The book “the Englishman’s boy” by Guy Vanderhaeghe briefly claims the Henry Ford was an anti-Semite who actually bought a newspaper to help spread his view. Feel free to dispute this, but it got me thinking about other famous anti-Semites (no Mel Gibson jokes please). Do you know any?
Also, I am not 100% clear on all this anti-Semite stuff. I know the argument that they killed Christ but that seems pretty lame to me. There must be something else. The only other thing that I’ve thought of is that they are very industrious and tended to be business owners and therefore more wealthy. Since, historically, they did not have a county of their own, they were seen as outsiders stealing the wealth of a nation.
Hatred is the reason that requires no reasoning.
The International Jew appeared in Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent. "The International Jew"
From what I’ve heard, anti-Semitism was ‘normal’ at the time.
Antisemites hate Jews because they think Jews are evil. They think Jews are evil because they hate Jews. It really is that simple.
In the words of George Orwell, writing in the UK during World War II:
He continues:
Ford’s anti-Semitism was far in excess of anything that might be considered normal for the time.
Was it? Or was it just that he had the means to spread it?
You might find this pretty interesting.
Try naming a famous person from, say, any time before, World War II, and the overwhelmingly odds are that the person was overtly or covertly anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism was part of all European cultures dating back as far as we can trace and the immigrants brought it with them.
Jews did not tend to be business owners. A small fraction of Jews did prosper in the 19th century and earlier in banking, because Christians were bound by rules against usury and Jews were able to move in a niche that opened for them.
Until recently, all businesses operated like that. Jews could not run large businesses because the WASP elite in this country (as in other European countries) would not hire them. Jews could found businesses but the WASP money interests would not lend to them. The successes they did have were in industries that were considered too declasse to interest the elites. The garment industry, the movie business, and others were run by Jews because the elites didn’t want to be associated with them until they were built up and the money involved was overwhelming. A few Jewish banking firms, along with A. Giannini’s Catholic Bank of Italy (later the Bank of America) made fortunes by being willing to bankrool them.
This is all capsulized in one amazing anecdote from Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood:
This is the mere tip of the iceberg. There were quotas at major colleges so too many Jews couldn’t attend. Jews couldn’t get elected to Congress (except from a few ethnic enclaves). Jews were not part of the cultural arts. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were major anti-Semites.
It goes on and on. Things have changed sufficiently, mostly because of WWII, that it seems that people no longer remember this part of the past. But to a good approximation what I said in my first sentence is true: everybody famous was an anti-Semite. Those who weren’t were the extremely rare exception. And this held true for all social classes down to the bottom. Ford was simply more overt about it, but he had so many followers that he can’t possibly be called unusual or an exception.
Why? The short answer is Christianity.
Oh – That was not meant to refute. It’s an actual question.
Heh.
d&r
Businessweek - Bloomberg (reviewing Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (2002)).
The Jews are always there and handy to blame for all kinds of problems. If you’re poor, you can hate the Jews for being capitalists. If you’re rich, you can hate the Jews for being communists. If Jews maintain their own customs, you can hate them for insulting your culture. If Jews assilimate your customs, you can hate them for infiltrating your culture. If you attack a Jew and he lets it slide, you can call him a coward. If you attack a Jew and he fights back, you can call him a militant.
The virulence of Ford’s hatred toward Jews was not the norm for the time. He was a pathological case.
For a very interesting read, check out The American Axis by Max Wallace, which details Ford’s descent into anti-Semitism (he also helped popularize a famous fraud, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and also explores the career of Charles Lindbergh, who was prone to similar hatreds and bizarre racial ideas far beyond what Americans of the kind could stomach.
Make that “Americans of the time”.
I’m not so sure. You will recall that Leo Frank was lynched in 1915. The lead-up to that lynching was a wave of anti-Semitic propaganda, promulgated in large part by Thomas E. Watson through his weekly paper The Jeffersonian. I have seen issues of The Jeffersonian from 1915. They contain some of the most vile anti-Semitic rants you could ever imagine.
From the Leo Frank article:
Soon adding to the atmosphere of anti-Semitism was the Red Scare of 1919, a nation-wide hysteria arising from a fear of Communist revolution in the US. According to this article:
So it seems to me there was a lot of anti-Semitism percolating in the US even before Ford began his campaign of hatred.
Recommended reading: Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel by C. Vann Woodward. Really fascinating to read about Watson’s downward spiral from idealistic young populist (and Presidential nominee) to twisted old bigot.
I don’t dispute there was a substantial amount of anti-Semitism prevalent in the U.S in Ford’s day. It was not, however, generally of the kind that manifested itself in the form of newspaper crusades against the Menace of International Jewry, or lynchings. Discrimination common at the time does not compare with attempting to stir up hatred on a mass scale.
Wallace’s book is useful in part because it looks at public opinion of the period, contrasted with Ford’s brand of bigotry. He also does this in the case of Lindbergh, noting that while a majority of Americans in the late '30s were isolationist, unlike Lindbergh their sympathies were with Britain and other countries struggling against Nazism. And they did not buy into Lindbergh’s frequent hints (and later direct accusations) that Jews were trying to push America into war.
Excuse the slight digression regarding Lindbergh, but this thread (and having read the Wallace book) give me a chance to add something to an earlier discussion about him. Both Lindbergh and Ford had views that resonated with numerous people, but it’s a far cry from the claim that typical Americans were in sympathy with the virulence of their hatreds.
Most Americans opposed lynchings of blacks at the time as well, yet prejudice against blacks was omnipresent in all sectors of American society. Blacks were discriminated against in every industry, were treated cruelly and roughly by police, lived under official Jim Crow laws, were regularly mocked in all entertainment media when they weren’t being actively barred from them, and existed in direst poverty.
Gays were subjected to similar treatment, although they were more invisible and could more easily hide. There were not public lynchings of gays that I am aware of, but beatings or murders probably happened and probably were hushed up.
Jews, blacks, and gays were not evenly dispersed through society. Most Jews lived in Jewish ghettos (the word originally applied to a restricted area for Jews outside Venice) in large cities. Although the percentage of Jews was probably higher 100 years ago than today, fewer Americans had ever encountered one and still fewer were friends with any. They were seen as an outside alien race.
This is true for blacks as well, who were disproportionally in the south and in the rural south until the Depression forced them north in search of jobs. Even then they were limited to ghetto areas almost exclusively.
Gays had a few concentrations, New York and Los Angeles primarily, with the rest being closeted in fear of exposure.
It would be nice to think that because Americans disapproved of overt, vicious or violent attacks on these three communities that this also means that they were not massively, sincerely, and rabidly prejudiced against them. It wouldn’t be true, though. When it is the default mode that a population is generally despised then no overt tactics need to be used. Violence towards blacks in the south increased after the civil rights movement started and they began to stand up for themselves and gain outside acceptance, remember.
It’s easy to demonize the other, and blacks, gays, and Jews were the “other” to the vast majority of white, straight, Christian America, who were the vast majority. Diversity is often attacked these days, apparently primarily by right-wing pinheads, but we’ve seen the results of hundreds of years of pure communities in America. That result was hatred, prejudice, discrimination, exclusion, and second-class status. People who are direct competitors for scarce jobs will be hated, certainly - look at immigrants and outsources. But neighbors are harder to apply hatred toward. Assimilation has eased prejudices, evidently to the point when they can be historically denied. They can’t and they shouldn’t. Anti-Semitism was real enough to prevent Jews from being rescued from Hitler, and it doesn’t get realer than that, even if it was a quiet reality.
I myself heard a few guys in the army during WWII say that , yeah Hitler was pretty bad but “He sure knows how to handle the Jews.”
I think that Irwin Shaw’s depiction of Noah Ackerman’s tribulations in The Young Lions wasn’t off the mark.
Henry was pretty far out, but he sure wasn’t all by himself.
It’s the contention of James W. Loewen in various works that the years 1890 to 1940 were the nadir of race relations (and ethnic/religious relations) in the U.S. He’s talking about prejudice against blacks, Asians, American Indians, and Jews in this claim. In the years up to the Civil War, there was a slow decrease in this sort of prejudice in most of the country (although it didn’t go too far). Even in the south, racial prejudice was a more of a desperate attempt to prop up slavery than a matter of theory. In the thirty-five years after the Civil War, there was a surprising amount of decrease in the level of prejudice. Blacks, Asians, American Indians, and Jews were more integrated in mainstream society than we might think. After 1890, there were numerous new restrictions in what jobs all these groups could work at, in where they could live, and in how much they could mix socially with other groups. These restrictions were not just the ignorant biases of stupid or poor people. They were propped up by the writings of famous and otherwise intelligent people.
Nitpick. It an area surrounding a square right in Venice.