Clarence W. Barron, considered the "founder of modern journalism", and after which the Barron's investor magazine is named, wrote the following (emphasis mine):^1
Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.
Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If you believe in democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is the poison that destroys democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all. Socialism holds out the hope that a man can quit work and be better off. Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if you will read the interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of January that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German sympathizers, Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of the college professors in the United States are teaching socialism and Bolshevism and that fifty-two college professors were on so-called peace committees in 1914. President Eliot of Harvard is teaching Bolshevism. The worst Bolshevists in the United States are not only college professors, of whom President Wilson is one, but capitalists and the wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they are talking about. William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet convert Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is Charles R. Crane. Many women are joining the movement and neither they, nor their husbands, know what it is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and so are most of those one hundred historians Wilson took abroad with him in the foolish idea that history can teach youth proper demarcations of races, peoples, and nations geographically.
Ford also built a plant in Gorki, USSR. Yet, Ford's portrait hung in Hitler's office, he received the highest medal, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, and he printed 500,000 copies of the forged document "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Ford was later found to be using slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp as well. Why did Ford materially support the USSR if he believed the country was controlled by jews, and he was an open anti-semite? Even if you believe personal and monetary gain was the motive, it does not make sense, because Barron apparently had reason to believe Ford was a Bolshevist ideologue.
1. Arthur Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, They Told Barron (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), pp. 13-14.
There's a few things going on here, so I think we need to back up a little.
First, this book, They Told Barron, was published two years after Barron's death, "edited and arranged" by Pound and Moore. So this is not a work that Barron intended to be published, and these sorts of 'as told to' exposes were quite popular in Interwar America, but not necessarily accurate (I'm thinking of the legal troubles Rose Wilder Lane ran into for her 'interviews' with Charlie Chaplin and Herbert Hoover that were largely fictional). I'm not saying that is happening here, but it's worth being somewhat skeptical of the provenance and accuracy.
Next, the text is notsaying that Barron believed Ford was a "Bolshevist". This diary account is recounting a conversation he had with "Doheny", who believed that Ford was. Who is this Doheny? Most likely it's Edward L. Doheny, an oil baron from California who was the rough template for Daniel Day Lewis' character in There Will Be Blood.
Also note who else Doheny is calling 'Bolshevist": President Woodrow Wilson; Charles William Eliot, who was President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; Frank Vanderlip, President of National City Bank of New York (the future Citibank), and Charles R. Crane, a wealthy oil heir who was a donor to the Wilson campaign and involved in Wilsonian diplomacy (and who later would get into hot water for favorable comments about Hitler). Also notice that Doheny is singling out 'peace committees',pacifists and socialists, who in the 1919 context would have been groups opposed to US participation in the First World War. Basically Doheny is listing a who's who of notable progressive figures connected to Wilson, and groups further to the left, and smearing them all as being in league with Bolsheviks (who in the context of February 1919 were a rag-tag group clinging to power in the Russian Civil War, but with an upsurge in strikes and industrial action in the United States after the end of the war in 1918 were thought to be destabilizing American society - this would lead to the "Red Scare" of 1919).
So why is Doheny including Ford among this number? Ford during the First World War was inclined to pacifism, and was drafted by Wilson into politics. In 1918 he was picked to run as Democratic candidate for one of the Michigan Senate seats, in an attempt to elect a Senate favorable to Wilson's to-be-negotiated peace plans. Ford lost by some 4,500 votes, and in the event the Senate majority was Republican.
So Doheny seems to be making a very partisan Republican internationalist stance against a variety of political opponents, including Ford, that would have been prominent on the scene in 1919. Henry Cabot Lodge or Theodore Roosevelt might not have put the issue in quite these terms, but they presumably would qualify as red-blooded American allies in Doheny's view.
As for Ford's investment in the USSR: Ford Motor Company did invest in a mass production facility in Nizhni Novgorod (then Gorky) in 1929, using plans based off of the River Rouge facility. Note that this is ten years after the quote given. It's also worth noting that US investment in the USSR in that year was not restricted to Ford Motors, but also included major investments by DuPont, US Steel, Caterpillar, and many others, plus investments by French, Italian and British firms. The USSR was especially open to foreign direct investment at the start of the First Five Year plan in 1929, and with the Crash of 1929 and the worsening Depression, foreign firms were willing to risk the investment and business in the USSR. This had little to do with their collective opinions on Soviet communism, and at the time Stalin in interviews with foreign journalists would go so far as to single out the US for praise.
So there is a great deal more that can be said about Ford's political beliefs and his controversial connection with Nazi Germany. But I just wanted to ground the text being cited, and note what it is saying, who is doing the saying, and what it is implying, rather than stating.