Turns out Ford was such an ardent antisemite that Hitler called him an inspiration. He's the only American spoken of favorably in Mein Kampf, and he had a portrait of him behind his desk.
Ford was a conspiracy theorist on the matter of buying into the idea that Jews controlled a lot of stuff and were the root cause of everything wrong with America. He bought his hometown newspaper and later stuffed it with antiJew articles, requiring Ford dealerships to include a copy with every car purchase.
It got so bad that the ADL sued him and he had to issue an apology because it was starting to affect his reputation and his sales.
Although legend has it that what killed him was someone showing him a film reel of the atrocities at a concentration camp, and being so horrified that he had a fatal stroke.
He was also anti-union, although the why of it, I'm not certain. Wikipedia says he explains it in his autobiography, My Life and Work, where he basically says that union leaders have their heart in the right place but caused more harm than good. I found a Quora answer that talked about a guy called Harry Bennett, who is a prominent figure on the Wikipedia article. He was Ford's security chief. Former Navy and a boxer, he had a lot of influence over Ford, and he liked intimidating and beating up union reps. Quora guy said that when Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped and killed, he became very paranoid about the same happening to his family, and Bennett convinced Ford that the union was gonna do that to him.
Eventually he had to cave to the unions, partly because everybody else had willingly joined them, partly because of The Battle of the Overpass, where a march for better treatment resulted in some deaths, and partly because he threatened to dissolve the company rather than join the union, but then his wife said she'd leave him.
I mostly knew good things about Ford. His economic philosophy seems mostly find. He advocated world peace, sought it through capitalism and international trade, and was kind of anti war. These things just seemed particularly interesting to me.
Willow /
npub1qs…pzh54
2024-09-04 22:05:32
in reply to nevent1q…43x5
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npub1qs88m2ljw8qu6tzy3e3tapuwsa263l4n6wa0lzdf628u3c98ta4qjpzh54Published at
2024-09-04 22:05:32Event JSON
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