Henry Ford Quotes

Ford’s publication had printed a variety of virulent lies about Jews in general and Aaron Sapiro, a prominent Jew in particular. Shapiro sued for libel. Ford who had strong anti-Semitic views (See {586985}) tried to avoid testifying but could not. His attorneys then won a mistrial but Shapiro went to trial again. This time Ford wanted to settle and issued an apology as part of the settlement. In it he claimed that although the his publication had printed the Anti Semitic and libelous material, he knew nothing about the publications day-to-day operations and professed no animosity towards Jews. Most American Jews believed the apology sincere and knew very little of all of Ford’s anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi and fascist history. To this day it is unclear whether Ford knew the details about the virulent publications, or was a part of the writing and editorial policy and selection process, but his entire history indicates that the apology was more out of a desire to settle the lawsuit than to right a wrong.

This fact was one of the reasons that McCarthyism and HUAC were able to get traction. The Red Scare paranoids found something to really worry about. They overreacted, sensing the problem not as one of a large number of misguided and naïve people trying to help America do better, but as active spies controlled by the Kremlin who wanted to destroy the American way of life. There were two basic reasons these naïve officials acted that way. Many of them had not forgotten the devastation of the American people in the Great Depression and believed that capitalism had almost failed completely and the rough edge had to be taken off American capitalism by injecting some socialist principles such as stronger labor unions, ending racial and religious discrimination, controlling monopolies, and regulating critical industries. They also were mindful of the fact that the Russians were bearing the brunt of the WWII casualties—military and civilian—while killing more of the Germans and capturing more German occupied territory than the other allies together, yet they were not receiving the same level of assistance—technical, intelligence, economic and political as the British. They saw helping the Russians as saving American lives on the battlefield by making them more effective and keeping German soldiers and weapons away from the Western front and Americans. They also remembered that many in Congress were opposed to our entering WWII in Europe until Germany declared war on America. They had in many cases been apologists for Fascism and passionate enemies of communism. Some American industrialists like Henry Ford were anti-Semitic and overt admirers of Hitler. {586985} So these officials tried to redress the imbalance that existed while at the same time little was really known about Soviet Russia and the Stalin excesses that were as bad as some of Hitler’s. {634969} The only information Americans had were the terrible casualties the Russians were taking and the in kind that they were dishing out to the Germans. The number of Soviet spies in America were few and commensurate with the number of agents we had in Russia. But few Americans realized the difficulty the U. S. and the rest of the democratic world would have with Russia after the war was won.