Henry Ford is probably responsible for 21st century Americans having heard of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', as he had 500000 copies given away free to people who worked for him. Was he recognized as a crackpot in his lifetime? Were there repercussions for his opposition to entering WWII?

I am not aware of Ford actually handing out copies of the Protocols to his employees, couldn't verify it easily. But it may be someone is thinking of the Dearborne Independent. It was a newspaper Ford acquired in 1919, and it quickly became a platform for his views and was widely distributed, even nationwide. By 1920, Ford had started to become quite famous: he had introduced a new technology, affordable automobiles, very modern production methods, and was paying decent wages to his workers. He was the image of an American hero: self-made , self-educated , unpretentious , clever, hard-working, and wealthy. Some people wanted him for President, many wanted to hear what he had to say, and the Independent became a way for him to do that.

Ford was anti-Semitic, but not in the sense of being a Nazi: he had Jews working in his factories, and had a Jewish architect design them. When Jewish refugees were trying to flee Germany in the 1930's, he advocated letting them into the US ( unlike most US politicians) and when he later saw some of the film footage of the concentration camps, after WWII, it very probably hastened his decline and death.

If this seems contradictory, it is somewhat: Ford had many contradictions. But some of it was the fairly common anti-Semitism found in the rural US. The US currency was based on the gold standard. This was felt ( perhaps justifiably) to be hindering available credit to farmers , and giving Wall Street bankers and financiers greater leverage. When William Jennings Bryan campaigned for President on a Free Silver platform he gained great support from farmers, especially in the midwest and places like Michigan.

Although bankers like J.P. Morgan were anything but Jewish, the notion that there was an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world gold supply therefore had a ready audience in the rural US, and Ford was a Michigan farm boy who believed it ( another famous rural Michigander, Charles Lindbergh, had similar views). He also was very much focused his entire life on helping farmers ( both the tractor and the soybean industry can be credited to him). Fairly soon after Ford bought the Independent, he started talking about how the Jewish conspiracy was hindering the common man. He published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the paper and discussed them.

Almost immediately , in 1920, one of the paper's editors left in disgust. The other, William Cameron, would continue on. Ford's name didn't appear attached to the articles, but it is inconceivable that , given Ford's management style, anything in the paper wouldn't be written without his approval. The result was what we would now call a shit-storm, but not initially as big as you would think. Many of his Jewish employees must have been first and second generation Americans, and must have had plenty of experience , heard real stories, of real bigotry, if not pogroms, in Eastern Europe. Today, you would expect massive protests from the workers: his architect protested, but there were no strikes. It was before the Holocaust, and small-scale anti-Semitism was common enough: for example, landlords would often offer rooms only to "Christian" lodgers. Probably many recent Jewish immigrants simply shrugged it off. But the reaction did come: both Jewish newspapers like the Forward but also the New York Times ( Dec. 1, 1920) mocked and denounced it. Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, wrote against it: ex-Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Howard Taft signed petitions against it. An actual libel suit was filed by activist Aaron Sapiro in 1924, and though it was dodged by Ford lawyers for some time, eventually there was a trial and Cameron was forced to take the hit, testifying in court that Ford had nothing to do with the content of the paper. From this, and when the Anti-Defamation League started a Ford boycott , in 1927, Ford surrendered and closed the paper. He would disavow his views after the trial- but it's not clear how sincerely. The International Jew was much later given a second life in the Middle East, long after Ford's death, published for anti-Zionist readers.

Ford experienced the same repercussions for being opposed to the War as the other millions of people in the US did for being opposed: none. When it started, like them he pitched in. If anyone doubted he was sincere in the war effort, perhaps the Willow Run plant turning out a new B-24 bomber every hour allayed their fears.

Ford had, as I said, a lot of contradictions. He wanted to pay a living wage but was willing to employ a thug to run a goon squad to beat-up union organizers or anyone who might become one. He had a great deal of ingenuity and imagination when it came to creating his Model T, but became a barrier to innovation in his plants later, when the technology and markets changed. He created a lot of urban problems with his high-impact industrial plants, but seemed to feel that his workers only needed to pretend that they were all living in a small Michigan farm town. Steven Watt's The People's Tycoon is the best recent book on him, and offers perhaps the best approach to understanding him: thinking of him as various people, all named Henry Ford.