A Century of Hate: The Connection Between Henry Ford and Donald Trump
There’s something about the endorsement of a rich American that makes people stand up straight. There’s a feeling, from Donald Trump to Warren Buffet, that they’ve seen it all, been on the inside, gotten to see the way things really work. Trump has made the word of the rich as valuable as it ever has been, those loyal to him have the convictions of true believers. They can trust Trump because of his success, some combination of the real and imagined. Win or lose, a cast-mold of his hair will stand above the GOP for decades. You can see this pattern in another rich man who decided to use unconventional tactics to get his message out: Henry Ford.
Trump and Ford have many similarities. Both men have names that became brands. “Fordism” became a buzzword of the Tens and Twenties, synonymous with the man’s many successes. In his essay “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci describes Fordism as “the ultimate stage in the process of progressive attempts by industry to overcome the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” Both made rapid and aggressive expansion a trademark of their companies. Both proclaim intense loyalty to those who work for them. With a similar passion, both were and are opposed to unions. Both claim a sense of anti-war populism — Ford was a vocal opponent of World War 1, and Trump has claimed retroactively that he opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Both believe political campaigns should be run on the cheap: after Woodrow Wilson begged Ford to run for the Democrats as a Senator from Michigan, Ford agreed but promised that he wouldn’t “make a penny’s investment.” He lost by two percent with charges of voter intimidation and fraud swirling around his Republican opponent for years. Above all Ford was convinced, like Trump and many tech innovators today, that he could change the world provided he had the right means to get his message out.
For Donald Trump, this means Twitter. Trump’s Twitter page has become common fodder on the daily news cycle, beyond the point of novelty or interest. Many caution to not let Trump “feel normal,” but his use of social media sure does. Spitting out conspiracy theories and rants against the media, Trump feels at home on the site, and is undoubtedly very pleased that no politician has ever used the free service so effectively.
Ford tried to control the narrative in a similar way: buying his own newspaper. While he did spend money on The Dearborn Independent, he presumably did not spend much on the small, local paper that had been operating on a loss. Overjoyed to have such a wealthy benefactors, the paper quickly developed “Mr. Ford Page,” where Ford could write, or have someone write, whatever he wanted. Sometimes, these were Art of the Deal — style promotions of business philosophies and egotism. “The people transfer their own feelings to the successful person, and then think of his success under those terms,” Ford once wrote. Imagining a “man of achievement” receiving a day of celebration in his honor, Ford looks out to the crowd in contempt: “If only they knew it, the man so honored was probably fuming because he was wasting his time to make a public holiday — he wanted to get back to his work.” When not discussing the benefits of working more, Ford began to write glowingly and in great detail about anti-Semitism.
Here, of course, is where Trump backers would say the comparisons end. The Dearborn Independent is not known for Henry Ford’s thoughts on how to make it in business — it’s infamous as the original home of The International Jew: The World’s Problem, what would become a template for Ford’s anti-Semitic tome,The International Jew. Editors and writers quit in disgust and left Ford to his own devices, which he expanded upon greatly. Let Ford be Ford, some might say. Editorials described the “Jewish ideal of world revolution” playing out in the newly founded Soviet Union. The book version of The International Jew, broken into four volumes, asks again and again why Jews consider themselves to be so hated all over the world. A “curious admission,” Ford writes, “which would lead a less self- centered people to inquire, Why?”
Trump’s turns towards hate offer less of a formally structured conspiracy, to be sure. Like all hate, it reflects the times. Questions about Judge Curiel or Ted Cruz’s father are more likely to gain traction because than, say, a 9/11 conspiracy precisely because they are questions as opposed to answers. We live in unsure times and Trump does not claim to understand his enemies, he wants to pause immigration until “we can figure out what’s going on.” He only proffers himself, and his strength, as the solution. Trump-brand anti-Semitism sees no conspiracy but rather tends towards the stereotypical, assuming Jews are natural-born money handlers who will blindly follow anyone who says the words “strong on Israel.”
But regardless of the elaborate nature of any particular plot, it’s plain to see that Trump demanding to “figure out what’s going on” with Muslims is as honest an inquiry as Ford’s. His claims of simultaneous Mexican genius and evil could be put shoulder to shoulder with Ford’s assessments, when he declared that “[j]ust as the capstone” of the great Jewish victory over any particular society “is ready to be placed upon the edifice of Jewish triumphs, something occurs and the structure shrinks.” The conspiracy always gets found out, in other words, be it through Trump or Ford of some other great mastermind of destiny.
The Dearborn Independent never hit the 13 million that Trump’s Twitter feed has, but it did very well for itself. At its peak in 1924, the paper had a circulation of 700,000, second in the country only to the New York Daily News. That same year, his home of Michigan voted for him in the Democratic presidential primary, although he did not campaign. Like Trump, Ford understood that the best way to interact with the people was to directly interact with them, to find them where they were. And what better place to do that than his own companies, of course? Just as Trump resorts have become mainstays of the campaign cycle, Ford dealerships began to distribute copies of The Dearborn Independent. Some enterprising salesmen even placed copies in the passenger seats of newly purchased cars, so the driver could have some reading material for when they got home.
There have been many peaks for anti-Semitism throughout history, and Ford certainly has a mountain range all to himself. What’s notable is that Ford’s anti-Semitic works outlived his beliefs. In an act that can only be described as chutzpah, a Jewish lawyer from San Francisco named Aaron Sapiro sued Ford for libel in 1927. Sapiro, normally a farming activist, felt that a section in the book version of International Jew, “Jewish Exploitation of the American Farmer’s Organizations: Monopoly Traps Operate Under the Guise of Marketing Associations,” specifically targeted his work. In court, Independent staffers claimed that Ford had no idea what was being published under his byline, which many found difficult to believe. Sapiro’s case attracted national attention, and Ford closed down the paper in December of that year. He sent out a national apology to American Jewry, which many were quick to receive.
But while The Dearborn Independent died its ideas lived on, especially abroad. By 1921, Ford’s work in the Independent had reached right-wing circles in Germany and by 1925 the newspaper Hammer was advertising the writings of “the eminent American industrialist and social politician” Henry Ford. An early article on Hitler from the New York Times, dated December 20, 1922, reports the “wall beside his desk in [his] private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford.” Hitler’s open admiration for Ford, seeing his efficient work methods and anti-Semitism tied together, came through in an early version of Mein Kampf in which Ford is mentioned.
And it wasn’t just Hitler. During the Nuremberg trials Baldur von Schirach, the one-time paramilitary leader of Hitler Youth, said that reading Ford in his youth made a large impact on him. “In those days,” von Schirach told the court, “this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor, Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.”
It’s too early to say what Trump’s impact will be, but it’s clear he’s become a galvanizing force among some in the way a young Schirach saw Ford. An April 2016 study of “The Trump Effect” on schoolchildren by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that said effect was massive nationwide. “At the all-white school where I teach, ‘dirty Mexican’ has become a common insult,” a Wisconsin middle school educator told the SPLC. “Before election season it was never heard.” A high school teacher from Maryland said that many “students think we should kill any and all people we do not agree with. They also think that all Muslims are the same and are a threat to our country and way of life. They believe all Muslims want to kill us.” Middle schools across the nation reported “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as becoming a common taunt, and noted a strong uptick in Trump words like ‘loser’ or ‘deadbeat.’ A sixth grade teacher in California summed up the antagonistic, aggressive sentiment by saying that their “students seem more interested in the campaign this year, but only in the same way they are interested in circling a couple of kids who are about to fight on the playground.”
Trump, the man who used his brightest moment to say “I am your voice,” has given words for feelings. Seemingly endless words, in fact. Now that his campaign has merged completely with the “alt right” of Breitbart Media it’s clear that Trump’s words will live on after he has lost the election. The alt right depicts itself as both as harmless pranksters and dead-serious intellectuals. “They have no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies,” claim Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos in a very special Breitbart report, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It’s “just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked. These younger mischief-makers instinctively understand who the authoritarians are and why and how to poke fun at them. The intellectuals are animated by a similar thrill: after being taken for granted for centuries, they’re the ones who get to pick apart some of the Enlightenment’s dead dogmas.”
In other words, none of it is serious until it is. Do alt-righters worry about children actually meaning the insults they see, feeling the hatred as their own? Who means it and who doesn’t? They’re probably just racist, because anyone who says racist things and plays The Boy Who Cried Context is a racist, right? These are lines about as solid as the one separating Fordism from anti-Semitism. “If the GOP fully becomes the home to the Breitbart and alt-right movement,” Peter Wehner, who was director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under George W. Bush, told The Washington Postm “it’ll cease to be the Republican Party as we’ve known it. There will be a huge crack-up beyond anything we’ve seen.” As the kids weaned on Trump’s hatred grow, they’ll soon enough encounter a movement organized at levels Henry Ford of which dreamed: one with breadth, strength, and an ever-present memory of how Donald Trump swept through the primaries. How could they forget? How could any of us?
