, it landed in the English-speaking world where it caused great consternation. Much is made of German anti-semitism, but there was fertile soil for "The Protocols" across Europe and even in America, thanks to Henry Ford and others.

Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh have long been exalted as two of the greatest American icons of the twentieth century. From award-winning journalist Max Wallace comes groundbreaking and astonishing revelations about the poisonous effect these two so-called American heroes had on Western democracy. In his wide ranging investigation, Wallace goes further than any other historian to expose how Ford and Lindbergh-acting in league with the Nazis-almost brought democratic Europe to the verge of extinction. With unprecedented access to declassified FBI and military intelligence files, Wallace reveals how the close friendship and ideological bond between automotive pioneer Ford and aviator Lindbergh culminated in an abuse of power that helped strengthen Hitler's regime and undermined the Allied war effort. Wallace traces Henry Ford's ties to Nazi Germany back as far as the 1920s, presenting compelling evidence of a financial paper trail proving that Ford subsidized the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, who described Ford as "my inspiration." For the first time, the genesis of Ford's notorious Anti-Semitism is uncovered: The American Axis proves that Ford's private secretary and life-long confidante was a German spy, who channeled his employer's Jew-baiting crusades to further the cause of the Third Reich. Lindbergh's own anti-Semitism and white-Supremacist views captured the attention of the Nazis, who soon manipulated him in their clandestine Fifth Column efforts. As the first unauthorized biographer to gain access to the Lindbergh archives, Wallace paints a substantially more chilling portrait of Lindbergh's pre-war activities than any previous historian and produces new evidence that the Nazis secretly plotted to install Lindbergh as the leader of the movement to keep America out of World War Two. The most controversial corporate investigation since IBM and the Holocaust, the book reveals that the Ford Motor Company's military and political complicity in the Third Reich war effort was considerably stronger than the company has acknowledged and that a US Army post-war investigation concluded that the company had become "an arsenal of Nazism." Wallace disputes a recent internal investigation into the use of slave labor at Ford's German plant during World War II - which company officials claimed as a vindication of its wartime activities - and reveals that corporate President Edsel Ford was about to be indicted by the US government for "Trading With the Enemy" at the time of his 1943 death. The American Axis is not only a mesmerizing, cautionary tale, but a compelling historical exposé.

FULL UNEXPURGATED VERSION. The famous American industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, an independent journal, in 1918. Ford then used this newspaper to publish a series of 80 articles between 1920 and 1922 on what he identified as the "Jewish Question in America." The Dearborn Independent was distributed nationwide to Ford dealer showrooms and was offered free of charge to the general public. At its peak, circulation reached 700,000 readers. The work's reach was worldwide and was quoted in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Henry Ford's picture hung in Hitler's office, and in July 1938, the German consul at Cleveland 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. The 80 articles were later republished in book form but were severely redacted and edited, with an abridged version becoming the most widely circulated copy. This version is the full unexpurgated original of Ford's groundbreaking study of the Jewish Question, and contains all the content, prefaces included, of the books first published by The Dearborn Independent as Volume 1:The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (1920); and Volume 2: Jewish Activities in the United States (1921). The accompanying Volume III and IV in this new series contains Ford's other two original volumes: Volume 3: Jewish Influence in American Life (1921); and Volume 4: Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States (1922). Completely reset and hand-edited. Cover image: A poster from the Nazi film The Eternal Jew(1940) which used material from Ford's books.

The only complete set of all 80 unexpurgated articles published by the famous American industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford in his Dearborn Independent newspaper between 1920 and 1922. The topics included foreign and domestic politics, finance, the movie industry, stage and theater, the agricultural sector, media control and manufacturing, and contains by far the best analysis of how the United States was systematically taken over by Jews after they were allowed to immigrate to that than country in large numbers in the late 19th century. The work's reach was worldwide and was quoted in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Henry Ford's picture hung in Hitler's office, and in July 1938, the German consul at Cleveland 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. The 80 articles were later republished in book form but were severely redacted and edited, with an severely abridged version becoming the most widely circulated copy. Originally published by The Dearborn Independent as a four volume set, this new completely reset edition combines all the volumes into a handy two volume version, without losing any of the text. Completely reset and hand-edited. Volume III and IV contain the second set of 38 articles, while the companion Volume I and II contains the first 42 articles. Cover image: A poster from the Nazi film The Eternal Jew (1940) which used material from Ford's books.