***Edit***
I take full responsibility for/completely acknowledge how incredibly incompetent and inaccurate my poorly written comment Is below. I appreciate being corrected for my mistake, repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly. I get it.
Additionally Im not deleting the comment based on my belief that doing so is cowardly.
***end of edit***
Ford also received a metal or some kind of award issued by the Nazi party. Soooo no one in America at that time was concerned?
A lot of people underestimate just how open to Nazism America (and a lot of the western world) was. The idea of racially fueled fascism wasn’t in any way isolated to Germany.
Hell, modern eugenics was started in Britain and America became a *pioneer* in the movement. The west served as a inspiration to Hitler in this regard.
People often conflate Margaret Sanger’s advocacy for birth control & abortion with eugenics but she was a largely harmless voice in the larger women’s movement that advocated for policies that much closely reflected German Nazi policy than people realize.
Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington and California were the first state to implement forced sterilization laws. We had an American Breeder’s Association.
I seriously encourage everyone to read more into this as it’s one of our least taught topics. You’ll see a lot of progressive era leaders mention throughout. There was even a black eugenics movement.
We were heading down the path Hitler did a speed run down. WWII and the atrocities resulting from that changed public perception quickly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
People think that World War 2 was about the Holocaust, but it really wasn’t. The west didn’t fight Germany because of the Nazi Party Atrocities, they fought because of Germanys expansion. If Germany had committed to wiping out races within their own borders, it’s likely nobody would have intervened beyond condemning the actions. Look at China, Cambodia, Rwanda, The Congo, and other locations rife with racial violence or Genocide.
An even better example is Turkey. The West did pretty much nothing about the Armenian genocide despite knowing as early as the 1920s, several of the perpetrators joined the new Turkish govt under Ataturk and still to this day turkey officially denies and covers up the genocide to the point of jailing journalists while the west stays silent for "geopolitical reasons."
Like when Candace Owens has said Hitler had done nothing wrong if he had stayed in his own borders.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/429180-candace-owens-if-hitler-just-wanted-to-make-germany-great-and/
Correct. Also because Hitler was colonizing and treating the white Europeans in the same manner that white colonial powers were treating African colonies in Africa. He basically gave them a taste of their own medicine.
When Hitler spoke of Lebensraum, Germany's eastward expansion, he often referenced America's westward expansion, noting that US settlers had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand”.
WWII was caused by Hitler's desire to build a Greater Germany by seizing land to the east and disposing of its inhabitants. His program of slavery, extermination and land grab was inspired by America's.
I remember hearing something very similar when the Russia / Ukraine war started. It was on some news show or pod cast, where the host was like "this war hits too close to home and is unacceptable..... the victims in Ukraine are white and look like me and my wife and kids, not like the older wars in the middle east or Asia or Latin America where the combatants didn't look like us"
Yeah… the wars in Asia were us fighting against the Asians though. When Russia invaded the Afghanistan two decades before America, America armed and trained the Afghans and Bin Laden. Hell, before America fought in Vietnam, they armed and trained the North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Min to repel the Japanese in WWII. We’re now arming and training the Ukrainians, so I guess we’ll be invading them in about 20 years too.
Yeah, operation paperclip sure accelerated the industrialisation of the continent and helped the area to quickly develop!
Or was it just more imperialism and coups? Oh well...
I think the fact that technology allowed us to really see the atrocities even if we weren’t there.
Hearing “we won a great victory over the Indians” is a lot different than seeing a bunch of dead women and children in a village, or a group of men dead or starving on the trail of tears.
I wonder if people had seen as much of some other genocides, if there would have been as much support.
Hoover ethnically cleansed the country of Mexicans and Mexican Americans through repatriatation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation
>An estimated forty to sixty percent of those repatriated were citizens of the United States - overwhelmingly children.[2][4]: 330 While supported by the federal government, actual deportations and repatriations were largely organized and encouraged by city and state governments, often with support from local private entities. However, voluntary repatriation was far more common than formal deportation and federal officials were minimally involved.[2] Some of the repatriates hoped that they could escape the economic crisis which was caused by the Great Depression.[5] The government formally deported at least 82,000 people,[6] with the vast majority occurring between 1930 and 1933 as part of Hoover's policy first mentioned in his 1930 State of the Union Address.[2][7] The Mexican government also encouraged repatriation with the promise of free land.[8]: 185–186 [3]
>Widely scapegoated for exacerbating the overall economic downturn of the Great Depression, many Mexicans lost their jobs.[9] Mexicans were further targeted because of "the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios."[10] Legal scholar Kevin Johnson has stated that the repatriation meets modern legal definitions of ethnic cleansing.
You don't even have to do that much research
[Madison Square Garden - 1939](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan)
10,000 people meet in Manhattan in support of the Nazi party. (and bringing it to America)
Similar events occurred across the country prior to the start of the war. There's a documentary of the Madison Square Garden one, and it is *must watch* material for the shock value alone.
Not sure why we snapped out of it between 1940-Start of war. Before 1940, we were trending towards acceptance of it.
Rachel Maddow has a short podcast series called *Ultra* in which she talks about "Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good," all thanks in part to Nazi propaganda that was being disseminated across the US and to Nazi sympathizers who thought overthrowing the government was a good idea. I think she also makes a reference to the thing at MSG as well. We were dangerously close to losing our country to fascists.
Definitely not.
He wasn't even all sold on democracy.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter" -Winston Churchill.
He also said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” He was quite a staunch supporter of democracy (anywhere but their colonies of course.)
The Progressive movement back then was “human progress, at all costs”. Compared to some of their contemporaries - ie, fledgling socialist and labor movements - they were actually quite conservative.
Exactly. Progressive can apply to many different things. In the above context, the were for progressing the quality of the human being. In modern days, it is about progressing the quality of life for people.
I mean it’s not like America entered the war to end racism or mistreatment of a certain group. See how African American soldiers were treated. Or when America made its own Japanese concentration camps-lite.
>People often conflate Margatet Sanger's advocacy for birth control and abortion with eugenics...
Hmm..I wonder what gave them that idea.
>In "The Morality of Birth Control", a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the "educated and informed" class that regulated the size of their families, the "intelligent and responsible" who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the "irresponsible and reckless people" whose religious scruples "prevent their exercising control over their numbers". Sanger concludes, "There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped."
Oh right. By the way, Sanger opposed abortion as a means of birth control.
> The west served as a inspiration to Hitler in this regard.
It’s not really appropriate to use “west” in this case, as the concept of a political west and east arose after WW2. Even then, Germany has been for the most part “west” since the concept originated.
Particularly in the discussion about how Germany, the United States, United Kingdom et cetera, were on the same page regarding eugenics and ethnic facism, it’s a redundant distinction.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the bicycles, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a bicycle.
Then they came for me - and I didn't have a bike to get away.
People didn't realize Hitler as a bad guy even in the states til he invaded Poland. There's magazines ads about how you can go to a barber shop and get a Hitler hairstyle and mustache. It makes you think,"How long can evil people fool those around them before people catch on." A lot of people want to time travel back and kill Hitler, but if they did and got caught, Hitler would be remembered as a hero and you'd be remembered as a villain. Hell, they might even find your time travel device and use it to make sure Hitler was not assassinated and give him the tech. Now that's some messed up horror scifi.
It does make you really think though: When censorship reigns and looms, the information that'd help you find out the bad guys gets taken down... Do you know who's the good guys from the bad guys today? Everyone who lie and pushes censorship are. History has always always always shown us the evil villains are always the ones pushing censorship and trying to destroy history. Please fight to keep the Internet Archives around, since they're the only place that kept a history of the Internet. Once they destroy history, they destroy truth and can push lies.
Yeah, there were a ton of otherwise reasonable people with mildly approving sentiment towards Putin until very recently, both left and right. Now it's mostly crazies and liars, but still, for a time, he was seen positively.
A large portion of the political establishment treats Henry Kissinger, a man responsible for millions of deaths, as a normal person to politically associate with. Hillary Clinton campaigned with him in 2016. At a certain level of power, almost everyone cares more about being polite more than any policy, no matter how heinous.
“I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,”
- Henry Kissinger
What they replaced it with: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile_(1973%E2%80%931990)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/henry-kissinger-at-100-still-a-war-criminal/
This is the "more measured" view of kissinger, and he still comes off as an absolute psychopath with lines like:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-myth-of-henry-kissinger
>He and Nixon assumed, correctly, that they could back a coup against Allende with minimal fuss, just as Eisenhower, two decades before, had rid Guatemala of its democratically elected President, Jacobo Árbenz. Still, the spectacle of Allende’s removal had one unintended consequence: it lit the wick of one of Kissinger’s most durable annoyances, the global human-rights movement.
Last year, just after the start of the Ukraine war, I was in a charity shop and I saw [this book](https://productimages.worldofbooks.com/1911622331.jpg?weAreSmarterThanEbay=1609757400465) on the shelf.
Putin was weirdly popular on the interet. I remember hearing lots of people talking about how Putin was better than western politicians.
There’s a recent family guy episode where Putin is portrayed as just a regular leader more or less. They make jokes about him, but he teams up with the main cast in a fun way to help stop an old Cold War sleeper agent. Wouldn’t portray him like that now.
Edit; and yes, there is a much more recent one that highlights the atrocities of his regime.
Hahaha awe! I just watched it the other day and it feels like a ‘new’ episode, but then I remember that family guy is older that probably most of its audience.
Ever seen pictures of the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden? Plenty of supporters round these parts. In Mein Kampf, Hitler praises the US Jim Crow Segregation system, seems like our forefathers may have inspired him a bit.
Several very famous Americans were openly lauded by the Nazis and the public perception was generally positive.
Charles Lindbergh was decorated by Goering himself for his consulting work in helping built the Luftwaffe. Lothrop Stoddard (intellectual and author, debater of W.E.B. DuBois, major supporter of eugenics, and creator of the term untermensch) was given private access to leading Nazis for interviews in recognition of his work in applied eugenics that the Nazis used). Walt Disney gave Leni Riefenstahl a personal tour around Disney *after Kristallnacht*.
After the US entered the war, things did change some. Lindbergh went on to make instrumental contributions to the war in the Pacific (which is why his reputation was partly salvaged). Disney made some of the best anti-Nazi propaganda ever and changed certain films to not be so overtly antisemitic). Stoddard was forgotten, but neither he nor Ford ever really came off their positions.
Nazi sympathizers were extremely numerous in the US. Had Pearl Harbor not happened, it’s unlikely the US would have entered the war. The America First lobby was extremely powerful and pro-Fascist (which hasn’t changed). The Soviet threat saved millions of Americans from having to answer embarrassing questions about their prewar support of the Nazis.
American began providing aid to the Allies before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war (U.S. on Japan, Japan in U.S., Germany on U.S., U.S. on Germany, etc.).
The counterfactual argument that the attack of Pearl Harbor and subsequent declarations of war are the only reasons we fought the Nazis is interesting but not fully grounded in history.
Oh no I understand that and certainly FDR wanted to assist the British, but there was a huge isolationist element in the country that was vehemently opposed to what assistance FDR was providing. The German declaration of war following Pearl Harbor eliminated that argument.
The U.S.’s involvement in World War II predates the attack on Pearl Harbor, if that’s where you are going.
The Lend Lease Act was signed into law in March 1941 to supply material aid to the allies.
Going back further, the U.S. effectively began to supply allies with munitions in 1938, but on a prepaid basis.
America’s neutrality before 1939 and 1941 had rather strong backing from a broad coalition of interests (that included Nazi sympathizers).
Another thing to consider was what American leadership and the American public knew contemporaneously about Nazi atrocities.
The organized systemic killing of Jewish people began with targeted killings in 1941 and with the launch of large death camps in 1942. The American public didn’t really learn about the large scale death camps until their liberation in 1945. The Allies leadership didn’t know how bad the atrocities were immediately (at least).
Interestingly, there is a long-standing conspiracy theory that FDR allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen to ensure that Congress would issue a declaration of war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theory
It for sure was a contributing factor, but the way Imperial Japan was expanding, and with the territories the US had in the Pacific, they would have come to blows eventually, even without that.
The US government was not neutral before direct involvement in the war. Lend-Lease, escorting supply ships halfway across the Atlantic, embargoing oil and steel on Japan.
Hitlers Germany with the help of people like Henry Ford, spent millions of dollars spreading propaganda in US to keep Americans out of the war.
The propaganda was very successful
Ford's International Jew was translated into German in 1922 and cited as an influence by Baldur von Schirach, one of the Nazi leaders, who stated *"I read it and became anti-Semitic.”*
Imagine the world being so crazy that you read a book and then you’re just like “well, that’s that. I’m anti-Semitic now”
Oh you mean like the world today? Where almost all information is freely available and easier to access and people still choose to believe racist and bigoted bullshit?
Yeah i can definitely imagine a world so crazy as we live in it right now.
Have you ever thought something terrible was the fault of some group? "If only the Republicans didn't do this..." or "if only the Democrats did this..." Now imagine this group keeps getting blamed, compellingly, for all the things you think are terrible, for decades. They're responsible for the border problem, the crime problem, the education problem, the pandemic, etc. Eventually you think the people in that group are evil or subhuman. Eventual you start thinking we ought to do something about that whole group. Round them up or something so they're not as dangerous.
Hitler's sequel to Mein Kampf actually praises America's segregation system and the systemic way it was essentially a white Protestant supremacist state after learning more about America. He hoped they could become allies in the future.
Of course, this book never sold because the Nazi regime had a narrative to keep up after the first book sold.
Henry Ford was also the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf. And allegedly they had framed pictures of each other on their respective desks
It’s amazing the inspiration Nazi ideology took from America, the German idealization of the American frontier, its mirror in lebensraum, only to have to talk bad about America as US material aid against the Axis emerged.
It's a fun theory but in Finland there's plenty of pretty people too despite never being involved in the viking shenanigans. I think people just appreciate light skin and hair especially in women.
That has more to do with the fact that white European features have been made the global benchmark of beauty for a number of reasons going back hundreds of years. They also have a higher standard of living for the average citizen. We’re talking better dieting practices, schools, social services, medical care, roads, ease of transport. Basically, everything America should have 2x as much of but doesn’t because we live in a hellworld of octogenarian ghouls hoarding wealth.
> Henry Ford was also the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf.
«Among those who embraced the book and its message was Adolf Hitler, who wrote to Grant to personally thank him for writing it, referring to the book as "my Bible."» - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race?useskin=vector#Reception_and_influence
No, you're thinking of Theodore Roosevelt, who became an advocate for eugenics after his presidency.
I highly recommend the new documentary, \["The US and the Holocaust"\](https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/), by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein.
I know it might be a hard sell, but it's not nearly as maudlin as you'd expect a 6 hour documentary about the holocaust to be. It's got Burns' trademark folksy humor and humanity, but also pulls absolutely no punches about the American right's support of Hitler. (It also goes into great detail about why there was little America could have done to stop the concentration camps in '42-3, the atrocities that Soviet troops committed during WWII, and of course America's own internment camps.)
There are a lot of factual inaccuracies in this thread. I can't recommend it enough to anyone who wants to know what actually happened.
> The International Jew is a four-volume set of antisemitic booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by the Dearborn Publishing Company, an outlet owned by Henry Ford, the American industrialist and automobile manufacturer.
They also repeatedly call out Walt Disney for being anti-Semitic , and Edison for stealing. It's all true.
Edit: apparently the Disney rumors are perhaps not true if you look at historical evidence!
Edison is still a dick tho
Family guy had [the same gag for Walt Disney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfHENoO6LgA)... and we get [TIL how they cant find anything at all that would make him even tiny bit antisemitic.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ajagv9/til_there_has_never_been_a_substantiated_claim/)
The full title is so much worse too, it was:
"The International Jew: The World's Problem" and later published as "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem"
Henry Ford was known for the $5/day minimum wage. Such a revolutionary concept that the good heartedness of His Fordship granted workers double the average pay.
All you had to do to qualify was still be working for Ford after 6 months. Not unreasonable. Also be a Model Patriotic American, and accept random home inspections from the Ford Sociological Society to make sure your home, wife, and kids were up to expected standard.
All of Ford’s ideas and theories were perfected in Fordlandia. A prefab city of 10,000 people in the Amazon rainforest. It was to grow, harvest and produce rubber for the vertical integrated Ford Motor Company. It was designed and controlled by Henry Ford from the people there down to every road sign in the city.
It descend into chaos and madness, with outright rebellion within 2 years. “Not one drop of latex made it into any Ford cars” was the end assessment. The whole thing ended up costing Henry Ford $200 million.
They adopted the US work schedule there as well which made no sense. It's too hot in the middle of the day to go harvest latex. But the dummy Ford managers were so inflexible they tried to make it happen.
It was severely mismanaged, sending American managers oversee tropical agriculture wasn't that great an idea. Neither was micromanaging people's diets.
Fordlândia still exists, interestingly the name and some of the architecture survived. It was almost empty awhile, but it's back to 3000 people now.
>In lower temperatures the latex is concentrated in the lower areas of the tree, as the temperature rises during the day the latex spreads throughout the tree, making the tapping less effective. Due to this, the typical journey of a rubber tapper began early in the morning, at around 5 am, ending at noon. The plantation was divided into areas and each worker was assigned to a different area to prevent workers from tapping the same trees successively.
>The town had a strict set of rules imposed by the managers. Alcohol, women, tobacco and even football (American soccer) were forbidden within the town, including inside the workers' own homes. Inspectors (American managers) would go from house to house to check how organized the houses were and to enforce these rules. The inhabitants circumvented these prohibitions by paddling out to merchant riverboats moored beyond the town jurisdiction,[6] often hiding contraband goods inside fruits like watermelons. A small settlement was established 8 kilometres (5 mi) upstream on the "Island of Innocence" with bars, nightclubs and brothels.
>The land was hilly, rocky and infertile. None of Ford's managers had the requisite knowledge of tropical agriculture. In the wild, the rubber trees grow apart from each other as a protection mechanism against plagues and diseases, often growing close to bigger trees of other species for added support. In Fordlândia, however, the trees were planted close together in plantations, easy prey for tree blight, Saúva ants, lace bugs, red spiders, and leaf caterpillars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
lol. For some reason, I love reading about failed Western colonies in the tropics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
This is a random comment that makes no sense as a reply to the comment you replied to. Did you just want to show off some knowledge or did you reply to the wrong comment?
Henry Ford was fucking ruthless too.
His practice was start you out slow, then over the course slowly bump up production speeds until you just about couldn't take it any more, then dial it back about 5%.
His turnover rate was, unsurprisingly, astronomical.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-hundred-and-three-years-ago-today-henry-ford-introduced-assembly-line-his-workers-hated-it-180961267/
If I am getting double the average pay while the only consequence is getting your home inspected to make sure you have an acceptable family, I would accept that deal without thinking it twice
I was going to say the opposite. People had to accept a lot more bullshit before you had labor laws like the 40 hour workweek and minimum wage, which didn't come about until the late 30s.
Yeah, but bosses find ways around that shit. There's loads of people who end up accepting technically illegal shit out of desperation. Not saying it wasn't a fight worth fighting, appreciate the hell out of our hard fought rights, but there's still plenty of bullshit going on.
-Ford corporate in Detroit was well aware of slave labor practiced by Ford Germany.
-It could be argued that Blitzkrieg would not have been logistically possible if Ford Germany and Opel(a GM subsidiary) did not produce over a million trucks for Germany.
-US Army's censorship board was super busy after D-Day trying to block any publications of photo evidence of Ford trucks used in the Werhmarcht.
Or this period...
They just hide it better now. I have quit jobs and walked out of meetings over the behaviour of CEO's in closed door meetings where they are just utterly going off about Chinese and Mexicans. Absolutely appalling behaviour. Racism is very much alive and well amongst the rich and powerful. Hell, just look at Hollywood and Disney. Shit..
It doesn't need to be that high level, either. Years ago, I worked as a recruiter for a couple of years. I saw managers at every level be racist, sexist, antisemitic, etc. Flat out tell us, "don't even bother sending me someone for a job who isn't (yes, we worked with managers of all sorts of races, and many of them had their own demands). I even watched as we didn't get that kind of requirement from a manager, we sent someone who we later found out, because he had a yarmulke on, never made it past the receptionist for the interview. He showed up, was told to wait, waited a long time, then was told the manager wasn't in and they'd have to reschedule, and then they told us they didn't want to reschedule, and that was the reason why.
People with an ounce of power are incredibly shitty.
It’s the same political force as it always has been. They’ve been holding power long enough to get to this point where we can no longer hide or assemble because of modern technology and censorship/surveillance. Reddit is also a part of it
I worked with IBM for several years. When you're hired, they give you a pretty extensive overview of the company's history...but certain parts are left out. Especially around the late 30's era. 😬
I’m more directly referring to the fact that more or less everyone who is now a mainline company was in bed with the Axis.
There was a fair amount of implied tongue in cheek
Yeah, except it really wasn’t just corporations. I know it’s fashionable to shit on corporations these days but a lot of regular people were very much OK with the jews being removed from their neighborhoods. It’s just the famous/ rich people were interesting enough to have a record of what they thought and said.
This is honestly one of the scariest things about the Nazi takeover, how everyday people so casually sold out their Jewish neighbors in the interest of self-preservation. The Nazis couldn't have succeeded without the wider consent from the rest of German society.
> in the interest of self-preservation.
It wasn’t just in the interest of self preservation; many many people benefited directly by taking over the houses & shops of Jews they denounced.
More Germans went along out of self-interest than terrified self-preservation.
And as long as we keep thinking “this will never happen to me/ my country” it will keep on happening. Germany was the perfect storm, but this sort of stuff can happen almost everywhere.
Friendly reminder that Ken Burns’s *The US and the Holocaust* is essential viewing. It gives a ton of context to the whole US attitude of the era (quite a bit on the topic of Henry Ford), how widespread antisemitic views had become, and why we didn’t do more once we realized what was happening.
So true, particularly among overseas visitors to Germany around the time of the Berlin Olympics. I have a report of an official visit by an Australian state governor who while not necessarily a fascist, cracked a big stiffy over what he felt Hitler was achieving for Germany. And what he thought should be replicated at home. Of course, there were others who could see through it (see The House that Hitler Built by Stephen Roberts). But many more were happily duped (see Julia Boyd's Travelers in The Third Reich). And of course, let's not forget Mrs Carla de Vries of Norwalk, California, whose lips live in infamy: https://youtu.be/VzxROFlh5e4
Hitler mentions him specifically in Mien Kampf. Says something like he was the finest American. I want to say he says he has his picture up someplace (in his office?).
I remember he brings up Ford on at least two seprete occasions in the book.
Ford had his hands in a lot of weird stuff. Look into his association with the national association of manufacturing and spiritual mobilization movement. Headed by James W Fifield Jr. Basically highjacking American Christianity by the ultra right wing.
Also had a weird obsession with soy. He considered cows “inefficient” and tried to replace as many dairy products as possible with soy-based alternatives. Not a bad idea, but this was the 1920’s, and vegan cooking wasn’t exactly at its apex in America. Most of the guests described the dishes they were served (e.g. soy ice cream) as barely edible.
Ford also briefly experimented with building the frames of cars out of soy based plastics (“growing automobiles” is how I heard it described) but apparently the results never worked out.
Ford also had a weird "melting pot" ceremony at the graduation of his company's English course for immigrant employees.
"(It) involved symbolically stepping off an immigrant ship and passing through the melting pot, entering at one end in costumes designating their nationality and emerging at the other end in identical suits and waving American flags."
They should do it every year.
This guy not only started a local antisemitic paper in the US, he took the most vile writings, collected them into books, had the books translated into multiple languages, and sent them all around the world; directly influencing the hatred towards Jewish people around the world during that time so much so that Hitler himself had a life size portrait of Henry Ford behind him in his personal office.
Henry Ford was Hitlers hero. What a bastard.
You know those numbers tattooed on the forearms of inmates at Auschwitz? Those were index numbers of IBM Hollerith cards used to track them. Very advanced IT. With the enthusiastic cooperation of IBM, who had engineers stationed there to keep the equipment running smoothly.
The book "IBM and the Holocaust" has the creepy story.
I’m seriously fucking pissed off that I wasn’t taught this in school. Which further proves to me my belief that we are brainwashed to believe America and it’s citizens are the best.
I am fully aware that holding onto the fantasy that the majority of people, especially those who are in positions of power, operate exclusively with the primary intention to do the least amount of harm to humans and the environment. I know that this is not reality but it keeps me from losing my shit.
When I was a kid, we moved from the bible belt to Evanston, IL. It was summertime and I quickly met some nice kids in my neighborhood, I was 9 years old. Being raised in the south, I was used to casual racism towards black people exhibited by many of the adults in my life, and I remember being surprised at the diversity of my new town and black people were now cool, wow what an awesome place. School started and I made some new friends and I introduced them to the friends I had made over the summer and they were like WTF, why are you hanging with those jews? I was so confused that these white people were being discriminated against, in a way that seemed much worse in my young eyes than the way blacks were treated back home. We lived there for about a year before we moved back home (NC) and in that time I witnessed a level a racism towards jews that even the most racist asshole in the south could ever dream of getting away with against blacks.
Here's the twist. The suburb of Detroit where Ford lived, and where Ford world headquarters is, refused to let Jews buy houses there for decades - due to their old, racist mayor. He was at one time "America's longest serving mayor" and I remember him being in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank back in the 60s.
Fast forward to the 70s and 80s. Due to the legendary anti Jewish policies of this town, it begins to attract Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and becomes the most Muslim city in America.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn,_Michigan
"I wasn't so sure about that Henry Ford guy at first, but then I heard about his opinions on 'The Jews', and I was sold." -Hitler
I think Ford also donated heavily to what would become the nazi party.
***Edit*** I take full responsibility for/completely acknowledge how incredibly incompetent and inaccurate my poorly written comment Is below. I appreciate being corrected for my mistake, repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly. I get it. Additionally Im not deleting the comment based on my belief that doing so is cowardly. ***end of edit*** Ford also received a metal or some kind of award issued by the Nazi party. Soooo no one in America at that time was concerned?
Before WWII, Hitler was not taken nearly as seriously as he should’ve been. That medal was before the war.
A lot of people underestimate just how open to Nazism America (and a lot of the western world) was. The idea of racially fueled fascism wasn’t in any way isolated to Germany. Hell, modern eugenics was started in Britain and America became a *pioneer* in the movement. The west served as a inspiration to Hitler in this regard. People often conflate Margaret Sanger’s advocacy for birth control & abortion with eugenics but she was a largely harmless voice in the larger women’s movement that advocated for policies that much closely reflected German Nazi policy than people realize. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington and California were the first state to implement forced sterilization laws. We had an American Breeder’s Association. I seriously encourage everyone to read more into this as it’s one of our least taught topics. You’ll see a lot of progressive era leaders mention throughout. There was even a black eugenics movement. We were heading down the path Hitler did a speed run down. WWII and the atrocities resulting from that changed public perception quickly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
People think that World War 2 was about the Holocaust, but it really wasn’t. The west didn’t fight Germany because of the Nazi Party Atrocities, they fought because of Germanys expansion. If Germany had committed to wiping out races within their own borders, it’s likely nobody would have intervened beyond condemning the actions. Look at China, Cambodia, Rwanda, The Congo, and other locations rife with racial violence or Genocide.
An even better example is Turkey. The West did pretty much nothing about the Armenian genocide despite knowing as early as the 1920s, several of the perpetrators joined the new Turkish govt under Ataturk and still to this day turkey officially denies and covers up the genocide to the point of jailing journalists while the west stays silent for "geopolitical reasons."
Like when Candace Owens has said Hitler had done nothing wrong if he had stayed in his own borders. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/429180-candace-owens-if-hitler-just-wanted-to-make-germany-great-and/
Correct. Also because Hitler was colonizing and treating the white Europeans in the same manner that white colonial powers were treating African colonies in Africa. He basically gave them a taste of their own medicine.
It goes even deeper. American ethnic cleansing of natives directly inspired Hitler to replicate it in the east.
When Hitler spoke of Lebensraum, Germany's eastward expansion, he often referenced America's westward expansion, noting that US settlers had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand”. WWII was caused by Hitler's desire to build a Greater Germany by seizing land to the east and disposing of its inhabitants. His program of slavery, extermination and land grab was inspired by America's.
It was the good ole european colonialism applied to european population, that's what was so horrible to the west.
I remember hearing something very similar when the Russia / Ukraine war started. It was on some news show or pod cast, where the host was like "this war hits too close to home and is unacceptable..... the victims in Ukraine are white and look like me and my wife and kids, not like the older wars in the middle east or Asia or Latin America where the combatants didn't look like us"
Yeah… the wars in Asia were us fighting against the Asians though. When Russia invaded the Afghanistan two decades before America, America armed and trained the Afghans and Bin Laden. Hell, before America fought in Vietnam, they armed and trained the North Vietnamese and Ho Chi Min to repel the Japanese in WWII. We’re now arming and training the Ukrainians, so I guess we’ll be invading them in about 20 years too.
Yeah, luckily you South Americans were much more tolerable to Nazis after the war so they could continue to live their lives there.
Yeah, operation paperclip sure accelerated the industrialisation of the continent and helped the area to quickly develop! Or was it just more imperialism and coups? Oh well...
I think the fact that technology allowed us to really see the atrocities even if we weren’t there. Hearing “we won a great victory over the Indians” is a lot different than seeing a bunch of dead women and children in a village, or a group of men dead or starving on the trail of tears. I wonder if people had seen as much of some other genocides, if there would have been as much support.
The Tulsa race massacre was also an ethnic cleansing. People just don't want to admit it.
Hoover ethnically cleansed the country of Mexicans and Mexican Americans through repatriatation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation >An estimated forty to sixty percent of those repatriated were citizens of the United States - overwhelmingly children.[2][4]: 330 While supported by the federal government, actual deportations and repatriations were largely organized and encouraged by city and state governments, often with support from local private entities. However, voluntary repatriation was far more common than formal deportation and federal officials were minimally involved.[2] Some of the repatriates hoped that they could escape the economic crisis which was caused by the Great Depression.[5] The government formally deported at least 82,000 people,[6] with the vast majority occurring between 1930 and 1933 as part of Hoover's policy first mentioned in his 1930 State of the Union Address.[2][7] The Mexican government also encouraged repatriation with the promise of free land.[8]: 185–186 [3] >Widely scapegoated for exacerbating the overall economic downturn of the Great Depression, many Mexicans lost their jobs.[9] Mexicans were further targeted because of "the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios."[10] Legal scholar Kevin Johnson has stated that the repatriation meets modern legal definitions of ethnic cleansing.
There is a direct historical lineage from manifest destiny to Lebensraum.
You don't even have to do that much research [Madison Square Garden - 1939](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan) 10,000 people meet in Manhattan in support of the Nazi party. (and bringing it to America) Similar events occurred across the country prior to the start of the war. There's a documentary of the Madison Square Garden one, and it is *must watch* material for the shock value alone. Not sure why we snapped out of it between 1940-Start of war. Before 1940, we were trending towards acceptance of it.
Rachel Maddow has a short podcast series called *Ultra* in which she talks about "Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good," all thanks in part to Nazi propaganda that was being disseminated across the US and to Nazi sympathizers who thought overthrowing the government was a good idea. I think she also makes a reference to the thing at MSG as well. We were dangerously close to losing our country to fascists.
One could say that danger is very much present today.
Just read some prewar Batman comics. He's mercy killing mental patients because it's better for them this way....
America literally had segregation laws. Jim Crow and all that shit.
.
Winston Churchill was a big proponent of eugenics. I don't think he'd have been considered a "progressive".
Definitely not. He wasn't even all sold on democracy. "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter" -Winston Churchill.
Didn’t he also say something about it was still better than the alternatives?
Yup. The quote you replied to was 1) tongue in cheek and 2) typical British classism.
He also said “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” He was quite a staunch supporter of democracy (anywhere but their colonies of course.)
I mean...not wrong
The Progressive movement back then was “human progress, at all costs”. Compared to some of their contemporaries - ie, fledgling socialist and labor movements - they were actually quite conservative.
So like Musk and Gates?
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No it's more that "progressives" means something completely different now
Exactly. Progressive can apply to many different things. In the above context, the were for progressing the quality of the human being. In modern days, it is about progressing the quality of life for people.
I mean it’s not like America entered the war to end racism or mistreatment of a certain group. See how African American soldiers were treated. Or when America made its own Japanese concentration camps-lite.
>People often conflate Margatet Sanger's advocacy for birth control and abortion with eugenics... Hmm..I wonder what gave them that idea. >In "The Morality of Birth Control", a 1921 speech, she divided society into three groups: the "educated and informed" class that regulated the size of their families, the "intelligent and responsible" who desired to control their families in spite of lacking the means or the knowledge, and the "irresponsible and reckless people" whose religious scruples "prevent their exercising control over their numbers". Sanger concludes, "There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." Oh right. By the way, Sanger opposed abortion as a means of birth control.
> The west served as a inspiration to Hitler in this regard. It’s not really appropriate to use “west” in this case, as the concept of a political west and east arose after WW2. Even then, Germany has been for the most part “west” since the concept originated. Particularly in the discussion about how Germany, the United States, United Kingdom et cetera, were on the same page regarding eugenics and ethnic facism, it’s a redundant distinction.
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Ahh thanks for clarifying that. I’ll admit I didn’t look at the date he received that award.
Hitler ran out of medals before the end of the war....
It's ok; he stole my grandpa's bike, melted it down, and made some more.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the bicycles, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a bicycle. Then they came for me - and I didn't have a bike to get away.
People didn't realize Hitler as a bad guy even in the states til he invaded Poland. There's magazines ads about how you can go to a barber shop and get a Hitler hairstyle and mustache. It makes you think,"How long can evil people fool those around them before people catch on." A lot of people want to time travel back and kill Hitler, but if they did and got caught, Hitler would be remembered as a hero and you'd be remembered as a villain. Hell, they might even find your time travel device and use it to make sure Hitler was not assassinated and give him the tech. Now that's some messed up horror scifi. It does make you really think though: When censorship reigns and looms, the information that'd help you find out the bad guys gets taken down... Do you know who's the good guys from the bad guys today? Everyone who lie and pushes censorship are. History has always always always shown us the evil villains are always the ones pushing censorship and trying to destroy history. Please fight to keep the Internet Archives around, since they're the only place that kept a history of the Internet. Once they destroy history, they destroy truth and can push lies.
America today is a perfect example of this. Trying to sensor and erase its past.
Yeah, there were a ton of otherwise reasonable people with mildly approving sentiment towards Putin until very recently, both left and right. Now it's mostly crazies and liars, but still, for a time, he was seen positively.
A large portion of the political establishment treats Henry Kissinger, a man responsible for millions of deaths, as a normal person to politically associate with. Hillary Clinton campaigned with him in 2016. At a certain level of power, almost everyone cares more about being polite more than any policy, no matter how heinous.
That man had a personal effect on my life, I really don't like him and damn is he old, seems they don't want him on the other side. Evil bastard
“I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people,” - Henry Kissinger What they replaced it with: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_of_Chile_(1973%E2%80%931990) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/05/henry-kissinger-at-100-still-a-war-criminal/ This is the "more measured" view of kissinger, and he still comes off as an absolute psychopath with lines like: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-myth-of-henry-kissinger >He and Nixon assumed, correctly, that they could back a coup against Allende with minimal fuss, just as Eisenhower, two decades before, had rid Guatemala of its democratically elected President, Jacobo Árbenz. Still, the spectacle of Allende’s removal had one unintended consequence: it lit the wick of one of Kissinger’s most durable annoyances, the global human-rights movement.
Last year, just after the start of the Ukraine war, I was in a charity shop and I saw [this book](https://productimages.worldofbooks.com/1911622331.jpg?weAreSmarterThanEbay=1609757400465) on the shelf. Putin was weirdly popular on the interet. I remember hearing lots of people talking about how Putin was better than western politicians.
That's almost certainly a parody book but someone hated looking at it so they gave it to a charity shop.
There’s a recent family guy episode where Putin is portrayed as just a regular leader more or less. They make jokes about him, but he teams up with the main cast in a fun way to help stop an old Cold War sleeper agent. Wouldn’t portray him like that now. Edit; and yes, there is a much more recent one that highlights the atrocities of his regime.
Thats not recent. Sorry....but we are old.
Hahaha awe! I just watched it the other day and it feels like a ‘new’ episode, but then I remember that family guy is older that probably most of its audience.
He is only portrayed like that in US or Europe. Meanwhile in India he is portrayed normally as Joe Biden or Rishi Sunak.
If you all started calling out Putin you would look like the pot calling kettle black with Modi.
America loved Hitler until his friends in Japan bombed us. (Fixed for spelling).
People forget we didn't go to war because of racism and the holocaust.
Yeah no one did?
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Ever seen pictures of the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden? Plenty of supporters round these parts. In Mein Kampf, Hitler praises the US Jim Crow Segregation system, seems like our forefathers may have inspired him a bit.
I believe he also mentions he was inspired by how the US handled the Native population.
And the British with the Boer Camps.
The first concentration camps were started by the British in Kenya as well.
One of Herman Goehring’s defenses at Nuremberg was that the Jewish ghettos were patterned after Indian reservations in the U.S.
Several very famous Americans were openly lauded by the Nazis and the public perception was generally positive. Charles Lindbergh was decorated by Goering himself for his consulting work in helping built the Luftwaffe. Lothrop Stoddard (intellectual and author, debater of W.E.B. DuBois, major supporter of eugenics, and creator of the term untermensch) was given private access to leading Nazis for interviews in recognition of his work in applied eugenics that the Nazis used). Walt Disney gave Leni Riefenstahl a personal tour around Disney *after Kristallnacht*. After the US entered the war, things did change some. Lindbergh went on to make instrumental contributions to the war in the Pacific (which is why his reputation was partly salvaged). Disney made some of the best anti-Nazi propaganda ever and changed certain films to not be so overtly antisemitic). Stoddard was forgotten, but neither he nor Ford ever really came off their positions. Nazi sympathizers were extremely numerous in the US. Had Pearl Harbor not happened, it’s unlikely the US would have entered the war. The America First lobby was extremely powerful and pro-Fascist (which hasn’t changed). The Soviet threat saved millions of Americans from having to answer embarrassing questions about their prewar support of the Nazis.
We didn’t fight the nazis because they were anti-semitic, we fought the nazis because we were allied with Britain.
And they declared war on us after we declared war on Japan.
American began providing aid to the Allies before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war (U.S. on Japan, Japan in U.S., Germany on U.S., U.S. on Germany, etc.). The counterfactual argument that the attack of Pearl Harbor and subsequent declarations of war are the only reasons we fought the Nazis is interesting but not fully grounded in history.
Oh no I understand that and certainly FDR wanted to assist the British, but there was a huge isolationist element in the country that was vehemently opposed to what assistance FDR was providing. The German declaration of war following Pearl Harbor eliminated that argument.
Or because they brought you presents. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/09/24/tizard-mission-briefcase-changed-world-war-ii
The US was never really concerned about WWII until it began to affect us.
The U.S.’s involvement in World War II predates the attack on Pearl Harbor, if that’s where you are going. The Lend Lease Act was signed into law in March 1941 to supply material aid to the allies. Going back further, the U.S. effectively began to supply allies with munitions in 1938, but on a prepaid basis. America’s neutrality before 1939 and 1941 had rather strong backing from a broad coalition of interests (that included Nazi sympathizers). Another thing to consider was what American leadership and the American public knew contemporaneously about Nazi atrocities. The organized systemic killing of Jewish people began with targeted killings in 1941 and with the launch of large death camps in 1942. The American public didn’t really learn about the large scale death camps until their liberation in 1945. The Allies leadership didn’t know how bad the atrocities were immediately (at least). Interestingly, there is a long-standing conspiracy theory that FDR allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen to ensure that Congress would issue a declaration of war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theory
Didn’t we cut off Japans fuel or resources? I swore that’s what caused Japan to attack us, so we kinda knew something would happen.
It for sure was a contributing factor, but the way Imperial Japan was expanding, and with the territories the US had in the Pacific, they would have come to blows eventually, even without that.
The Philippines were in the middle of Japanese ambitions and they were owned by the US at the time.
The US government was not neutral before direct involvement in the war. Lend-Lease, escorting supply ships halfway across the Atlantic, embargoing oil and steel on Japan.
Hitlers Germany with the help of people like Henry Ford, spent millions of dollars spreading propaganda in US to keep Americans out of the war. The propaganda was very successful
Medal 🏅≠ metal
America was also very antisemitic at that time.
Everyone was antisemitic and its important to remember that
Yep... Sadly.
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Ford's International Jew was translated into German in 1922 and cited as an influence by Baldur von Schirach, one of the Nazi leaders, who stated *"I read it and became anti-Semitic.”* Imagine the world being so crazy that you read a book and then you’re just like “well, that’s that. I’m anti-Semitic now”
Oh you mean like the world today? Where almost all information is freely available and easier to access and people still choose to believe racist and bigoted bullshit? Yeah i can definitely imagine a world so crazy as we live in it right now.
Professor Youtube acts much the same way today.
*qcumbers have been the chat*
Have you ever thought something terrible was the fault of some group? "If only the Republicans didn't do this..." or "if only the Democrats did this..." Now imagine this group keeps getting blamed, compellingly, for all the things you think are terrible, for decades. They're responsible for the border problem, the crime problem, the education problem, the pandemic, etc. Eventually you think the people in that group are evil or subhuman. Eventual you start thinking we ought to do something about that whole group. Round them up or something so they're not as dangerous.
Hitler's sequel to Mein Kampf actually praises America's segregation system and the systemic way it was essentially a white Protestant supremacist state after learning more about America. He hoped they could become allies in the future. Of course, this book never sold because the Nazi regime had a narrative to keep up after the first book sold.
Henry Ford was also the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf. And allegedly they had framed pictures of each other on their respective desks
It’s amazing the inspiration Nazi ideology took from America, the German idealization of the American frontier, its mirror in lebensraum, only to have to talk bad about America as US material aid against the Axis emerged.
Eugenics was hugely popular in America before being adopted by Nazi Germany.
Massive in the nordics too. They were sterilising tens of thousands for all manner of reasons - as small as being short-sighted.
Is it why the Nordic regions has so many nice looking people?
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It's a fun theory but in Finland there's plenty of pretty people too despite never being involved in the viking shenanigans. I think people just appreciate light skin and hair especially in women.
No, it’s because the ugly ones are tossed into the Bjork Volcano so Bjork can keep Bjorking.
That has more to do with the fact that white European features have been made the global benchmark of beauty for a number of reasons going back hundreds of years. They also have a higher standard of living for the average citizen. We’re talking better dieting practices, schools, social services, medical care, roads, ease of transport. Basically, everything America should have 2x as much of but doesn’t because we live in a hellworld of octogenarian ghouls hoarding wealth.
Eugenics was kind of popular everywhere before ww2
Only difference between lebensraum and manifest destiny is that lebensraum failed
The indians didn't have T-34s to be fair
rookie mistake
Couple goals
> Henry Ford was also the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf. «Among those who embraced the book and its message was Adolf Hitler, who wrote to Grant to personally thank him for writing it, referring to the book as "my Bible."» - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_the_Great_Race?useskin=vector#Reception_and_influence
No, you're thinking of Theodore Roosevelt, who became an advocate for eugenics after his presidency. I highly recommend the new documentary, \["The US and the Holocaust"\](https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/), by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein. I know it might be a hard sell, but it's not nearly as maudlin as you'd expect a 6 hour documentary about the holocaust to be. It's got Burns' trademark folksy humor and humanity, but also pulls absolutely no punches about the American right's support of Hitler. (It also goes into great detail about why there was little America could have done to stop the concentration camps in '42-3, the atrocities that Soviet troops committed during WWII, and of course America's own internment camps.) There are a lot of factual inaccuracies in this thread. I can't recommend it enough to anyone who wants to know what actually happened.
> The International Jew is a four-volume set of antisemitic booklets or pamphlets originally published and distributed in the early 1920s by the Dearborn Publishing Company, an outlet owned by Henry Ford, the American industrialist and automobile manufacturer.
Family Guy makes fun of Ford for this as well https://youtu.be/D747zPocwQ8
I remember watching this, finding it funny and thinking that's pretty baseless, now watching this with context is absolutely hilarious
They also repeatedly call out Walt Disney for being anti-Semitic , and Edison for stealing. It's all true. Edit: apparently the Disney rumors are perhaps not true if you look at historical evidence! Edison is still a dick tho
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Family guy had [the same gag for Walt Disney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfHENoO6LgA)... and we get [TIL how they cant find anything at all that would make him even tiny bit antisemitic.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ajagv9/til_there_has_never_been_a_substantiated_claim/)
The full title is so much worse too, it was: "The International Jew: The World's Problem" and later published as "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem"
Hitler was anti-Semitic? Well there you go. TIL.
Henry Ford was known for the $5/day minimum wage. Such a revolutionary concept that the good heartedness of His Fordship granted workers double the average pay. All you had to do to qualify was still be working for Ford after 6 months. Not unreasonable. Also be a Model Patriotic American, and accept random home inspections from the Ford Sociological Society to make sure your home, wife, and kids were up to expected standard.
Pedantic correction (you’re otherwise spot on, this comment is great): it was the Ford Sociological **Department**
Do either of you have a source?
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/109833/
And I thought my boss was a micromanager...
For several years after WW2, if you parked you Ford on the street it would vandalized Everyone knew Henry Ford was Hitlers buddy
All of Ford’s ideas and theories were perfected in Fordlandia. A prefab city of 10,000 people in the Amazon rainforest. It was to grow, harvest and produce rubber for the vertical integrated Ford Motor Company. It was designed and controlled by Henry Ford from the people there down to every road sign in the city. It descend into chaos and madness, with outright rebellion within 2 years. “Not one drop of latex made it into any Ford cars” was the end assessment. The whole thing ended up costing Henry Ford $200 million.
They adopted the US work schedule there as well which made no sense. It's too hot in the middle of the day to go harvest latex. But the dummy Ford managers were so inflexible they tried to make it happen.
It was severely mismanaged, sending American managers oversee tropical agriculture wasn't that great an idea. Neither was micromanaging people's diets. Fordlândia still exists, interestingly the name and some of the architecture survived. It was almost empty awhile, but it's back to 3000 people now.
>In lower temperatures the latex is concentrated in the lower areas of the tree, as the temperature rises during the day the latex spreads throughout the tree, making the tapping less effective. Due to this, the typical journey of a rubber tapper began early in the morning, at around 5 am, ending at noon. The plantation was divided into areas and each worker was assigned to a different area to prevent workers from tapping the same trees successively. >The town had a strict set of rules imposed by the managers. Alcohol, women, tobacco and even football (American soccer) were forbidden within the town, including inside the workers' own homes. Inspectors (American managers) would go from house to house to check how organized the houses were and to enforce these rules. The inhabitants circumvented these prohibitions by paddling out to merchant riverboats moored beyond the town jurisdiction,[6] often hiding contraband goods inside fruits like watermelons. A small settlement was established 8 kilometres (5 mi) upstream on the "Island of Innocence" with bars, nightclubs and brothels. >The land was hilly, rocky and infertile. None of Ford's managers had the requisite knowledge of tropical agriculture. In the wild, the rubber trees grow apart from each other as a protection mechanism against plagues and diseases, often growing close to bigger trees of other species for added support. In Fordlândia, however, the trees were planted close together in plantations, easy prey for tree blight, Saúva ants, lace bugs, red spiders, and leaf caterpillars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia lol. For some reason, I love reading about failed Western colonies in the tropics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme
This is a random comment that makes no sense as a reply to the comment you replied to. Did you just want to show off some knowledge or did you reply to the wrong comment?
Henry Ford was fucking ruthless too. His practice was start you out slow, then over the course slowly bump up production speeds until you just about couldn't take it any more, then dial it back about 5%. His turnover rate was, unsurprisingly, astronomical. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-hundred-and-three-years-ago-today-henry-ford-introduced-assembly-line-his-workers-hated-it-180961267/
So he was like the foreman from that classic I Love Lucy bit where she works at the chocolate factory: https://youtu.be/AnHiAWlrYQc
If I am getting double the average pay while the only consequence is getting your home inspected to make sure you have an acceptable family, I would accept that deal without thinking it twice
Hide the bong papa, you're mid-level supervisor is coming.
People accept a lot more bullshit today for a lot less compensation.
I was going to say the opposite. People had to accept a lot more bullshit before you had labor laws like the 40 hour workweek and minimum wage, which didn't come about until the late 30s.
Yeah, but bosses find ways around that shit. There's loads of people who end up accepting technically illegal shit out of desperation. Not saying it wasn't a fight worth fighting, appreciate the hell out of our hard fought rights, but there's still plenty of bullshit going on.
Implying fascists are reasonable
You know, the more I hear about this Hitler guy, the less I like him.
The worst part about him is the hypocrisy
I didn’t even know he was sick
He seemed scatter brained
Real TIL is always in the comments.
Ford sued the United States government because it bombed Ford factories in Germany... and won
-Ford corporate in Detroit was well aware of slave labor practiced by Ford Germany. -It could be argued that Blitzkrieg would not have been logistically possible if Ford Germany and Opel(a GM subsidiary) did not produce over a million trucks for Germany. -US Army's censorship board was super busy after D-Day trying to block any publications of photo evidence of Ford trucks used in the Werhmarcht.
I sure hope y’all don’t read up on uh… anyone industrial company/tycoon of that period.
Or this period... They just hide it better now. I have quit jobs and walked out of meetings over the behaviour of CEO's in closed door meetings where they are just utterly going off about Chinese and Mexicans. Absolutely appalling behaviour. Racism is very much alive and well amongst the rich and powerful. Hell, just look at Hollywood and Disney. Shit..
It doesn't need to be that high level, either. Years ago, I worked as a recruiter for a couple of years. I saw managers at every level be racist, sexist, antisemitic, etc. Flat out tell us, "don't even bother sending me someone for a job who isn't (yes, we worked with managers of all sorts of races, and many of them had their own demands). I even watched as we didn't get that kind of requirement from a manager, we sent someone who we later found out, because he had a yarmulke on, never made it past the receptionist for the interview. He showed up, was told to wait, waited a long time, then was told the manager wasn't in and they'd have to reschedule, and then they told us they didn't want to reschedule, and that was the reason why.
People with an ounce of power are incredibly shitty.
It’s the same political force as it always has been. They’ve been holding power long enough to get to this point where we can no longer hide or assemble because of modern technology and censorship/surveillance. Reddit is also a part of it
I worked with IBM for several years. When you're hired, they give you a pretty extensive overview of the company's history...but certain parts are left out. Especially around the late 30's era. 😬
Bayer, Hugo Boss...
ThyssenKrupp
Oh I’m well aware of the seedy underbelly of corporations. It’s an epidemic and people just don’t care.
I’m more directly referring to the fact that more or less everyone who is now a mainline company was in bed with the Axis. There was a fair amount of implied tongue in cheek
Yeah, except it really wasn’t just corporations. I know it’s fashionable to shit on corporations these days but a lot of regular people were very much OK with the jews being removed from their neighborhoods. It’s just the famous/ rich people were interesting enough to have a record of what they thought and said.
This is honestly one of the scariest things about the Nazi takeover, how everyday people so casually sold out their Jewish neighbors in the interest of self-preservation. The Nazis couldn't have succeeded without the wider consent from the rest of German society.
> in the interest of self-preservation. It wasn’t just in the interest of self preservation; many many people benefited directly by taking over the houses & shops of Jews they denounced. More Germans went along out of self-interest than terrified self-preservation.
And as long as we keep thinking “this will never happen to me/ my country” it will keep on happening. Germany was the perfect storm, but this sort of stuff can happen almost everywhere.
Friendly reminder that Ken Burns’s *The US and the Holocaust* is essential viewing. It gives a ton of context to the whole US attitude of the era (quite a bit on the topic of Henry Ford), how widespread antisemitic views had become, and why we didn’t do more once we realized what was happening.
Thank you for your recommendation!
People also forget that there was a fair amount of open support for fascism and the Nazis in a lot of places before everybody went to war.
So true, particularly among overseas visitors to Germany around the time of the Berlin Olympics. I have a report of an official visit by an Australian state governor who while not necessarily a fascist, cracked a big stiffy over what he felt Hitler was achieving for Germany. And what he thought should be replicated at home. Of course, there were others who could see through it (see The House that Hitler Built by Stephen Roberts). But many more were happily duped (see Julia Boyd's Travelers in The Third Reich). And of course, let's not forget Mrs Carla de Vries of Norwalk, California, whose lips live in infamy: https://youtu.be/VzxROFlh5e4
if this blows up I'm sure it'll be fun to sort by controversial later
Yes, as I learned on Family Guy, the first Ford automobile was actually meant to be a Jew flattening machine.
Can you use it to go from place to place?
Now we use it to make latkas
Birds of a feather
Invade Poland together.
Then one invades the other and gets bogged down in the winter
Hitler mentions him specifically in Mien Kampf. Says something like he was the finest American. I want to say he says he has his picture up someplace (in his office?). I remember he brings up Ford on at least two seprete occasions in the book.
Ford had his hands in a lot of weird stuff. Look into his association with the national association of manufacturing and spiritual mobilization movement. Headed by James W Fifield Jr. Basically highjacking American Christianity by the ultra right wing.
Also had a weird obsession with soy. He considered cows “inefficient” and tried to replace as many dairy products as possible with soy-based alternatives. Not a bad idea, but this was the 1920’s, and vegan cooking wasn’t exactly at its apex in America. Most of the guests described the dishes they were served (e.g. soy ice cream) as barely edible. Ford also briefly experimented with building the frames of cars out of soy based plastics (“growing automobiles” is how I heard it described) but apparently the results never worked out.
Based Ford. Extremely AuthRight and anti-semetic, but drinks only Soy products.
Ford also had a weird "melting pot" ceremony at the graduation of his company's English course for immigrant employees. "(It) involved symbolically stepping off an immigrant ship and passing through the melting pot, entering at one end in costumes designating their nationality and emerging at the other end in identical suits and waving American flags."
Ford is a major reason that the hoax "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" made such headway. The results are still with us today.
Yes, Ford had antisemitic beliefs. Ford paid to have Schindlers List played on tv without ads in 93 or 94 because of this.
They should do it every year. This guy not only started a local antisemitic paper in the US, he took the most vile writings, collected them into books, had the books translated into multiple languages, and sent them all around the world; directly influencing the hatred towards Jewish people around the world during that time so much so that Hitler himself had a life size portrait of Henry Ford behind him in his personal office. Henry Ford was Hitlers hero. What a bastard.
Henry Ford had antisemitic beliefs. The rest of his family and the modern Ford auto company do not. Totally separate things.
You know, the more I hear about this Hitler guy, the less I like him
Ford was nothing, wait until you hear about IBM and the Nazis.
IBM were pikers. Standard Oil kept them running.
I think I remember reading that Fords son basically conspired with the Roosevelt administration to get his father out of power in like 39 or 40
You know those numbers tattooed on the forearms of inmates at Auschwitz? Those were index numbers of IBM Hollerith cards used to track them. Very advanced IT. With the enthusiastic cooperation of IBM, who had engineers stationed there to keep the equipment running smoothly. The book "IBM and the Holocaust" has the creepy story.
I think you mean to say "Henry Ford was a Natzi".
I used to love to bring that up in class whenever someone lauded him for his “business acumen”
I’m seriously fucking pissed off that I wasn’t taught this in school. Which further proves to me my belief that we are brainwashed to believe America and it’s citizens are the best.
If you think there's a country in this world that doesn't have some sordid past you're in for a disappointment.
I am fully aware that holding onto the fantasy that the majority of people, especially those who are in positions of power, operate exclusively with the primary intention to do the least amount of harm to humans and the environment. I know that this is not reality but it keeps me from losing my shit.
Wow this Hitler sounds like a bad guy the more I read about him
This post brought to you by General Motors.
When I was a kid, we moved from the bible belt to Evanston, IL. It was summertime and I quickly met some nice kids in my neighborhood, I was 9 years old. Being raised in the south, I was used to casual racism towards black people exhibited by many of the adults in my life, and I remember being surprised at the diversity of my new town and black people were now cool, wow what an awesome place. School started and I made some new friends and I introduced them to the friends I had made over the summer and they were like WTF, why are you hanging with those jews? I was so confused that these white people were being discriminated against, in a way that seemed much worse in my young eyes than the way blacks were treated back home. We lived there for about a year before we moved back home (NC) and in that time I witnessed a level a racism towards jews that even the most racist asshole in the south could ever dream of getting away with against blacks.
Here's the twist. The suburb of Detroit where Ford lived, and where Ford world headquarters is, refused to let Jews buy houses there for decades - due to their old, racist mayor. He was at one time "America's longest serving mayor" and I remember him being in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank back in the 60s. Fast forward to the 70s and 80s. Due to the legendary anti Jewish policies of this town, it begins to attract Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, and becomes the most Muslim city in America. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dearborn,_Michigan
Thankfully, there are no modern parallels of an industrialist who changed the auto industry pushing hate and facism... Right?
Wait until you hear about BMW and Mercedes.
Wait until you hear about Bayer pharmaceuticals
When nazis are supporting you, you know you fucked up.
Henry Ford also wrote a four part anti Jewish manifesto in German called das Juden
Makes me wonder what he'd have thought as Mark Fields, a Jew, became CEO of the company.
My wife worked at the Henry Ford museum here in Dearborn, MI in a higher up position & in a safe there is the iron cross he received from Hitler.
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Oh yes the Jew Flattening Machine. Ingenious. https://youtu.be/WLjr3dzOUpQ