Henry Ford on Crisis Response

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's account of Henry Ford's antisemitism documents that Ford owned an influential newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and used it to spread antisemitic ideas to hundreds of thousands of American readers. Beginning in 1920, the paper began publishing a series of antisemitic articles under the title The International Jew, drawing on longstanding false conspiracy theories that originated outside the United States and reframing them for an American audience. The Museum notes that Ford made a policy of automatically subscribing every new Model T buyer to the Independent, an unprecedented fusion of industrial distribution and propaganda. When his editor Edwin Gustav Pipp resigned in protest, Ford replaced him with William J. Cameron, who eventually wrote most of the International Jew series. The Museum also records that Ford's antisemitic publications influenced readers beyond the United States, including Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Party leaders in Germany.

The Dearborn Independent, also known as The Ford International Weekly, was a weekly newspaper established in 1901 and published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927 out of Dearborn, Michigan. The Wikipedia account records that at its height during the mid-1920s the paper claimed a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, sustained in part by Ford's policy of automatically subscribing every Model T buyer. The paper's antisemitic editorial line drew multiple libel lawsuits, including from San Francisco attorney and farm cooperative organizer Aaron Sapiro, and triggered a sustained campaign by the Anti-Defamation League for a boycott of Ford vehicles. The last issue was published in December 1927, after Ford's signed apology to Sapiro and the closure of the libel trial. The closure ended a public-relations crisis that had begun to depress Model T sales and turned the Independent into the most notorious newspaper episode in American industrial history.

The Rouge was also the theater for the labor violence that defined Ford's late career. In March 1932, following mass layoffs, four to five thousand former employees marched on the plant in the Ford Hunger March. On May 26, 1937, members of the United Auto Workers arriving to hand out leaflets were attacked by Ford's Service Department in what became known as the Battle of the Overpass; the Wikipedia account records that the UAW was not officially recognized at the Rouge until June 20, 1941, with a signed contract. The same complex attracted outside admiration: in 1932 Edsel Ford invited Diego Rivera to study the facilities, work that informed the Detroit Industry Murals exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Charlie Chaplin studied the Rouge for his 1936 film Modern Times. The complex was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1978.

On June 30, 1927, Henry Ford released a signed letter apologizing for dozens of antisemitic articles that had appeared in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, between 1920 and 1925, and that had been re-published in pamphlets under the title The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. The Reform Judaism account, drawing on the American Jewish Archives, records that the apology was written in direct reaction to a libel charge brought by Aaron Sapiro, a California attorney who had been personally named and attacked in one of the Independent articles. Sapiro's was the only libel suit to reach court. The trial garnered intense publicity under headlines such as THE JEWS TRY FORD, and Ford's signed apology closed the case. The apology was accepted by leading American Jewish figures as a manly amende, though the underlying pamphlets continued to circulate abroad for decades.

On the afternoon of May 26, 1937, United Auto Workers organizer Walter Reuther arrived at the Miller Road Overpass at Gate 4 of Ford's River Rouge complex with clergymen, representatives of the Senate Committee on Civil Liberties, and dozens of women from UAW Local 174 wearing green berets and carrying leaflets that, in substance, presented the union as an alternative to Fordism. Reuther posed for photographs with organizational director Richard Frankensteen and a few other organizers, the Ford Motor Company sign visible in the background. Then Harry Bennett arrived with his entourage. Bennett, one of Henry Ford's right-hand men, ran the Ford Service Department, a private police force of ex-convicts, ex-athletes, ex-cops, and gang members. What followed, captured on film by Detroit News photographer James Kilpatrick, was a beating of Reuther and Frankensteen so public that corporate violence against union organizers became, briefly, impossible to deny.

PBS American Experience's profile emphasizes that Ford legitimized antisemitism at a scale no private individual had matched in American history. In 1918 Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and roughly a year and a half later began publishing a series of articles claiming a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America; the series ran in ninety-one consecutive issues. Ford then bound the articles into four volumes titled The International Jew and distributed some five hundred thousand copies through his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The PBS account, drawing on historian Hasia Diner, judges the rhetoric to be unremarkable in content but extraordinary in scope. Ford also republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious Russian forgery claiming an international Jewish conspiracy controlling world events. As one of the most famous men in America, Ford gave antisemitic ideas authority they would not otherwise have received.