The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (77 page)

Occasionally, however, the Ford-Liebold relationship turned contentious. Though respectful, Liebold did not fear his boss; in the words of Irving Bacon, “He'd tell him right off the bat that he didn't agree with him, and why. He wasn't a bit afraid to tell Mr. Ford what he thought.” Ford usually appreciated such candor, but occasionally tempers flared and resentments set in. “They'd get mad and refuse to speak to each other for months at a stretch, and Mr. Liebold would have to conduct his business in a more or less indirect fashion in order to get the things he wanted to put over,” reported Cordell. “But they'd always get back together.”
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Liebold's stern personality and efficiency were reflected in his physical presence. He always appeared a picture of neatness with his stocky frame, immaculate suits, starched shirts, wire-rim glasses, neatly groomed hair, and calm, stern demeanor. His personal life was cast in the same mold. He had married Clara Reich in 1910, and within thirteen years the couple had produced eight children. Apparently, he managed his family with the same efficiency he displayed at the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford once told an associate, “When dinner time arrived at the Liebold household, Liebold marched his children around the table in military style, and when they had reached their places he commanded, ‘Sitzen sie!’ ”
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Liebold's passion for order, however, alienated most people with whom he worked. He gained a reputation for being blunt, even brutal in his professional relationships, and appeared uninterested in personal friendships. “I make it a rule not to have any friends in the company—you must be in a position where you don't give a God-damn what happens to anybody,” he once told Fred Black. Stories about Liebold's cold, tactless manner became widespread in the organization. J. L. McCloud, who headed the chemical-and-metallurgical laboratory for many years, encountered it unforgettably on Christmas Eve. “As I walked out I met Mr. Liebold and I said, ‘Merry Christmas, Mr. Liebold!’ He stopped and thought for a minute or two, and finally said, ’Well, all right.' ”
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This tough demeanor and willingness to offend others became especially effective tools for Liebold to control access to Henry Ford. Reporters who wanted to interview the industrialist had to pass through his office manager first, and the route was not an easy one. “Liebold treated reporters badly,” according to Fred Black, and “was very heavy-handed.” By the 1920s, this screening had extended to many company executives, whom Liebold frequently insulted and then left cooling their heels. They deeply resented having their access to Ford blocked by a man who, in Harry
Bennett's words, “looked like a typical Prussian, and often acted like one.” Many of them, however, also feared Liebold, who had a small group of operatives keeping tabs on Ford managers, the results of which went into elaborate files.
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Liebold demonstrated his tactless manner in an incident involving Ford's hobby of rescuing and restoring antique buildings. When a Virginia state senator asked Ford to reconsider his removal of a building from the Old Dominion, Liebold wrote a terse, insulting reply to the friendly letter of inquiry. “It would appear that here in Dearborn where such other evidences of our early history and civilization are being constructed, it would be in its proper place, where maintenance and care could be given, instead of permitted to disintegrate as its present condition shows,” he said. Ford clearly valued such toughness. When William Cameron once commented that Liebold seemed to antagonize many people, Ford replied, “Well, when you hire a watchdog, you don't hire him to like everyone who comes to the gate.”
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But Liebold, it was clear, used dogmatic, dictatorial methods not only to protect his patron but to enhance his own position in the organization. Many agreed with Fred Black that “Liebold had almost a Hitlerian desire for power.” One of Ford's workers in the 1918senatorial campaign wrote a bitter complaint about “Czar Liebold” to a newspaper editor. “E. G. Liebold is the most disliked man I have ever come in contact with in all my experience,” he wrote. In turn, the editor, who had had his own run-ins with Liebold, forwarded the letter to Edsel Ford and added his own complaint. “Mr. Liebold has become a real menace to your father, yourself, and your business,” he warned. “His great greed for power and more power has driven him to action akin to kaiserism.”
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Perhaps Liebold's most notorious contribution to Ford came from his central role in the Dearborn
Independent.
According to Liebold, Henry Ford asked him to become involved in this journalistic venture in late 1918, when delays had mounted. “You go out there and see what you can do to help out. See if you can get the thing going,” Ford said. Liebold found much disorganization and inefficiency, so he deputized Fred Black and they fired about half the employees and reformed the organization. Liebold claimed that Ford also asked him to become editor of the paper when Pipp left, but he demurred and recommended Cameron. Everyone knew who was really in charge, however. As Cameron himself admitted, “I think the man who really ran the thing was E. G. Liebold.” With characteristic efficiency, Liebold paid attention to the smallest detail, such as checking the paper for misspellings and grammatical mistakes. When he found an error, a curt note to the staff would explain, “I didn't want to be put in the position of being a
proofreader.” Once, when Irving Bacon resisted doing illustrations for the newspaper, Liebold gave him “a browbeating look” and demanded, “Are you trying to tell me how to run this magazine?”
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In managing the
Independent,
Liebold focused on one particular goal. He hated everything Jewish, and he saw the publication as a vehicle for promoting this agenda. He did not mask his anti-Semitism. When clashing with another Ford operative at the Chicago
Tribune
trial, he explained the problem with a simple statement: “He was a Jew.” When Liebold criticized Fred Rockelman for inflating his own importance in the company, he could not resist the observation, “His wife was half-Jewish.” He related how Mrs. Rockelman had brought to the Dearborn Country Club several Jewish guests who talked so loudly and behaved so boorishly that Mrs. Ford took offense and complained to her husband. When denouncing government regulation of the American economy, Liebold observed that reputable sources had told him how “prominent Jewish financiers … conceived the idea of a Federal Reserve Bank” prior to 1912.
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Liebold's pro-German leanings, which he muted during World War I, supplemented his anti-Semitic fervor. Intensely proud of his heritage, he used his position to promote German achievements and activities. “Whenever any German delegation came to the office, the big red carpet was rolled out and royal honors were paid,” Harold Cordell noted. “Whereas a United States Senator could just sit out in the anteroom for hours and wait for an audience.” Historian Neil Baldwin, who has closely examined the evidence, argues convincingly that Liebold even served as an emissary to Ford from the rising Nazi movement in Germany during the early 1920s. In 1924, Liebold brought Kurt Ludecke, Adolf Hitler's primary fund-raiser in the United States, to meet with Ford in Dearborn and solicit money. Ford, though agreeing with Ludecke's slurs on the Jews, refused to offer financial assistance to the Nazi cause. Liebold always denied any connection between the Nazi movement and Ford. At the same time, however, without a shred of guilt, he admitted, “I always felt that the republication of the
International Jew
books in Germany had a large influence.”
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According to Harry Bennett, Liebold constantly stirred up Ford's anti-Semitism. “I recall in particular one time when Liebold sat beside Mr. Ford at a big banquet,” he wrote. “I saw Liebold lean over toward Mr. Ford and heard him whisper, ‘See that man over there? He's a Jew.’ And then I saw Mr. Ford look at the man Liebold had pointed out, and his expression changed.” Another time, Liebold informed his patron, in a disapproving tone, that wastepaper from the newspaper was being collected and hauled away by a Jewish man. Ford, of course, subsequently decreed that “he didn't want any more wastepaper sold to the Jews. He didn't want them around the
plant.” Their shared pathology led Liebold and Ford to the crackpot theory that Jews had been behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. They became convinced that Lincoln's wartime authorization of greenback dollars had outraged a group of “international bankers,” and these “Jewish internationalists” decided to kill the President. Liebold put several investigators on the case to gather evidence for an article in the Dearborn
Independent.
Not surprisingly, they found none.
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Liebold emerged as the prime mover in the “International Jew” articles. Those close to the scene described him as “the spark plug in the Jewish series.” He insisted, “Our present campaign against the International Jew is based on facts which we have gathered for some time past and is not based on prejudice.” He tried to position Ford's newspaper as a heroic defender of the truth, claiming, “We have been threatened and bombarded with Jewish letters…. However, we have set out to do our duty as we see it, and will die in the effort if we do not make a success of it.” Liebold contended that the
Independent
faced subversion from “Jewish sources of distribution” and that in many city libraries “the Jews would go in there and borrow the paper and never return it.”
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For all of Liebold's vigor in promoting the campaign against the Jews, he never usurped Henry Ford's authority. “Everything that was being done was because of Mr. Ford's wishes in carrying out the idea of revealing to the public the facts pertaining to certain Jewish activities,” he wrote later. Throughout the 1920s, Ford made clear to Liebold his determination to pursue the Jewish bugaboo. When planning the newspaper attack, Liebold suggested that they use the heading “International Jew” to distinguish “good” members of the race from “bad” ones. Though Ford agreed, he insisted, “You can't single them out. You have to go after them all. They are all part of the same system.” As he once proclaimed angrily, “We are going to print their names. We are going to show who they are.”
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The anti-Semitism of Ernest Liebold and Henry Ford eventually created a full-blown crisis. Their partnership in bigotry had produced the “International Jew” series, but, not satisfied with that success, they initiated another attack on Jewish influence in America. This time they went too far. Their actions produced a lawsuit and a spectacular trial that, like the Selden and Chicago
Tribune
suits, brought Ford much publicity. The attention, however, revealed a side of Henry Ford that many had never seen.

On the morning of February 20,1925, Aaron Sapiro filed a libel suit against Henry Ford and the Dearborn Publishing Company. A series of articles in
the Dearborn
Independent
had characterized his attempts to organize farm cooperatives as a plot by Jewish international financiers to capture control of the American economy. Claiming defamation of character, Sapiro demanded restitution in the amount of $1 million “to vindicate myself and my race.” Earlier in the decade, a series of skirmishes had been fought between Ford and various Jewish groups and individuals following the publication of “The International Jew.” But now a major battle was joined as lawyers were hired and strategies were hatched.
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Ford's eagerness to participate in this trial reflected his warped judgment about the larger implications of his anti-Semitic crusade. He had never quite understood the impact of his attacks in the Jewish community. Blind to the prejudice and hatred spread by his newspaper, Ford genuinely believed that he was only attacking “bad” Jews, and that “good” Jews would support his crusade to reform the bad habits of the race. As publication of “The International Jew” unfolded, he had a falling out with Rabbi Leo Franklin of Detroit that seems to have mystified him. Franklin, leader of a prominent Reform temple in the city, had been a neighbor and longtime friend of Ford, and when the “International Jew” articles first appeared he believed that Ford had been swayed by evil advisers. Franklin thought the automaker would listen to reason and counseled patience, but he changed his mind as the articles continued. For several years, Ford had sent a new Model T to the rabbi every year, but in the summer of 1920, Franklin returned the gift. In an accompanying letter, he sorrowfully noted “an unfortunate idea that has taken possession of you …that must inevitably tend to poison the minds of the masses against the Jews.” Ford telephoned a few days later, and his response spoke volumes about his naïveté: “What's wrong, Dr. Franklin? Has something come between us?”
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Angrier Jewish reactions to Ford's campaign arose in other quarters. The American Jewish Committee, under the leadership of attorney Louis Marshall, denounced “The International Jew” as “puerile and venomous drivel.” Marshall also led a campaign to have Jewish newspapers refuse to accept advertising from the Ford Motor Company. Telegrams of protest from other Jewish groups and individuals streamed into the offices of the Dearborn
Independent;
sporadic boycotts of Ford automobiles cropped up in urban areas around the country. Herman Bernstein, editor of the
Jewish Tribune,
brought a libel suit against Ford when the latter claimed that Bernstein had told him the inside story of how Jews plotted war and planned to take over the world. To an extent, Ford responded to such pressure. “The Jewish articles must stop,” he told Cameron and Liebold, and ordered an end to the “International Jew” series in January 1922.
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