{"id":276,"date":"2018-07-29T19:49:11","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T02:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=276"},"modified":"2023-08-05T14:01:58","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T21:01:58","slug":"defending-henry-ford-2003","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/defending-henry-ford-2003\/","title":{"rendered":"Defending Henry Ford (2003)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A whole sub-genre of books exists to tar Americans as Nazis or sympathizers of the Nazis, and there is some truth to some of the accounts, just as there is some truth (a lot more) that some Americans in those days were sympathetic to the Communists. But when I read the argument against Henry Ford in \u201cThe American Axis,\u201d I thought, \u201cThis is too much.\u201d It was an example to me of how not to write history.<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My review appeared in Liberty, November 2003.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review of Max Wallace,\u00a0The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich<\/i>, St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2003.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The argument in\u00a0The American Axis\u00a0<\/i>is that Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford are partly responsible for the rise of Hitler. So suggests the book\u2019s cover art, which shows Ford, Lindbergh and a backdrop of a Nazi concentration camp.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The 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\u00a0The American Axis\u00a0<\/i>wants to prove more than that.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This is the first political history by Max Wallace, whose previous books were\u00a0Muhammad Ali\u2019s Greatest Fight\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Who Killed Kurt Cobain?\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The exaggeration starts in the first sentence: \u201cThe process that brought Henry Ford\u2019s portrait to a prominent position behind Hitler\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This was a campaign in Ford\u2019s\u00a0Dearborn Independent\u00a0<\/i>newspaper to vilify international Jewish bankers. Hate-filled it was, but it is an exaggeration to say that it \u201cwas to dominate his attention for the next eight years.\u201d It was a sideline. Ford\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ford was a self-made man, an industrial genius who never graduated from high school and famously said, \u201cHistory is bunk.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ford 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\u2019 money, but to create his own capital. He did it, and counted it as a win against the moneychangers.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ford did more than just oppose World War I. He chartered a \u201cpeace ship\u201d to carry antiwar protesters to Europe. Wallace recounts this, but has no appreciation of why anyone would object to fighting German \u201caggression.\u201d Wallace also recounts that Ford, as well as Lindbergh\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0None of which is explained in this book.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some 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.<\/em> 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\u00a0his\u00a0<\/i>wall.)<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace leaves certain things out of his narrative that ought to be there, and adds others that ought to have been edited out.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There is an accusation that Ford gave money to the Nazis in 1922, eleven years before the Nazis took power. It is not Wallace\u2019s 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, \u201cA significant amount of archival materials from the company\u2019s early days… has been \u2018discarded.\u2019 \u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Not discarded, but \u201cdiscarded,\u201d with sneer quotes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 1924, a Nazi arranged a meal with Ford by tagging along with composer Richard Wagner and Wagner\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t know. Wallace says, \u201cWhether or not Ford actually financed Hitler, there can be no doubt about his ideological sway over the fuehrer-in-waiting.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace has been trying to say that Hitler got some of his\u00a0money\u00a0<\/i>from Ford, and, failing that, says it doesn\u2019t matter because Hitler was \u201cswayed\u201d by Ford.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Swayed to what?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But 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 \u2014 because they were critics of Jewish bankers, or just to get a pest away from his dinner table \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In another innuendo, Wallace quotes a historian who asserts that Hitler got the idea of industrial killing from Ford\u2019s production line. Wallace offers no proof of this, but even if it were so, would that tarnish Ford? Wallace doesn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Another of Wallace\u2019s hits is his recounting of a statement by Ernest Liebold, a pro-German who was\u00a0<\/span>Ford\u2019s longtime assistant, and later fired, that Ford\u00a0<\/span>received a shipment of swastika pins in the 1920s<\/span>\u00a0and encouraged some people to wear<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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them. Wallace notes that Liebold is not a trustworthy witness, and that his memoirs are \u201cfilled with exaggerated, self-serving and sometimes blatantly false accounts,\u201d but he likes this story about the swastika pins enough to use it.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Again, what if it were true? A swastika pin has ominous meaning today, but what meaning would it have had in Detroit, U.S.A., in 1925?<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Fast forward a few years. Hitler is in power. He has persecuted Jews but is not yet killing them wholesale, and he is making territorial demands on his neighbors but has not yet begun the war. Germany is at peace with the United States, though Hitler is none too popular here. Ford has a factory in Germany called Ford-Werke. The factory has a few military contracts with Berlin.\u00a0<\/span>In July 1938, a couple of months before the Munich crisis, the German consuls of Detroit and Cleveland offer to award the Grand Cross of the German Eagle to Ford. There is a famous picture of Ford in white suit and sash accepting the medal, looking somewhat bemused.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What to make of this? Well,\u00a0they\u00a0<\/i>are sucking up to\u00a0him<\/i>. He might have refused the award if he understood the Nazi doctrine and disapproved of it. Then again, he had a factory in Germany, and his inclination as an investor in Germany would be to avoid an insult to the German government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Immediately, he was denounced in the United States for accepting the award. Challenged to give it back, Ford said that he did not agree with the persecution of the Jews and was willing to hire Jewish refugees. But he kept the medal and did not criticize Hitler directly.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To Wallace, this shows that Ford was an Axis sympathizer. To me, it looks as if he was trying to stay out of public positions that could hurt his business (and not succeeding).<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Germany and Russia began World War II in September 1939, and in May 1940 Germany invaded France. The U.S. policy was to be officially neutral but to sell war material to the Allies for cash. The interventionists supported this because they said it would help defeat Hitler while keeping America out of the war; the isolationists, like Ford, opposed sales because they believed they would get America into the war.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In June 1940, Ford was offered a contract to build 3,000 Rolls Royce aircraft engines for the United States and 6,000 for Britain, with the latter engines to be paid for by the British government. Ford refused the second contract. \u201cWe are not doing business with the British or any other foreign government,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we make 6,000 Rolls Royce Merlin engines, it will be on an order from the United States government.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ford did not want to entangle America in the war. Wallace quotes Ford production chief Charles Sorensen, speaking in September 1940 about Ford\u2019s political hot buttons: \u201cHis pet peeve was Franklin Roosevelt, but any mention of the war in Europe or this country\u2019s involvement upset him almost to incoherence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace makes it sound as if Ford were an Axis sympathizer because he refused to make engines for the British while Ford Werke was making trucks for the Germans. He\u00a0never mentions\u00a0<\/i>that Ford also had a subsidiary in Britain that was available to the British government. The Ford factory at Dagenham would produce 360,000 military vehicles and 250,000 V-8 aircraft engines for the British in World War II. Ford would also set up a plant at Manchester that would produce 34,000 of the Rolls-Royce aircraft engines.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace does mention, in passing, that General Motors had a subsidiary in Germany\u00a0\u2014 Opel \u2014 and it also made trucks for the German army. He mentions that Ford had a subsidiary in France that made trucks for the French army, and when the Germans came it made trucks for the German army. There is a pattern here: a factory supports the government of the country it is in. If it refused, it would be seized, and it would still support the government of the country it was in.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace sees a great moral problem in Ford Werke. He says it \u201camassed huge profits without interruption.\u201d In his book, he throws around the phrases \u201cunfettered corporate profits\u201d (p. 227), \u201chuge profits\u201d (p. 329) and \u201cmassive profits\u201d (p. 351) for their rhetorical odor, showing no sign that he understands what a profit actually is, of the distinction between an accounting profit and cash, or between a currency that is convertible and one that is blocked. He does report that Ford Werke accounted for less than 2 percent of U.S. investment in Germany at the outbreak of war, and that when the war ended the cumulative cash dividend from Ford Werke, translated into dollars and made available to the American owners, amounted to just $60,000.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He also presents evidence that Ford Werke used slave labor in the latter part of the war. But Ford Werke was not under control of its American parent during the war.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And so it goes. I can\u2019t claim that everything that Henry Ford did was good. But wandering through all Max Wallace\u2019s smoke is no way to get a clear or fair picture of his subject.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wallace\u2019s treatment of Lindbergh is similar, but he makes a somewhat stronger case. Wallace does show that Lindbergh was fascinated by the Nazis in the late 1930s, that to some extent he admired them, that he toured their aircraft plants and accepted the same medal Ford did, and that one of his reasons for opposing American entry into World War II was that he thought Germany would win. As with Ford, the Nazis tried to use Lindbergh, and apparently had some success at it. But it does not make him a Nazi, or responsible for Nazism.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I thought, while reading this book, how a right-winger might write a similar book about various liberal heroes of the 1930s and 1940s cooperating with Stalin and with Communism. It would be a much longer book than this, with more smoke\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>more fire; and if anybody would offer it for review, how the righteous progressives would denounce in one voice as an expression of intolerable and outrageous McCarthyism.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a9 2003 Bruce Ramsey<\/span><\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A whole sub-genre of books exists to tar Americans as Nazis or sympathizers of the Nazis, and there is some truth to some of the accounts, just as there is some truth (a lot more) that some Americans in those days were sympathetic to the Communists. But when I read the argument […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-276","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1148,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/276\/revisions\/1148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}