The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (76 page)

One of its strands emerged from Ford's populist political sensibility, with its distrust of financiers, bankers, and institutions of economic power. As did the Populist Party in the 1890s, his denunciations of Wall Street combined economic radicalism with a strong anti-Semitic element. “The Jew is a mere huckster, a trader, who doesn't want to produce, but to make something out of what somebody else produces,” he told an interviewer in 1921.”Our money and banking system is the invention of the Jews, for their own purposes of control, and it's bad. Our gold standard was founded by the Jews; it's bad, and things will never get right until we are rid of the power they hold through it.” For Ford, “Wall Street finance capitalists” and “New York Jews” were practically synonymous terms, and in 1922he denounced the “greed and avarice of Wall Street Kikes” to the Detroit
Free Press.
Specifically, he viewed Jews as antithetical to the populist ideology of hardworking producerism. “He always stressed the fact that the Jews were the type of people who preferred nonproductive enterprises,” an associate explained. He also blamed Jewish financiers for his defeat in the 1918Senate election. Again like his populist predecessors, Ford endorsed a strategy of agitation and exposure to undermine this economic power. “Ford is a great believer in what he calls ‘stirring people up.’ He thinks the average man is too lazy and unprogressive,” noted a reporter who talked with Ford about his criticisms of Jews.
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Ford's opposition to war provided a second strand in his mental web of anti-Semitism. He came away from his crusade against World War I with the clear conviction that international Jewish bankers lay behind the bloodbath. This conviction, of course, neatly dovetailed with his populist critique of Jewish financial power. He told Allan Benson that he had learned of Jewish culpability on the cruise of the Peace Ship. “It taught me who starts the wars—the International Jew, the International Jewish banker—and we're
going to write some articles about him sometime,” he confirmed to Fred Black. The war, Ford became convinced, had been fomented by wealthy Jewish lenders such as the Rothschilds and the Warburgs. In fact, while the Peace Ship was in mid-journey he had shocked fellow traveler Rosika Schwimmer by bursting out, “I know who caused the war—the German-Jewish bankers! [He slapped his breast pocket.] I have the evidence here. Facts! The German-Jewish bankers caused the war.”
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In a 1925 interview with
Farm and Fireside,
Ford clearly delineated the connection he saw between Jews and international conflict. “What I oppose most is the international Jewish money power that is met in every war,” he declared. “No matter what happens to the nations in a war the money power always wins. No war starts without it and every war stops when it says so. That is what I oppose—a power that has no country and that can order the young men of all countries out to death.” For Ford, ironically, opposition to Jewish financial power was part of the noble reform crusade to bring peace to the world.
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A third strand of Ford's anti-Jewish sentiment came from his growing cultural conservatism. In the postwar years, he became increasingly drawn to the American past as he began to collect antique furniture, support old-time American music, re-create historical buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revive
McGuffey Readers,
and refurbish old machines and implements from traditional farms. From such a cultural palette, he painted an attractive portrait of traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant village life that had little room for Jews. In fact, Jewish influences were blamed for lascivious new styles in music and dress, loose standards of sexual propriety, and scandalous productions in theater and movies. Associates heard him launch tirades against Jews in the entertainment industry who were subverting sturdy American traditions with jazz and movies. In
My Life and Work,
he defined America as a Christian nation and demanded that Jews “labour to make Jews American, instead of labouring to make America Jew-ish.”
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Ford's anti-Semitism was frightening not so much for its viciousness as for its combination of ignorance, unpredictable absurdity, utter conviction, and naïveté. Though not advocating violence in the European sense of pogroms, Ford had a hostility toward Jews that was perhaps equally disturbing in its open-endedness. One minute he would assume a dialect and laughingly relate how he had encountered a Jewish shopkeeper in Washington, D.C., who supposedly told him, ‘Well, I been readin’ dis Dearborn
Independent
of yours. It's all right. It tells the truth about us.” The next minute he would encourage Cameron to write about how Benedict Arnold had created a “Jewish front” in the American Revolution as an agent of Jewish
bankers and warmongers. Or he would denounce Jay Gould as an avaricious “Shylock,” even though the speculator was a lifelong Presbyterian. Or he would demand that engineers avoid using brass as a component in the Model T because it was a “Jew metal” (the engineers responded by using it when necessary and then covering it with black paint). Or he would propound such bizarre ideas, as he did in the early 1930s, that Hitler had been brought to power in Germany by wealthy, influential Jews in order to clean out the less prominent ones.
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However ignorant and malignant Ford's views were, they were exacerbated by another influence. By the early 1920s, his bigotry was being encouraged by someone ensconced at the very heart of his organization. Jealously guarding all outside access to Ford and looking after his personal financial affairs, this man viewed Jews as the bane of civilized society. At every opportunity, he encouraged his boss to do likewise.

In June 1920, Ernest G. Liebold, Henry Ford's business secretary and office manager, received a copy of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This text purported to be the proceedings of a conclave of Jewish leaders in the 1890s that ratified a plan for world domination. Translated by the Russian émigré and Bolshevik foe Boris Brasol, this version had come into the possession of a Madame Shishmareff, who was married to a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. In turn, she contacted Liebold, and arrangements were made to get him a copy. Within days, the
Protocols
were feeding the anti-Semitic attacks appearing in the Dearborn
Independent.
Liebold was thrilled, believing that this document provided concrete evidence of nefarious Jewish activity in the United States and around the world. “We took the
Protocols
at their face value,” he explained later. “That's all we tried to do. In the various activities they [the Jews] performed, we could show a definite trend.” The
Protocols
were an utter fabrication, but Liebold never indicated he knew that. It would not have mattered. For a man who loathed Jews and craved power at the Ford Company in equal proportion, such a distinction was beside the point.
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By the early 1920s, Liebold had gained considerable authority at the company through his personal relationship with Henry Ford. E. G. Pipp, who despised Liebold, believed he was poisoning the mind of his benefactor through flattery. ‘Mr. Liebold tilted back his chair, unbuttoned his coat, put his thumbs into the armholes of his vest, expanded his chest, and said: 'Mr. Ford, YOU don't have to think as other men think; YOUR thoughts come to you like a flash, from a sub-conscious mind, and you have your problems
solved,’ “Pipp described. He continued, ”The door to the Ford mind was always open to anything Liebold wanted to shove in it, and during that time Mr. Ford developed a dislike for Jews, a dislike which [grew] stronger and more bitter as time went on.” This partnership in bigotry had actually begun more than a decade before.
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Ernest Gustav Liebold had become Henry Ford's business secretary by a chain of circumstances. He had grown up in Detroit in a family of German Lutherans. After studying business, he took a job at the Peninsula Savings Bank in Highland Park in 1910 and slowly worked his way up from messenger to teller to bank officer. He eventually met James Couzens, who took an immediate liking to the hardworking young man. Couzens was involved in starting up a company bank in Highland Park to serve Ford employees, and he appointed Liebold first as head cashier, then to the board of directors, and then as its president. Liebold caught the attention of Henry Ford, who put him in charge of the D. P. Lapham Bank in Dearborn, an insolvent institution he had just purchased. Liebold, with his customary intelligence and efficiency, revived the Lapham Bank and impressed Ford greatly. By 1913, he was working directly for Ford and had received authorization to pay the industrialist's personal bills. He came gradually to handle Ford's business correspondence as well. Within a few years, he became Ford's office manager and gained power of attorney to sign Mr. and Mrs. Ford's personal correspondence and deal with their financial affairs. His salary was paid from Henry Ford's personal account rather than through the company.
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Liebold became a force to be reckoned with in the company. From his office in the engineering laboratory in Dearborn—right next to Henry Ford's office—he controlled access to the industrialist. He served as Ford's executive secretary, financial manager, accountant, and intermediary with the press, and stood at the center of every Ford project that did not involve the making of automobiles. Every day at midmorning, he would arrive at work, walk sedately from the garage to his office, and consult with his secretary, Hazel McConnell, and his assistant, Charlie Zahnow. Liebold's office suite was the picture of orderliness, and he sat for hours in his swivel chair behind a large desk managing Henry Ford's affairs and writing checks that often ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. His office also held a large safe, in which he kept over $1 million in cash.
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Liebold's power came not only from his abilities, but from taking advantage of Ford's notorious aversion to handling the details of his business. He realized that his boss had no patience for examining letters or documents or discussing the particulars of any financial or organizational issue. As Liebold commented, whenever he tried to discuss details with Ford “he'd get up and walk out. He just didn't want to be bothered about that….
He'd say, ‘I'll be back in a few minutes' or ‘I'll be back later on.’ That's the last I'd see of him.” This habit created considerable opportunity for Liebold, who was delighted to work out various undertakings and submit them for his boss's approval. “All Mr. Ford had to say to Liebold was, 'Do this, do that,’ and he'd carry out the most ambitious projects,” reported one observer. Such an arrangement served the interests of both men.
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At the Chicago
Tribune
trial, Liebold established a news bureau to disseminate Ford's side of the story, and supervised a group of undercover operatives from a suite of rooms in the Medea Hotel in Mount Clemens. He supervised the building of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and managed Ford's run for the Senate. A few years later, he organized the Ford for President boom, and became very interested in radio broadcasting because he thought it could be used to help Ford achieve high political office.
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Liebold performed even the most minor of tasks. When Ford became enthusiastic about a wood-burning train and wanted it restored and its cars decorated with paintings, Liebold called artist-in-residence Irving Bacon and gave him detailed instructions. When Ford hosted an elaborate banquet in honor of Thomas Edison, Liebold organized the affair. Ford's avid interest in antiques sent his office manager scouring the countryside in search of old steam engines or nineteenth-century furniture. When Ford complained that people were hounding him as he arrived and departed from work by automobile, Liebold procured a set of false whiskers that Ford actually wore in transit for a few days.
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In the words of Fred Black, Liebold “was riding high, wide, and handsome” in the Ford organization and was overheard to remark that soon “he expected to be General Manager.” He supervised Henry Ford's interest in banks, real-estate projects, the DT&I Railroad, and mining and lumbering interests. “Liebold had tremendous power here in the twenties…. He had his finger in almost every pie,” noted a secretary in Ford's office. Indeed, Liebold's responsibilities became so crushing that they drove him to a nervous breakdown in the early 1930s, when he disappeared from Dearborn for several days and holed up at a hotel in a remote area of Michigan to rest and recover his equilibrium.
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Though Liebold saw himself as an extension of Ford's will, an intricate relationship nonetheless developed between the two men. It was studiously formal. Throughout their many years of working together, no one ever heard them address each other except as “Mr. Ford” and “Mr. Liebold.” Their respect was mutual, with Ford trusting many of the most important matters in his life to Liebold's discretion while the latter shouldered this responsibility with devotion. According to Harold Cordell, who worked in
Ford's office for many years, “Liebold was very devoted to him and, from what I could see, did his best to do what was right for Henry's interests.”
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