Rosika Schwimmer's Entaglement with Henry Ford

Debunking Henry Ford's Abuse of Schwimmer and the Pacifist Movement.

Rosika Schwimmer was strong as a pacifist, and a feminist, but she was weak in her politics as a Jew.  Thus when she saw the evidence of Henry Ford's anti-Semitism, early on, she failed to be sufficiently self-protective, protective of the Jewish people who were being maligned, or protective of the pacifist movement she was representing.  She ended up wishing she had never met Ford.  And the pacifist movement, also, wished the same thing, that she had never met him and that they had never met him. 

 

This happened a century ago, in the early Twentieth Century.   

Rosika Schwimmer and Louis Lochner had sought out Henry Ford with a specific project in mind, and a specific financial role for him to play, in a telegram campaign,  but they came away with something else, because Henry Ford was a major mega-power-tripper.

 

There was already a  war in Europe, then called the Great War, later called World War I.  Many people wanted to keep this war from spreading, and the pacifist movement was leading a broad coalition to amplify this voice.  Schwimmer and her colleagues wanted to keep the United States out of this war.  They also wanted to bring the warring parties in Europe to the negotiating table, while the war was still going on, rather than wait for a military victory and an unconditional surrender.  They wanted to bring about a softer and sooner ending to the war, through continuous mediation.

 

Rosika Schwimmer and Louis Lochner met with Ford and his entourage at Dearborn, Michigan, and they asked him to sponsor thirty thousand telegrams to President Wilson, urging him to keep the U.S. out of the war, and to support continuous mediation among the combatant parties.  They had the wording of the telegram worked out, and they assured Ford they had the thirty thousand ready signers, if he would pay the bill.  Thirty thousand people  seemed quite a larger number, in those days, and a telegram had a connotation of priority and urgency.  The sending of this massive telegram, or barrage of telegrams, would coincide with the start of an international peace conference in Sweden, which was promoting the same platform.

 

It may have made good sense to approach Henry Ford with this project because he had recently publicly expressed his opposition to the spread of the war, and he was already well known and had an heroic stature, and had as well the financial resources.  However, the telegram project got lost, and what emerged instead was a disaster known as the Ford Peace Ship. 

 

What do I think actually happened in that meeting?  I think that when Schwimmer and Lochner presented their telegram idea, which was a large scale idea for its day, 1914, Ford went into a competitive gear, and did his classic move to increase scale  many fold.

 

On another occasion, on a camping trip, Ford's friend Harvey Firestone said he had just bought 400 acres in Brazil to grow rubber trees.  The next time they went camping, Ford announced he had just bought eight hundred thousand acres in Brazil to grow rubber trees, and build "a Ford city" experiment.  Ford had the world's longest production line. Ford had the world's largest private police force.  In five years, Ford would massively escalate the production of anti-Semitic literature.  Henry Ford had developed the mass production of cars, but he was also  Mr. mega-size many a thing.  And when he heard the pacifists in his office talking about thirty thousand telegrams, he went into gear competing with them, and sold them on a Peace Ship.

 

This was something bigger and bolder than their telegrams.  He would charter a ship that would transport the delegates and celebrities from the U.S. to the conference in Sweden.  This would garner them more publicity than the telegrams.  However, when this went into reality, their program  was lost.  The ideas of continuous mediation among the warring parties, and no expansion of the war --  these ideas were lost in the diffused and distracted attention of the press. 

 

Henry Ford's foolish and naïve statements regarding the war became a focus.  Bickering on the ship, and the alleged personality flaws of Schwimmer, seemed more interesting than the serious proposals being made to end the war. Schwimmer was cast as someone who had duped a gullible Ford into a fiasco.               

 

So Ford's promise of more publicity was a sorry joke.  Moreover, most of the original celebrities envisioned for the voyage either declined or backed out.  Also, while Ford technically did pay for the charter of the Oscar II,  the organizers were stuck with a stack of related bills which they kept submitting to him for reimbursement, for which they were never reimbursed. 

 

They all wished they'd never met him.  But it was not at all over yet for Rosika Schwimmer. The worst was yet to come.

 

Seven years after the Peace Ship fiasco, when Ford was conducting his massive propaganda crusade against the Jews, in the pages of the Dearborn Independent, he was asked by a reporter about the origin of his interest in anti-Semitism.  Ford claimed that he was introduced to anti-Semitic thinking by a prominent Jew on the Peace Ship.  This Jew, according to Ford, had said the war they were opposing had been caused by Jews, and Jewish bankers.

 

He made these remarks after already having published two years of the Dearborn Independent's  anti-Semitic crusade, and thereby losing his entire credibility on the subject of  the Jews.  No one should have given any credibility to this remark, and yet people widely did.  Many people reasoned:  the two prominent Jews on the Peace Ship had been Herman Bernstein and Rosika Schwimmer.  Herman Bernstein was well known as a journalist and as the editor of a Yiddish daily paper, Der Tag, and he would never have said such a thing. Bernstein had published a pamphlet exposing the fraudulent history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Ford had excerpted and utilized throughout his Dearborn propaganda.  So nobody thought the prominent Jew could be Bernstein.

  

But here some people made a mistake, thinking, then, it must be Schwimmer.

 

Based on my research, what do I think was true?  I think that no Jewish person on board the Peace Ship ever suggested to Ford an anti-Semitic causation for the war, but instead, this interpretation was his.  He presented his interpretation at his first meeting with Schwimmer and Lochner, and they refuted it, or showed him briefly what was wrong in his thinking. They explained to him, the causes of a war are several and complex, and are not at all about the Jews or anything Jewish.  Schwimmer and Lochner both corrected him, at their first meeting, and they thought their correction was sufficient to educate him.  But not so.

 

The causes of the war included the system of alliances and antagonisms between monarchs, who were cousins having family fights into which they dragged their nations and their allies.  The causes of the war included an assassination. The causes of the war included a feature of capitalism, in which power and decision-making are in the hands of the mighty few, thus tempting profiteering from a war economy. That only men exercised political power and women were just acquiring the right to vote, this was also considered a factor that favored militarism, rather than more civil dealings among nations.   I'm saying, these were the contentions of the coalition that was working to stop the spread of the European war, and trying to bring about its conclusion through negotiations.

 

When Ford made his remark that a prominent Jew on the Peace Ship had introduced him to anti-Semitic thinking, he was lying.  He was introduced to anti-Semitism in his childhood, more than once, including  by a grandfather who believed the Jews had caused the Civil War in the United States -- because Jewish merchants had in fact sold goods to both sides.  This reasoning was bizarre for its confused attribution of causality, as well as prejudiced and ignorant. But Ford built on this and eventually became a mass producer of it. 

 

Ford's defamation of Rosika Schwimmer was made by innuendo, and therefore she had no standing to sue him.  Yet according to Naomi Sheppard, an Israeli sociologist, she did sue a reporter who repeated this calumny, explicitly naming Schwimmer and treating the allegation as if true.  Sheppard has several pages about Schwimmer in her book about Jewish radical women in the early Twentieth Century.  She says that Schwimmer pleaded repeatedly with Ford to take back his remark, and one of these attempts was a letter published in the New York Times in 1927. 

 

Ford had just closed the  Dearborn Independent and  given a pseudo-apology to the Jews. Schwimmer wanted a clearing of her name, specifically, which of course she never got.  This 1927 letter reveals that Schwimmer still regarded Ford as a sincere pacifist, a man with many failings and one redeeming quality in her eyes.  But the nature of Ford's pacifism is debatable.  Ford talked a pacifist line, but did not walk the walk.  

Ford spouted pacifist rhetoric, and he may have liked the sound of it.  He would rather give a man a tractor than a rifle, Ford said.  But as Anne Jardim  said in her biography of Ford as a businessman, he seemed to have no conviction behind this rhetoric.  Twice he converted his massive manufacturing empire exclusively to war production.  Ford claimed not to have received a penny in profit from war production, but Jardim, as well as the official history of Ford Motor Company, assert that this is simply not true.  

Roskia Schwimmer, who did have conviction behind her pacifist words, was not able to see through Ford's insubstantial version of pacifism, and this constitutes another blunder on her part.  However, she was not alone in this blunder.  In the early 1980's,

a paper place mat at McDonald's restaurant, entitled "Great Americans" identified Henry Ford as an auto manufacturer and pacifist -- an example from popular culture showing the persistence of this myth.       

    

Ford was real as an anti-Semite, but created an unreal image of himself as a pacifist.  Schwimmer was real as a pacifist.  She had conviction and courage behind her rhetoric.  When Schwimmer, an Hungarian originally, applied for U.S. citizenship, after living here for many years, she jeopardized her own application by honestly discussing her pacifism in answering one of the questions.  She was denied citizenship.