Review of Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich, St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

         The argument in The American Axis is that Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford are partly responsible for the rise of Hitler. So suggests the book’s cover art, which shows Ford, Lindbergh and a backdrop of a Nazi concentration camp.

         The lives and beliefs of both men did intersect in certain ways with the German National Socialists. Ford believed in a Jewish banking conspiracy; Lindbergh admired the technical and organizational achievements of the late-1930s German state. But The American Axis wants to prove more than that.

         This is the first political history by Max Wallace, whose previous books were Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight and Who Killed Kurt Cobain? Wallace has been industrious in digging for dirt on Ford and Lindbergh, and fills his book with a heap of it, much of which he immediately exaggerates.

         The exaggeration starts in the first sentence: “The process that brought Henry Ford’s portrait to a prominent position behind Hitler’s desk began during the summer of 1919, when Ford made the first public sortie in a hate-filled but distinctly American campaign that was to dominate his attention for the next eight years.”

         This was a campaign in Ford’s Dearborn Independent newspaper to vilify international Jewish bankers. Hate-filled it was, but it is an exaggeration to say that it “was to dominate his attention for the next eight years.” It was a sideline. Ford’s attention was dominated by the Ford Motor Company, and when, in 1927, his railing at Jewish bankers began to hurt the sales of his cars, he shut down the paper and promised never to attack Jews again.

         Ford was a self-made man, an industrial genius who never graduated from high school and famously said, “History is bunk.” He had two political crusades in his life, one against Jewish bankers and the other against war, neither of which Wallace takes much effort to understand.

         Ford hated bankers because they lent money to companies like his and took the companies away in hard times. He had lost a company that way around the turn of the century, and vowed that that would never happen to Ford Motor. He was determined not to borrow bankers’ money, but to create his own capital. He did it, and counted it as a win against the moneychangers.

         Ford did more than just oppose World War I. He chartered a “peace ship” to carry antiwar protesters to Europe. Wallace recounts this, but has no appreciation of why anyone would object to fighting German “aggression.” Wallace also recounts that Ford, as well as Lindbergh’s father, believed that Wall Street financiers had entangled America with Britain and helped drag the country into the war. He presents this as a crank belief, but it was not. President Wilson asked for war because German U-boats were sinking American merchant ships. The ships were carrying goods that the British had bought with money raised on Wall Street.

         None of which is explained in this book.

         Some of those Wall Street financiers were Jewish, though the most prominent of them, J.P. Morgan, Jr., was not. Anyway, Ford did become fixated on Jews, and after World War I had published a scurrilous book, The International Jew. It was translated into several languages, including German, which apparently was why the young Hitler had a picture of Ford on his wall. (But Ford did not have a picture of Hitler on his wall.)

         Wallace leaves certain things out of his narrative that ought to be there, and adds others that ought to have been edited out.

          There is an accusation that Ford gave money to the Nazis in 1922, eleven years before the Nazis took power. It is not Wallace’s accusation. The accuser was a German politician. Wallace repeats it, quotes a historian who says there is no evidence of it, and then undermines the historian by saying, “A significant amount of archival materials from the company’s early days… has been ‘discarded.’ ”

         Not discarded, but “discarded,” with sneer quotes. 

         In 1924, a Nazi arranged a meal with Ford by tagging along with composer Richard Wagner and Wagner’s wife, Winifred. The purpose was to ask Ford for money. The Nazi sprung his question and later (in a book) complained that Ford was a tightwad, and wouldn’t contribute a nickel. But Wallace reports that Winifred Wagner, still alive in 1997, told a researcher that Ford said he had helped Hitler. When? How? How much? We don’t know. Wallace says, “Whether or not Ford actually financed Hitler, there can be no doubt about his ideological sway over the fuehrer-in-waiting.”

         Wallace has been trying to say that Hitler got some of his money from Ford, and, failing that, says it doesn’t matter because Hitler was “swayed” by Ford.

         Swayed to what? 

         But back to the original charge: giving money. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Ford had given some money. This was 1922. Even if Ford had been talked into making a donation to the Nazis — because they were critics of Jewish bankers, or just to get a pest away from his dinner table — it is unlikely in 1922 that any American who had never been to Germany (or to high school) understood the National Socialist German Workers Party. Ford abhorred both socialism and war, and was never in favor of killing an entire race of people.

         In another innuendo, Wallace quotes a historian who asserts that Hitler got the idea of industrial killing from Ford’s production line. Wallace offers no proof of this, but even if it were so, would that tarnish Ford? Wallace doesn’t say it does; he just reports it and moves on. He follows the conventions of an objective historian while producing a biased account, and he does this over and over again.

         Another of Wallace’s hits is his recounting of a statement by Ernest Liebold, a pro-German who was Ford’s longtime assistant, and later fired, that Ford received a shipment of swastika pins in the 1920s and encouraged some people to wear