Jump to content

Talk:Henry Ford

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Danny (talk | contribs) at 16:52, 1 February 2003. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Who know something about Henry Ford's Land speed record with the Ford 999 in 1904. It lacks in my source for Land speed record. Ericd

I don't understand why "(and false)" (about the Zion thing) keeps being removed, without any discussion, so I'll keep putting it back, OK? :) It would be nice if the person who is so keen to remove it could advance a case for this. 194.117.133.118 00:00 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

I don't understand why it's removed without any comment on the talk page. Ericd

Can we have some historical backing for the following statements, please? References to scholarly works of history, etc? --Clutch

Detractors often point out that Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler financial backing when Hitler was first starting out in politics, and prohibited Jews from working in the Ford company's European factories. In July of 1938, Ford became the first American awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by the Nazi regime, the highest award that could be given to a civilian. He was praised in Hitler's Mein Kampf as "the only man in America free from Jewish control."
The last sentence is a paraphrase; I'll quote the passage in full here:
...It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union. Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence."
– Mein Kampf, first edition, page 639.
A footnote in my translation states that in the second edition Hitler changed "a single great man, Ford" to "only a very few". This might be a source of confusion.
The rest should be fairly easy to confirm or deny; I'll work on it a bit today. Hephaestos 16:11 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)
(Here is a photograph of him recieving the Grand Cross; that wasn't very difficult. In light of this, I think I'll let others play class librarian on the rest if they wish. Hephaestos 16:25 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC))

The formal repudiation, while perhaps forced by public opinion (one cannot, after all, read Ford's mind) was dated June 30, 1927. These two sources, [1] and [2], agree. It's fairly obvious what when two independent sources with widely different agendas agree on something, it can be taken as truth.

Furthermore, I'd be interested in knowing the rationale behind demanding sources for statements and then deleting the reference to said sources when they are presented. To put it in the mildest terms I am able to muster, such behavior shows a distinct lack of scholarship. Until such time as you are motivated to do your own research, I would advise you to leave the products of others' research alone.

Hephaestos 00:43 Feb 1, 2003 (UTC)

You put a link to the Aryan Nations website as a reference. When I followed the link, the very top of the page talked about a) Henry Ford's confession that he didn't sign the document, and him and his family were suprised to hear about it and b) Ford's personal secretary wrote a book at his time at Ford, where he confirmed Ford's statement that he was the one that signed the apology, which had actually been written by the Anti-Defamation Committee. --Clutch 00:53 Feb 1, 2003 (UTC)
I do not consider the Aryan Nations website to be an unbiased source (nor do I consider the ADL website an unbiased source). The fact that they agree the apology document was issued, regardless of their respective spins on the circumstances, is very telling.
The link was there as an illustration of how "The International Jew" remains currently-read and influential more than fifty years after Ford's death. While one can in no way say that every site with a copy of the book is a hate site, it's fairly clear that a competently-done hate site would not be without it (I could have just as easily pointed to the KKK site, for example).
Hephaestos 01:07 Feb 1, 2003 (UTC)

I'm distressed by the character this page is taking under Clutch's hands. Ford "published a series of articles on Judaism"??!? He's hardly Menachem Mendel Schneerson, here. I don't think Clutch should be editing this page, or other pages about anti-semites, if he can't bring himself to be anything other than apologetic. Graft

Some facts:

  1. Henry Ford, while a major industrialist, was no genius (yeah, yeah, it's POV--keep reading). In a recorded converation he stated: "All the world needs for the guidance of its life could be written on two pages of a child's copybook."
  2. He also hated cities (he was an avid back-to-the soil supporter), bankers, etc.
  3. He believed that a consortium of "international Jews were behind" World War I and all other wars for that matter.
  4. He hated what he called the "Jewish international capitalist," while he himself owned a financial empire with branches and factories (plantations and mines) around the world.
  5. He justified this with word play. He was "industrialist" while Jews were "capitalist."
  6. He did not write his own columns in the Dearborn Independent. They were written by Ernest Liebold (a close friend of Von Pappen, the vice-fuehrer and a Nazi propagandist); William Cameron (a Bristish Israelism supporter, who believed that the English people were the true Israel of the Bible and that the Jews were spawn of the devil--a precursor of Christian Identity); and Boris Brasol (a former member of the Black Hundred in Russia, which organized the pogroms of the late 19th century and one of the groups suspected of writing the Protocols).
  7. On two occassions, 1922 and 1927, Ford retracted his anti-Semitism. Several reasons are given for this, including law suits, presidential aspirations, and a decline in sales in Jewish areas (all assumptions).
  8. Hitler quoted Ford frequently and may even have plagiarized sections of Mein Kampf from the Independent.
  9. While Ford later denounced this episode, his publications continued (and even now continue) to be quoted and reprinted by anti-Semitic organizations, including Nazis and neo-Nazis.
  10. Whether he actually changed his mind about Jews is open to debate. My reading of the evidence is that he did not (but again, that is my personal POV).

Cheers. Danny 16:51 Feb 1, 2003 (UTC)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Henry_Ford&oldid=647605"