How Henry Ford, Who Published Racist Diatribes Against Jazz, Helped Popularize the Sound of Jazz and R&B

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Henry Ford playing fiddle with his old-time dance orchestra on his 70th birthday in 1933. (From the collections of The Henry Ford)

Henry Ford was unquestionably a great man, but he was not a very good man. As an entrepreneur and industrialist, he may have changed the world — for the better, I personally think — but as a human being he had serious failings. According to Richard Bak’s Henry and Edsel, the elder Ford would humiliate his son, Edsel, in public because Henry, a farm boy, worried that his only child would become the soft son of a rich man. That practice continued into Edsel’s adulthood.

Clara (Mrs. Ford) had to make her peace with Henry’s long-term relationship with Evangeline Cote Dahlinger, whom the industrialist met when he was 50 and she was 23 — his associate C. Harold Wills’ secretary at the Highland Park plant. Her son John Dahlinger asserted that he was the son of Henry Ford, whom he strongly resembled.

Ford’s public life was no less unsavory. His bigotries are well known. In his mind he divided the Jewish community between “good Jews” — those he personally knew, like architect Albert Kahn — and “bad Jews,” the boogeymen “bankers” of his fevered imaginations. Less well-known is the fact that many of the most hateful things attributed to Ford were not his own words.

Henry Ford was no writer. After foolishly suing the publisher of the Chicago Tribune for defamation, ignoring the old saying about not suing folks who buy ink by the trainload, Ford was shown, in a humiliating fashion on the witness stand, to not be a proficient reader. In guiding the development of the Model T, we know that Ford preferred wooden models of parts to blueprints. He may have been dyslexic. He certainly didn’t have the skills to write for publication.

Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work, was ghostwritten by Samuel Crowther.

The task of expressing Ford’s distrust of world Jewry fell to Ernest G. Liebold, Henry Ford’s personal secretary and general manager of The Dearborn Independent, the newspaper Ford used as his public megaphone. Liebold first came to Ford’s attention when, in 1912, Henry took over the small Dearborn bank where Liebold worked as a teller. The son of Prussian immigrants, he was precise, rigid, unemotional, and willing to do things that Ford wouldn’t ask his other associates to do (well, other than Harry Bennett). Over time his services to Ford included being his personal business representative, signing the automaker’s personal checks, responding to Ford’s mail, acting as Ford’s personal spokesman to the media, and, perhaps most importantly, controlling Ford’s schedule and who had access to him.

Liebold, like Ford, was also a man with Jews on the brain. He believed in Jewish conspiracies and, with Ford’s backing, set up an agency in New York City to investigate prominent Jews and those Gentiles he considered to be doing the bidding of Jewish masters. He surrounded himself with like-minded Jew-haters, an interesting mix of former government officials, ex-Secret Service men, czarist Russian emigres, fanatics, and ex-cons.

At the Dearborn Independent, Liebold began running a series under the heading of The International Jew, alleging all sorts of nefarious activities to those of the Mosaic persuasion. Jews supposedly had a “dictatorship” in the United States, where they maintained secret control of newspaper editors, bootlegged whiskey, Tammany Hall, and even major league baseball.

Liebold’s (and Ford’s) bigotries were not restricted to Jews. They saw blacks as inferior and criminal, though that, too, was blamed on Hebrews. The Independent blamed lynchings of blacks on “Negro outbursts” provoked by “n***** gin” allegedly produced by Jews.

One of African-Americans’ great cultural contributions to America and the world, jazz music, was also seen by Ford and Liebold as a Jewish plot*. Jewish Jazz – Moron Music – Becomes Our National Music, was published in the August 6, 1921 issue of the Dearborn Independent. Recorded music had been around since Edison’s 1877 wax-cylinder phonograph, and the “modern” Victrola that played Emile Berliner’s flat recordings was introduced in 1906. However, though the phonograph was a great success, in the 1920s much of what was considered popular music was still being sold as sheet music, and much of that originated from music publishing firms in New York City’s “Tin Pan Alley,” where many of the composers, lyricists, and publishers were from Jewish backgrounds.

From The International Jew:

“Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent parlors and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons… Popular Music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of cave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted to homes where the thing itself, unaided by the piano, would be stamped out in horror. Girls and boys a little while ago were inquiring who paid Mrs. Rip Van Winkle’s rent while Mr. Rip Van Winkle was away. In decent parlors the fluttering music sheets disclosed expressions taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of high school boys and girls.”

And you thought jazz was about improvising on a musical theme.

In addition to the less savory aspects of Henry Ford’s musical tastes, he had a genuine affection for the kinds of traditional music that many Americans played at home and at community events. Among Ford’s personal artifacts at the Henry Ford Museum are his Stradivarius and Guarneri violins that he used to play fiddle music.