Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch Read Free Book Online

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    America never found out exactly what Ford’s facts were, and despite his campaigning the country did go to war in 1917, following the sinking by a German U-boat of the passenger liner Lusitania . By the time the U.S. doughboys were on their way home from Europe, there were new enemies for the celebrated industrialist to fight. There was, above all, Bolshevism, the negation of everything Ford believed in.
    Ford, though a diffident man, did not believe in the quiet use of financial muscle. One lesson that he took from his antiwar campaign was that he could not rely upon the existing press to get his message over. Indeed, he was locked in a multimillion-dollar libel suit with one of the most powerful, the Chicago Tribune . Ford had also won the Michigan primary for the Republican presidential nomination in 1916 without ever agreeing to stand. It seemed to him that if he reached the people directly then he was likely to achieve political success. He was ever the innovator, and the solution seemed clear to him: he would become his own press, start his own newspaper. So in January 1919, the Dearborn Independent (Dearborn was the location of the first Ford plant) was launched, featuring, among the usual things, “Mr. Ford’s Own Page.” Promoted by Ford dealers throughout America, the Dearborn Independent soon had a print run of 300,000.
    Initially, the newspaper manifested interest in the concerns of its readers, whom it took to be the hardworking folks of America and their families. But it wasn’t long before “Mr. Ford’s Own Page” was fulminating against the specter of Bolshevism and its threat to the American way of life. In April 1919, the paper printed an article about Russian Bolshevism, commissioned from a Russian exile, Boris Brasol, who had made an acquaintance of Henry Ford’s personal secretary, Ernest Liebold. 15 Four weeks later, Liebold had his own article published, pointing out the “deep and sinister” role played in creating the conditions for the First World War by “financial interests.” Like a Ford car, the components were being assembled by different people. Soon they would be put together, and the thing would begin to move.
    It took a year or so for the various themes—the Americanization of immigrants (120,000 Jews arrived in the United States in 1920), the greed of the great bankers (with special mention of the Rothschilds), and the threat of alien Bolshevism—to coalesce. When they did, the impact was huge. On May 22, 1920, and for ninety-one successive weeks after that, the Dearborn Independent devoted itself to campaigning on what it called “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”
    The starting point of this sustained campaign was a folksy “just askin’ ” stance. The observable fact was, as the paper put it, “a sparse Jewish ingredient of three per cent in a population of 110 million—attaining in fifty years a degree of control that would be impossible to a ten times larger group of any other race.” 16 How, the Dearborn Independent wanted to know, had such a remarkable state of affairs come about? What special and specific qualities did the Jewish people have? What did such minority power mean for the majority of Gentiles? Week by week, the paper went through various aspects of life and politics, naming the chosen people wherever it found them and becoming a veritable Jew’s Jew in America. Sometimes the tone was plaintive. In an article about the music business, for example, the author lamented that once upon a time, “composers like Victor Hebery and Gustav Kerker” had been popular, “but now the Irving Berlins have forced themselves into places hewn out and established by Gentiles who had a regard for art.” A regard that Mr. Berlin, we may deduce, did not have. Sometimes the tone was cross, as when noting that Jewish control of the movie industry had made it impossible to show a film called The Life of the Saviour because it