Clip 8 Far Gresham Vol. I

A Novel

Far Gresham

Vol. I

by

R.E. Prindle

Clip 8

     When the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933 the struggle between Nazis and Semitists was already in progress within the constext of Judaism and Communism.  On the eve of the Nazi ascension the Semitists were already crying for the isolation and boycott of Germany.  The Semitists were distributed throughout all the nations and states.  They now tried to erect an international cordon around Germany.

     The Germans fought back.  Germans, too, were distributed throughout the countries of the world.  Just as the United States had the largest Jewish population outside Europe, perhaps in the world, so it also had the largest German population outside Europe.  The Nazis hoped that German solidarity was not entirely dissolved; they therefore sent agents into the United States to arouse the German population to the sacred collective cause of Germandom.

     Thus the two national religious groups of Jews and Germans joined battle on American soil.  But that doesn’t mean there were any American Nazis.

page 351.

     Ben had heard of the international Jewish conspiracy but as usual he was ill-informed; it was something that he vaguely thought might exist and something which he vaguely feared if it did.  He just didn’t know.

     In Arthurian terms the international situation might be explained thusly:  The knights of all nations wore mantles on which were their national symbols, they carried a matching shield.  They were also confined to a geographical locality wherein their lord was sovereign.

     Mixed among all the knights of all the nations were a group of knights who wore mantles that were white with a blue Mogen David on the breast.  They however carried a contrasting shield that bore the symbols of the knights of the various other nations.  Thus no matter which shield they bore, and they exchanged them with each other as the need arose, they appeared to represent a different ideal than the other knights, which did not further the interests of the other knights lords but seemed to further their own interest at the expense of the other knights and their lords.

     Indeed they did, for they knew what they believed and salvation lay with them as their prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, said.  When the other knights challenged them, saying that no man could serve two masters, that they must choose between the nation on their shields or the Mogen David on their mantles, they put on the magic ring that made their shields and mantles match and cried:  ‘Ah, but this is only our religion; just as you have yours we have ours and every man is entitled to believe as he chooses concerning God.’  Then they took off their ring and their shields took national forms.  Thus they appeared to be working at cross purposes with the nations.  Indeed, it has been wisely said in the Bible:  No man can serve two masters.  Thus the Semitists were accused of conspiring against all the nations in the furtherance of their own belief system.  Yea, verily, and it was so.

page 352.

     Immediately as the Nazis tried to arouse Germans in the United States to their international destiny, the Semitists, in 1934, began to agitate for a congressional investigation of un-American activities.

     This was couched in language to seek out and expose anti-Semitists.  Semitism was to be made the official belief system intolerant of all others.  Four years the Semitists toiled.  In 1938 the House Un-American Activities Committee was established using almost the identical language that the Semitists proposed in 1934.

     The Semitists feared Fascism as their mortal enemy.  They interpreted the term broadly to include all those whose beliefs put them in opposition to Semitist beliefs no matter how innocently and legitimately those beliefs were held.  It was not in the interests of the United States to become embroiled in the European War.  Because of the Nazis’ attitude toward the Semitists it was in the interests of the Semitists to embroil the United States in the European war for their sakes.  Now this is where Ben became confused.  If the International Jewish Conspiracy didn’t exist then why should Americans who just happened to be Jews care about what happened to Jews who just happened to be Germans or French in Europe?  The Big Fella scratched his head.  Thus American nationalists who sought to keep America out of the European war were defamed as Fascists and anti-Semitists.  Many of these people had formed the America First Committee to agitate against American entry; their careers and reputations were sacrificed to Semitist goals.  They were defamed and ridiculed, discredited as mere cranks.  The United States did become embroiled in the ‘just’ European war.

page 353.

     The purpose of the House Un-American Activities Committee had been intended solely to expose the enemies of the Semitists not their allies.  When the Americanists were given control of the committee they lashed out at all enemies attempting to destroy American tranquility, Fascists and Communists alike.

     Now the Communists who, like the Semitists themselves, were an organization of international, rather than national solidarity, found it impossible to affiliate honestly with national organizations.  Communist interests were similar to Semitist interests.  Hence the membership of the Communist party was composed predominantly of Semitists; which is not to say that the Semitists were predominantly Communists, only that the majority of Communists bore the mantle of Semitism while carrying the Communist shield.

     Thus, while the Semitists were death on Fascism they were benevolently inclined toward Communism.  They made the enemies of Communism their own enemies.  So when the Radio Priest condemned Communism he was baited into anti-Semitism.  Secure as an anti-Communist he was vulnerable as an anti-Semitist.  Semitism was socially, if not legally, protected.  So the Semitists pursued all the anti-Communists, defaming and belittling them.

page 354.

     After the War it became apparent that Communists had been much too coddled.  While no Fascist had ever been a threat to Ameica, Communists were now found tohave infliltrated every aspect of governmental service, education and, it was feared, religion.

     Americans became hysterical about Communism.  In the wake of the war the Committee hauled up gobs of Communists.  Needless to say the overwhelming majority of these Communists were also Semitists.  But the Semitists successfully hid behind their American shields, claiming the benefits of the United States Constitution which they despised as human while still pursuing their own ‘God given’ Law.  This time, learning from the Radio Priest the Committee refrained from mentioning Jews.

     The battle raged through 1954 when a tacit agreement was reached that the Semitists would abandon Communism while Americanists would abandon ‘Fascism.’  As there was no Fascism the Semitists got the better of the deal.  Thus Semitism became the backbone of Americanism.  The nation’s ribs hung from the spine of Semitist desires.

     For Ben this was all a whirl that spun his head around and around.  Politics had nothing to do with coal.  All he wanted to do, his entire system consisted of selling coal.  In his way Ben knew what he believed as well or better than any Semitist.

     As simple minded as Ben’s hope was it was as good a belief system and certainly less destructive than that of the Semitists.  For Semitism is based on a false prophet.  Just as Nazism was based on the false premise of innate Aryan racial supremacy so Semistism is actually based on a belief in the innate racial superiority of Semitists.  This belief has been converted into religious terms but those religious tenets contradict objective truth.  Hence Semitists say that they prefer God over Truth, which indeed they must.  So also they must be the most intolerant of people; they must viciously suppress all other belief systems and objective inquiry, lest the fallacy of their beliefs be exposed.  Just as the Pope relying on the revealed word of God compelled Gallileo to deny the reality that the earth revolved around the sun.  History itself must be revised and falsified to allow only Semitist beliefs.

page 355.

     While they decried the Committee for suppressing intellectual beliefs it was only because their ox was being gored.  They raised their American shields to their breasts to conceal their Mogen David and demanded American rights that the Mogan David would never grant in a like situation.  As soon as they vanquished the competing belief system in 1954 they began to practice the very methods they had condemned.  All independent thought was condemned as anti-Semitism.  Men, women and careers were destroyed by the simple whisper- ‘anti-Semite.’  Actors and actresses found it difficult or impossible to find work if they took an independent view.  It had been only  yesterday when the Jews had cried: ‘Fie, fie, for shame on the blacklist.’

page 356.

     Ben didn’t care.  His digestion was bothering him.  As the post-war years passed he knew his coal business was in trouble.  Trouble after trouble piled atop him.  Communism at home, Communist triumphs rolled up in Asia.  Even what religion he had rose up to trouble him.  Millennarians were proclaiming the imment second coming of Christ.

     In about 1650 the Jews who had been expelled from England three hundred fifty years before were seeking legal readmission, the argument had been used that when Jews were dispersed throughout the world then Christ would return.  Rumor had it that the American Indians were descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel giving proof that Jews were everywhere else but England.  If Jews were readmitted to England then conditions would be satisfied for the Savior’s return.

     The Bible, which is capable of many wondrous  conflicting interpretations now prophesied, or so it was said, that when the Jews were gathered in Israel once again, then would Christ return.  In 1948 the State of Israel had been established so now good Christians were singing hymns down by the riverside awaiting his return.  Ben quaked.  He didn’t believe it but he couldn’t be sure.  When Jesus didn’t appear the reason given was that Israel had indeed been reestablished but all the Jews hadn’t returned yet.  There were still some in the United States.  The great day was put off to some future generation or, perhaps, eon.  As the gas lines passed Warden’s house that fall costing Ben another couple dozen customers the result became clear to Ben.  There wasn’t going to be any coal business.  Ben got down on his knees beside his bed to pray to the Lord of Hosts, the God of the Jews, the God of the Christians, the god of Coal.  He had devised an elaborate plea but he just broke down sobbing:  “Please God, let me sell coal until I die;  Please, God, let me sell coal until I die.’  The pleas would have been perfectly answered if Ben had died then, but he didn’t.

page 357.

      Now, if one believes such things, God happened to be sitting idly on the edge of his bed at this exact moment clipping his toenails to perfection, listening to the odd prayer as his capacious mind was able to see all and hear all at one time, when Ben’s plea reached his ear. Yeah!  God couldn’t believe his ears.  His lips twisted into a smile at the ridiculous plea.  He suppressed a giggle. The giggle burst into a laugh.  The laugh became a bout of hilarity.  God rolled on the floor in merriment clutching his sides.  ‘Please God, let me sell coal as long as I live.’  Was anything as ridiculous heard since Sir Gareth asked Arthur to sleep in the kitchen?

     Barely able to stand from laughter, God scooped up his beard so as not to put his knee on it and tear it out, rose to his feet and went to his liquor cabinet for three fingers of manna.  On earth manna is called usquebaugh, although some style it Irish tea.  God strolled out amongst the gathered angels chuckling sipping his drink and guffawing:  ‘Please God, let me sell coal until I die.’

     Ben’s God didn’t answer his prayer.  Ben’s troubles were only beginning.  Solomon and David Hirsh’s were already well developed.  As 1950 was about to dawn Sears had cut deeply into Hershey’s business.  The fat part, the part that develops after you’ve met your expenses- the profit- had subsided beneath the paper thin level.

page 358.

    Solomon and David were fighting back as best they could.  They resorted to all the standard retail sales tricks, some which they had said that they would never use, but the post-war retail rules had shifted, at least temporarily, beyond the Hirhes ken.  Intense, even insane, competition  from massive over-expansion was only beginning.  Rather than being a grand seigneur dispensing  the right to shop to patrons, retailers would have to learn to be suppliants begging for their customers custom; in the years to come retailers would actually have to debase themselves before their customers.  Some called it a retailing revolution.

     Stores would now have to adapt their operations to the customers needs and wishes.  Hershey’s, and they were definitely not alone, had always pleased themselves.  They had closed Monday through Saturday at 5:30; they had closed on Sundays, some both Sundays and Mondays.  Like downtown merchants everywhere they resented extended hours.  Sears aggressively stayed open till nine weekdays while they were open after church, twelve to five, on Sundays.  The response was instantaneous; people who worked till 5:30 found the hours advantageous.

     Hershey’s made the weak counter of being open till nine on the ‘busy’ days:  Monday and Friday.  Shoppers interpreted the new rules against them.  Business continued to decline.  Cost cutting measures had reduced the staff, eliminated departments, even closed a floor.  In desperation about a year after that last load of coal had been delivered to the Wardens, David made a fatal move.  The Hirsh women were asked to help out at the store in yet another economy move.  Beverly Webster Hirsh took her place behind a counter.  A shop girl.

page 359.

     An electric thrill tingled the nerves of certain of Ben Webster’s friends who delighted in giving him bad news under the guise of informing him of what he should know.  Even though Big Ben was a common man with what he called the common touch, he didn’t want the Webster women associating with the common people.  He hadn’t approved even of Beverly’s having been present at the Christmas party at Fortress.  He had been molified, and only surlily at that, because it was ‘charity’, in Biblical parlance, ‘a good work.’  Beverly’s marriage had been serious and stressful business for him.  He would have preferred that she marry Christian, but of the choices available David Hirsh had seemed the one with the most inviolable future.  The Hirshes were bidding fair to become a Valley dynasty.

     Ben reacted to the news by catching his breath, his face went blind, his posture stiffened.  Ben couldn’t see his informant taking the greatest pleasure in his discomfiture.  The informant, his arms akimbo, the two fingers of his left hand resting on his chin, gave a little bow, a barely perceptible leaning forward of the torso and cooed:  ‘Just thought you should know, Ben Webster.’

     In his agitation the little insult or gibe flew through his conscious mind into his subconcious.  He wouldn’t ever remember it but it served to increase his agitation against David.  Ben felt betrayed, betrayed by everyone.

page 360.

     His country was in the grip of the Commies and the last days of the world might be imminent.  Everything seemed to be going wrong at once.  Gas mains were interlacing the city; convenience of use and hatred of Big Ben Webster found everyone accepting metered service.  Ben didn’t feel so big anymore, he felt superannuated.  Ben had already shut down the subsidiary yards distributed throughout the city.  At the main yard he was only using half his bins, the ones closest to where his rail spur left the line.  Ben still maintained the yards in super repair and excellent condition but he was only marginally profitable.  He could see the deficits coming.  Now his precious baby, Beverly, stood behind a counter like a common shopgirl.  How much should one common man be forced to stand?

     Ben didn’t bother to check up on the rumor, he knew it was true.  He went home and worried about it.  He had a couple drinks to help him worry.  Now, Ben should have taken his wife and gone up to his cabin in the woods at Tawas Bay.  He should have sat around for a week or two and sorted things out.  He should have, but he didn’t.  His frustrations descended on him hard, with a crash; he worked himself into a towering rage.

     Ben phoned to have his son-in-law and daughter visit him that very night.  Michael answered the phone to say they were at a dinner engagement but that he would leave the message to call.  Ben should have stopped drinking but he kept a head on all through the next day.

page 361.

     In his rage Ben cursed David Hirsh for having failed in his manhood; how could he put Ben’s baby girl to work waiting on her social inferiors.  Ben huffed and puffed, he roared in anguish.  All his anxieties came together to dance on the head of the pin of his fears.

     Now, believe me, what follows is painful for me to relate, for I too am a 100% American, but two generations later than Ben, so we have different reactions to the same situations; besides I know what I believe; Ben didn’t.  As little as I owe to people like Ben Webster and David Hirsh, my grudge is personal not genetic.  So was Ben’s actually.  I don’t want to defend Ben before you but what he said would never have been said in different circumstances.  Besides their dissimilarities had been accentuated by David himself.  He had called attention to their religious differences.

     David had responded to the shock of the Nazi extermination camps by reaffirming his Jewish beliefs.  This act necessarily entailed his withdrawal from the Christian community.  He ceased attendance at Fortress Of God.  Beverly followed him into the synagogue.  Whereas David had straddled the Jewish and Christian belief systems he now wholeheartedly embraced the Jewish belief system.  Just as the fear of Communism was making Americanists hysterical with fear, so the Nazis drove the Jews into hysteria.  David and his fellow Jews began to suspect that Americans were plotting to destroy them.  Whereas before the War they had fantasized a huge Fascist conspiracy in American they now created a huge Nazi organization waiting in the shadows for the moment to arise and devour them in ovens.  The anti-Communist activities of Americans were seen in this light.  Americanist anti-Communist fears reached such a fever pitch that in 1953 concentration camps had actually been constructed in an anticipated roundup of Communists.  To round up Communists was in essence to round up Jews.  Once the Communists were rounded up it was a short step for David and his fellows to imagine that an extension to round up Jews as Jews would be next.

page 362.

     Thus a certain coolness developed between the Hirshes and the Websters in the post-War years.  They began to distance themselves from each other.  A little picket fence arose between them.  Dave and Mike, as they had been affectionately known to the Websters, became David and Michael of a more sombre religion.  The two families had begun to find fault with each other.

     David and Beverly had responded to Ben’s request for attendance.  Beverly who had called her father back had heard the quavering urgency in his voice.  As both families were battling serious and grave economic problems Beverly was quite naturally apprehensive that some disaster had befallen her father; she had communicated that apprehension to David.  David’s mind was then occupied with the possible economic problems that might have befallen Ben.  Neither associated Beverly’s clerking at Hershey’s as the problem, but both had highly strung nerves as they drove over to Ben’s.

     Ben was half-stewed as he stood at the window watching for their arrival.  He saw the car turn into his driveway and stop.  He had intended to get them into the house where he could confront David with the accusation; or rather begin to berate him as a failure as a man; Ben was going to start in the middle where it hurt the most.  He hadn’t planned to take it further than that; he didn’t know what he would have answered to David’s objections, nor probably would he have given David an opportunity to object.

page 363.

     The two were halfway across the lawn when Ben impetuously burst the front door open, standing with one foot in the house, one foot on the porch.  His pride was shattered.  He assumed his most imperative posture.

     Internally Beverly said:  ‘Oh, jeez.’  Ben was wound tight.  His voice was incredible at any time but now his capacious diaphragm pushed the air over his thick wide vocal cords with typhonic force.  Glowering at David madly, his emotions rushing through his mind like Niagara over its falls, Ben bellowed:  ‘Get into this goddamned house, you Jew.’  But David, in his state of heightened anxiety had heard:  ‘Get into this house you goddamned Jew.’  He would swear forever that that was what Ben said, but Ben didn’t.

     Ben had always been peremptory so his manner didn’t offend David, but Ben’s words as he heard them did.  David stopped in mid-step as Ben’s blast reached him,  his foot hung suspended on a step of air.  His mouth dropped open, his breathing stopped and he went blind while his blood surged through his brain obliterating the universe.  Perspiration immediately soaked his clothes.  Memories of every event he considered anti-Semitic that had ever happened to him or to the Jews in general; every anti-Semitic thought that he believed anyone had ever harbored against him flashed through his mind.  Through this traumatic melange of memories and fears exploding in his mind wound the thread that his own father-in-law was an anti-Semite; the anti-Semitic conspiracy had reached into his own home.

page 364.

     It wasn’t true.  Ben had meant the term merely as a mild form of disapprobation, temporary at that; an ejaculation made in the choler of the moment.  Ben had meant it only as he would have called one of his own a brat.  Ben was perhaps a trifle insensitive, but David had been his son-in-law for fourteen years.  He thought he had a right to be familiar, besides, of late, David had constantly reminded Ben that he was a Jew.

     David had never been able to consider his own responsibility nor did he now.  For David it was a shattering realization that ‘anti-Semitism’ was every where.  It was even in the bosom of his family of which his hopes and fears had nourished the notion that it was the one place he was secure.

     To David’s stricken mind the universe could have begun and ended in the time he had been standing with his foot in mid-air.  Without putting his foot down he spun around and retraced his steps to his car.  Beverly who understood the seriousness of the situation nevertheless waved to her father that it would be all right.  She slid into her seat barely in time not to be knocked down by her door as David shot out into the street in a blind panic.  His feeling of revulsion was intense, he had to get away from there.

page 365.

     It wouldn’t be all right.  It wouldn’t ever be all right again.  David, who had been plunged into the abyss of despair, bobbed to the surface rather quickly under the concerned ministrations of his wife Beverly and her mother.  David visited his father-in-law’s house within a year.  There was no cordiality between he and Ben.  Ben had been hurt very deeply by his opinion of David’s conduct as regarded Beverly.  In his heart he could no longer regard David as a man and this consideration overrode all others.  This was quite as serious to him as David’s reaction to his being called a Jew.  He never had another opportunity to discuss Beverly’s clerking.  He knew that she still worked at Hershey’s.  His shame and degradation were complete but he bore them stoically, however he wanted to hurt David.  He didn’t know that he had given David a wound that would always stay fresh and raw, a wound that would never heal.  David wanted to hurt Ben also.

     Big Ben was soon forced to close down the coalyard.  Something went out of Ben’s life when he did.  He always retained the property in the hope that someday the past would return.  He always maintained the property in readiness to receive the shipments of coal.  The fences were maintained and painted every year.  The signing was fresh; Ben’s little white shack glowed whitely at night like a ghost.  Grass grew over the rail spur; the tracks quietly rusted away.  The future had consumed the past.

page 366.

9.

      I was having a big banana split at Trinkow’s drug store next to the Court Street theatre on Court St. and Caterina.  Trinkow’s apparently couldn’t conceive the notion of ‘banana split’ on their own so they had bought into a banana split franchise called the Pig Trough.  The split was served in a little wooden trough which was supposed to be of brabdingnagian proportions.  It was actually, according to my notions, conceived along more lilliputian lines.  As a reward for eating this supposedly mammoth Pig’s Trough one received a button that said:  ‘I made a pig of myself at Trinkow’s Drug.’  I don’t know if Trinkow thought I would wear such an absurd button but I was given one anyway.  The thing was a heck of a good banana split; its creator understood the finer nuances of ‘banana split.’  I don’t know if I would have paid him money for the information as Trinkow’s did, I could have done just as well with my own unaided faculties.  I guess Trinkow’s couldn’t.

page 367.

     I had had several over the last few weeks.  I had a button each to prove it.  I was now in a dispute with the clerk who was refusing to give me another on the specious grounds that I already had several.  As I paused in the discussion to scoop up some chocolate, which I had carefully segregated from the strawberry and pineaple, saving the best for last, I overheard two men behind me talking.

     One was saying:  ‘Whatever happened to Webster anyhow?’

     ‘Oh, he’s still around.’  The other said.  ‘He’s in the oil business over on Transit St.  Didn’t you know that?  He stands out in front of his shack watching the world go by.  You ought to go over and take a look at him.’

     ‘Hmm.  Maybe I will.’  Was the reply.

     N0 maybe about it.  I would.

     I was allowed to use Skippy’s old bike, an ancient Columbia, so I hopped on and found my way over to Transit St.  The street was on the North side of the Valley, not too far from the coalyard.

     There was Big Ben.  He was a far cry from the Big Ben of old.  He no longer felt important, so that, as he stood there, he seemed contracted into himself; he no longer stood tall like the Big Ben of old.  Instead of the wonderful bustle and noise of the coalyard there was just a big oil tank standing silently in weeds on its four tubular steel legs.  It was like a spent war machine from the War of the Worlds.  He had a couple of greasy trucks for delivery, bought second hand.  Very functional compared to the big clean rigs that delivered coal.  Even the drivers looked foul and sinister compared to the proud way the coal drivers carried themselves.  There was no rail spur or puffing blowing steam engine.  His wholesaler came by in the dead of night to fill his tank.  There was no magic.

page 368.

     Ben was a monopolist at heart.  Dominance was his game.  Cordiality was foreign to him.  They had had to buy coal from him.  He could treat them as he liked; show them who was boss.  He could be Big Ben.

     Now he was only one of a dozen retailers.  He competed not only with the other retailers but the gas main.  He had bought into a small pie of even smaller pieces.  So that was his problem:  Oil was competitive; he wasn’t.  Oil customers didn’t like to be talked to the way Ben was used to talking to his coal customers.  They could go somewhere else where they were treated better.  They did.  Ben was stagnating, running downhill, nearing the bottom.

     When the man in the drugstore said that you should go take a look at Ben a lot of people were.  There was a steady stream of cars turning the corner, then taking a slow driveby as they passed Ben standing on the weedlined sidewalk in front of his little shack.  They still feared him.  They didn’t turn their heads to gawk at him, but eyed him furtively from the corner of their eyes, the drivers leaning foward slightly, inconspicuously , as they hoped, to see round their wives.  The eyes of the little ones stared just above the level of the back windows not knowing what they were looking at but aware that he was a legend.

page 369.

     I rode up turning off the main walk to stop Skippy’s blue bike in the walkway leading up to the shack.  It was one of those temporary looking pre-fab jobbies sitting up on cinder blocks rather than a real foundation.  The thing was a non-descript brownish color with a door in the middle and a large picture window on the right.

     Ben probably thought I was impertinent as I leaned my elbows and forearms on the handlebars and stared up at him.  He looked at the old beat up Columbia, than at my shoes and ill fitting worn clothes.  His lower right lip drooped into a sneer as his upper lip curled to say something when his eyes met mine.  It was one of those rare instances when one’s vision penetrates the plane of individuality and reaches into the brain through the inner eye.  We saw each others contempt for the other.

     A couple of years had passed since I had last seen Ben.  My youthful innocence was vanishing.  I understood the implications of his curling sneer better.  As Ben’s prospects deteriorated he, like some convicted criminal, had turned to Jesus.  The religion of the Book.  The Book that preaches that unfortunates must exist, the poor will always be with us.  As a self-fulfilling prophecy, if the poor don’t exist naturally people must be pushed down to fill the ranks.  Ben’s religion insisted that rather than raising people up it is far better that the will of God be expressed by letting them seek the lower level.

     I was conscious by now of having been and being pushed down.  Ben had long been guilty of the attitude even before he got religion.  The notion was endemic to the belief system with which he had been brought up.  Finance capitalists believed that laborers were the poor.  They had no rights because they were failures in the pursuit of wealth.  God had divined that they must live by the sweat of their brows.  God had written it down himself, with his own hand, as they thought, in his Holy Book.

page 370.

     A young man had grown up in the generation preceding Ben’s who had watched these Biblical devotees with disgust.  The first forty years of his life had coincided with the evolution of finance capitalism, a period roughly from 1865 to 1900.  The period was one of the extension of the railroad networks throughout the United States.  America was a wild untamed country, its people severed from the civilizing influence of Europe were a wild and woolly bunch of boys.  They were uneducated, unrestrained and undisciplined.  Honesty was a concept to be found in a book somewhere.  Law was whatever you could put over.

     The finance captitalists created their own law which was paramount to federal, state and municipal law.  Governments adjusted themselves to the finance capitalists, the capitalists did as they pleased.  A fundamental law of theirs was that labor was a commodity.  The price of labor was the least amount that a man would accept to perform a service.  If only one man could do the job then he could set his own price; if anyone could do the job the finance capitalist set the price.  This was in inviolable article of faith.  The Bible backs up the whole program.

page 371.

     During the exploration of the United States all the great natural resources fell into relatively few hands.  The great mines belonged to them, huge forests, which a few years before had belonged to no one, became the private property of the few who grabbed them.  God’s bounty was taken from the many.  The few dug and cut the wealth of the land forcing labor to work for less than a living wage under execrable conditions.  Any rebellion was treated as a violation of the sacred word of God.

     When asked by what right they claimed the assets that until recently had been the property of all, the finance capitalists looked out and said with a straight face: ‘God gave them to us.’  Must have.  When laborers went on strike a judge screamed with a straight face: ‘Don’t you know you’re tampering with God’s divine order.’  He was right too.  For God, in his own voice, had said that laborers must win their bread, and bread only- no luxuries- by the sweat of their brow.  Luxuries were to be no part of their lives.

     Dissenters to this creed were clubbed and shot down.  They were put on a black list and found it very difficult to find a job.  At the least they had to adopt several aliases.  Then they lived in fear of being exposed and moving on to yet another job.

     In the West, in Colorado, during this man’s middle manhood, a bloody war raged between the hard rock miners and the mine owners.  This man shook his head in shame.  He thought that if he ever had a chance he would change all that.  There was slim possibility of his getting a chance for he was merely an unschooled skilled laborer.

page 372.

     Then too, he saw the stranglehold the finance capitalists had on the money of the nation.  The gold standard created a money monopoly which these finance capitalists enjoyed.  Like all populists he knew that the value of the country, the manufactures, the land, the crops in the ground far exceeded the value of all the gold in the world.  But the gold standard gave them control of the country; they fought furiously to maintain the gold standard.

     As the nineteenth century drew to a close the finance capitalists consolidated their position.  All the industrial resources of the country were under their dominion.  They had a corner on the United States.  Not very many families controlled the resources of the nation.  Companies in the various industries were organized into great trusts or cartels which set prices for their own benefit, not by supply and demand, not by the cost of the article, but for their own benefit.  You didn’t need a college education to see that it was wrong.

     This man tinkered away at building an automobile, thinking all the time that if he had a chance he would show them how to do it right.  He was probably simple enough to think that they would appreciate the instruction.  He was brilliant but untutored and not a little naive.

     He just didn’t think that things had to be the way they were.  For him history was bunk.  It was matter of of human will not divine destiny.  That man’s actions would speak louder than words in a musty book.  That man was Henry Ford.

     Beginning in 1903 when his efforts to form an automobile company began to bear fruit, Henry Ford was more than a manufacturer.  He was a visionary.  His system was not devoid of religious aspects.  In many ways Ford was a prophet.  He threw such a challenge to the system of the Bible Thumpers, Jew and Gentile alike, that they rose as one in their attempt to destroy him.  Ford had been watching them, analyzing their methods, criticizing them and preparing his own positive plan as he matured into a man.

page 373.

     It was clear to him that he had to stay out of their hands.  He had watched the bankers manipulate the railroads, ignoring the public weal, milking the value out of them by a succession of bankruptcies and reorganizations.  The value went into their pockets; the refuse remained with the public.

     It was clear to him that sole ownership was absolutely necessary, for if once he atomized his value by issuing stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, his company would fall within the realm of speculation.  Ownership and control would pass from his hands into the hands of men who created nothing but turned the fruits of everyone elses labor to themselves.  Ford’s revulsion to bankers was founded on reality.  It was not a cranky quirk as bankers have always portrayed it.

     It has been aptly stated:  Change is now.  As the auto industry came into existence it marked a change in American business.  The railroads and exploitation industries had reached maturity.  The methods of the international bankers, the finance capitalists, had been appropriate to the great industries of the nineteenth century; they were not appropriate for the emerging industries of the twentieth century.  Success in automobile manufacturing would depend on more intangibles than railroading, mining or lumbering.

page 374.

     They would try the same tactics in the auto industry but would have to adapt themselves to running an ongoing profit making company.  The auto companies were profitable.  They were also self-financing.  Even though bankers intially adopted a hands off attitude in fear of the new product the auto manufacturers devised ways to get along without them.  Cars were in such demand that there were at first more buyers than cars.  Ford and others had sixty day terms with their suppliers while receiving deposits from the dealers with immediate payment on delivery.  Ford learned to turn a car out in days, delivering it to the retailers and having payment in the bank long before his sixty day credit terms came due.  Ford was more careful than most, he never had a public stock offering and never borrowed.  Unlike other manufacturers he was totally independent; he was not subject to the influences of the financial community.

     W. C. Durant, who formed General Motors, was.  In 1910 he was forced to go to the bankers who plundered the company and took control away from him for five years.  In 1910 Durant’s Buick and the Ford were equal sellers; in 1915 Ford’s management had pushed his company so far beyond General Motors under banker management that it wasn’t funny.

     Ford was lucky; he had realized his dream.  In the gestation of the auto industry his vision triumphed.  Ford had envisioned selling a low priced car to millions of buyers when cars were a rich man’s toy selling in the hundreds.  Ford perfected his production methods to the point where he could make tens of thousands of them and then just made them without prospective buyers in sight.

page 375.

     His backers were frantic.  They called him crazy and meant it.  They tried to have him ejected from the company, but the cars sold as fast as Ford could turn them out.  Henry Ford had been right, the buyers were there waiting.  For Ford to have persisted in the face of such opposition took great courage.  Ford had been right, everyone else had been wrong.  Henry Ford thus became inured to criticism.

     The Ford Motor Co.  prospered mightily.  Its value grew astronomically.  It was real value.  Henry Ford called his system service production as opposed to finance capitalism.  Rather than price his car at what the market would bear, regardless of cost, Ford took advantage of economies of scale and actually reduced the price of his car as his sales increased.  Ford was a wild card and a threat to the system.  The finance capitalists shook their heads and eyed him warily.

     By 1915 Ford had succeeded to the point where he could begin to implement his whole plan.  He had watched the manner in which the international bankers had treated labor with disgust.  He had foreseen a day when everyone had enough for necessities with more left over for luxuries besides.  He was creating a day when machines took the heavy work from the backs of men.  Men no longer had to live from the sweat of their brows.  Ford wanted to raise men up, to improve their condition, to make them healthier and happier; he didn’t want to push them down.

     In 1914 Ford violated the most sacred tenet of the finance capitalists’ code.  He refused to treat labor as a commodity receiving the lowest wage that they would accept.  They already couldn’t understand Ford.  He had perplexed them by increasing his profits while lowering his prices.  He had already made all of them look bad through the comparative management of GM and Ford.  Now he voluntarily raised wages to better than twice the going rate for unskilled labor.  The man was a class traitor, he had to be stopped.

page 366.

     But how?  His five dollar day had made him such a national hero that he was untouchable by slander and defamation.  He was financially beyond their reach.  He didn’t need their money; he had cash reserves of over one hundred million dollars.  He eyed them warily too; he knew what it took to stay out of their clutches.  He didn’t intend to be a W.C. Durant.

      He couldn’t be touched competitively; he had over fifty percent of the market.  But there was a joker in the deck that could take the trick.  He could be made to defame himself.  Ford was impetuous.  He was a loner, he hadn’t learned to discipline himself in social situations.  He was something of a wild man in the social sense.  He would say things; perhaps do things.  Ford plans had been visionary.  His notion of making millions of cars that everyone could afford had been so far ahead of the times that he had been told History showed  it was impossible.  Ford had replied:  ‘If that’s so, then History is Bunk.’  They fastened on the phrase: History is Bunk to depict Ford as an illiterate boob who had merely stumbled onto a good thing.  It was a beginning but his reputation was sound.  It would take more.

page 377.

     In the first decade of the twentieth century a General Bingham had been made a reform commissioner of police in New York City.  New York City had always been a great factory  turning out criminals.  Reformers wished to change the situation.  As police commissioner General Bingham published a magazine article in an honest attempt to analyze the situation.  In this article he made the remark that half the crime in New York City was committed by Jews.  This remark was not vindictive or fallacious as time has proven.  It was ill considered, true or not, for the Jews of New York City rose up in wrath.  They denied the facts, of course, but more importantly they got General Bingham fired.  They defamed him as an ignorant bigot.  Bingham was chastened but he wanted his job back.  He still had plans to clean up New York City.  In an effort to show that he had reformed or, at least, gotten the message, a few years later he published a short book on the white slave trade.  The White Slave trade was inappropriately chosen as the Jews were dominant in the trade and very sensitive to criticism on the issue.  Even though they dominated the trade they refused to acknowledge it on the basis that Judaism  had always insisted on purity of morals and the sanctity of the family.  Whenever truth and dogma collides, truth has to give.  In his book, General Bingham showed his intent by never once mentioning Jews.  They were conspicuous by their absence.  None of the names of criminals mentioned even had names that could be construed as Jewish.  All the names had been Anglicized.  The leading criminals were still Jews but it was not to be mentioned.  Oh now, there was power.  Bingham still didn’t get the job back.  He was finished.

page 378.

     Just as the Radio Priest would be lured into attacking Jews at a later date and court destruction, if now Ford could be led into attacking the Jews there would be no way that he could avoid destruction.  Getting someone into a fight is easy.  Anybody who has ever prowled a schoolyard knows how easy it is to involve someone in a fight while putting the onus on the other fellow.  For it was necessary to strike but to conceal the hand that struck.

     All you have to do is get a bunch of guys to surround the victim and tip his hat off from behind.  If that doesn’t get a rise do it again while punching him in the back.  When the guy turns around jump back defensively while shouting to draw public attention:  ‘What’s wrong with you, buddy, I didn’t do anything to you.’  It’s pretty easy.  It wasn’t hard with Ford either.

     Henry Ford had attained the position he had always sought.  By 1914 when he changed the wage structure of American industry Ford Motor Co. had attained a position of industrial security.  Ford’s daring predictions of the industry’s viability had been proven; the future of the industry was clear to Ford.  How own self-confidence in his thinking and abilities was powerfully validated.  He therefore felt confident to express himself in all his beliefs.  Ford, while not a pacifist, was opposed to war.  The Great War had begun in 1914.  Much of the Old Guard was pressing to enter on the side of the allies.  Ford took out full page ads in leading newspapers against US involvement.  It was commonly thought at the time that peace could be negotiated between the combatants.  Thus in 1916 a Hungarian Jew, showed up on Ford’s doorstep with the proposal that he sponsor a peace mission.  Ford was but too enthusiastic; by December he and an entourage were on the way to Europe with the slogan that they would have the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.  His mission was met by general ridicule.  so much so that it looked like it might have been planned.  Aboard the ship, in addition to the Hungarian Jews was another Jew by the name of Herman Bernstein.  Bernstein had connections with the AJC and other Jewish ‘defense’ groups and may be contrued to have been there as their representative and privy to much inside information of Jewish intentions.

     While at sea, as Ford told it, they told him that he was wasting his time as only the Jews could bring about peace.  Bernstein later denied the statement so one is left with the choice of believing either Ford or Bernstein.  Bernstein has a rather shaky record for veracity; I choose Ford.

     Ford returned home immediately on arrival, his faith unshaken, although he was subjected to devastating ridicule in the press.  Now, I don’t think there’s a real argument to this: the press was and is controlled by the Jews.  Ford still made no comment about the Jews.  After America’s entry into the war Ford observed and was troubled by the very close association of the Wilson administration and the Jews.  A casual review of history of the period will easily demonstrate the veracity of his view.  He had serious disagreements with the Jewish administrator of the powerful War Industries Board, yet Ford made no comments about the Jews.

page 380.

     After the war, as the twenties dawned, the dominant position of the auto industry in the economy became apparent to everyone.  Even the bankers recognized that the financial future would be dominated by the industry.  The international bankers, the finance capitalists, thus made moves to bring the industry under its control just as the industries of the nineteenth century had been.  The difference was that the auto companies couldn’t be repeatedly bankrupted and reorganized without destroying them.  They had be operated as profitable ongoing businesses.

     W.E. Durant was ejected from control of General Motors in 1920 as renewed pressure was placed on Ford.  Horace and John Dodge, third in importance after Ford and GM, both died in 1920 placing their company in limbo to be devoured at monstrous profit to the finance capitalists five years later.  A board of bankers and Duponts replaced Durant at GM.

     Ford had borrowed money, even the wise do foolish things, to buy out his backers.  He was given a very short time to come up with the money else a multi-billion dollar company had fallen into the hands of the bankers for sixty million.  Ford did pay the debt on time.  But his information indicated that the pressure had come from Jewish investment bankers.  There may have been little or nothing sinister in this fact.  International bankers were international bankers.  The House of Morgan, which was not Jewish, was installed at General Motors.  Perhaps a just division of the industry among the international bankers required Ford to go to the Jewish houses.

page 381.

     But in examining the events from the time of the Peace Ship to the present Ford came to the conclusion that he was under attack by the the Jews, which to all appearances, he certainly was.  The attacks would not have ceased in any event; the bankers wanted Ford Motors.  Ford had no alternative but to counter-attack.  He chose the method of expose.

     This post-Great War period was one of even more intense anxiety than the post-1945 period.  The Bolshevik triumph in Russia had completely unnerved the Western world.  A series of Bolshevik revolutions outside Russia had been suppressed or overturned by counter-revolutionaries.  Hundreds of Reds had been expelled from the United States while thousands had returned to Russia of their own accord.

     It was widely believed that the Jews were behind the Bolsheviks and that the Bolsheviks were part of a Jewish plot to realize an ambition of world domination.  There was intense world wide antipathy toward the Jews.  A large number of books were written exposing Jewish influence in the world revolution.  Thus the Jews were occupied in defusing world wide antagonism to themselves.

     Ford bought a newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which he used as a vehicle to propagate his beliefs and expose what the called the International Jew.  He divided Jewry into two groups.  Good Jews who weren’t aware of what the others were doing in their name and International Jews who were the problem makers.  A series of articles demonstrating Jewish involvement in various aspects of American life were printed and later collected into four volumes known by the collective title of The International Jew.  While less scholarly in format than the other expose books, Ford’s articles are nevertheless well researched, accurate and well written.  The books are not vile, indeed, none of the exposes were vile- what the ordinary person means by ‘anti-Semitic.’  All merely present a viewpoint differing from that of the Jews.

page 382.

     Well, Ford had stepped into the maelstrom.  Both Jews and those of the ‘better classes’ reviled him.  Those of the better classes abandoned him.  His reputation had suffered irreparable and degenerative damage.  It was the considered opinion that he was an eccentric addle pate, a manufacturing genius but hopelessly at sea in intellectual matters.  It was suggested that perhaps his egregious opinions were caused by a lack of formal education.

     The notion was that if he had been to college he could never have formed these opinions.  It was said that such opinions could only be held by uncultured, unlettered, ignorant persons.  Well, untrue at any time in history, unless of course one thinks that history is bunk.  Actually Ford was in the best of company in his antipathy to the beliefs of the Jews.  The Roman historian, Tacitus, who has a magnificent reputation as an intellectual, was much more personal in his rejection of Jewish claims to universal dominion.  Even in the time of Christ, considered opinion opined that the Jews were seeking world dominion.  Voltaire, the father of the Enlightenment was much more coarse in the expression of his opinion of Biblical religion, both Christian and Jewish.  He really knew how to express himself too.  The two greatest historians of all times have rejected Jewish claims.  Arnold Toynbee, the lesser of the two is haughtily disdainful of Judaic claims while the greater, Edward Gibbon, dismisses their claims with his usual disdainful bemusement.  Von Treitschke the great…but why go on; lack of a formal education had nothing to do with Ford’s  opinion; he was facing the facts as he and countless others before him had done.

page 383.

      It might be more easily argued that only the most ignorant and illiterate accept the Bible at face value.  In this decade of the twenties the famous Scopes Monkey Trial would be conducted in Tennessee in which the Biblical theory of creation was upheld.  The religious colony of New Zion, North of Chicago was in full flower.  The New Zionists like the Old Zionists made it dogmatic that God had indeed made a flat earth; and flat they maintained it was, even in the twenties.  Bishop Ussher of Ireland using biblical data computed the age of the earth at 4004 years and so publicly announced.  This age was at variance with the Jewish calendar which proclaimed that, in fact, (fact being here understood as their belief) the earth had been created by their tribal god some 5700 years ago.  The Jews hold Bishop Ussher in error by nearly two thousand years.

     How did the Jews account for dinosaur bones and other evidences of greater antiquity?  This ancient Biblical folk assert that God placed them their to test man’s faith.  How crazy was Ford?  Well, in this inane quarrel, it is insane to ask.

page 384.

     Still, a man has a right to defend himself.

     Ahhh, but does he?

     In defending himself against an ism, Judaism is this case, is defense legitimate or is it heresy punishable by law or the ism?  The issue shows that Ford was guilty of heresy, that he practiced ‘anti-Semitism.’  From the point of Judaism this is true.  But according to universalist standards is it in fact a crime?  Remember Ford had developed his own belief system which may be summarized in his term- service production.  His ideology directly contradicted the Biblical ideology of finance capitalism practiced by Jews and goys alike.  Thus the actual battle was between two exclusive systems with Ford and the Jews as point men.  Anti-Semitism has absolutely nothing to do with it except as a red herring.  When in doubt shout:  ‘Anti-Semitism.’  Ford was not obliged to accept the point of view of the Jews.

     Now, all the leading industries of the nineteenth century had been run along the established methods of Biblical attitudes.  The attitude toward labor and its wage policy highlighted the differences between the two systems but Ford had carried the exposure of the fallacy of the finance capitalist system further.  Rather than buying his needed supplies from their plants Ford had built his own system of suppliers.  Each plant showed the bankers how their evil ways could be exchanged for better.  This was in itself a mortal insult.

     The key to Ford’s activities was to improve working conditions.  Primarily he invented machines to take the heaviest and hardest work from the men.  He was a fanatic for cleanliness and order.  He stepped back and looked at each industry to see how its methods of production could be improved.

     He showed them how to better run a steel factory.  Circumstances dictated that he had to buy a railroad whose right of way crossed the Ford River Rouge plant.  The road had been repeatedly bankrupted and was in reorganization when he bought it.  The road had never made a profit.  Ford reconditioned the dilapidated equipment, cleaned up the line, raised wages and made it so profitable that he applied to the authorities for a rate reduction.  The regulators were in the hands of the finance capitalists; needless to say his request was denied.

     When he was compelled to buy coal mines in self defense, he showed how they might be cleaned up and run properly.  The coal miners had been most scandalously used by the famous capitalists.  Ford raised their wages but more importantly he raised the miners up.  He built decent housing for them and painted the houses white.  This was unheard of on the line.  He did the same with the hard rock miners of the Upper Peninsula.  He repeated the efforts for the Timber Beasts in the forests he bought.

     The conditions of seamen were vastly improved on his ore boats that brought the materials down from the North.  Glass manufacturers using antiquated methods were unable to supply the vast quantities of plate glass Ford Motor needed.  Ford bought a glass company and revolutionized glass production. His men had plate glass flowing endlessly down the line.  Do you know who introduced the soy bean crop to America?

page 386.

     In other words, he thought he was demonstrating by example.  The finance capitalists took his efforts as a repudiation of their methods, not that they didn’t adopt his methods.  They didn’t want him to defend himself, they just wanted him to go away.  In 1925 international bankers offered him one billion dollars for his company.  They had learned from General Motors how to run an auto company without an entrepreneur.

     According to Biblical prescriptions an antagonist is not allowed to defend himself.  Indeed he has no possible defense.  Once charged you are considered guilty.  The Biblical peoples are in possession of God’s own truth, all else must be false, hence heretical.  A non-believer has no defense.

     Prohibition which had just been enacted at this time simply outlawed the views of drinkers and made them criminals if they persisted.  A vocal minority had imposed its will on a passive majority.  In America the self-righteous always seek to limit the rights of those they have made antagonists.  In the war against the tobacco industry every attempt has been made to restrict the offensive powers of the smokers.  Certain forms of advertising have been outlawed; had they the strength I am sure the anti-tobacco forces would outlaw the cultivation of tobacco in the United States.

     The anti-abortionists violate all laws in their attempt to outlaw abortion.  It makes no matter what the majority believes; these biblically oriented bigots believe that their views are paramount and are derived from God himself.  Heck they’ve got it in His own writing.

     Thus in Ford’s efforts to present his views his Jewish antagonists believed that Ford should be outlawed, that he should be compelled to silence, murdered.  The American Constitution must give way to Biblical Law.  Their views and their views alone were sacrosanct.  To oppose them was criminal; the crime was anti-Semitism.  They would observe no morality in their opposition to Ford.  The Jewish attitude to opposition and their methods were never more succinctly demonstrated than by the founder of the first Jewish defense organization, the French Alliance Israelite Universelle, Adophe Cremieux.

     At the beginning of the nineteenth century Cremieux characterized his opponents as an insane fraction who appealed to the masses with daring and to the authorities with treachery.  The insane faction wanted to bury freedom of conscience under the weight of a single religion, freedom of the press under censorship.  HIs opponents, so he said, should be tracked down relentlessly, its hypocrisy undermined, it must be attacked in its hopes, its acts, its projects.  The Jews must wage a daily, even a moment to moment war against it.

     Jewish methods have not changed in the two hundred years since Cremieux made his statement.  Ford was depicted as insane.  He may have disagreed as to who wanted to bury freedom of  conscience under the weight of which single religion or who wished to end freedom of the press under censorship but he was subjected to a relentless attack in his hopes, acts and projects.  He was depicted in the most unfavorable light as a bigot.

     Henry Ford was a good, decent, honorable man.  His wish had been only to make his tormentors stop.  The writing collected into the volumes of  The International Jew were immediately disparaged as anti-Semitic, by which is meant irresponsible, violent and mean attacks.  But they were not.  The articles were well researched dealing with viable and realistic criticism of his tormentors.  But there is no such thing in Semitist minds as honest criticism of their beliefs; all criticism is heresy, or in secular terms, defamation of their belief system.

page 388.

     The Jews responded by considering  but then withdrawing a lawsuit against Ford for defamation of their belief system while continuing to defame him.  They invaded the libraries and stole copies of his books to be incinerated.  Of the hundreds of thousands printed the books are virtually unobtainable in libraries today.  As Catholicism had its index of forbidden knowledge so a Jewish index of forbidden knowledge was created.  Ford’s books led the list, followed by books of Dickens and Shakespeare.  The period was one of high emotions.  A few years later the Nazis would institute an index of forbidden knowledge.  They would build a bonfire in the middle of the street into which they threw all the books by Jewish authors.  The Communists too, had their index of forbidden knowledge.  Heading their list was the most Holy Bible.  What did all these books endanger?  Why, simply the foundation of the particular ism.  For in truth, the Truth is anti-Semitic; the Truth is anti-Catholic, the Truth is anti-Nazi and anti-Communist.  All these isms stand as the Pope with a repentant Gallileo before him.  The world isn’t what they would have it.  The earth does revolve around the sun; it isn’t flat.  Dogma cannot change reality.  Heresy is nothing more than the Truth, or the pursuit of it.  What was Ford’s offense?  He pointed out the false basis of Judaism.

     Like all hypocrites and bigots, Ford’s enemies sought to discredit him by his own hand while concealing theirs.  That’s what undermining one’s enemy’s pride, disclosing his false humility and unmasking his hypocrisy means.  When you have driven him to the point of distraction, you point and calmly say:  ‘See, I told you so.’  The amazing thing is that mankind still hasn’t learned to see through the sham.

     Strike! But conceal the hand that strikes.  Ford demanded that the Jews come forth to defend their pants.  He issued his challenge and laid his charges before them.  The Jews would not come forth to defend their pants.  The God of the Flat Earth acted in the stead of the finance capitalists; or at least that is what the sons of Moses and servants of Jesus would have the world believe.

     Strike! But conceal the hand.  Obtain victory but in the name of God, for God moves in mysterious ways and uses strange vessels to obtain his ends.  Avoid responsibility for your actions; put them at God’s door instead.  Plans were set afoot to destroy Henry Ford as though by act of God for Henry Ford’s own guilt.

     Strikes were concocted at the coal mines that fed Ford’s furnaces.  Ford’s coal reserves were consumed as the strike dragged on.  Ford’s mighty empire ground to a complete halt as his coal supply failed.  Tens of thousands of workers lay idle and destitute as the Children of God waged His war against one man.  All must suffer because of their anger at one.  The finance capitalists were so intent on one victim that they would destroy the world in their attempt to subdue him.

page 390.

     The strike was such that it probably could not have been engineered by the Jews alone.  It must have involved the goi faction.  Ford was allowed to see only the Jews.  A counter-attack on his own kind would be dismissed as rivalry.  The strike would be seen only as a dirty trick.  Only the Jews could bring Ford down.

     Ford was a leader, if not the initiator, in the creation of the international business empire.  His plants were in Ireland, England, France, Germany, Italy…Palestine, Japan; Ford blanketed the world.  No one was in a better position to know what was happening financially in the world.  His sources of information rivaled those of the Jews.  Where there were Jews there was Ford; where there was Ford there were Jews.  His interests were opposed to those of the international bankers of whatever stripe of nationality.  He was not part of the money cartel.  When he blamed international bankers for certain things who was in a better position to know?  Yet he was derided by his enemies as a mere crank, a crackpot, a simple minded man.  Could a simple minded man devise a complex innovative international manufacturing firm where none had existed before?

     The truth was quite different.  Ford, once again, showed whoever would see what his enemies were.  Ford was now completely armed against financial attack.  His company was almost totally vertically integrated.  He owned his company lock, stock and barrel.  He once again had a reserve of a hundred million.  Profits in the tens of millions continued to roll in.  Once again Ford was secure.  He had made himself well nigh invulnerable to attack from above, attack by financial methods.

page 391.

     Ford’s enemies were rich in resources and persistent to the point of fanaticism.  Ford had shown himself to them as an unrepetant heretic.  If he had desired it of them, it would have been impossible to obtain release.  Not only would he, as an arch-heretic be pursued to the grave but the goal was to blacken his name for all eternity.  The 614th rule for all Jews is to allow Hitler no posthumous victories.  The same may be said of Ford and all their enemies.

     Jewish resources exist both within and without the nation.  Gois consider it anathema to be accused of anti-Semitism.  They are more than willing to persecute their own on Jewish behalf on no more evidence than a whisper.  Ford apparently did not understand this aspect of his problem.  If he had, one might question whether he might have attempted another avenue of defense, or, perhaps accommodation with the finance capitalists, both Jew and goi. But then to surrender an iota is to surrender the whole.

     One of the resources the Jews tapped was the goodwill of the newspaper and magazine publisher, William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst had been a longtime friend of immigrants in general and Jews in particular.  In the latter half of 1922 the Jews used the pages of Hearst’s International Magazine to publish a series of lurid, shameless articles on Ford titled:  The Inside Story Of Henry Fords Jew-mania.  A prominent goi journalist of the time, Norman Hapgood, lent the use of his name as a by-line; the articles were almost certainly written by a Jewish defense agency as it is improbable that an Anglo would have been aware of much of the information contained in the articles, or have shared the sentiments expressed.  The articles are merely slanderous and defamatory.  They are a confused melange of Jewish fears and hatreds, most of which had nothing to do with Henry Ford, but which were intentionally confused with him.  The content ranges from a fear of the restoration of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia, a ritual murder case in the Ukraine, the killing of a Jewish-German diplomat and the persecution of Albert Einstein in Europe.  Ford’s connection with these events was never explained, indeed, they were non-existent.

     Further Hearst’s International endorsed the articles as policy and offered to lend its pages to the denenciation of any other Jewish opponents.  For all his evidences of good will, Hearst would fall foul of Jewish heresy and like Ford be pursued to and beyond the grave.  No man can serve two masters as the Bible says; Hearst was forced to choose between his Judaistic sympathies and his Americanism.

     Now, the Jews invariably deny any sympathy for or connection with Communism, yet, when Hearst evidenced his disapprobation of Communism he became as marked a target as Ford regardless of his contributions to the Jewish cause.  Heresy is punishable by oblivion.

     Judaism is a collectivist nation.  Jewish values and attitudes are inculcated in the individual from birth to death.  Like carnys in the carnival when the cry of ‘Hey Rube’ goes up, all the carnys flock to the defense of their own.  When the cry was raised against Ford there was no lack of volunteers to punish him in whatever way was available to them.

     The movies were a Jewish business.  By 1920 all the studios, with the possible exception of Mack Sennett, were Jewish houses.  At this time the dominant figure in the movies was William Fox.  The finance capitalists consumed him and his empire a few years later.  He is noted, if not remembered, as the Fox at the end of Twentieth Century-Fox.  There’s a joke in there too.

     At that time Fox had an actual legal monopoly on the right to produce newsreels.  Fox Movietone News was the sole producer of newsreels.  When Fox heard the cry against Ford he set about to find a way to injure Ford.  Defamation.  He attacked him in his pride.  Fox instituted a conscious policy of photographing every Ford car involved in an accident with the intent to demonstrate that Fords were unsafe.

     At the same time the other movie producers banned the use of Ford cars in their movies.  Movie historians may wonder why the number one selling car is never used in the films of the twenties and thirties.

     In terms of a conspiracy there was no actual meeting in a cemetery where a decision was made and directions given to Fox and the other producers.  The movie people were not knowing members of a conspiracy in the accepted meaning of the word.   They were like piranas who, smelling the blood of a stricken victim, move in the direction of the scent to contribute their bit of destruction.  No one had asked them for their bit, but the Volk had been attacked.  Ford had violated the Law; not the law, but the Law, the Law of the God of Moses.  He had been induced to attack the sacred people of God.  He had condemned himself out of his own mouth, by his own actions.  The hand that had provoked him had been concealed.  No one had seen the first offence given to him; they saw only his retaliation.  Ford appeared to be the aggressor.

page 394.

     Every Jew would move in to do his bit.  There were no ‘good’ Jews and International Jews, there were only Jews.  Reversing the procedure of ants bringing their little bit to the anthill, each would take a little of Ford’s anthill and carry it away thus realizing God’s will on Earth.  Ford had been excommunicated, he was now legitimate prey for theft, slander, cheating, even murder.  He was outside the protection of the Law.  It was the duty of every communicant to interfere with him in whatever way possible.

     Oh, the big organizations would be hard at work on the observable side; now that Ford had showed what kind of guy he really was their actions were now justified.  The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee would make the big plays, the obvious moves, the visible ‘defensive’ acts, the hard hits to bring Ford to his knees.

     The cry had gone out:  ‘Is there no one to help the sons of the widow?’  The education of centuries began to express itself.  The mother had been struck.  The collective body moved into action.

page 395.

     They stood beneath the blue and white of their flag.  Blue to represent their most high god; white to represent the supposed purity of the chosen people.  There was no color to represent the Truth, nor was their need for any; for God was more important than the Truth.  Truth must conform to God and not he to it.  Which was more important?  Truth is irrelevant, reality is immaterial, God is all.

     Like Hearst, Fox did yeoman work for his Jews.  His activities were of no value to spare himself when the finance capitalists stole his company and dumped him in the trash can of history at ten cents on the dollar a few years later.  The remnants of Fox’s empire went to loyalists like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Twentieth Century-Fox.

     Jews led boycotts against the purchase of Fords.  Ford’s reputation carried him over their attempts although he was being increasingly seen as an eccentric crank.  No man’s reputation can withstand such relentless defamation.  His innovations began to be turned against him.  Ford was actually the first promoter of what has since become one of the largest cash crops in America: Soybeans.  Soybeans are a versatile crop; Ford used the product to make plastic door handles; others have used the beans to fabricate steak or crab.  At any rate his effort to establish the crop was now ridiculed rather than approved.

     More importantly, as secure as he was financially, he was just as vulnerable in his work force.  Legions of troublemakers entered his plants to sabotage production.  He was forced to discontinue much of his benevolent policy.  He had to take more of a protective stance.

     His son, Edsel, proved incapable of understanding the nature of the battle.  Ford therefore turned to a man named Harry Bennett who was tough, ready and able to defend Ford’s interests.  As Ford turned to Bennett, his enemies had turned the tide of the battle.  Ford had lost the offensive, the rest of his life would be spent on the defensive.  Confusion and consternation ruled Ford’s workplace.

     Then followed the Great Depression.  On the eve of the Depression Ford had been paying eight dollars a day which was a source of great pride to him.  The Depression forced him to halve it in the struggle to survive.  Tension in the plants increased.  It was aided and abetted by the Communists.  The Communists had survived the reaction of 1920.  They were now a legal party.  they had regrouped and were becoming a powerful subversive force.  Stalin had consolidated his position in Russian by 1928.  He was now directing the world revolution.  Part of the plan was to disrupt American industry.  In 1932 in the dead of winter Communists led a march on Ford’s River Rouge plant.  Had the march succeeded the Communists would have occupied the plant and sabotaged and destroyed the machinery.  The resultant unemployment would presumably have aggravated social unrest to bring about the Bolshevik revolution in America.

     The marchers were met by the police who turned fire hoses on them:  shots were fired; Communists died.  Ford was blamed.  Ford was completely defamed as a wrong headed man, a contemptible crank.  In America there is only one side to any story; the newspapers were not controlled by Ford; his side of the story was never told.

page 397.

     Ford’s great brave dream of a world in which men were bettered rather than battered was all but lost, buried in the realms of darkness.  Ford could see the light but he didn’t have the prophetic skills to transmit it.  He could see a glorious future but he couldn’t reveal it enough to others to make them want it.  As always they were victims of Communist charlatans.

     Oddly enough the most serious blow to his reputation came from a most unexpected quarter.  There was one man who saw what Ford had actually accomplished.  In the peculiar way of futurists he was extremely conservative.  He disapproved of Ford’s dream, or at least his method.  Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was released in the early thirties, just about this time.  Huxley perceived the religious underpinnings of Ford’s activities.  In his novel, Huxley dated time B.F. and A.F., Before and After Ford.  He referred to Ford’s contribution to the advancement of civilization as only a conservative, perhaps even a reactionary, can.  In gentle and pernicious satire he belittled and ridiculed Ford.  Even Huxley’s human beings were turned out on a Fordian production line.

     Oh, I suppose if Ford had followed the Jewish method he might have sued Huxley for defaming his belief system.  He might have sought an injuction against the publication of the book.  He might have looted libraries of their copies as the Jews had done him.  He might have, but Henry Ford was an intelligent man; he was decent; he was good.

     Henry Ford was growing old.  The Wars came; his son died; Henry Ford retired.  He left behind the Ford Foundation.

     Henry Ford had never been big on charity.  Charity was the way finance capitalists did business.  First they ground the working man down, then they gave the excess profits taken from the workingman’s hide as charity for their own greater aggrandizement: put their names on streets and buildings.  It worked too.  People forgot how the money was acquired while lauding these fellows as benefactors of mankind.  Rockefeller and Carnegie on the goi side left hundreds of millions.  Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald of Sears, the Guggenheims and others on the Jewish side of finance capitalism gave and left millions for the benefit of the Jews.

page 398.

     Had Ford embraced finance capitalism or even classic supply and demand capitalism he might have made billions more than he did which he could have distributed as ‘charity.’  For those of you who have never received charity, you may believe me when I say that it is indeed better to give than receive charity.  Charity elevates the given while depressing the receiver.  But then, you see, that’s the way God planned it.  The poor shall always be with us.

     Instead Ford devised his system so that he doubled prevailing wages, giving men pride rather than despair.  He lowered the cost of his automobiles to the point where everyone benefited.  His largesse was as a matter of course, accepted, but ultimately unappreciated.  Ford still left more behind than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined.

     But now on the eve of death Ford’s companies were beset by many enemies.  Ford was struggling to survive.  The finance capitalists thought they had victory in their grasp.  Truly the Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform,  Man proposes; God disposes.  One might say that the God of the Bible gently removed Ford Motors from the grasping fingers of Ford’s enemies and placed the company in the hands of the very capable and appropriately named Henry Ford II, Edsel’s son.  One might say that God willed that Ford Motors should survive.  Why did not his putative adherents accept his apparent will?

page 399.

     According to Biblical methods one’s fate is determined by adding up one’s good works and balancing them against one’s sins.  Surely Henry Ford’s virtues far exceed his faults.  Surely there was a place in Biblical heaven for Henry Ford.  If flights of angels be, may they have carried the man who wanted to raise mankind from poverty to a juster reward to that great auto plant in the sky.  There is surely a place in bliss for God’s Own Manufacturer.

     Big Ben had been opposed to Ford along with the rest of his ilk.  Why pay bums more than they were willing to accept?  Push ’em down.  Push ’em down.

     Our gazes were interlocked as we saw into each other’s mind.  My feeling of contempt for Ben and what he stood for welled up from my mind and found outlet through my eyes.  Ben and I dueled it out in the beam of light between our eyes.  My contempt waxed stronger as I realized the brutality of Ben’s outlook.  The strength of my contempt dashed against his, driving him steadily back until he gave up.  He broke eye contact, viewing my person with fear.  The big belly rotated to the left as Big Ben turned to flee to the security of his shack.

     He ripped open the door, slamming it behind him as he plumped into his seat in front of his picture window.  He didn’t look at me again.  He clasped his hands before him as if in prayer, staring as though into the future; or perhaps he was seeking a vision of a past that could never return.

     Of course I had not backed down Big Ben Webster of the Immaculate Coalyard; I had only backed down his shadow, Big Ben of the Weedgrown Oil Tank, who was sunk in despair.  I studied him through the window for a moment while he studiously avoided further eye contact; then I slipped my foot up onto the pedal, turning in a wobbling arc through Ben’s weeds and off down the street.

pages 400-401.