By Joel Thurtell
Remember, too, that Detroit helped rescue America as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II … Now, when our automakers and autoworkers need a hand up, will America really turn its back?
— Detroit Free Press, Page One editorial, December 5, 2008
Asking Americans to remember how its national car-makers helped them in years past was not such a wise thing for the Free Press editorial writers to do.
Remember Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s thug whose security guards severely beat Walter Reuther and other United Auto Workers organizers on May 26, 1937 at what came to be called the Battle of the Overpass at the Ford Rouge plant? Dearborn cops ignored the Ford-instigated violence against the UAW.
Five years earlier, on March 7, 1932, there was the Ford Hunger March, when 3,000 people gathered to march on the Ford Rouge plant and hand a list of demands to Henry Ford. Dearborn cops turned fire hoses and bullets on the group, killing five and wounding nine.
History, yes.
The Justice Department in mid-20th-century America always had its eye on the Big Four, then Big Three, as government anti-trust lawyers tracked the shared monopoly dominated by then gigantic General Motors.
Then came Volkswagen. Slowly at first, foreign car-makers began to replace those weaker domestic firms (remember American Motors, Packard, Studebaker to name a few has-been car-makers?) that failed to compete against the U.S.-based shared monopoly. (I recommend the late David Halberstam’s book, “The Reckoning,” for an excellent analytical portrait of the Big Three, in particular Ford Motor Co., in their supposed heyday.)
Now, the shared monopoly is history, and the Free Press is harking back to World War II to help us recall the good things automakers have done for us. Why, the newspaper, itself supposedly in financial trouble, has gone to the expense of mailing copies of its auto-promotional and self-promotional front-page wrapper to every member of Congress.
World War II, hmmm. Arsenal of Democracy, hmmm.
According to Halberstam, Ford Motor Co. was so financially wobbly when the U.S. entered the war that the Franklin Roosevelt administration was concerned Ford might not be up to the task of building vehicles, including B-24 bombers, for the war effort. Ford did it, as we’ve been amply told, using its plant at Willow Run.
Arsenal of Democracy, right?
What we have not been amply told is how Ford also aided and abetted another arsenal — the Axis side in World War II.
Anti-Semite that he was, Henry Ford befriended Adolf Hitler and so did his son, Edsel. Ford’s best-seller, “The International Jew,” in 1927 became a favorite of Hitler. Hitler had praised Ford in his anti-Jewish diatribe, “Mein Kampf.”
All of this upstanding behavior is recounted in Charles Higham’s 1983 book, “Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949.” Higham’s book, well-researched and absolutely astonishing, was reprinted by Barnes & Noble Books in 1995.
Henry Ford backed that Axis arsenal before the U.S. went to war against Germany and Japan in 1941. He even refused to supply aircraft engines to Great Britain when the Brits alone were standing against the Nazis.
Henry Ford was contributing to Hitler financially by 1924. By the 1930s, Ford was sending Hitler 50,000 Reischsmarks a year for his birthday.
Real chums.
Remember Joseph Heller’s World War II novel, “Catch-22,” in which the fictitious U.S. Air Force officer Milo Minderbinder cuts a deal with the Germans to have American Air Force planes bomb their own base?
Pretty efficient, Milo thought. Get the job done, cut the middleman. And it’s a way to make money off both sides in a war.
Well, Heller’s seeming fabrication was more than metaphor. Higham researched connections between Allied and Nazi industrialists and bankers and referred to the international crew of conspirators and mutual war-profiteers as “The Fraternity.”
Here’s a paragraph from Higham’s book describing how a Ford plant in France suffered from an Allied aerial bomb attack in 1942, after the U.S. had entered the war following the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 67 years ago today:
The Royal Air Force, apparently not briefed on the world connections of The Fraternity, had just bombed the Poissy plant. (Edsel) Ford wrote (to Maurice Dollfuss, a French banker who helped finance the Poissy plant) on May 15 (1942) that photographs of the plant on fire were published in our newspapers here but fortunately no reference was made to the Ford Motor Company. In other words, Edsel was relieved that it was not made clear to the American public that he was operating the plant for the Nazis.
General Motors played the same two-sided war game. GM founder Alfred Sloan stayed on the board of GM-Opel’s German operations during the war.
Milo Minderbinder would have been delighted had he been real, but the truth is real enough: American-owned companies were making weapons for both sides, so as Allies destroyed Nazi war equipment and Nazis blew up Allied gear, orders poured into Axis and Allied Ford and GM plants alike for replacements.
Car-makers weren’t the only ones to collaborate with the Nazis. ITT owned Focke-Wulf which made bombers that laid waste to British towns and fighters that shot down Allied planes. Standard Oil sold fuel to all sides and had its tankers refuel U-boats at sea.
The most audacious example of trading with the enemy was set by SKF, the giant ball bearing firm with factories in Sweden, Germany, Italy, England and Brazil. While shorting U.S. war factories in need of bearings, SKF made sure the Nazis had all they needed. After all, those ITT-made Focke-Wulfs needed 4,000 ball bearings apiece. When the Allied air forces bombed the SKF bearing works in Schweinfurt, Germany in 1943, they lost 60 planes, and General Hap Arnold claimed the Nazis were tipped off by SKF. The losses to the Schweinfurt bombing were made up with shipments from Sweden and, possibly also from Philadelphia by way of South America.
Who says globalization is a 21st-century invention?
What a business model! Who needs planned obsolescence? This was planned mutual destruction of mutually manufactured materiel for mutually assured profit. Perpetual war would have meant a perpetual money machine.
Except for those pesky bombers. Aerial warfare got old after a while, especially with the fire-bombing, which destroyed the German labor force as well as the plants.
Yet there was profit to be made from bomber-inflicted factory destruction, too. In even more perfect Milo Minderbinder fashion, the U.S. government in 1967 gave GM a $33 million tax exemption on its profits as compensation for Allied bomb damage to the aircraft and vehicle plants it ran in Germany and Austria during World War II, according to Higham.
Other fond memories of America-friendly automaker behavior come to mind. How about GM’s systematic purchasing and dismantling of urban streetcar systems to force Americans to rely on the cars that this near-monopoly produced?
And there’s the auto industry’s incessant opposition to auto safety features, emission controls and fuel efficiency.
Oh yes, Detroit has been right there for Ameicans — so long as they owned stock in the Big Three.
Harken, newspaper editorialists: History is not a good tool for promoting an automaker bailout.
And in case newspaper execs have their hopes up — and their hands out — historical references would not be a wise way of grabbing public sympathy for a print media bailout, either.
Too many of us remember July 13, 1995, the first day of the longest newspaper strike in U.S. history, provoked by Gannett, the current owner of the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.
It was not the Battle of the Overpass, but it will never be forgotten.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
