Thanks sihhi - been really enjoying reading your posts lately.
Ford's Dearborn Independent is closed down in 1928, and there are wildly conflicting stories about what happens to his personal wealth where it is invested. Keeping to the religious principles etc
Ford does not like ostentation or luxury spending, so there is almost certainly a place where his private wealth is channeled before the formation of the
Ford Foundation. There are few records of
Ford's decisions at the Dearborn Independent itself although he is often there at weekly editorial meetings - his word just outright accepted (Neil Baldwin's
Henry Ford and the Jews the Mass Production of Hate is a key compiling source). The strong suspicion is that Ford gives assistance to FrCoughlin also in Detroit who is sort of campaigning back in 1926 on the idea of Protestant-Catholic unity (a KKK cross burning accompanies the opening of this new parish in a formerly all-Protestant suburb), defending prohibition, opposing gambling, very much on a scripture basis at this time.
There's a sort of breach in the middle when Roosevelt becomes a kind of Second Coming in 1932. At the time nearly everyone projects what they want to see onto him (not too dissimilar to aspects of the Obama crescendo in 2007-8). But when Roosevelt rescinds prohibition, doesn't form a Gold Standard etc, the radio talks return to praising Ford at the same time as praising Huey Long populist senator of Louisana. The NUSJ is still praising
Ford in 1937. Although it is based in suburban Detroit, there is a not insignificant following in the South and the NUSJ tries to promote the Ford promise of harmony between labour and capital in the industrial sector, by picture articles such as the following extolling the virtues of a new Ford plant in otherwise peripheral Georgia in the Deep South - attacked by bankers (not capitalism naturally). Ford is again mythologised as a sensible engineer - the bedrock of the 'American way'. The call in the model factory villages is for a return to a more moral, religious way of life - a time when banking was local and not based around Wall Street, a time when all had jobs - maybe the 1880s. To facilitate this return Ford brings out a book of dance patterns authored by "Mr & Mrs Henry Ford" - they are based around white American traditional customs it is very popular - the unspoken opponent is ragtime and jazz.
(Note the bit about "the girls will be trained homemakers" -
Ford is one of the most resistant to hire women workers as a result of religious as well as general social objections - and when he is finally forced to do so as a result of the second world war he does so on pay scales that are the most extreme of inequalities of all US vehicle producers - male workers receiving 85c an hour, women receiving under 50c for identical labour (provoking a male-majority-UAW-led strike, a collective agreement at Ford won in 1941 after a decade of struggle). Bizarrely, the power of Ford Co. propaganda has Ford as being a strong ally of women during the war because the Rosie the Riveter from the We Can Do It morale posters is exemplified in a real-life Ford female worker called Rose Will Monroe who appears in promo films for war bonds, which are shown before nearly every cinema screening of anything during the war. Once the war is over, most women are expelled from their Ford plant jobs and only in the 1970s does Ford in America begin hiring women workers on any scale.)
Ford often waxes lyrical about his early years as a true American - ie native born and farmer-born, in an attempt to make Ford the wholly American alternative to General Motors. General Motors is
buying up foreign car firms to shift production there (fears of outsourcing, giving American jobs to foreigners) in a bad way, when Ford does it, it does it well in the good way - it's contradictory/nonsensical but that was the line.
Ford is also opposed, from religious roots, to the idea of giving credit to consumers, regarding it as a form of usury encouraging moral depletion in the giver (expecting later reward, encouraging idleness now) and the receiver (not sound household budgeting, one step away from gambling to meet loans). GM's monthly and quarterly payments reach more buyers meaning GM overtakes Ford at some point in the mid-1920s in outright sales numbers, so eventually Ford does allow credit and hire-purchase arrangements in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Eventually, Ford, even forms partnerships with belligerent nations in 1939 even though he claims he is opposed to war and is a pacifist on religious grounds, his private thoughts are fixated by the conspiracy idea of Jews in Wall Street and Congress encouraging US to go to war (a common strand in isolationist thought) - including the notorious use of prisoner-of-war labour in Nazi Germany beginining in 1940.
In other words virtually all of Ford's pronouncements are
backward religious nonsense or hypocritical statements to bolster his brand - everything he says about banks and banking should be carefully used as an example of the dangers of conspiracism over banking, intentionally or unintentionally, giving vile figures like Ford leeway and popularity.
*** *** ***
This part is slightly off-topic, the article in the previous post above goes on to describe
banking as the cause of recession in Germany, following basically the lines the Dearborn Independent took in the 1920s (which based around attacking the financiers for blocking American exports): "For fifteen years Germany was held in the Red Talons of Bolshevism. During that time its press was taken over, its commercial life was ruined. The currency of the nation was
debased to ridiculous extremes. ... German international financiers, through the iniquitous levies of the Treaty of Versailles, were profiting on the miseries of the German people. The simple historical fact is that for fifteen years Germany was throttled by a combination of international Jewish financiers and Russian Communism, inflicted by Jews upon the nation. This is not anti-Semitism. Neither is it an extenuation of the vengeance now being wreaked by the German people on Jews. It is merely cited as another example in world history of the natural reaction which a regenerated people will exercise upon those they regard as their former persecutors. The present unfortunate conduct of the German government towards the Jews could have been obviated by the leaders of Jewry after the close of the World War. These giants of Judaism throughout the world applauded the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. They gloried in the murder of the Romanoffs. They remained silent during the years in which 17* [seventeen] million Christians were slaughtered by actual co-operation they encouraged the rape of Germany. The reaction was inevitable. Regardless of what America might think of Chancellor Hitler, he succeeded in unifying the German people. With this rebirth of national spirit came the desire to even the score with the Jews.
...
The significant fact in connection with conditions in Germany at present is the frantic attempt to enlist American sympathy for the Jews in
the Reich. It is out of all proportion to any previous effort to soften the heart of America in favor of an "oppressed minority.""...
The world did not resound with lamentations when the British forces, spurred on by international bankers, tied the leaders of the Sepoy mutiny in India to the mouths of canons and blew them to bits. More recently, there was little weeping and wailing when thousands
of Christian priests and nuns were slaughtered in Communist Spain. There has been no loud and vociferous protest against the exiling of
bishops, priests and nuns from Communist Mexico. The conclusion is inevitable that the turning on of American spigots of sympathy depends upon whose ox is being gored." (Social Justice, 12 Dec 1938, explaining the events of Kristallnacht the month before -the two days leaving every single German synagogue destroyed/damaged in some form, over 7,000 Jewish-linked shops destroyed, dozens of Jewish cemeteries attacked, 200/300/? killed, around 30,000 Jewish men arrested for detention camps, ostensibly in connection with the assassination of the one German ambassador)
* the number 17 million deaths under the Soviet Union where is its source- I don't know.
