Henry Ford and the Führer

When we talk about the influence and importance of a revered individual from American history, we often tend to exclude, or develop amnesia for, any uncomfortable facts about said person’s livelihood or personal opinions. Henry Ford, whose company is a household name within the automobile world, is one of these people.

Revealing the ugly truth

     To get straight to the point, he is not at all someone we should still be greatly celebrating, despite his already received heap of accolades. While there are many other underdiscussings regarding the history of this auto-magnate’s career, the most prominently discussed should absolutely be his sympathies with Nazi Germany.

     Ford’s endorsement of anti-Semitic rhetoric makes this incredibly bold claim a fact.

Once he acquiesced The Dearborn Independent in 1918, the newspaper of his Michigan hometown, “A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles [known broadly as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion] that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America…[he] 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”.

A dark ethos

     This precedent surrounding Ford’s ethos fits well into the nature of the decade he grew up in, as well as his privilege that became harnessed towards a career in automation. In Ford’s position, he had, frankly, just as much deductive logic (or lack thereof) as the working class he towered over.

Now, anti-Semitism’s whole history is long, broad, and too muddy to condense here. Ford’s top-down accusations rendered any substantiation into a near ad-homonym attack to be used leisurely against any societal ills; strikes, economic troubles, etc.

     It certainly did not help the Jewish-American community, and its immigrant diaspora, that Henry Ford was a man of immense stature and power while bleating fiercely against their existence.

As Ford’s persona rose to great heights come the 1920’s, where some even considered him a Presidential candidate, so was the truly nefarious Adolf Hitler in his German home nation of the new Weimar Republic.

A connection overseas

     While the loss of national confidence come the Central Powers’ defeat in WW1 might all seem distant, which was immediately followed by the German Revolution of 1919 and the Entente forcing Germany’s hand into the Treaty of Versailles, it managed to bridge a gap between the two nations.

It united a mutual hatred poised on conspiracy.

Meaning, it linked the arms of German ultranationalists arranging the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich with the ignorant American industrial barons and millionaires spanning from the overpopulous New York to the steel mills of Michigan, to the heights of California.

Fords reach and influence

     Ford, as one who’s economic ascent put his face among American ‘greats’, had the influence to post the ill-researched manuscripts to all reaches of the nation, wherever he had a dealership or there was talk of him in small white towns.

Then a tighter level of kinship. Ford was sending Hitler gifts of money for his birthday and was recieving a medal of the ‘Supreme Order of the German Eagle’ directly from the führer himself. To a non-German, this was the highest order they could recieve.

     The two did not stop communicating even as the 2^nd World War began, as Ford and his son, Edsel, “ On June 26, 1940…[attended] a party for [Nazi-sympathizing lawyer Gerhard A.] Westrick at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to celebrate the Nazi victory in France…Westrick had…[even] gone to see Edsel and Henry Ford at Dearborn on July 11 at the Ford’s urgent invitation, conferring with the Grand Old Man and his son on the matter of restricting shipment of important Rolls-Royce motors to a beleaguered Britain that urgently needed them”. A bastard traitor indeed.

A lack of history

     While Henry Ford himself has stated that ‘all history is bunk’, despite coming from such high a success as an automobile magnate, we can boil that form of logos down to two things.

The first revolves on the basis of Ford’s own lack of understanding history and preference for technological utilitarianism. The second is more appropriate when considering his allyship with the chief Axis Power.

Any bloody deed that Ford greenlit for the Third Reich was being done without the contexts of hidden or popular histories.

     Henry Ford was a man we have not been disgracing nearly enough as we ought to be, for his endangering of Jewish-Americans in the pages of The Dearborn Independent to actively sabotaging allied regiments during WW2.

As massive as his output of engines and steel was from the corner of Michigan, so was his commitment to the inhuman evil of the Nazi Swastika. This we should never forget or forgive, the outputs of his automobiles all pale in comparison to his lack of heart.