The 1929 Stock Market crash deeply affected the city of Detroit and the auto industry. A wave of poverty and unemployment began to move across the country and soon the consumer was no longer there. In four years the automobile marketplace lost ninety per cent of its previous business. Ford tried to keep the workers solvent and raised wages to $7 per day, but Model A sales weren’t there anymore, so the layoffs came. The mayor of Detroit, Frank Murphy, estimated in the early 1930s that a third of the 200,000 people in the bread lines were laid off by Ford’s factories alone. Unemployed citizens would wait hours for just a small ration of bread during the difficult economic times. The former employees of Ford were hungry and would even take to the streets with other unemployed workers in hunger marches. An article published in Fortune at the time noted that ‘Declining sales have changed Mr Ford from one of the greatest U.S. money-makers to one of the greatest money losers.’ Ironically, the very same Fortune magazine would name Henry Ford as businessman of the century in 1999.
Henry Ford hated the idea of a labour union. He hated that they were a challenge to his power and his absolute authority over the way he chose to run his factory.
Ford employed a young man named Harry Bennett, an ex-Navy man, to control the River Rouge factory floor with his gang of armed toughs that kept strict grips on the employees. Bennett was a small man at only 5ft 7in, and weighing a spry 145lbs. Ford wanted the 24-year-old to act as his muscle at his Rouge factory. The men there were gritty and tough to manage and Ford needed someone who answered directly to him that could strong-arm the employees into subservience. Bennett wasn’t a disappointment; he and his men ruled the plant with an iron fist and loaded weapons.
Bennett kept a basement office at the Rouge, which included a secret door that could be opened by using a button underneath his desk. In this secret room, Bennett and Ford would have their meetings, with a guarantee of the utmost privacy. Bennett was a company man through and through, once boasting, ‘I am Mr Ford’s personal man.’ His dedication to Henry Ford was second to none. ‘If Mr Ford told me to blacken out the sun tomorrow, I might have trouble fixing it. But you’d see a hundred thousand sons-of-bitches coming through the Rouge gates in the morning, all wearing dark glasses.’
Bennett played the role of a gentleman gangster, recruiting a variety of athletes, ex-military and even ex-cons to his Ford enforcement department, dubbed the Service Department. The men, adorned with suits, fedoras and guns, used the threat of physical violence to keep the workforce in check. The rules in the factories became strict and overbearing. The workers weren’t allowed to talk to each other or even sit down. The workers became accustomed to the absurd rules that they even learned to speak to each other without moving their lips, hoping to avoid a beating at the hands of Bennett and his men. The workers referred to it as the ‘Fordization of the face’.
The National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act, was passed in 1935. This new legal foundation gave workers the right to organise into unions, giving them the power to negotiate working conditions and wages. The Ford Motor Company was one of the last big companies to fight the unions. Bennett was authorised by Ford to take care of the union by any means necessary. The Service Department thugs attacked the union representatives when they came to the factory to hand out pamphlets. Images taken by photographers on the scene were soon published around the United States, showing evidence of the brutal nature of the battle that the unions were fighting. The restrictions in the Ford factory got out of control for a time. At one point, if men were seen talking in groups they were assumed to be unionising, were often beaten and subsequently fired. In April of 1941, 50,000 Ford workers protested outside the Rouge plant, pressing Ford to give in to the union demands for pay and conditions. Ford reportedly fumed that he would rather shut down his factory than give in to the union demands, but even Ford couldn’t ultimately stop the union. Ford’s son Edsel would step in as the voice of reason and strike a deal with the union, a move that Ford would resent.
Bennett became the trusted right-hand man of Henry Ford, which was likely a sore spot for his son, Edsel. When one man threatened Edsel’s life, Bennett assured him that he would handle the situation and the man turned up dead shortly thereafter. Bennett was clearly not a person to be crossed. Henry Ford eventually had Bennett spy on his son, who was living a lush extravagant lifestyle, which Ford hated. Edsel, an only son, soon began to see Bennett as a rival for his father’s affections, something that he gave out in very short supply as it was.
The Henry Ford who employed Bennett to control his workers was a far cry from the younger Henry Ford, who had been an eager pioneer and business mogul. No, this Ford was increasingly paranoid and angry. Ford felt that the world he knew was gone and that the country had lost control; he would often comment about how he yearned for yesterday. Ford didn’t mellow as he aged either, he continued to insist that the Jews were persecuting him and Edsel became concerned for his father’s state of mind and his ability to run the Ford Motor Company. Ford did suffer two mild strokes, one in 1938 and another in 1941; in 1945 however, he had another, far more severe, stroke that left him in a state of mental confusion. Edsel had died of stomach cancer on 26 May 1943, aged 49, so his son, Henry Ford II, took over as president of the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford died on 7 April 1947 at the age of 83.
Around a million Jews lived in the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century; half were located in New York City. This is a stark contrast to the previous Jewish population in America, which had been 50,000 only a half-century before. The population would continue to grow rapidly with 1.75 million Jews immigrating to America between 1900 and 1924. The power and influence of the Jewish community in society and in politics began to grow significantly during this time, as they began to represent 3.5 per cent of the American populace. This was a huge change from the less than 1 per cent that Jews had represented prior to this era. In fact, the primarily East Coast Jewish population was such a presence that when Theodore Roosevelt was running for his first full term presidency in 1904, his campaign released pamphlets in Yiddish.
The Jewish presence had become so noticeably large in America that by the time the First World War rolled around, the armed forces began to cater especially to the Jewish population, trying to incite them to get involved in the war effort. On 9 April 1917, the Jewish Welfare Board was established, a mere three days after America officially declared its war on Germany. The purpose of the JWB was to support Jewish soldiers during wartime and to recruit and train rabbis, in much the same way that priests and pastors were provided to support the Christian soldiers.
It was during the time between the First World War and the Second World War that anti-Semitism would grow rapidly in the United States. The conditions of the Great Depression would exacerbate the growing resentment, and even violence, towards the American Jewish population, due to a perception that wealthy Jews and Jewish bankers were responsible for the stock market crash.
Another major opposition to the Jews at the time was the Ku Klux Klan. The first rise of the KKK was reactionary following the loss of the South to the North in the American Civil War. The KKK would only last for five years during that volatile era of American history, but would rise again in 1915 and last all the way to 1944, near the end of the Second World War. The original incarnation of the KKK was directly opposed to African American leaders and advancement, and while the second version was no fan of African Americans, their focus was more on the recent immigrants to the United States, focusing on Jews and Catholics. The numbers of the Klan grew exponentially, clocking in at over 4 million, far surpassing the entire Jewish population of America at the time.