Henry Ford’s Anti-Semitism

Henry’s anti-Semitic views the ups and the downs of a lot of the Americans in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. Anti-Semitism in America Saw the change in virulence when we increased immigration millions more Jews into Ford’s life as a child. It reached its peak stage about the mid 1920s. The KKK has a membership that reached over 4 million. Prohibition made alcohol consumption illegal unless you had beer from before and you could not drink it with others. You could drink it by yourself in your house. One of Ford’s close friend planned a camping trip in 1919. Ford gave the group a lecture around the campfire. He 'attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists,' the friend wrote in his diary. 'The Jews caused the war, the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…' the friend wrote in his diary.

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. About a year later Ford put his own articles in the newspaper that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy that was infecting America. The series had a whopping 91 issues that ran through. 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. In 2012, American Experience interviewed Hasia Diner, the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University, and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History to ask her about Henry Ford's anti-Semitic views and the impact of his public expression of them. Diner is a prolific author and has written many books about American Jewish history, including her 2004 book, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. 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. The Jews have a certain phenotype: The Jew has a hook nose, the Jew is loud, the Jew talks with his hands. 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.

Henry Ford grew up hating the jews. The world that Henry Ford grew up in was one that very likely offered him certain themes about the Jews. He might have heard about them in church, that they were responsible for the crucifixion. He could have heard about them when somebody grumbled about having shopped in a Jewish-owned store and felt that they didn't get the right price, or that they were sold shoddy goods, that the Jewish shopkeeper was too aggressive in trying to talk them into buying something. There were many places, without being able to put your finger on a specific one in a specific town, in which 'the Jew' serves as, at that point of time, almost both a theological and a kind of racialized symbol of forces that people considered to be nefarious.

What did he blame on the Jews

When he was in The Dearborn Independent, Ford published articles that referred 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. Everything was the Jews. All Henry Ford did was blame the Jews. So 'the Jew,' in a way, became the symbol of a world that was being manipulated and controlled. Henry Ford is really prejudiced. Henry doesn’t like Jews. Henry wants to reduce the immigration. He does not want Jews in the U. S. because they think that they are the reason for everything that happened. This rubs of on to other people. He is one of the biggest in the industry. He is an influence to everyone.