“Young man,” Henry Ford snapped at a rural schoolhouse, “I invented the modern age.”This is, of course, a crazy quip. Or would be were it not pretty much true.
In honor of the Ford Motor Company actually finally releasing in early 22’ a cool, faithful retro reboot in the sharply designed Bronco (Chrysler Dodge beat them to it a long time ago with the Challenger back in 08’ and I can’t think of a recent design of theirs that is not total garbage say for the GT but this is a reboot as well though not a mass market one), we pivot to this great yet highly controversial AmeriKKKan legend-yet another white Anglo-Saxon style angry old man like Gilbert and Grapes but who can’t defend himself unlike them because he croaked a long time ago.
First, as a long suffering Detroit Lions (aka the Same Ol’ Lions-SOLs) fan (well, my whole life at least since I can recall pretty well going back to about age 7 w/Greg Landry under center so now ½ a century) I can argue he should be canceled forever ex post facto simply for fact that generations of his direct offspring who have allegedly owned and "run/managed" the SOLs solo since 1963-NOT the typical reason to do so in this day and age. They have arguably been the biggest No Fun League joke during that time w/only the Cleveland Browns being in the running based on wins and losses and pain and suffering and TVs destroyed during Sunday afternoons-but I digress.
And the fact that he never really seemed like a jovial gent (but he did dig square dancing-yee haw”!). But, for good or for bad or otherwise, he attained genius level due to him being universally recognized as the creator of the functioning mass production assembly line for cars and thus for a plethora of other products over time. And in particular, us AmeriKKKans love our automobiles, particularly our muscle cars of yore and lore, including yours truly, so we do owe a huge debt to him for our freedom to drive and ride without being hassled by the man, man. And arguably, he is Detroit, aka “Motown” as in the Motor City-his fingerprints are everywhere-my hometown was once called the “Paris of the Midwest” for about a ½ century starting in the roaring 20s until white flight in the 60s.
Yes, there are all those nasty anti-Semitic diatribes in his at one time nearly million circulation newspaper The Independent, which were published in the early 20s just after WWI when I guess those in both government and corporate power needed a new bogeyman after the war to order to sell the pulp and required paranoia-naturally this bashing of a “tribe” of people during that day and age was not an unpopular sentiment. And as we all know, the Jews were and have been the “go to” bogeyman until recent times for Whitey…(well, unless one is Arab-or Black or Asian, etc. but I digress yet again):
From the folks at thehenryford.org: …and least admirable aspect of Ford’s career was his descent into anti-Semitism. Convinced that “bankers” and “the Jews” were responsible for a whole range of things he didn’t like, from the world war to short skirts to jazz music, Ford used his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to carry on an active anti-Semitic campaign. Between 1920 and 1922 a series of articles denounced all things Jewish. While officially apologizing for the articles in 1927, Ford’s anti-Jewish sentiments ran deep.
And since our public school system of total indoctrination along with our mainstream mass media since the boom of daily newspapers around the turn of the 20th century has been implemented successfully over the past century or so, it looks like Henry was no dummy just like William Randolph Hearst when it came using a tabloid to push certain agendas-you can argue he was just ahead of his time-see Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch even if he did say of sorts that “history is bunk”.
After all, JD Rockefeller, who was the first US billionaire before Ford became the second, said ‘I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.’ And Ford delivered said workers to his factories-in droves of drones to put the widgets together and at the time generally the best prevailing wage over just a century ago-$5/day. So naturally he was not a fan of organized labor which should not be a controversial opinion even today as then but then again Marx is still taught as gospel in some of our ivory towers still to this day after being fully de”bunked” decades ago.
In short, again because you can’t judge the past by the present, while Henry’s thought crime of anti-Semitism back in the 20s was mostly publically denounced, with the money and power he had, well, he was pretty much untouchable. Heck, even Huxley decided to poke the bear in the early 30s when his dystopian novel, Brave New World, was published just as the 3rd Reich was taking hold in Germany.
In Aldous Huxley's dystopian society of Brave New World, the world dates its years as Annum Fordum, or "Year of Our Ford." Huxley's characters also use Henry's name as "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord."
Maybe he didn’t notice because after he got the assembly line perfected and the moola was rolling in on train boxes on the rails heading from River Rouge to Dearborn (where I went to elementary school for 5 years), perhaps he got bored because like a god, he came up with a new industrial utopian “place” dubbed Fordlandia starting in 1927-clearly named after himself like all powerful and deeply narcissist dudes do, deep in Brazilian Amazonia where the real rubber that hits the road resided. His mission was to get a monopoly on the tire business. The project was fully abandoned in 1934 after little success, tons of wasted funds and lots of worker revolts, disease, death etc. due to the harsh working conditions in the jungle-it was no “fun” indoor air conditioned factory assembly line.
Henry once said according to the Ford News "People are never so likely to be wrong as when they are organized. And they never have so little freedom. Perhaps that is why the people at large keep their freedom. People can be manipulated only when they are organized." Kudos Henry. You got them doing that for over a century now-5-6 shifts a week, day after day, month after month, year after year. So despite being a full on Heb Hater, you can’t really be canceled can you Hank? After all, you saved all kinds of US and personal HISTORY ironically at this massive museum complex at Greenfield Village in Dearborn Michigan for good and for bad or otherwise.
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