The Transfer Agreement (9 page)

Ford also employed agents to seek out more anti-Jewish "evidence." One such agent acquired a typescript entitled
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the fabricated secret minutes of an imaginary Jewish conspiracy to topple governments, dominate economies, pervert morals, and defeat noble blood-lines by intermarriage. The fake
Protocols
were laughed off by many. But a few, including Henry Ford, took them to be a veracious revelation of the most sinister plot of modern times. In May
1920,
a series of
Dearborn Independent
articles and editorials publicized the
Protocols
and a host of slanders and accusations under the general heading "The International Jew." Ford's articles accused American Jewish leaders such as Louis Marshall and Louis Brandeis of using Presidents Taft and Wilson as their puppets. Other prominent Jews were accused of perpetrating World War I for the benefit of Jewish bankers and fomenting the Russian Revolution for racial imperialism. The defamations continued weekly, as Ford's paper denounced the Jewish conspiracy for corruption on Wall Street, in labor, and on the ball
fiel
—
Jews
were even behind the Black Sox baseball gambling scandal. Jews were also allegedly responsible for Benedict Arnold, the Civil War, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. What Jews could not achieve by money, media, or manipulation, they would achieve by pandering to the sexual perversions of the powerful and prominent.
²¹

These accusations were not just the ramblings of
The Dearborn Indepen
dent.
They were in fact a product of the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford listed his name at the top of every front page. Ford motorcar dealers were compelled to buy and sell subscriptions. Dealers who filled their subscription quotas received Ford cars as prizes. Those falling short were assured that
The Dearborn Independent
was "just as much of a Ford product as the car or tractor." Many reluctant dealers received threatening legalistic letters insisting they sell the tabloid. Reprints were bound into booklets and distributed to libraries and YMCAs throughout the nation.
²²

Devoting the national sales force and the assets of Ford Motor Company to spreading Jew hatred made Henry Ford the first to organize anti-Semitism in America. Indeed, he was the hero of anti-Semites the world over. In Germany, thousands of copies of Ford's teachings were published under the title
The Eternal
Jew,
by Heinrich Ford.
²³

Ford's book quickly became the bible of the German anti-Semites, including Adolf Hitler—this at least two years before
Mein Kampf
was written. Hitler was so entranced with Ford's struggle against Jewish economic power that he hung a large portrait of Ford beside his desk and spoke of him incessantly.
³⁴
When Hitler was interviewed by a
Chicago Tribune
reporter in 1923 about Ford's chances of winning the U.S. presidency, der Führer enthusiastically declared, "I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascist Party in America."
²⁴

A year later, in 1924, Hitler wrote his own anti-Jewish epistle,
Mein Kampf,
his blueprint for the destruction of the Jewish people. Many of the ramblings in
Mein Kampf
were identical to passages in "The International Jew." Hitler lionized Ford even after the Nazis became a leading factor on the German political scene. Just before Christmas 1931, der Führer admitted to a
Detroit News
reporter, "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration." Once the Third Reich came to power, millions of Ford's books were circulated to every school and party office in the nation, many featuring the names Hitler and Ford side by side on the cover.
²⁵

American Jewish reaction to the Henry Ford threat was swift. Within a few months of the
Dearborn Independent's
inaugural anti-Semitic issue, a spontaneous Jewish boycott movement erupted. Libel suits were launched against Ford personally. A Jewish-led campaign to legally ban the sale or distribution of the publication began in Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, and other cities. Where legislated bans were overturned by court action, angry mobs often greeted
Dearborn Independent
street vendors.
²⁶

The backlash campaign started hurting Ford in late 1920, when Jews began refusing en masse to purchase any vehicle bearing a Ford emblem. Typical was a Connecticut Jewish community's 400-car parade in early 1921 honoring Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann-parade rules included the proviso "Positively no Ford machines permitted in line." Ford himsel
couldn't even
give
one away to his Jewish neighbor, Rabbi Leo M. Franklin of Detroit. Each year Ford gave the rabbi a custom-built car as a gift. But the rabbi emphatically refused Ford's gift after the
Dearborn Independent's
articles began.
²⁷

Even the American Jewish Committee encouraged the boycott. The Committee opposed proclaiming an "official" boycott, reluctant to openly answer Ford's charges of an economic conspiracy with a coordinated economic weapon. But Committee leader Louis Marshall felt a "silent boycott" would be equally effective, maintaining that any self-respecting Jew would know what to do without being told when purchasing an automobile.
²⁸

Ford's steepest sales declines first appeared in the Northeast, where Jews comprised a substantial segment of the car-buying market. Within five years, a leading dealer in the Southwest was painfully aware that wealthy Jews in Texas and neighboring states hadn't purchased a Lincoln in years. And company inquiries about low sales in Missouri revealed that Jews wouldn't take a Ford if it was handed to them free.
²⁹

In reality, the Jewish boycott of Ford products was probably not statistically effective. While Ford's sales in urban centers did decrease significantly, equally important sales in small towns and rural areas either remained constant or increased. And the recorded urban sales slumps were only partially due to the Jewish-led boycott. General economic conditions and the declining popularity of the Model T were equally potent factors. But in the early and mid-1920s, Ford people were convinced that the Jewish-led boycott was in large part responsible.
³⁰

The precise figures were guarded by Ford's corporate sales hierarchy even as dealers and regional sales managers continually pleaded for Ford's campaign to cease. For example, New York sales manager Gaston Plaintiff, a personal friend of Ford, wrote numerous letters bemoaning the boycott. Ford would typically reply,
"If
they want our product, they'll buy it."
³¹

In I927, the advent of a competitive Chevrolet made the Jewish boycott an unacceptable liability for Ford Motor Company. Any lost product loyalty would now be lost forever to the competition. The Model T was obsolete, and the company's future was precariously stacked on a new Model A. At the same time, Ford desperately sought to avoid humiliating public trials with libeled Jews who had sued.
³²

In the summer of I927, Ford's representatives approached Nathan Perlman, a vice-president of the American Jewish Congress, seeking a truce. Stephen Wise was in Europe, so Perlman referred Ford's people to the Committee. Louis Marshall prepared an embarrassing retraction
cum
apology for Ford to sign and publish. Close advisers cautioned the car maker that the humiliating apology might be too much for Ford's pride. But the global leader of anti-Semites had endured boycotts, legal actions, and political abrasions long enough.
³³
It was time to make money, secure the future, and fight Chevrolet.

On July
7, 1927,
in the last year of the outmoded Model
T,
as Ford acknowledged a decline of about a half million fewer cars sold, and as he prepared for a major financial effort to introduce his new Model A, the proud gladiator of anti-Semites released to the press his contrite plea for forgiveness for wronging the Jews and misleading mankind.
³⁴

I have given consideration to the series of articles concerning Jews which have since 1920
appeared in
The Dearborn Independent
...
and in pamphlet form under the title "The International Jew." ... To my great regret I have learned that Jews generally, and particularly those of this country, not only resent these publications as promoting anti-Semitism, but regard me as their enemy .... I am deeply mortified . . . . I deem it to be my duty as an honorable man to make amends for the wrong done to the Jews as fellowmen and brothers, by asking their forgiveness for the harm that I have unintentionally committed, by retracting so far as lies within my power the offensive charges laid at their door by these publications, and by giving them the unqualified assurance that henceforth they may look to me for friendship and good
will.
³⁵

Within weeks the retraction appeared in
The Dearborn Independent
itself. Shortly thereafter, Ford's advertising agencies were instructed to spend about
12
percent of the Model A's
$1.3
million introductory advertising in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish newspapers-the only minority press included in the campaign. Ford also directed that five truckloads of "The International Jew" be burned, and ordered overseas publishers to cease publication as well.
³⁶

Ford's capitulation was taken hardest in Germany among Nazi circles. Nazi boycotter Theodor Fritsch wrote to Ford lamenting the loss of both book sales and "the inestimable mental goods" Ford had bestowed upon civilization. "The publication of this book remains the most important action of your life." Yet now, as Fritsch put it, Ford was capitulating to the financial might of the Jews.
³⁷

Adolf Hitler, when informed of the retraction, tried to avoid comment. Henry Ford was the man the Nazi party and der Führer himself had lionized as the quintessential fighter of the so-called Jewish economic conspiracy. Hitler had once told reporters in Germany that "the struggle of international Jewish finance against Ford ... has only strengthened [Nazi] sympathies ... for Ford." In
Mein Kampf,
Hitler had declared that "only a single great man, Ford," was able to stand up to Jewish economic power.
³⁸

Ford's unexpected surrender was so powerful a loss to Hitler's movement that the Nazis preferred to ignore the retraction as a mere expediency. Fritsch continued printing "The International Jew." Nonetheless, the tribute to Ford in
Mein Kampf
was changed in its second edition. The words "only a single great man, Ford," were replaced with the phrase "only a very few."
³⁹

A lesson had been learned by Hitler and the Nazis. Jewish boycotts and economic influence, in the Nazi view, held the power not only to subvert governments, but to silence the most indomitable challengers.

Presidential candidate Norman Thomas declared, "Ford's backdown was good evidence of what a consumers' boycott and a lawyer's million-dollar libel suit can do in the way of educating a man who has heretofore been impervious to history."
The New York Telegram
editorialized,
"If
one of the richest men in the world cannot get away with an anti-Semitic movement in this country, nobody else will have the nerve to try it, and of that we can all be thankful, gentiles as well as Jews." But perhaps the most poignant summing up was uttered by Will Rogers: "Ford used to have it in for Jewish people—until he saw them in Chevrolets."
⁴⁰

Jews also believed in the power of Jewish boycotts.
It
mattered little whether the real might of the boycott was the statistical business harm or simply the
perception
of it. Boycott was a weapon the Jews were ready and willing to use in emergencies to dissuade the forces of anti-Semitism.

The anti-Ford boycott was but a commercial skirmish compared to the international financial war waged against Russian Czar Nicholas II by Jewish banker Jacob Schiff and the American Jewish Committee. The war began when Jews were blamed for Russia's social and economic chaos in the 1880s. The classic scapegoat scenario developed. Quotas for Jews were decreed in academia and commerce. Jews were physically restricted to the smallest hamlets. Bloody pogroms followed as mounted Cossacks swept through the hamlets pillaging and ravaging defenseless Jews.
⁴¹

Although America's German Jews detested the unkempt Russian Jews, they were nevertheless infuriated by the barbarism of the czar's persecution. Among the
Hofjuden
who considered themselves the custodians of Jewish defense, Jacob Schiff stood out as a central figure. A major factor in international finance, Schiff's greatest weapon was money: giving it, denying it. After the notorious Kishinev pogrom of Passover 1903, Schiff decided to personally lead a crusade to force Czar Nicholas to abandon his anti-Semitic campaign.
⁴²

Schiff used his influence with friends and family in Europe to commit major Jewish and even non-Jewish financial houses to a banking boycott of Russia.
⁴³
And before long, Russia's loan requests were in fact systematically denied in most French, English, and U.S. money markets. In 1904, after war broke out between Russia and Japan, Schiff lobbied tirelessly among commercial adversaries and cohorts alike to grant high-risk war loans to the Japanese. About
$
100
million, suddenly infused, quickly armed the under-equipped Japanese, allowing them to score a series of humiliating victories.
⁴⁴
Schiff's loans were officially recognized as the pivotal factor in Japan's victory, and the Jewish leader was commemorated in Japanese newspapers and history books as a new national hero.
⁴⁵