I just found out about how big of a white supremacist Henry Ford was, and I’m shocked. In school, I remember learning a ton about his car contributions and the assembly line, and when everyone talked about him it was as if he was some American hero.
To the contrary, he was the inspiration of Nazi Germany and so many other groups now causing trouble.
I’m curious why we haven’t learned about this?
Welcome to history! At times it can seem as though half the world is applying gold leaf to portraits of their heroes, and the other half has buckets of hot tar that they're ladling over them. Henry Ford has certainly gotten more than his share of both gold leaf and tar. This is not something new, however. He bought the Dearborn Independent , and in the 1920's he and his editors William Cameron and Ernest Liebold began writing and publishing articles about an international Jewish conspiracy, which Ford had felt was responsible for causing WWI. Ford was at the height of his popularity at the time, but there was a widespread outcry against the anti-Semitism of the articles, a defamation suit , and in 1929 Ford was forced to apologize and shut down the paper- but never really admitted his part, and instead faulted Cameron for it- even though Cameron was certainly following Ford's instructions. Ford's anti-Semitic ideas were similar those of another rural Michigander, Charles Lindburgh, and likely in part came from widespread beliefs among midwestern farmers about Wall Street bankers.
On the other hand, like Lindburgh, Ford didn't think he was anti-Semitic: he employed Jews at his factories and had a Jewish architect who designed them ( and was surprised when that architect reproached him). He certainly had factories in Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power but he had no love for the Nazis and they, not he, had control of them during the War. He was in favor of allowing Jewish refugees into the US in the 1930's when most politicians were against it, and it was the viewing of film footage of the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 that seems to have been the final blow to his already deteriorating mental state.
It might be annoying to hear historians constantly say that something is complicated. But Ford really was complicated. He wanted his workers to have a living wage, but he employed a thug, Harry Bennett, to have free rein in his factory to have union organizers rooted out and even beaten up. In his huge economies of scale he built giant factories that employed thousands of workers of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities and created a dense urban landscape: yet he hated the dense urban landscape, mocked foreign accents, and thought everyone should live like they were in a small colonial-era village, going to church and attending square dances (and of course everyone in that ideal small village was White, like him). He embraced the ideal of family life, but was a genuinely terrible father to his son Edsel and a dictator to his wife. He innovated the development of both the farm tractor and the soybean industry- even gave grants to African-American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver- yet he resisted making any great changes to his Model T for years until finally forced to do so by his son and engineers.
Ford had so many contradictions that when Steven Watts wrote a biography of him, he decided to write about several people named Henry Ford. It was not a bad approach: one chapter for gold leaf; another chapter for tar.
Watts, S. (2006). The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Illustrated ed.). Vintage.
Hi there! You’ve asked a question along the lines of ‘why didn’t I learn about X’. We’re happy to let this question stand, but there are a variety of reasons why you may find it hard to get a good answer to this question on /r/AskHistorians.
Firstly, school curricula and how they are taught vary strongly between different countries and even different states. Additionally, how they are taught is often influenced by teachers having to compromise on how much time they can spend on any given topic. More information on your location and level of education might be helpful to answer this question.
Secondly, we have noticed that these questions are often phrased to be about people's individual experiences but what they are really about is why a certain event is more prominent in popular narratives of history than others.
Instead of asking "Why haven't I learned about event ...", consider asking "What importance do scholars assign to event ... in the context of such and such history?" The latter question is often closer to what people actually want to know and is more likely to get a good answer from an expert. If you intend to ask the 'What importance do scholars assign to event X' question instead, let us know and we'll remove this question.
Thank you!