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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Zach Burness, who is an associate professor of communications at Penn State University's Greater Allegheny Campus. He's the editor of Punkademics, co editor of the NFL Critical and Cultural Perspectives, and, and most importantly for today's show, author of One Less Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility. So welcome to the show.
- [01:04]
Dr. Zach Furness
Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
- [01:07]
Dr. Claire Aubin
How are we feeling today? It's 12pm in extremely sunny California, and yesterday Pete Hegseth just accidentally leaked war plans to the editor in chief of.
- [01:19]
Dr. Zach Furness
The Atlantic on the group chat. You got to have the top secret stuff going on in your group chats. It's a good tip for people if you want to do that.
- [01:26]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's not even remotely relevant to today's topic, but I just think it's extremely funny. And I want to have the fact that this happened get recorded for posterity on here because I am a historian. It's just I'm for whenever this comes out, which I think will probably be a couple months from now, whenever this comes out. I'm excited to see what has happened, what has transpired since this moment now where we're still like, what the fuck?
- [01:52]
Dr. Zach Furness
Oh, Jesus, this could be. Yeah. Who knows what could happen in the next couple months?
- [01:57]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Honestly, no idea. Let's get to what we're actually here to talk about.
- [02:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
Ford.
- [02:03]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Who? Yeah, boom. Who are we talking about today?
- [02:07]
Dr. Zach Furness
Henry Ford. I gotta say, from the outset that I mentioned to you earlier, this is kind of like extracurricular hate on my part. I don't typically teach about Ford, or I'm not a Ford historian by trade, but I did spend a hell of a lot of years thinking about bicycles, riding them, and eventually writing about bicycles and car culture. And so Ford is kind of inevitable in that regard because he's one of the people that really facilitates all of car culture in the United States. So he's always been there. And it was when I got a little bit older, kind of casually running across some references to him and his antisemitism and then being like, wait, hold up. And, you know, kind of like diving into a few things here and there and just being like, God, this guy's a real piece of shit. You know? And then it wasn't until later seeing, you know, the picture of him getting an award in Michigan from the Nazis that created, you know, basically created the award a year before, but it was the highest ranking award they could give to somebody outside of out of the Reich. And. Yeah, just kind of, you know, it sort of sat there in the back. So when the opportunity came to. To actually, like, lay into Ford, help contribute to tarnishing his legacy permanently, I couldn't pass it up.
- [03:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I think it's also like that you probably have the same experience that I did the first time I heard about this sort of anti Semitism Ford and anti Semitism, which is where someone was like, oh, you know, and notorious anti Semite Henry Ford and being like, the car guy. Like, the car guy Ford. That was his other thing.
- [03:37]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, an assembly line of anti Semitism. He was incredibly adept at it.
- [03:43]
Dr. Claire Aubin
When I get asked who my most historical, most hated historical guy is, and I genuinely get asked this a lot now that the pod exists in the world, when I asked who it is or get asked who it is, I usually say Henry Ford. Awesome. So I need you and everyone at home to believe me when I say that I am so locked in and ready for this episode. I have been waiting for this.
- [04:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
I am. I'm glad to be in conversation because I know that you must have lots to say about it, and I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, particularly as somebody who's done a ton of research on Nazis in the US And Nazis in general and all the variations and striations of Nazis that exist and are horrible.
- [04:21]
Dr. Claire Aubin
The rainbow coalition of Nazis.
- [04:24]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, it's impressive. They come from all shapes and sizes. They take all. Yeah. So Ford, I mean, you know, I got interested in him, obviously, because of his role in making cars. So everybody knows Henry Ford primarily from automobiles and usually associated with the assembly line. And those things are both very true. There's a lot of things about Ford that kind of. From the outset, I'll say you got to give him credit for. And not just credit, but I think that they are. His legacy is multifaceted, if you want to put it that way, to be both accurate about it and at times generous. But I think that there's a number of things in particular that he was a pioneer at, technologically speaking. There were a lot of other people that did some of the things that he did, both in terms of making cars and doing production. But one of the main things that he did was take the idea of the assembly line, which he had learned from the. What were called, like, disassembly lines, of taking apart animal carcasses in slaughterhouses in places like Chicago and Cincinnati, where they developed this assembly line process for dissecting carcasses in the slaughterhouses and took that idea of having that, as well as previously allegedly seeing a guy named Colonel Albert Pope, who was the president of a bicycle company, had done a similar thing in his plants, and Ford had visited one of his plants. So he. He saw this kind of thing in action of doing an assembly line, and some other people had experimented with doing mass production, where you'd have identical parts and lots of things so that you could, you know, have everything, could match and insert one to the other. So he put both of those things together, and as a result of that, manufacturing went wild, which you can talk about later. The kind of pinnacle of his work was the Rogue river factory, which was completed in 1928 in Dearborn, which was his hometown. Uh, this place was like the pro. I mean, it. It. To call it like a. The. The shrine to capitalism and modernity and technology is, I think, putting it mildly. It was like one and a half miles long or one and a half miles wide by one mile long. There were like 95 or 96 buildings. It was like 16 million square feet of factory space. It had docks, a hundred miles of railroad track. It had the largest steel mill in the world. Like, boats would literally pull up to the docks with ore, wood, coal, and out the other end would be cars. And so, you know, this is the thing that, like, Diego Rivera spent time there and was so kind of amazed by it. That's what he was looking at before he painted the. His famous murals that depict that particular place. So as a kind of testament to, like, mass production and what you can do with technology. That's definitely up there. Uh, one of the things that I think is most significant about Ford, as far as some of the policies he put into place, he was really one of the first person to pay black and white workers the same wage, and in addition, hired tons of black workers way more so than. Than other places. There's a lot of caveats with that, which I'll talk about in a bit, but it Is I think, important to understand, like how. How big of a deal that was as far as actually creating a space where black people could be treated with dignity and respect with regard to the wages that they made and their ability to be institutionally, in a lot of ways, treated on par with white workers. In other ways, not so much. Yeah.
- [08:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And he also was hiring immigrants at a really high rate, which is important because his father was an Irish immigrant. So I think this is part of his thing was hiring immigrants as well. And for some other context, Ford was born in the late 19th century, in 1863. He dies in 1947. He founds the Ford Motor Company in 1903. So all of this is happening before the sort of first half of the 20th century or in the very early part of the first half of the 20th century. So to have black auto workers, to have immigrant auto workers working alongside white, non immigrant Americans was. Yeah, I can. Is. Is a very revolutionary thing to be doing and to be paying them similarly. Again, with some caveats. And treating them somewhat similarly. With some caveats. Exactly. Which as you said, we will get into. Yeah, this is. This is very revolutionary.
- [09:04]
Dr. Zach Furness
If you're into the whole. If you're into the whole, like, business management thing, which, based on how he ran things, you shouldn't be. But if you are big pioneer in that. And what are some other things? Incredibly proficient uses of soy. He was like soy crazy at one point and spent tons of money funding scientists to figure out all of these uses for soy and various kinds of food and adhesives and building materials. And he would sometimes have feasts at his house with guests where every single thing was made out of soy. And apparently it was pretty disgusting at the time, but he was just fascinated. He would get really fascinated by things and just get totally hung up on them. Industrial recycling as well. He was a very big recycler and was trying to constantly use things that were getting scrapped in one place in other parts of his operation. So those are all things I think you got to give him some credit for.
- [09:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I had no idea about the soy thing also. That's fully new information for me. And it's also funny because the people who valorize him a lot now are terrified of soy. Like soy is like to be soy. Is it actual insult that they use. And this guy is actually the OG soy boy.
- [10:12]
Dr. Zach Furness
He is the soy guy for sure.
- [10:16]
Dr. Claire Aubin
That's very. I had no idea about that. That's actually extremely funny. He also. So part of his sort of legacy and the myth around him is that he started becoming interested in mechanics and automobile mechanics at around age 12. He then becomes, after a few years of working as like a machinist in a factory, he then becomes an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company of Thomas Edison. Becomes very close friends with Thomas Edison. So he's already from like a fairly young age before he founds the Ford Company, Ford Motor Company. He is already surrounding himself with these sort of like I was going to say luminaries, but that's very funny to say about Edison.
- [11:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
It's a good pun.
- [11:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Luminaries like Thomas Edison.
- [11:07]
Dr. Zach Furness
Exactly.
- [11:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And these people who are seen as these sort of like visionary industrialists very early on. And so that's part of the sort of group of people that are around him. And part of why his legacy is so heightened so quickly is that he's also surrounded by people who are doing that in their own industries too. Because the myths around him start while he's like as early as Ford is founded. Like these sort of the myths that we think about or that we sort of associate with him now, those myths began while he was still alive.
- [11:41]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah. And I mean he, he has all these components to his life that are really key pieces of, you know, the great American myths that we tell. Right. The, you know, going to school in a one room schoolhouse, being from the country. You know, his mom died when he was 13. You know, he makes his way up, pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. Is like the most hardcore believer in that sort of thing that you can be like, you cannot, you cannot embody that sort of view more than Henry Ford did. You know, the country guy that does good, rising yourself up out of meager circumstances by your own wits, hard work, dedication. He embodies all of these things. And yeah, I mean he was, when he was young he worked as an apprentice, then he worked for Westinghouse and was working on engines. And yeah, his early work for Edison's company. Edison was kind of like encouraged him when he was first making some different kinds of vehicles and he got really fired up by that. So he kept designing things. But yeah, he started, he was 40 when Ford Motor Company was found in 1903. And that was after. So a couple years before he was with some people that backed him that created the Henry Ford Motor Company in 1901. He left the following year and then that company became Cadillac. And then yeah, so the 1903 he starts Ford Motor Company and in 1908 he invents the model table and the Model T is his masterstroke. In a variety of ways. It was explicitly designed and promoted by him to be the common man's car. It was supposed to be affordable, it was supposed to be utilitarian. It was supposed to be these things that automobiles were not exactly imagined to be at the time. They had a lot more either kind of, you know, highfalutin connotations. Sound like a 1920s, like Southern Lord highfalutin, you know, he has. But they, you know, they have these connotations of social class and mobility that aren't what, exactly what he's going for. And he also is an incredibly good publicist and promoter. And so he realizes that both his genuine interests in giving people that live on farms and in the country the means to have to be more mobile. He also realizes that this is, you know, this goes over very well with the public to say that, you know, these cars are for farmers. This is going to, it drastically changed farmers lives and put people in the country in touch with the rest of the world in a way they hadn't been. You know, and he gets tons of hype in newspapers. He's really good at doing this from the get. Sets up a network of car dealerships that also do this job of like not only selling his stuff, but promoting the brand. He's a brand guy before branding was a thing. Well before that understood very well, like how to do the kind of totality of production and marketing and, and hyping through the press. You know, even prior to people like, you know, Walter Lippman putting out books like Public Opinion and you know, Edward Bernays putting out books on propaganda and public relations. Like, here's somebody that just kind of intuitively understood like how you get the press's attention.
- [14:45]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So this is a guy, in other words, who his LinkedIn profile would have been the most obnoxious thing you've ever, ever seen in your life.
- [14:54]
Dr. Zach Furness
Just tremendous amounts of information, personal essays, blog updates, lots of links, lots of hashtags.
- [15:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of those like posts that starts with an emoji and is like, and here's what I did and you can do it too. And it's like, but he's not doing this sort of pyramid scheme griftery thing at the beginning. Like he really is saying, I've got the idea. Yeah, yeah. And I mean he's kind of famously remembered as the guy, the man who turns every American into an automobile owner. That's kind of his goal. And he succeeds, which I think is a good segue into talking about why he sucks.
- [15:33]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah.
- [15:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So what's your. Well, I mean, we know there are several, several areas in which we can have beef with him.
- [15:40]
Dr. Zach Furness
Variety, a whole bunch.
- [15:42]
Dr. Claire Aubin
We can just pick one to start. What would you like to start with?
- [15:44]
Dr. Zach Furness
I mean, I guess just on what you just said. I mean, for me, not just personally, but as far as, you know, taking a bigger picture view of what I think should be, you know, fostered and promoted as far as humanity goes. I mean, I think cars are, they're just, you know, objectively destructive, right? I mean they, the kind of legacy that they've created. Not cars themselves, but the things that we've built around them. You know, they're the kind of symbols of individualism and they're the symbols of, you know, fuck you, get out of my way basically. And that kind of, you know, the fabric for all of that stuff, the, you know, the infrastructure for that stuff, the idea of mobility in the kind of way it was framed, tons of that is directly responsible or directly attributable to Ford. And you know, part of it is like, you know, you can't fault the guy for making a good product. There's that end of it too. He didn't single handedly cause car culture to happen in the United States. He didn't build the highways, he didn't do all of the other things culturally that preceded the invention of the automobile that I think made Americans very predisposed and kind of like culturally prepped for the car to be the answer to these longings that were already kind of brewing. Like the ideas of individualism and mobility that were like pretty core parts of, you know, early American mythos of, you know, the frontier and discovery and all these sorts of things. But you know, single handedly, you know, half of all cars in the United states were Model Ts by 1918. And between, I don't know, it was like when they started making those, which was in 1908 and 1927, when they stopped making the Model T, they sold 15 million. So I mean like, you know, the 1920s are the period where you go from very small amounts of people driving to the 1929 where like one out of every roughly four and a half people in the US have a car. And a big part of that was he lowered the price down. It was 825 bucks when he started them in 1908 and then it was 260 bucks in 1925. So it was affordable. And so it just made it so that if people were kind of on the fence about it, they could do it without going into crazy amounts of debt, which wasn't the case beforehand. It was still a lot of money back then, but it wasn't, it wasn't break the bank money.
- [18:09]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi, it's Claire. Thank you for listening to the show. You're currently hearing the free version of this Guy sucked. So I'm here to tell you about our Patreon. In order to make the show sustainably and independently, episodes switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you are a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting us and joining our honorary haters club. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pastry at your local hip coffee shop, you'll get to listen to a new episode every week instead of just the biweekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other Patreon exclusives. To sweeten the deal, just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in the episode description to sign up. And now we have a society that is really built around cars, like is built around car travel. We build our cities, particularly modern cities, around cars. And so even the. Even someone who's not responsible for car culture writ broadly, but who makes it possible or sort of is the person that provides the access point by which car culture is able to enter and take over American culture and American life. And this is true also all over the world. It's not like car culture just explodes in America, but the sort of American cultural influence and the relationship it has to the rest of the world and cars being this sort of like, thing that allows Americans to, or that allow Americans to experience rapid social, economic progression, whatever that is also sold abroad too. And so what we think of as car culture in America and abroad, like people like Henry Ford are part of the problem here or are a large part of the group of people who make that possible.
- [20:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
He's the father in a lot of ways, you know, and he has all the connotations associated with driving and that are these very moralistic kind of ideas about, you know, what it can do for humanity and the, you know, this, this morality that's kind of tied to the idea of driving in a way that imbues it with all of these, these values that are, you know, in a lot of cases, people experience some parts of that that are very real. And I'm sure In, you know, 1915, if you're getting behind a car for the first time, I mean, you just have your face melted off for how exciting it would be, I imagine. But it's also, you know, in hindsight, I mean, I find it ironic that he basically, like, in looking at, you know, slaughterhouse manufacturing processes, I mean, he's basically taking like, the industrialization of death that starts with cows. And basically the end result of that is 60 million dead Americans by the end of the 20th century.
- [21:01]
Dr. Claire Aubin
This gives me a wonderful opportunity to talk about a quote that I found before this. Before this episode. Okay, so by the 1940s, or actually even well before then, people were already criticizing this and criticizing the sort of growth of car culture and what it does to people and how it leads to our. How it shifts our thinking and our relationships to other people. And one of my favorite thinkers, and probably, I assume yours too, and one of the greatest haters of all time, Theodore Adorno, writes in a book, Legendary man in Minima Moralia, which is a collection of his thoughts written between 1944 and 1947. He writes about car culture as being this extremely isolating and also dangerous thing. And he writes, which auto driver has not felt the temptation in the power of the motor to run over the vermin of the street? Passersby, children, bicyclists. They already knew this was bad.
- [21:56]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, totally. Especially Europeans. I mean, because this was something that, you know, it didn't resonate the same kind of way with. With Europeans and just particularly people that were politically minded. I mean, there's lots of great. That's a fantastic quote. And there's a. Some other ones from, you know, like some French socialists and, you know, like the 1920s or 30s where, you know, I quote someone in my book of saying that it was somebody looking at traffic and they're like, you know, you know, you're never going to have socialism with these things, Right. The. The very idea that just that what it turns you into, that Adorno is. Was alluding to. Right. That you just become monstrous in a lot of ways from your relationship to other people in a structural sense. Not because, like, you're a piece of shit just because you drive it, but because, you know, it just, like, nudges you toward that relationship with the rest of the world. You know, it's you versus them. It's like they're on the other side of the glass. And it kind of others everybody.
- [22:44]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And we talk about defensive driving like that you need to be defending against people at all times like that, you are. There is some competition or aggression that is occurring at all times, and that's just a normal part of the way that we learn to drive now.
- [22:57]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, and there's a lot. You know, there's a huge amount. There's a great historian I love named Peter Norton, and he has a. An excellent history of the use of the term jaywalking. And I think he's writing a book right now about when automobiles were starting and the sort of reaction of pedestrians to them everywhere. Because there was a lot of pushback. I mean, people were getting killed. And people use streets in the way that they had. I mean, not to the extent, but, you know, human beings forever have used city streets as places to gather. And, you know, they've always been places where, whether it's animals going through or wagons or something like that, you know, there's. There's people getting by and going through there, but there's also spaces for people to hang out and for kids to play and for people to sell stuff. And, you know, American cities had that same thing to a lesser extent than, you know, European cities did, but in lots of neighborhoods. And that stuff got quickly just bulldozed out of there in order to turn city spaces into just like thoroughfares from driving. And, you know, lots of people got pushed out. And that wasn't something that everybody took lightly. And that entire history is really glossed over. It makes it seem as if, like, cars came along and everybody was just like, yes. And then that was it. You know, it was just like it was over. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't such a smooth thing. It took a lot of, you know, took creating these ideas about, like, who the road's for and promoting it and, you know, even coming up with terms that were insulting, like jaywalking, which initially was basically calling somebody like a hillbilly walking around, you know, like, bumbling around and kind of like looking up at the sky, not knowing where they were going. That's what the term implied. But, you know, there's no.
- [24:32]
Dr. Claire Aubin
The person walking is. Is committing the offense rather than just being a person using public space.
- [24:38]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yep. Yeah. And you completely take the idea of safety and to distribute it onto the rest of the public, whether that's, you know, cyclists. You always read articles about there being, you know, cyclists getting hurt in things. They almost never fail to mention what they're. They have a helmet on as if, like, you know, that's. That's the thing. Keeping a 3,000 pound car from hurting you is because you had a helmet. I mean, people should wear them, but, you know, not. Not the reason why they get mentioned. It's just like this kind of internalized idea that, yeah, like, kids are just as much responsible for their own safety in the street as, you know, Ford Explorers or something like. That's crazy. It's just insane.
- [25:16]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of. One of my very good friends is a professional cyclist. Like he was in the Tour de France. He's like, oh, wow, he's a cyclist. That's his job. Yeah. And the number of times he's been hit by cars is unbelievable. Like, he and all his friends get hit by cars regularly. The way that he and his wife met was because she almost hit him with her car. And it's like. It's like, that's a funny thing, but also like, it's unbelievable. This is someone whose job it is to not get hit by cars. Like, his job is to ride a bike around and not get hit by cars. And he gets hit by cars all the time. And to bring it back to Henry Ford. It's people like this who are sort of dedicated to readjusting and reshaping American culture in order to make cars have this sort of primacy and make cars at the forefront of American culture and part of American identity. Like, driving a car is an American pastime, is an American experience. People like him are what make that possible and what start to push out everyone else and any other sort of use of public space.
- [26:23]
Dr. Zach Furness
Ironically, with him, he has. So he's very anti city. Like, he's very clear about this. And it's for all of the typical reasons that you'd find, like, kind of conservative perspectives at any period, really. Like, it's, you know, it's where the vice is, it's where the drinking is. You know, he was a hardcore teetotaler. He was. Didn't drink. You know, it's where the. It's where the blacks live, it's where the Jews live. It's where the Bolsheviks are. It's, you know, it's the filth, the grime. It's all the stuff that. Everything that's great in the world actually, but it's the stuff he hated. It's the stuff he hated. And he had this like, very kind of schizophrenic attitude towards farm life and rural life. He really embodies in a lot of ways. There's a few people that I read that talked about this connection with this thinker, Leo Marx, who has this Great big American studies guy. And he has this great analysis of gardens and the sort of role that the metaphor and the kind of building of gardens has for development in the US where it's like this middle ground between something that's completely kind of sterile and urban versus the wild, you know, unrestrained savageness of the woods. It's like it's manicured, it's managed nature. And he always has these kind of ideas, and they're part of this whole approach to social engineering that he has that he pursues really actively. And so you get this kind of strange relationship where on the one hand he's creating cars, that he's creating vehicles that are radically helping to transform the very kinds of spaces that he is increasingly becoming nostalgic for and also trying to replicate in various living experiments. He has a number of these throughout Michigan. Small places where they'd either, like, build a village from scratch or take a kind of small town that existed and just engineer the whole thing. They would have a particular plant. They would usually be based around some sort of plant that Ford used for their cars that they would export whatever it was, whether it was a logging town in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, or, you know, they had some other factory that produced something for his cars. And, you know, they have the. Have the housing for all the workers. And he'd encourage and sometimes force people to build gardens and tend to them. And he really, he was as much interested in the idea of like, experimenting on and manipulating and producing people and communities as he was cars. And it seemed to be like a. A pretty intense preoccupation of his for a long time, both like, early on in his career and then especially at the end when he tries to basically create a country called fordlandia in two and a half million acres in Brazil, which Greg Grandin has a fantastic book about.
- [29:24]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi, everybody, it's Claire here with my usual quick shout out to tell you about other Multitude shows I think are worth listening to today. I want to tell you about Attach youh Resume, a show that is just about to enter its second season, where Multitude CEO Amanda McLaughlin and head of Creative Eric Silver interview online creators about how their jobs work and how they got there. Attach youh Resume lets listeners hear the personal stories behind seismic events in digital media and learn what concrete steps we can take to build a sustainable media landscape. Amanda and Eric are longtime podcasters and business owners, as well as the founders of the collective that makes this Guy Sucked Possible and empowers people like me to create cool stuff while retaining all of our rights as creators years, which is really rare in the digital media world. They genuinely care about this stuff and the people who make it. And the show really highlights that. I personally was on attach your resume last year talking about how I had no idea what I was going to do with my life and future as an extremely online public historian. And here I am now. We might even be doing an update episode now that my life is wildly different thanks to you all listening right now. So keep an ear out for that. Attach your resume proves that the best credential for deciding the future of media is actually making stuff. So go give it a listen wherever you get your podcasts. I think the first thing. I think we need to talk about fordlandia in just a second. And the first thing we need to talk about here is his obsession with making people do stuff, because I really.
- [30:46]
Dr. Zach Furness
It's his favorite thing in the world.
- [30:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's his favorite thing. So one of the things that makes Ford very famous and very popular early on is that he eventually, after he realized that people were not enjoying working in his factories anymore because he had revolutionized manufacturing and introduced the assembly line, et cetera, et cetera, to the factories, and they were getting bored by their jobs, and they had these sort of monotonous, terrible jobs in factories. He raises the minimum wage allegedly to $5 a day, which at the time was enormous. Yeah, this is an enormous thing for the average factory worker. It's the equivalent of a little over $120 a day now. And he sort of raises this wage to combat the fact that although his manufacturing process is highly efficient, workers lives monotonous, and they hate their jobs and they want to leave, but they don't actually make $5 a day. They make 250. And they have to earn bonuses in order to get the other half of the $5 they're supposed to be getting paid. And they earn the bonuses by being obsessively tracked and monitored by what he calls the sociological.
- [31:56]
Dr. Zach Furness
Sociological department. Yeah, yeah, they go in and they'd. They'd grill workers, their families, their associates. I mean, everybody. They're. Everybody's lives are connected through the factory, right. And in Detroit in a pretty short amount of time, like, the vast majority of people who are even working in the city work for Ford. But yeah, they were. I mean, they were grilling people with questions about their marriages, their sex lives, their intimate relationships, how they use money, whether they're putting money into bank accounts, which they were forced to do. They had to be sober. They had to Be living in clean homes. They had to be living in basically like nice homes, not in, you know, kind of shambles, which of course creates lots of. They start to enforce this a lot less when it comes to the black workers that move there because they don't have a choice and living in different kinds of conditions because Detroit, like everywhere else, was incredibly racist and had redlining and wouldn't let black people live in tons of other places. And. But yeah, I mean, he. They had. He had that team of people. And yeah, if you didn't pass that stuff, you didn't get paid. Like, you got a six months period where you could sort of earn the write back to make that sort of money. But yeah, it was 2. 34 an hour. And then the rest you got was sort of subject to this of you being a good boy, you know. And this was a way to both keep all of the workers under control and then particularly for all of the immigrant workers, this was tied to forcing them to take civics classes and English courses. The. I have a great quote from somebody, the director of the sociological department, this guy named Samuel Marquis, noted, the first thing we teach them through the sociological department through these classes is we teach them to say, I am a good American. And then we try to get them to live up to that statement.
- [33:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Oh, my God.
- [33:49]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah. I mean, and you know, they would have these ceremonies when they finished their. When they finished their courses where they would literally have this big. This big melting pot, this ceremonial size melting pot. And, you know, they've made it so that the courses that they did through there served as their official, like, US Documents of, you know, declaring citizenship instead of taking the first step through the government. Like, if you did these through Ford, you were on that path. But yeah, I mean, creating all these towns, creating, you know, these places where he could turn workers into Americans. Right. And he really saw it as the. And in that process, you're turning workers. Workers into consumers too, which he was huge on.
- [34:31]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I can't get. Oh, sorry, just to go back one second. I can't get over the idea of being like, okay, you've said your pledge of allegiance, you've taken your Americanizing classes, now get in the big cauldron.
- [34:44]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, yeah, I don't think. I don't think they actually got. I don't know if they got in. I don't know. I never actually looked that up. It was big enough that you could.
- [34:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So in my mind, they're getting baptized crazy cauldron.
- [34:55]
Dr. Zach Furness
And being like, probably would have liked to do It, Yeah, he tried to take over for tons of places too. I mean, he tried to. He was going to build, I mean, he was going to essentially take over the entirety of Muscle Shoals, Mississippi, starting with a dam and build like what he described as a new Eden in the valley there and create this, you know, there's this fantastic city and got tons of hype for this and people were, you know, because if he said he was going to do something like this, I mean, this would radically shift everybody's life as far as the kinds of businesses that would sprout up around it and who could move there, et cetera. And it didn't work out. But I mean, he tried to, you know, in addition to these random towns and throughout Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, you know, he was way into this. He wanted to mold people. And particularly, you know, early on also he. The. Some of the people that worked and lived in these towns and worked at some of his plants, they were what he referred to as like farmer mechanics. So they would be off for a few months where they would tend to their farms and then work in the factory, which he saw as like, you know, this, this kind of perfect synthesis sort of thing.
- [35:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And then he tries this, like you said, he tries this in Brazil by making this. So it's Fordlandia. It's.
- [36:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
It's so crazy.
- [36:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I was reading up on this like an hour ago because I was like, I need to, I need a refresher on the Fordlandia thing. So he founds this industrial town in 1928, like you said, on a bajillion acres and square miles of like land in the Amazon rainforest near this city called santarem. It's for 10,000 people. And the idea is that he wants to get around British control of rubber and he wants to have his own, like, rubber town basically in Resil, because he's a big company town guy. That's his whole thing.
- [36:37]
Dr. Zach Furness
He could make and produce and manufacture everything except for the rubber. So that was the quest. It was like. And so. And the bottom had fallen out through the rubber market about 10 years before that, which caused huge amounts of turmoil. And especially in the place that he went to people who had already been, you know, living in destitute poverty in the woods, namely variety of different Indian tribes and various peoples from a number of places of, you know, post colonial periods, through colonialism, all the legacies of that stuff just leave people there in terrible shape. And he comes into that with the idea that like, yeah, I'm going to, you know I'm going to undercut the British. Like fuck them. I'm going to get this under my control. And he has nobody on board that knows anything about, about rubber. He has nobody on board that knows anything about botany. Like they don't know. He has like a few kind of like hustlers and grifters that essentially just try to convince him that they know what they're doing. But I mean every single part of this is so, it's just so crazy because the layers of stuff you don't know going into this are gargantuan. I mean just like the descriptions of. I mean they're starting at the wrong time of the year and trying to clear cut areas for trees to initially start. These like rubber grows in the jungle and he wanted to grow it basically like, like crops out in the altogether. Like you're growing corn or something, which it doesn't grow that way. But he. So they clear cut all this land and they do it in, in not during the dry season. So the wood's too wet and then they're just pouring thousands and thousands of gallons of kerosene on everything and there's smoke for hundreds of miles while they're doing this. Every little bit that you chop to clear cut, you know, the, the amount of like insects and poisonous things that be falling on people and biting them was just. It was like every single thing was deadly there. And every single way you could fuck up anything they did. Like they couldn't even get every, most of the stuff that they brought. They brought an entire factory on a boat disassembled and like a bazillion pounds of goods and everything. They couldn't even get their stuff fully off of the ships for three years. They never even built docks for the first couple of years because the people he had running it, despite him being this like rabid, you know, prohibitionist and anti drinker, you know, he had some guys that were on the sauce down there and you know, and it was a variety of different interchangeable people that either were, you know, taking money on the side or just like drinking and partying or getting pushed around by, you know, it basically the area became this kind of common grounds for like misfits and travelers and prostitutes. And then eventually he gets his real serious people down there to try to clean it up and get it going. And if you see any pictures of it, a lot of them are from that period. So a pristine looking hospital that was years after people had been. And the workers were still living in huts and lots of People that died, clear cutting stuff. Lots of people that died from malaria. It was just the biggest train wreck from top to bottom. But it was, it was indicative of the mindset of him and other industrials, which is like you colonize things. I mean, there's a quote from him, he used to walk around all the time and write little things down in these notebooks that he'd keep in his, in his jacket. And you know, years later, people got access to these. And at one point he's talking about like the black problem, or I forget how he phrased it, of the workers in his mills. And he said the answer. And then on the other page it said, colonize them or colonialize them. And this is in his factory in Detroit. So I mean, if you sort of extrapolate the mentality, I mean, it doesn't take a big, you know, stretch to go from thinking about colonization in other places and how you treat your own employees and other people in your own factories.
- [40:41]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And I mean, I think even the fact that he's talking about people in his own factories in America and being like, we need to colonize the people in my factories in America already sort of shows a mindset which allows him to believe that he can just go to Brazil and take over this area and everything's gonna be fine. Because he has this hubris built into him by his success. Like through his success, he thinks, well, I can just do whatever I want on top of this. One of the things I was reading about in Fordlandia that goes back to his obsession with exerting extreme control over his employees is he also says, here are all these people living in Brazil, many of whom are members of indigenous groups. Whatever. You know what I need to do with all these people living in Brazil? I need to Americanize them.
- [41:24]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah. Peaches.
- [41:27]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Literally. So particularly, he's particularly obsessed with diets and what the right thing to feed his workers are. And so he has this like very, very strict diet that they have to stay on. They eventually revolt because they're so upset by the fact that they can't just eat whatever they want to eat because they're human beings. He also, in this sort of Americanization, he also forces them, or he and his company forced them to work midday in the hot sun in this place that they've clear cut. When in Brazil, there more traditionally would have been breaks because this is the hottest part of the day in fucking Brazil, not Detroit, where people would take breaks when it's a million degrees temperature.
- [42:09]
Dr. Zach Furness
Or not even living in that area at that time of the year.
- [42:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, totally. And so he's basically like, no, you just have to pull yourself up by the bootstraps. I don't care about the sun. Who cares about the sun?
- [42:20]
Dr. Zach Furness
So many. Yeah, I mean, it's so. It's like people, when they had that revolt, you know, they. They almost burnt the whole place to the ground. I mean, you know, I think rightfully.
- [42:28]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So, and they should have.
- [42:29]
Dr. Zach Furness
I mean, they. They were feeding people rotten meat and rotten food, but, yeah, feeding them, like, ridiculous American food and forcing people to do this. I mean, as much as he tried to institute prohibition, pretty much everybody who was down there was just like, look, man, that's. You know, that may go over where you're from, but, like, that's not happening. You know, that's not happening here. That's not the law here. You can only do so much. So he. He lost that battle on a number of fronts. But, yeah, I mean, it was just no regard for how the ecosystem works, how labor works, how people's culture or work habits are what people care about, their. Everything. It doesn't matter. It's just like, we're doing our thing. And that mentality, I mean, shared by people that are at the core of. Of car culture, too. I mean, Firestone was the same way. I mean, he colonized Liberia and was some of the most horrific. I mean, outside of the Congo, it was some of the most horrific, you know, exploitation and abuse of workers in the rubber plantations there so they could make tires. And, you know, this is. These are his buds, right? There's. There's some, you know, pictures of, like, the Firestones and the Fords and the Edisons all, like, you know, lunching in a tent, going out on their little, like, country retreats. And it's actually one of the places where there was a naturalist writer that Ford was a fan of that wrote a book about him, but he spent a lot of time with him, and he remarked on the fact that this is, I think, the late teens, where Ford, after a dinner one night, just started, like, going off on this, like, globalist Jewish conspiracy rant. And he was really kind of taken aback and wrote it down in his notes, but never actually published it in the book that he wrote on Ford. But, you know, it was some of the first indications by. Even in amongst his cohort of, like, casual and more. Maybe casual, not right, the word, more formal, eugenicist and racist, that this dude was a little extreme. And, you know, all of that stuff really comes to fruition when? 19, what is it, 19? 19. About 21. You know, there's a big economic recession and he runs into financial problems with Ford, lays off tons of people. And this is around the time where his distrust of bankers in particular and all of his previous anti war disposition, that was all exclusively based around what he referred to as, you know, the German Jewish banking problem. All of that becomes like much more pronounced in the late teens. And he just becomes like full time. I'm doing it. I'm doing anti Semitism like it's my fucking job. And that's his. You know, that's when he takes over the small newspaper called Dearborn Independent and just uses it as a vehicle to publish an insane amount of. The most ridiculous combination of old school and newly revised anti Semitic literature that the United States had ever seen.
- [45:22]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. His antisemitism is bad enough that even the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation has to have a webpage dedicated to just acknowledging that he was an anti Semite. Literally call it the most controversial and least admirable aspect of Ford's career. Which I think is like still letting him get off quite easy because there are a lot of other bad things to his career like we've just talked about.
- [45:48]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, we didn't even mention the fact. Sorry, go ahead, go ahead.
- [45:50]
Dr. Claire Aubin
No, you go ahead.
- [45:51]
Dr. Zach Furness
I mean, as far as him being a real piece of shit before we get on more in the. The anti Semitism stuff, which really need to talk about the. I mean, the other thing that he did to control workers, which was just as big, if not a more significant element of the company was the organization that he had in his, you know, that, that worked for him. What they called the Ford service department. The head of this was this guy named Harry Bennett. He was an ex Navy boxer, super mobbed up. Loved to fight, loved to be a tough guy thug. Used to like shoot his gun in his office. Would shoot a pellet gun like in the factory when he walked around. And people just kind of got used to hearing like the dings in random places. Ford loved this guy. He thought he was like the coolest guy ever. Ford treated his own son Edsel like garbage. And would often would treat Harry like an angel. And oftentimes in front of Edsel to humiliate him. And he would like, set the two of them at odds by like essentially provoking Henry both, like, implicitly and explicitly to fuck with Edsel and to like make fun of him and really just humiliate him publicly. And Edsel's wife, because he died before Henry Ford did. And Edsel's wife actually said that Bennett was the reason he died so young. Just from having to deal with this guy constantly. But this dude hired. He hired. It was about 3,000 people that worked in the service department. And these were just every variety of spies, thugs, low life, you know, gangsters, hooligans, wrestlers, boxers, ex football players, dock workers, just like big dudes that wanted that he had for muscle. And their job was to keep everybody in line, particularly to make sure that people didn't organize unions. But they also served a really active role in just like constantly being on workers case. Workers were never allowed to sit down in any of Ford's factories. So enforcing that kind of thing, just like, you know, making it known constantly that people were being watched. And they did. So between the sociological department and the service department, it was like a massive surveillance operation. And essentially the biggest. You know, this is like, arguably they're bigger than, I believe, the Pinkertons at that time. They're like the. They're kind of like a biggest secret paramilitary force in the US Basically working for a corporation at the time, this crew of the service department. And Bennett hired a. I think to kind of like make it look equitable or just to leave him from certain duties. He hired African American ex cop named Donald Marshall, who was kind of his eyes and ears in the factory. And he hired another African American, former track and football star at the University of Michigan. And they did a lot of his dirty work too. But I mean, these, you know, they just like really abuse workers. There's two really big things that are very widely written about in 32. Like, this is the midst of the Depression. I mean, the year before that, I don't know, they. The company had let go like 90,000 people and in like 1931. So in 32, this group of people planned what was called the. Became known as the Ford Hunger March. So they go to the River Road complex and they present 14 demands to Henry Ford, the Service department, the Dearborn cops and other forms of security all just like beat the shit out of people, open fire on them. 60 people are hurt, five people are killed. Five years after that, it's what became known as the Battle of the Overpass. Folks from the UAW were gonna hand out leaflets on an overpass near the plant's main gate. And the service department comes out and, you know, along with the cops who either stood by or helped also just like beat people up really bad, tried to destroy all the photos from what happened. And I mean, this is Just like, a sample of the things that they did. I mean, Bennett himself, he had all these compounds in different places, too, with, like, secret getaway spots and, like, underground arsenals of. Of weapons that were either for him or to possibly protect Ford and, you know, kind of usher him out of the city. I mean, it was just, like, the height of paranoia and surveillance and oppression in a lot of ways.
- [50:10]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And it's like, it's not that he's just an asshole, which he is obviously, like, on a personal level to his children, to the people around him, he's an asshole. One, two. He also hires people to be assholes to his workers. He, like, actively surrounds himself with people who are willing to do that, too, because nothing makes you, you know, work faster at the factory than a dude with a gun. Seriously, who's standing there not letting you sit, like, really. And I know it sounds like I'm being facetious, but, like, that is a no.
- [50:33]
Dr. Zach Furness
Literally.
- [50:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But he's doing this by force. He is saying, these people love working. They get potentially $5 a day. They can't drink, they can't do anything. They can't have sex with anybody. They. They have to go to church. They like all these things. And also, someone's going to shoot them or threaten to shoot them if they sit down.
- [50:50]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah. And if you're a black worker at that time, too, more likely than not, you were working in the foundry, which was the most dangerous job, the most backbreaking labor, and the most dangerous in multiple ways, like the stuff that you would inhale, the heat itself, and just the ability to be scalded, burned, and crushed to death by various kinds of machinery there. So it had a disproportionate number of black workers in the foundry or work in other jobs that were seen as kind of like the shit jobs, even though they did get the same pay. Right. And they couldn't enforce the whole housing thing that he tried to do early on. Because black workers primarily lived in an area. It was on the east side of Detroit, and most of the black workers were concentrated in that area. And, you know, it was slum housing, and it was. Ford knew it was going. Ford was more than willing to build entire communities from the ground up and to build housing for his workers. He could have easily, within a matter of weeks, built brand new housing for all of his. All of the black workers that moved to the city in droves. He just didn't want to. He didn't care. And he knew that he could get people to work there. And I Think this is really widely debated, his role as far as black labor goes. There's a great book that I read some pieces of a couple years ago and then read some this past week from Beth Tompkins Bates. It's called the Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford and talks about all this really explicitly. And you know, the period of. What is it? It's like the. The amount of folks that were Moving there by 1919, there's like 1700 African American workers. The numbers just start to like, you know, double and triple at. At various times. And you'd have huge waves of people that were part of the great migration. And that in addition to that, started to go and like recruit other people back home to come up there. But then you also have a lot of white workers from the south that start to move north and a lot of them are very used to and want to take advantage of like, you know, Jim Crow kind of relationships. So then there's tons of abuse that black workers are taking from some of the southern white workers that work there in addition to getting hassled and brutalized by cops in the area. And one of the biggest things was massive amounts of Klan in Michigan during the 20s as well.
- [53:17]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. I do think we need to talk about the antisemitism thing just for this last little bit.
- [53:25]
Dr. Zach Furness
No, please, we have to.
- [53:26]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But I am actually very, very glad that we spent the majority of this.
- [53:28]
Dr. Zach Furness
Talking about the biggest reason that for me in pursuing it from the beginning of why he sucked. But all these other things are why he sucked.
- [53:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You. But yeah, well, those things are important. And I think the anti Semitism part is actually fairly widely known and is important. And he sucks on a sort of world historical scale for that. But I also think that other things, these sort of more granular things that are like, okay, he did this and then he did this and then he hired these people. Those very often get kind of ignored or subsumed by, well, he made these cars. And also really it's the anti Semitism that we should care about. But those other things matter quite a lot too. And they, and they go to helping us to describe his character as a person and why this legacy more broadly, why it matters to talk about all these other parts of a person in order to really understand who they are and what's missing from their sort of longer term legacy.
- [54:21]
Dr. Zach Furness
And when you look at a guy like this, I mean, it really begs the question, like, what do you have to do for people to just say you're a piece of shit. And we shouldn't learn about you. Like, the fact that this is all bracketed as some, you know, like they're. Like they're extracurricular. Curricular activities or something. Like, they're just. There's some side part of his story. It's like, if this isn't your defining feature, that you publish a newspaper that run 91 successive articles and then bind them into four different books, collecting those articles under the name the International Jew the World's Problem. And use your newspaper as the biggest platform for antisemitism in the United States. He published half a million copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In addition to these articles that quoted liberally from the Protocols as if the Protocols were real. Because, of course, that was the whole antisemitic thing. Was that this whole story of this alleged meeting between these, you know, these shifty, crafty Jewish world leaders that are plotting global conspiracy. That they were. That they were essentially taken from their meeting as if they were like, notes. And, you know, this first was created as Russian propaganda against the communist takeover in 19. Was it 1903. And then so this gets circulated. But Ford is really the one responsible for making this available in the United States In English.
- [55:51]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely.
- [55:52]
Dr. Zach Furness
And it's like all of this stuff, and yet it's still like. Well, but he. You know, he. What about the assembly line, though? And it's just like, I don't care about the assembly line. It's like, this dude is. He is the only person. He's the only American that Hitler talked about in Mein Kampf. There was an article in the New York Times, I think it was in 23 or something like that. Where somebody from there goes to the NSDAP office. And in the waiting room before they go in to meet the future Darfur. There is a copy of Henry Ford's book in the waiting room. And then above Hitler's desk, the only thing, there is a portrait of Henry Ford above his head. One of the first things that he did was his focus on the Autobahn and the Volkswagen, which he said explicitly at the ceremony and prior to that was dedicated to, like, that he was inspired by Ford. He constantly talked about it. I actually think there's no way to prove it. But I think that Hitler may have even named his book My Struggle after Ford calling his own autobiography, which came out three years prior. My Life and Work and Cause. Hitler initially had this absurdly long title. Like My Struggle against the Bolshevik Jews and Their Jewish Jewiness. It was like this super long, stupid title that he shortened. And I actually think that he may have thought about the kind of crisp and conciseness of Ford's book as the thing that inspired him to just be like, my struggle. That'll work.
- [57:24]
Dr. Claire Aubin
I would believe that.
- [57:25]
Dr. Zach Furness
But, I mean, he saw him as the bastion of fascism in the United States. And it's unclear. People can't prove it, but, you know, it's alleged that Ford floated money directly to Hitler. It's alleged that there were a lot of other deeper ties between the Nazi party and some of Ford's organizations done through, you know, a variety, you know, because they have essentially, like, networks of companies and things. I mean, Ford also had factories in. In Germany, including the one that was. That was fordwerk, that employed tons of slave labor. And this was something that. Yes, they were the only factory, to my knowledge, that wasn't completely taken over by the Nazi party like they were. They. They took it over to the extent that they had one of their own people run it. But it was still under Ford's umbrella. And they were the only company, to my knowledge, American company, that was allowed to keep that relationship, no doubt because of Hitler's admiration for Ford. So, I mean, they are really, like, the attitudes they're espousing are identical. I mean, the only difference in any way, shape or form is what Hitler does with that power that Ford allegedly, when he saw footage of the concentration camps close to the end of his life, had a stroke when he saw it. Good, I'm glad.
- [58:47]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And they were also using assembly lines in concentration camps, in labor camps. A lot of the thought process that Ford is famous for.
- [58:54]
Dr. Zach Furness
Absolutely. That whole industrialist mentality. I mean, you know, the people were. The people's numbers that they had tattooed on them were from IBM. Like, those are. Those were numbers that said that they could use IBM machine processors in order to keep track of people numerically in that sort of way, you know, and. And IBM is. Well, that's a whole other story. But Edwin Black has a really good book about that. And there's, you know, so there's all these kinds of connections. These are not just like ancillary kinds of things. These are the same people talking about the same stuff. And fundamentally, that is, you know, the Jewish problem. And I mean, I'm just going to read the most kind of quintessential example of, like, the kind of stuff that he was saying. So this is one of. What's this article called? This is Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music, which, like all of his other 91 articles, begin with a Quote from the Protocols as if they are like you're quoting biblical passages at the top. It's surprising that whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews in baseball corruption, A group of Jews in exploitative finance, a group of Jews in theatrical degeneracy, a group of Jews in liquor propaganda, A group of Jews in control of national war policies, A group of Jews in control of the press through business and financial pressure. A group of jews, war profiteers, 80% of them Jews. Organizers of active opposition to Christian laws and customs. Jews in this miasma of so called popular music which combines weak mindedness with every suggestion of lewdness. Again, Jews. This is like one, one paragraph. It's, it's, it's just ridiculous. And it's like there's, yeah, essay after essay after essay of the most inflammatory Nazi shit that you could ever. Right. I mean, this is the inspiration for Adolf Hitler. It's not the only place where he got this from. The Protocols had been translated in German. German has a long history of antisemitism that precedes Henry Ford. But the fact that Henry Ford is Henry Ford and espousing this stuff carries a level of credibility that is so profoundly dangerous. And you know, Jewish leaders at the time, they didn't tackle it. They were in a difficult position. National. Some, some folks from national groups initially were like, we can't make hay out of this. If we do, it's going to give it more attention. And then after like the second or third essay, they were like, we got to do something. And one person in particular, you know, writes a letter from the organization and to, to Ford, a local rabbi who was previously Ford's neighbor. And Ford had given him a number of, of custom Model Ts over the years as gifts, not like, as bribes or something. Just like, you know, people in the community, right. He gave people cars. He decides that he's gonna try to take the approach to. Try to talk to Ford one on one about this and, you know, tell him, you know what, to basically try to take the approach of like, you know, I know that you don't know how bad this is, but like, it really is kind of thing and thinking that the kind of better wisdom of Ford will prevail and he can get him to stop this. And apparently when in the midst of this conversation is when Ford received the telegram from the folks in New York, this guy writing on behalf of a number of Jewish groups to express their shock and dismay and kind of horror at what he was writing and publishing. And Ford sees this and just kind of has a really visceral reaction and becomes even more closed off and hostile about the idea of rejecting anything. And he doesn't. And the only time that he rejects any of this is. Is after a lawsuit in 27, because a guy named Aaron Sapiro takes him to court. He was a lawyer who was organizing farm working collectives in Canada and especially in the US in the West. Now out in California. And Ford uses his International Jew columns to, you know, slander this guy over and over and over again. So he takes him to court and, you know, as part of the proceedings, Ford totally has this. This completely bullshit made up. Says he was in a car accident and kind of staged, apparently. Staged like a fake car accident. Said he was like, I'm too injured to testify. You know, it's completely fake. But it got him out of testifying. And he decided after that he wasn't gonna do anything. And so he. He basically lets Jewish leaders write up a letter and he just signs off on it without any fuss. Mainly because he was coming out with a new model car the following year and cared enough about money that he recognized this was gonna be a problem. Think he was just sick of dealing with it, but he and Walt. Yeah, he just. No, no, he's. He just continued like, you know, he hung out with Lindbergh in the years after that. And somebody. There was a quote from him saying that when he got together with Lindbergh, like, all they talked about was the Jews.
- [63:46]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And like, while all this is happening also. So when he gets sued. So for some timeline also, just some like, broader timeline.
- [63:54]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, sorry, I'm just like.
- [63:57]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It happens, man. He. So he was publishing this. This International Jew series, which is under his page. So it was on the front page of the Independent, where he also had a page literally called Mr. Ford's own page.
- [64:09]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yeah, great title.
- [64:10]
Dr. Claire Aubin
But he published it almost weekly for three years. There are 91 issues of the paper that have a variation on the international Jews theme. He kept publishing this shit from 1920 to 1922. So he's early also in the sort of Nazi style Jew hatred. This is early when this is happening. He gets boycotted. Pioneer Progenitor. He was really just, you know, had some visions for the future. And he gets boycotted in 1922 and stops for about a year and then starts back up again because he's like, okay, enough time has passed. We can do this again. So he. He already has boycotts in 22, he turns it into the four volume set that you talk about. And then he, like you said, apologizes in 1928, signing this letter. But in that 1927 suit, what he does, which the suit is because he was publishing something about how New York banks, which were, according to him controlled by Jews, were harming Texas farmers. So it also fits with his obsession with farming and like the country, the.
- [65:11]
Dr. Zach Furness
Good farmers being hurt by the bad Jews.
- [65:13]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Exactly. So he gets sued for libel on, on this basis. And then while being sued, his editor, William Cameron testifies in court that he had done all of it in sort of of his own volition, that he was truly the anti Semite and Ford had nothing to do with this.
- [65:29]
Dr. Zach Furness
But you get that, you get a lot of that apologia. Like in hindsight now, and I think people fail to. It's very easy to say he didn't write it and have it be factually true. What they really mean is he didn't type it.
- [65:42]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah.
- [65:43]
Dr. Zach Furness
Because he, he published it. He knew exactly what was being published. Nobody did a goddamn thing without Ford's okay, period. Yeah, he was a control freak. The idea that people took his newspaper and on the front page typed something and put it out there that he didn't approve of is so laughably ridiculous for a guy that had teams of people investigating his workers sex lives and their bank accounts like, well, I just didn't know what was in the paper. I mean, it's absurd, you know, it's ridiculous. Yeah.
- [66:12]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And even at the time, people who knew Ford said, like, people at the time knew that. And everyone since then who has studied him has said it's very clear he knew what was going on and that he just got this guy to be his ball guy in the suit, essentially. So let the record show that it's pretty well established that he definitely knew what was being published and encouraged it and was signing off on it. And in many cases was the person being like, okay, this is what we need to write next. And to also go. Or sort of like hearken back to what you said earlier in the episode. He gets the fucking Nazi Grand Cross of the German eagle in 1938 for being such a good friend to Nazism, which you're right, is, is the highest honor a non German can receive at this point in time.
- [66:58]
Dr. Zach Furness
Super Buddies Award for the Nazi.
- [67:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, he, he basically is in the Nazi hall of Fame. Like.
- [67:03]
Dr. Zach Furness
Yep.
- [67:04]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And then.
- [67:05]
Dr. Zach Furness
And let them come to the US and give it to him. And the, the award, I think it's a, it's like an eagle with four little swastikas around it. It's not like there was any hiding it. It's like these are literally Nazis coming to bring you Nazi shit with a Nazi pin and putting it on your Nazi ass chest. And you're just like, you know, he's. He looks real happy in the pictures, too. Yeah, I'm sure he was thrilled.
- [67:24]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And then 61 years later, in 1999, he gets listed on the Gallup list of the 18 most widely admired people of the 20th century, as voted by the American public.
- [67:37]
Dr. Zach Furness
And this is exactly what, this is.
- [67:38]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Exactly the problem, right, is because cultural memory is short.
- [67:41]
Dr. Zach Furness
Well, I. It's just, I get in. I'm in enough of a bubble of my own creation in various kinds of ways through scholarship and hanging out with radical punk weirdos and stuff for most of my life. That, like, baseline view, if anybody knows anything about Ford, is something along these lines. So it's only when you kind of step back or you look at, you know, the kind. Those kinds of things, surveys or the way that he gets written about in history books or one liners and, you know, I've read and done a lot of stuff around history, technology, and outside of scholarship. Just like general interest kinds of things. The way he's discussed. Yeah, it's always just like these are all footnotes. It's like these things don't undercut or undermine your ability to see his achievements as anything other than pioneering and if not genius, you know, and it's like, I don't know what you have to do. Especially in the United States, especially at that time. Like, we fought a war against the Nazis. It's like the fact that anybody let that slide, I mean, and they, they didn't in a lot of ways. But people then, by the time he got that award from the Nazis, they sort of were like, oh, old man Ford. He's real kooky and old. And he was. But like, who, you know, who gives a shit? The guy was an old man. Like, he was. Who cares if he's old? He was still running businesses, and he was still saying the same stuff he'd been saying and on the record as he was in, like, 1915 when he opposed World War I. And there was a Hungarian radical feminist that came to the US that was trying to, like, get people involved in anti war efforts and women's organizations. And they came. Wilson wouldn't meet with her, but Ford would. And she came to meet with him, and he didn't know she was Jewish, and he's like talking and she's explaining some things about the why the war happened. He's like, I know why the war happened. German, Jewish, German Jewish bankers. And everybody in the room was kind.
- [69:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Of like, hold on.
- [69:37]
Dr. Zach Furness
And then he kind of stops and then she's talking for a bit. And then he literally just repeats the same exact thing again, like it was German, Jewish bankers. As if she didn't hear him the first time.
- [69:49]
Dr. Claire Aubin
He really wanted to make sure that the joke landed.
- [69:51]
Dr. Zach Furness
It was just like the guy could not have been more clear his entire life how he felt that everything bad in the world was Jewish because of Jews, and often because of what Jews also facilitated the blacks to allow to happen or to do. Whether it was music at the cultural level or being uppity in the workplace and fighting for a union. All of that, the whole package, all of it was Jewish. Jazz was Jewish, unions were Jewish, Bolshevism was obviously Jewish. And the outgrowth of that is corruption everywhere else and the facilitation of genetically inferior people like the African Americans. And this is all for this is Ford's ideology. This is his worldview. This is who he is and what he was. And the fact that anybody remembers anything about him other than this is, you know, shame on them in a. Is the nicest thing I could say possibly.
- [70:53]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And even if they remember something else other than this, the fact that they are able to remember that without this being always held up in conjunction with it like that. We're not saying notorious asshole and anti Semite Henry Ford every time we say his name.
- [71:06]
Dr. Zach Furness
Publisher of the Protocols of Elders of Zion.
- [71:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, like it's. It. It's inferior. And so I think we can say unambiguously, Henry Ford sucked.
- [71:15]
Dr. Zach Furness
Sucked.
- [71:16]
Dr. Claire Aubin
We could talk about this for I could talk about this forever. And I do think eventually I probably want to do like a series on Henry Ford. Like do Henry Ford Month where we just like can really get. Because I do think that this.
- [71:28]
Dr. Zach Furness
He's an example.
- [71:30]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, he's a perfect example of this guy who sucks for reasons that not everyone is aware of. Also sucks for reasons that everyone is aware of and is somehow gets a pass on a lot of that stuff all the time. Thank you so much for coming on. Zach Furness can be found on blueskyunkademic and you can get yourself a copy of One Less Car or Punkademics at the link in our episode description. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude podcast collective. This episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Zach Furness, and produced and edited by Tom Amani. All of our theme music was written and produced by my dog's third favorite person, Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes ad free, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe@patreon.com thisguysucked See you next week.