Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 716–718 NEIL BALDWIN. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. New York: PublicAffairs, 2001. Pp. xii Ⳮ 416. Even those familiar with the facts of American anti-Semitism will find the latest exposé of Henry Ford to be an instructive tour. Neil Baldwin has amassed a tide of evidence against the great American industrialist, and with a fine eye for narrative and conflict, Baldwin has created a lucid and important book. Henry Ford and his propaganda newspaper of the 1920s, the Dearborn Independent, drew upon nearly every popular anti-Semitic source available at the time, from ancient religious antagonism to the latest scientific eugenic theory, and Baldwin does his best to document and contextualize the vast material. Baldwin’s story of Henry Ford is an excellent way to introduce readers to the breadth and penetration of modern nationalist anti-Semitism. Henry Ford was a visceral Jew-hater, someone who felt such internal torrent bubbling up in him that he could not contain outbursts of outrageous and exceedingly trite slurs, including those of Jewish conspiracy, Oriental racial inferiority, and old-fashioned Christian disdain for the ‘‘Talmud’’ Jew. Although Ford kept at the tip of his tongue a staggering repertoire of invective, in the end, his vision was primarily nationalist. Just a few titles from his compendium of propaganda, the International Jew, show the basic contours of his view: ‘‘Are the Jews a Nation?’’; ‘‘Jewish Influence in American Politics’’; ‘‘Bolshevism and Zionism’’; ‘‘Jewish Supremacy in the Theatre and Cinema’’; ‘‘Jewish Jazz Becomes our National Music’’; ‘‘Liquor, Gambling, Vice and Corruption’’; ‘‘The World’s Foremost Problem’’; ‘‘The High and Low of Jewish Money Power.’’ Social, cultural, racial, and ultimately economic defilement was the heart of the indictment. ‘‘Wall Street kikes’’ (p. 166) bothered him most of all, since he believed they were conspiring to sap the good American farmer and worker (in a word, the American Volk) of financial independence through Jewish schemes such as Paul Warburg’s advocacy for a centralized Federal Reserve Bank or the use of credit by Nathan Straus, ‘‘one of whose department stores operated under the Christian name of R. H. Macy,’’ according to the Dearborn Independent (p. 215). If Ford’s hatred had a fundamental motivation, it was his nostalgia for a pure, uncomplicated, agrarian past, a past that the flivver-king himself had done more than any American to decimate. In that sense Ford’s romantic and volkish anti-Semitism was akin to BALDWIN, HENRY FORD AND THE JEWS—ALEXANDER 717 that which grew in Europe at the time. Ford was in effect an American Nazi; he was not a card carrier, but he shared a worldview with that party and accepted medals from Hitler as late as 1938. As a propagandist, Ford was both as animated and as pedestrian in his Jew hatred as Alfred Rosenberg or Joseph Goebbels. Baldwin is absolutely correct to compare the Dearborn Independent with the Völkischer Beobachter, together the world’s leading anti-Semitic propaganda venues of the 1920s. I think this comparison begs one more—namely, that Munich and Detroit may be viewed as doppelgängers in the period. Both were agrarian centers in transition; and both acted as magnets of racist angst and violence from 1919 onward (in 1921 the Detroit Klan had 875,000 members). They differed mainly in that the sons of one locale had lost the last war while those of the other had won. Ford’s massive nationalist campaign is a reminder of the political possibility open to the nationalist right in 1920s America—if defeat and freefalling depression had ravaged this country a decade earlier. Of course historical possibility is not history, and as it happened, Henry Ford became an American crackpot, as did William J. Simmons of the Klan and others of their kind. The extent to which Jews themselves were able to demote these nationalists to the margins of America’s political spectrum is perhaps the best part of Baldwin’s book, since he records with vigor what he calls ‘‘retaliation...