‘Long overdue’: Henry Ford home to confront his antisemitism

DEARBORN, Michigan – The bust of Henry Ford looked on sternly as hundreds of Jewish professionals flooded his pool room.

The visiting Jews admired the views of the Rouge River from Ford’s windows and strolled through his immaculately maintained garden. They studied a mock-up for a Navajo rug in his basement woven with a particular pattern — one that appeared to resemble a Nazi swastika. 

The staff at Fair Lane, the historic Dearborn home of Henry and his wife Clara, welcomed the Jewish educators, historians and museum staff. Why they did soon became clear during a panel discussion in that pool room. When the home reopens to the public in June 2027, after a 17-year closure for restoration, staff will teach visitors about Ford’s antisemitism.

This facet of the pioneering industrialist’s life was hardly incidental. The onetime richest man in America published venomous conspiracy theories in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, for years. Hitler was a professed admirer, and Nazi Germany awarded him a medal. 

Leaders of Jewish groups greeted the news that the home would address Ford’s antisemitism with optimism. 

“We applaud Fair Lane’s commitment to addressing Henry Ford’s antisemitism publicly,” Catherine Cangany, CEO of the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement. “This history happened, it caused harm, and it continues to have consequences we all must confront.”

Cangany, who has research expertise on the Dearborn Independent, sat on the June panel with Fair Lane’s curators but is not involved in the antisemitism initiative itself. Local Jewish groups including hers have been pushing for Ford’s enterprises to acknowledge his antisemitism for years. 

“The reckoning is long overdue, and we all will be better for it,” she said.

The curators did not broach specifics of their plan with their Jewish audience in June. For the rest of the summer, as Fair Lane proceeded with its renovations, most of the Detroit area’s Jewish leaders were kept in the dark.

More than two months after the conference, top staffers Austin Eighmey and Hannah McCready sat down with (JEWISH REVIEW) in Ford’s library to outline their educational plans in more detail. 

Surrounded by replicas of books on German race science that helped to inform Ford’s attitude toward Jews, they explained that they viewed discussions of antisemitism as core to the revitalized Fair Lane’s statement of purpose. Such information would sit, they said, alongside other unflattering aspects of Ford’s character, such as his union-busting activities.

“Our mission is to illuminate the lives and legacy of Henry and Clara Ford,” Eighmey, senior director of historic resources, said. Part of that legacy, he said, was noting that “he was an ignorant man, fed a lot of poor information that he himself sought out.”

“It’s our job to tell a more full picture and give people a lens with which to view history,” added McCready, the site’s director of interpretation and education.

In the Detroit area, where Ford’s name still looms large nearly 80 years after his death, such a commitment is notable. In 2023 the former president of the Ford Foundation, the family’s charitable arm, acknowledged and condemned its namesake’s antisemitism. Other local institutions devoted to historic purveyors of antisemitism have reckoned with their own legacies in recent years, including the church founded by demagogic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin.

But as Ford the man continues to be heavily mythologized today, by new generations of entrepreneurs and gearheads — and white supremacists — the physical museums and educational institutions in the region that bear Ford’s name and have connections to his family largely have not broached his antisemitism. 

Those include The Henry Ford, a museum built around his personal collections; Greenfield Village, a historic reenactment village that includes a restoration of the mogul’s childhood home; and the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, a Detroit heritage site where Ford’s Model Ts were built.

For a long time Fair Lane, too, didn’t touch the subject. After Ford’s widow Clara died in 1950, the property was turned over to the Ford Motor Company, which brokered a deal with the University of Michigan to build a Dearborn satellite campus on the site. 

For decades the university offered tours of the grounds on a largely volunteer basis, also using it as an events space. The house has been closed to visitors since 2010, as the team undertook an extensive restoration project with an eye toward reopening for the public. 

Eighmey said the plan to teach about antisemitism had been the goal since the restoration’s early days. The staff met with representatives from the Zekelman Holocaust Center, the state’s flagship Holocaust museum, to discuss how such a project would look.

“They were straightforward about Henry Ford’s antisemitism and hope that it will be incorporated into the interpretive narrative where appropriate but, at the same time, they respectfully acknowledged many of Henry Ford’s strengths and expressed a deep regard for Fair Lane’s stories, physical spaces, and current restoration work,” reads one executive summary of the focus group that a consultant shared with (JEWISH REVIEW). 

A spokesperson for the Zekelman declined to comment to (JEWISH REVIEW) for this article.

Local controversies in the interim called such educational commitments into question. In 2019 the city of Dearborn — where the Ford Motor Company is the largest employer — quashed a planned historical magazine that would have discussed Ford’s antisemitism, tied to the 100th anniversary of his acquisition of the Dearborn Independent. 

In what Eighmey today refers to as “the whole fiasco here in Dearborn,” the city’s then-mayor, John “Jack” O’Reilly, fired the magazine’s editor, prompting outcry. O’Reilly died last year. His son, Devon O’Reilly, now serves as Fair Lane’s CEO.

Despite this history, the younger O’Reilly is supportive of the plan to teach Ford’s antisemitism on the site, the curators said. “We have not talked about his personal life, really, and his familial connections at all,” Eighmey said of O’Reilly.

The team has developed talking points about Ford’s antisemitism as part of their “non-negotiables,” museum terminology for facets of history that every visitor will encounter. Donna Braden, a museums consultant who formerly worked with The Henry Ford and who is Jewish herself, was hired to give her feedback on the plan and drafted her own proposed “non-negotiables” for the subject. 

“Explaining the true story of Henry Ford’s antisemitism to non-Jewish people will help them understand why it is so important to the Jewish community,” Braden told the Fair Lane team in a report on their efforts. 

In a summary she shared with (JEWISH REVIEW), Braden also advised the team to “be aware of many people who are unaware of Henry Ford’s antisemitism, and it will surprise them.”

Braden drew from “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century,” an acclaimed 2006 biography by Steven Watts. Unlike other Ford biographers before him, Watts tackled his subject’s antisemitism head-on. His approach would later find surprising admirers within the Ford dynasty, leading to him presenting on the subject in 2018 to a room full of The Henry Ford staff and Ford family members. 

“It was, I must say, quite an experience, because I spoke pretty frankly about all of this,” Watts, an emeritus history professor at the University of Missouri, recalled to (JEWISH REVIEW) about his 2018 talk. “Most of the staff that talked to me about it actually indicated that they were a little relieved, I think, to have this brought out into the open in a fairly frank way.” 

The talk, co-presented with the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, did not lead to change — at least not at The Henry Ford, which has a separate ownership structure from Fair Lane. Today, no mention of Ford’s antisemitism can be found in The Henry Ford’s physical museum space, despite efforts from Braden and others to add such material. Some pages of its website now include some brief words on the subject.

Amid new efforts to push Ford’s family on the subject, Watts returned to Dearborn in 2024, partially to address Fair Lane at Braden’s invitation. 

“I hope that they will move forward to bring Henry Ford’s antisemitism to the public,” he said, of both Fair Lane and The Henry Ford. “I got the idea when I was there that they were thinking strongly about a more frank and open approach to all of this, and I guess I would hope that is the approach that they take, and not the ‘sweep it under the rug’ maneuver.”

He told (JEWISH REVIEW) that Ford’s antisemitism became most pronounced in the 1920s, shortly after the height of his business success.

Watts traces Ford’s antisemitism not to any one specific root cause, but rather to a confluence of factors, including the mogul’s economic populism; his failed efforts to send a “Peace Ship” of dignitaries to Europe during World War I, which he came to blame on a “Jewish financial interest in Europe”; and his embrace of conservative cultural signifiers, including square dancing.

“He basically begins to argue that Jews lay behind the corruption of that old-fashioned kind of rural, WASP cultural virtue, that Jews were behind jazz music, Jews were behind Hollywood movies, and that there was a kind of moral degradation that was at work,” Watts said.

Fair Lane has a separate ownership structure from The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village, both of which are largely built around other subjects Ford was passionate about, such as American innovation, rather than the mogul himself. Fair Lane, its curators say, is the natural place for visitors to learn about the Fords’ personal lives and beliefs.

Ford descendants still weigh heavily on Fair Lane’s board — including chair Edsel Ford II, Henry’s great-grandson, whom Eighmey refers to as “the Deuce.” 

The family was onboard for this reappraisal, the curators said. Fair Lane’s models in the museum space include Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia that has taught visitors about his slaveholding; and the Frick museum in Pittsburgh, where industrialist Henry Clay Frick comes under scrutiny for his fierce anti-union stance.

Visitors to Fair Lane, Eighmey promised, will “never leave here thinking, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big of a deal.’”

The Fair Lane team chose to restore the house to its condition in 1919 — in part because the home was photographed for an architectural magazine that year, allowing the curators to use it as a visual reference. 

The date is significant for another reason. 1919 was also the year that Ford acquired the Dearborn Independent, which he would soon use to publish a series of antisemitic conspiracies called “The International Jew” as well as the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to outline secret Jewish plans for world domination. 

Ford would require his dealerships to distribute copies of the paper with every automobile purchase, making the Independent, for a brief time, one of the country’s highest-circulated newspapers. Ford’s role as newspaper publisher was, in Watts’ estimation, the most notorious and seismic way the mogul’s antisemitism manifested in his lifetime. 

The choice to reset his home to the year he launched the paper “is further bringing all of this together as a narrative throughline,” McCready said.

After the paper shut down in 1927, owing in part to a libel suit brought against Ford by Jewish attorney and labor activist Aaron Sapiro, Ford — with the help of Jewish community figures — publicly apologized for spreading antisemitism. Around the same time, the celebrated Jewish architect Albert Kahn helped renovate Fair Lane.

The planned 90-minute Fair Lane tour, which is currently being workshopped, touches on the Peace Ship and Ford’s wielding of the Dearborn Independent. McCready described the tour’s intended arc: “He fails with the Peace Ship. He decides that there is a hostile press that’s controlled by financiers that’s against him. He purchases this failing local newspaper and starts getting really obsessed with his image in the media, and we kind of take it from there.”

It does not get into the Sapiro trial, though tour guides will discuss the topic if visitors bring it up. They also don’t plan to discuss the medal Ford received from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s when Hitler publicly expressed admiration for him, noting that it falls nearly two decades after the time period represented by the house’s restoration. 

Watts, the Ford historian, told (JEWISH REVIEW) that Ford had suffered two strokes at the time he received the medal, and “was in very bad shape” — possibly impairing his judgment.

“I think Ford’s got a lot to answer for, but I don’t think he was a Nazi,” Watts said. “I think things kind of went off the rails there.” By 1942, Ford was again publicly renouncing antisemitism, calling it “a distinct disservice to our country.”

At the Jewish museums conference, Cangany, the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan CEO, suggested the Fair Lane team should display copies of the Dearborn Independent around the house to demonstrate the effects of Ford’s worldview. That’s not part of the plan, Eighmey said: “It’s not on the site, and it never was.”

But the house does have other eye-catching artifacts. A room in the basement, in keeping with historic specifications, will be outfitted with a Navajo rug stitched with the ancient “whirling logs” symbol, which the Nazis later co-opted as the swastika. Ford had acquired the rug and displayed it in his home beginning in the 1910s, well before the Nazi swastika was popularized. 

Maintaining an honest assessment of its founder’s troubling history is a tall order for any museum in modern times. Even Monticello, which Fair Lane held up as a model, has faced right-wing backlash from figures who want the site to minimize discussions of slavery. 

Meanwhile, Ford’s legacy continues to shape the modern era as new conservative cultural figures from the business world push similar brands of populism.

In 2022, amid a dispute with the tech mogul Elon Musk over the prevalence of antisemitism on his social network X, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, called Musk “the Henry Ford of our time.” 

Greenblatt later apologized for the comparison, but some commentators took the analogy even further. “Twitter is to Musk as The Dearborn Independent was to Ford,” the writer Parker Molloy wrote at the time.

Last month in Dearborn, which today has a large Arab/Muslim community, neo-Nazi activists wearing swastika armbands staged an anti-Muslim rally. Their choice of venue carried historical echoes: They organized outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library. 

The Fair Lane team is aware of the modern significance of Ford’s antisemitism, they said. 

“Populist movements, they always end up using antisemitism as some sort of way to recruit people to their cause,” Eighmey told (JEWISH REVIEW). “And it’s a reality that I hope, after people leave their experience here, they do reflect on it and see, ‘Wow, wait a minute. Is this happening right now around me?’”