Henry Ford
Henry Ford
With Compliments of the Author
Francis O'Neill
June 1926
Biography:
Henry Ford, born in 1863 in rural Michigan, was one of the most significant figures of the early twentieth century. A relentless tinkerer, Ford focused his adult life on making automobiles affordable to ordinary people, and by 1908 he had perfected the techniques of large scale mass production. By 1916 he was making and selling nearly half a million copies of his Model T, available only in practical, no-nonsense black. His massive manufacturing plants produced nearly every part of the car.
O’Neill probably sent the book to Ford knowing that Ford’s grandfather, like O’Neill himself, hailed from West Cork. Before WWI Ford appeared in the press as a symbol of up-to-date modernity and creative efficiency. He hired African American workers when others would not, and he paid higher wages and instituted a forty hour work week, largely to stave off unionization. He had a “Sociological Department” that aimed to help immigrants assimilate to American culture: it stands in marked contrast to some of the anti-immigrant hostility common at the time. Ford also shared O’Neill’s fascination with the preindustrial past and had begun collecting artifacts of American rural life.
But Ford had a much darker side. After 1920, he became obsessed with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and bought a newspaper, the Dearborn, Michigan, Independent, to spread his message. Adolf Hitler, then on the rise in Germany, kept a picture of Ford in his office and praised Ford’s anti-Semitism in his autobiography. In 1926, when O’Neill sent Ford this copy of Irish Minstrels and Musicians, objections to Ford’s propaganda appeared often in Chicago newspapers.
Did O’Neill share any of Ford’s views? Sadly, O’Neill’s daughters destroyed his letters after he died. None of O’Neill's surviving letters show any signs of anti-Semitism whatsoever, and it does not appear in his scrapbooks, his known published writing, or in speeches and interviews.
[Biography by Mike O'Malley]
Bibliography:
Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews (NY, 2002)
For examples of Chicago newspapers covering Ford’s anti-Semitism see Chicago Tribune, Jan 31 1921 p. 13; May 19 1924 p. 12; Jan 8 1925 p. 3.
Provenance: From the research of Aidan O'Hara. Aidan has a larger work on this copy of O'Neill's Irish Minstrels and Musicians here:
