(This takes 6⅓ minutes to read.)
The Jew in Germany is regarded as only a guest of the people; he has offended by trying to turn himself into the host. […] Thoughtful Germans hold that it is impossible for a Jew to be a patriot […] What will happen in Germany is not now known. Some regrettable things have already happened. But the Germans will doubtless prove themselves equal to the situation by devising methods of control at once unobjectionable and effective.
These words come not from a fascist in the German Reich nor even one elsewhere in Eurasia, but from the beloved American capitalist Henry Ford, who wrote this in his 1920 work The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. He is the only American mentioned positively in My Struggle.
To classify Henry Ford as a fascist would be only a slight exaggeration. His Masonic membership and particularly his professed pacifism were both highly unusual for any fascist. Yet neither of those prevented him from receiving awards from the Fascists, nor did they prevent his business from accounting for the second largest share of army and transport trucks in the Third Reich, nor did they prevent both his business and General Motors from supplying Fascist Italy with vehicles — to say nothing of how Ford Werke AG used neoslaves from Auschwitz. Curiously, despite having little positive to say about Zionism, Ford’s business also distributed one thousand products to Palestine; the Ford Motor Co., Ltd. and subsidiaries had some operations there. (It is highly unlikely that the indigenous or ‘Arab’ population was the largest market for these products, given that the Middle East’s indigenous populations favoured riding camelback or horseback whereas the settlers favored machines.)
The origins of Ford’s antisemitism have long puzzled historians, especially since he was on good terms with a few individual Jews (e.g. Rosika Schwimmer). It is unclear if it originated from an unpleasant incident, parental advice, miseducation, or some other typical source.
We know, however, that antisemitism is useful to capitalist goyim since it harms economic competition. It is in the very first chapter of The International Jew that Ford claimed that ‘most of the big business, the trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers or their agents.’ Ford’s problem was not with businesses, trusts, banks, or even monopolies, but with the Jewish presence in these phenomena, which supposedly worsened all of them. He portrayed Jews as unworthy competitors, unfair in business, and blamed them for class struggle. Like the Fascists, he believed that it was possible to harmonize labour with capital:
That, indeed, is one of the tragedies of these times, that “labor” and “capital” are fighting each other, when the conditions against which each one of them protests, and from which each one of them suffers, is not within their power to remedy at all, unless they find a way to wrest world control from that group of international financiers who create and control both these conditions.
Yet Ford circumspectly acknowledged (if only for a moment) that
all Jews are not rich controllers of wealth. There are poor Jews aplenty, though most of them even in their poverty are their own masters. While it may be true that the chief financial controllers of the country are Jews, it is not true that every Jew is one of the financial controllers of the country. The classes must be kept distinct for a reason which will appear when the methods of the rich Jews and the methods of the poor Jews to gain power are differentiated.
[…]
The rich German Jew could buy the recognition he desired by acquiring financial power over those interests which most directly affected the ruling class of Germany, but how was the poor Jew to gain the recognition he desired? — for all Jews are actuated by the same desire; it is in them; they feel the spur to mastery.
Thus, Ford hit two targets with one arrow by implying that even poor Jews can be sources of trouble, saying that they merely hunger for power (rather than wanting the power to end hunger). He even went so far as to claim that ‘the bond of sympathy between’ rich and poor Jews ‘never breaks’: a claim that is arguably even untruer today than it was a century ago.
It is unsurprising that Henry Ford was such a great inspiration to the Fascists. Quoting Susan Ronald’s Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941, chapter 11:
In 1931, when a Detroit News reporter interviewed Hitler in his Munich office, he seemed surprised that a large picture of Henry Ford hung over the future leader’s desk. Hitler gazed reverently at the Ford portrait and said, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
Ford had used his Dearborn Independent for hundreds of articles, some of which were “repackaged into booklets and distributed around the world” to give Ford’s message: “The Jew has no civilization to point to […] no great achievement in any realm.” Ford, the king of mass production and assembly line manufacturing of cars, also mass-produced anti-Semitism for American and world audiences.³
Receiving endorsements from a Fascist head of state would normally discredit the recipient forever, but Ford, being an American capitalist icon, has yet to fall from grace. In his own time many ordinary Americans respected him regardless of his bigotry; his cult of personality has been so persistent that antisocialists have been falsely crediting him with the eight-hour workday as well as comparing Elon Musk favorably to him, a comparison that is more appropriate than they realize.
Should we respect Henry Ford in spite of his antisemitism? He did acquiesce to numerous worker demands, such as paying better wages and reducing working hours, but we do not applaud oppressors for softening their oppression. Henry Ford, even if one irresponsibly chooses to overlook or forgive his bigotry, was certainly an oppressor. Quoting but one brief example from Stephen Norwood’s ‘Ford's Brass Knuckles: Harry Bennett, The Cult of Muscularity, and Anti-Labor Terror—1920–1945’:
One of Perry’s lieutenants knocked Herbert Harris, the other CIO organizer, unconscious, and carried him out of the park to his automobile, where Ford Servicemen blindfolded him. They drove him to “one of the usual whipping places” at the Trinity River bottoms. They told Harris, as he regained consciousness in the car, that he would be burned at the stake. At the “whipping place,” “Fats” Perry ordered Harris to remove his clothing. Servicemen then applied two coats of tar from his neck to his ankles, and covered him with feathers.
They then drove the still blindfolded Harris back to Dallas and dumped him in front of the Morning News building, where they had arranged for a photographer to take his picture. The next morning the Servicemen presented their superintendent with a specimen of the tar and feathers they had used, and were congratulated for a “damn good job.”’ Harris had to be hospitalized for three days.⁸
Ford’s famous hiring of Black workers also came with a caveat. Per Christopher L. Foote’s, Warren C. Whatley’s, & Gavin Wright’s ‘Arbitraging a Discriminatory Labor Market: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918–1947’:
How […] can Ford be viewed as an arbitraging firm? The answer lies in extending the analysis to nonwage features of the employment contract, and a prime example is working conditions. Though black [folk] were represented in most jobs at Ford, they were disproportionately assigned to the most distasteful jobs, such as those in the metal foundry, where workers were paid the same as co-workers who worked in less onerous jobs.
In a sense, Ford captured the negative wage differential that the outside market attached to black labor by masking it with a positive differential for difficult work. In this way, Ford could profit from discrimination elsewhere without generating major differences in the observed wages of its own black and white workers.
Like all other capitalists, Henry Ford received disproportionate amounts of money when homeless people were receiving (almost) none: the boneheadedness of this system should become apparent to anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes, unless you think that wasting money is a good idea. Now, you may disagree that one can waste money by leaving it unspent, but Ford also wasted money by spending it on a poorly planned Brazilian plantation that disrupted Aveiro’s wildlife, to name only the most obnoxious example from his monopolization of resources.
Between his antisemitism, union busting, casual White supremacy, resource mismanagement, and general wastefulness, it is easy to understand why the upper classes today consecrate this bourgeois paskudnyak. As for us, we would be better off looking up to people such as these strikers:
See also: Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate
Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
‘Ford and Hitler’ in Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1919–1933
Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle against Hate Speech (review)
‘“Any color as long as it’s black”: Henry Ford and the ethics of business’
‘The Propaganda of Prejudice: Anti-Semitic Themes in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent’
‘Pathway to the Shoah: The Protocols, "Jewish Bolshevism", Rosenberg, Goebbels, Ford, and Hitler’
