Mark Fields is the new chief operating officer of the Ford Motor Co., second only to the CEO of the 164,000 person multinational corporation.
Normally, this would not be of much concern except to avid readers of the Wall Street Journal. There were several COOs and presidents before Fields. There will be several after him.
But this time it’s different. Mark Fields is a Jew.
Henry Ford, who founded the company in 1903 that bears his family name, was an anti-Semite. When asked in 1920 what the problem with major league baseball was, Ford summed it up in three words–“too much Jew.” At the time, fewer than two dozen Jews had ever played professional baseball during the previous four decades. During the 1920s, Ford’s newspaper, the weekly Dearborn Independent, distributed to every Ford dealership, was loaded with anti-Semitic articles. Several of those articles were compiled into a four-volume set, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.
By the 1930s, Ford was both praised and honored by the Nazis, including Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS whose mission included the extermination of Jews. Adolph Hitler personally awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, that country’s highest award to a foreigner; Hitler personally kept a picture of the industrialist on his desk.
Ford, of course, wasn’t the only anti-Semite or racist in America. America’s colleges established admissions quotas or excluded minorities entirely. Medical schools admitted only a few Jews, and then only if they promised not to enter clinical practice but become psychiatrists. Apparently, they had to cede psychiatry to Jews because of the pioneering work by Freud, Adler, and other Jews. Jewish scientists–many like Einstein–were trained in European universities and then came to the United States during the wave of immigration between the world wars; they were “carefully watched” and often demeaned. Country clubs denied Jews access, villages denied them residence. And throughout the country, the resurgence of the Klan led to lynchings of Blacks and firebombing of synagogues.
Because of a higher proportion of Jews historically in the sciences, creative arts, social work, mass media, and financial empires than among the general population, a large number of Americans have isolated those professions and blamed Jews for whatever the current problem happens to be. A survey by the Anti-Defamation League in 2007 revealed that 15 percent of Americans held anti-Semitic views. More disguise their views by claiming they don’t oppose Jews, just urban liberals–a higher proportion of Jews live in urban areas than in rural areas, and Jews tend to be more liberal, and more active in social justice, than the general population.
During the late 1940s, Henry Ford II, the founder’s grandson, systematically decreased the company’s virulent anti-union attitudes and increased the company’s affirmative action program, promoting Jews, Afro-Americans, Hispanics, and women into management positions. Mervyn Manning, a Jew, became the first minority ever promoted to a Ford vice-presidency. He once recalled that at the time he was hired in the mid-1950s, the only Black in corporate headquarters was the shoeshine boy. Under Henry Ford II, the company approved and encouraged minorities to own Ford dealerships. But it was never enough.
My family, like hundreds of thousands of other Jewish families, never owned a Ford, nor had any plans to own a Ford, no matter the price, deals, or quality of product. There were other car lines produced by union workers whose bosses may have had attitudes against Jews and other minorities–GM and Chrysler’s affirmative action programs also lagged–but they weren’t as blatant in their Anti-Semitic hate as was the paternalistic creator of the Ford brand who had revolutionized the manufacturing process, paid his workers slightly better than industry averages, and established marketing as a central part to any corporation’s business plan.
Mark Fields was born in Brooklyn, and earned an economics degree from Rutgers and an MBA from Harvard. He began his career at Ford in 1989, and was fast-tracked into several executive positions. Shortly after his promotion to executive vice-president, Fields told an organization of Jewish business executives he “never encountered one iota of discrimination as a Jew during my career at Ford.” He will probably become the CEO within the next two years when the current CEO, Alan Mulally, retires.
It’s possible my family, and thousands of other families, may some day buy a Ford. The stain the company’s founder painted onto his product has faded. Perhaps when Mark Fields becomes CEO–and it’s no longer news that a minority has been promoted into executive management–it might be time to reconsider our decisions.
[Walter Brasch’s latest book is the critically acclaimed best-seller Before the First Snow: Stories from the Revolution, available at amazon.com, www.greeleyandstone.com, and brick-and-mortar bookstores.]
or any other racist who ever walked the face of the earth, but your statement below is one of two things.
It is either a disingenuous misstatement or it shows that you are not intelligent enough to warrant any attention whatsoever.
Here it is:
When I read this my immediate reaction was “Please. Ford could have cared less about the few individual Jews who had played professional baseball during its early years. His obsession was with Jews and money, Jews and the Northern European culture. Business and Aryan superiority, not ballplayers.”
It took me about 2 minutes to find one of his articles that conclusively proves what I am saying.
Jewish Degradation of American Baseball
A cursory reading of that article proves my point. He was saying that “Jews” were taking over baseball as a business, not that there were too many Jews playing baseball. And he was further saying that those “Jews” were debasing the game and turning it into a shell of its former self. Ford blames the Black Sox World Series scandal on Arnold Rothstein…a commonly held idea, right or wrong (I think it’s quite correct, myself.)…and then conflates that and the presence of a couple of other Jews in the business into part of his totally obsessive, paranoid worldview about “The International Jewish Conspiracy.” I am sure that I could find some of his other writings about other races and cultures as well. “Black people are stupid, Italians are slimy gangsters, Catholics want to take over the world,” etc., etc., etc.
Yes he was an anti-semite, among many other things. He was worse than that. But to prove that point one merely has to direct people to his writings. Why would you so strongly misdirect the meaning of what he wrote?
Again…my answer is that you are either not intelligent enough to understand the depth and complexity of his antisemitism or you are talking down to people for some reason. Either way…I’m calling you on it.
AG
P.S. A google search of the words “Henry Ford, who founded the company in 1903 that bears his family name, was an anti-Semite. When asked in 1920 what the problem with major league baseball was, Ford summed it up in three words–‘too much Jew.’ ” produces about 66 hits. You’ve been a busy, busy boy haven’t you Mr. Brasch? Why? hyping your book, I imagine. If it is either as misleading and/or as unitelligent as was this post, I’ll bet it’s a dull read.
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A recent comment of mine on a blog in France after this topic was mentioned – Murdoch Asked Petreaus to Run for US President. The elephants sent Roger Ailes to Petraeus, the donkeys sent Paula Broadwell. Of course the general has been called Betray us. Listen to the audio tape. Who has the last laugh?
Murdoch already has Hillary Clinton in his pocket book. It’s not domestic issues of interest to Murdoch, his great concern is the welfare of the state of Israel. In the new media, he sends some timely tweets on daily politics. Reminds me of the wealthy and powerful Henry Ford awarded $0.06 in a libel suit against the Chicago Tribune in 1919.
Power, Ignorance, and Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford and His War on Jews