An estate dusts off some disturbing history
In the rather highly unlikely event you were around in 1919 and were in the market for an automobile, and preferred a Ford to a Studebaker or Nash, when you took possession of your horseless carriage, the dealer would have given you a copy of The Dearborn Independent.
He was required to do so by Henry Ford himself, the founder of the company and one-time richest man in America. He had purchased the paper that year and used it as a tool for spreading Jew-hatred. Among the anti-Semitic material published in the rag was a series of conspiracies called “The International Jew.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forgery purporting to describe secret Jewish plans for world domination, was also offered to Ford-buyers and subscribers to the Independent—some 800,000 by the mid-1920s.
No wonder Hitler was a professed admirer of Mr. Ford, or that Nazi Germany awarded him a medal.
Visitors to “The Henry Ford,” the oddly-definite-articled name of a large indoor/outdoor museum in Dearborn that celebrates American innovation and the mogul’s accomplishments, and offers a wide assortment of historical exhibits, are not informed of Mr. Ford’s views about Jews.
Nor, at least for many years, were visitors to Fair Lane, Ford’s childhood home, apprised of the man’s dark side.
That, though, will be changing soon.
After Ford’s widow Clara died in 1950, the sprawling Fair Lane property—which houses a 56-room limestone home—was turned over to the Ford Motor Company, which brokered a deal with the University of Michigan to build a Dearborn satellite campus of the school on a portion of the estate.
Fair Lane has long been closed to the public due to an ongoing $50 million restoration project. But when it reopens next year, visitors to its famous erstwhile resident will be confronted squarely with his animus for Jews.
The staff at Fair Lane recently invited Jewish educators and historians to the home’s pool room, where they were apprised of the plan to dust off historical truth.
Back in 2023, Darren Walker, the former president of the Ford Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, acknowledged and condemned Henry Ford’s Jew-hatred. Fair Lane’s plans place that honest admission before the museum-visiting public.
The curators have developed talking points about Ford’s anti-Semitism as “non-negotiables,” museum-speak for aspects of history that every visitor will encounter during a tour.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently interviewed top Fair Lane staffers, who explained that they viewed discussions of anti-Semitism as core to Fair Lane’s statement of purpose.
Austin Eighmey, a senior director, told his interviewers that Henry Ford “was an ignorant man, fed a lot of poor information that he himself sought out.”
Ironically, Fair Lane’s CEO, who supports the plan to highlight Ford’s anti-Semitism, is Devon O’Reilly. His father, Dearborn’s late former mayor, quashed a city-funded magazine’s plan to highlight Ford’s anti-Semitism, tied to the 100th anniversary of his acquisition of the Dearborn Independent.
A deeper irony lies in the fact that Dearborn today is a place not terribly friendly to Jews. It has the highest proportion of Muslim and Arab-American residents in the US. And the anti-Israel sentiment common among some of those Dearbornians has spilled over, as anti-Israel sentiment is wont to do, into anti-Semitism.
The city’s demographics have nothing directly to do with Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism. They stem from an influx of Lebanese immigrants who came there for auto industry jobs in the 1920s. Then like attracted like, and the rest is history.
Also history—and herein lies the irony—is that Henry Ford’s jaundiced view of Jews (which, incidentally, he recanted late in life, although only after a libel lawsuit forced his hand) persist today in the city.
Dearborn’s residents—and, crucially, the community’s college-age members who may opt for the local campus of U of M—will, if they visit Fair Lane, learn about not only Ford’s Jew-hatred but also how it was fueled by ignorance and lies.
Whether those among them who harbor their own hatred will take mussar from the fact that Dearborn’s most famous personality was forced to recognize the lunacy of his delusions is far from a sure bet.
But we’re Jews. We can hope. ●
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