Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in Dearborn Township, Michigan. His father, William Ford, was an Irish immigrant. His mother was Mary Litogot Ford. Ford was good with machines early on. He left the farm at 16 to train as a machinist in Detroit. By 1896 he had built his first gasoline-powered car in a backyard shed. In 1903 he started the Ford Motor Company with $28,000 in cash from a dozen investors. By 1908 the Model T had made him famous. By 1913 the moving assembly line at Highland Park had made him one of the richest men on earth. In 1914 he announced the Five Dollar Day. That was more than double the going factory wage. It drew attention around the world and made him a public figure well beyond cars.
In 1920 the Dearborn Independent began running the series later collected as 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.' Ford was 56. He was worth about $1 billion (roughly $15 billion in 2025 dollars). His company was making more than half of all cars in the United States. He had run for the U.S. Senate in 1918 as a Democrat and lost narrowly to the sitting Republican, Truman Newberry. Through 1923 there was a steady 'Ford for President' movement. He was one of the most powerful private citizens in America, and maybe in the world.
The Dearborn Independent was a weekly newspaper Ford bought in 1918. He made Edwin Gustave Pipp the editor, and later William Cameron. Cameron became the main voice of the paper and the writer most tied to 'The International Jew' series. For the rest of his life, Cameron said Ford did not write the articles himself. But Ford's name was on them, and Ford oversaw and approved the direction. The paper went out through Ford dealerships across the country, which turned the dealer network into a sales force for subscriptions. At its peak it reached about 900,000 readers, one of the largest circulations in the country.
The first article ran on May 22, 1920, under the headline 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.' Over the next two years, the Dearborn Independent ran 91 articles on Jewish influence in America and the world. The articles were later collected into four volumes with the same title. Volume I covered Jewish influence in American finance, politics, and press. Volume II covered the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Volume III covered Jewish influence in American music, theater, and entertainment. Volume IV covered Jewish influence in American bootlegging, labor, and sport.
The series was translated into several languages and sold abroad. In Germany, Theodor Fritsch — a well-known German antisemitic publisher — translated and published the four volumes as 'Der internationale Jude.' The German edition was reprinted many times through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Adolf Hitler kept a portrait of Ford on the wall of his Munich office and cited Ford in 'Mein Kampf': 'Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.' In 1923 Hitler told a Chicago Tribune reporter: 'I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.' In July 1938, on his 75th birthday, Ford received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could give a foreigner.
In 1927, Herman Bernstein and Gaston Means both published evidence that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — a document Ford had pushed hard — was a forgery. Around the same time, Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer and organizer of farm cooperatives, sued Ford for libel. Sapiro said Dearborn Independent articles had falsely cast him as part of a Jewish plot to control American agriculture. Ford settled the suit, made a public apology in June 1927 — written by Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee — and shut down the Dearborn Independent in December 1927. Ford's apology stated: 'I deem it to be my duty as an honorable man to make amends for the wrong done to my fellow men and brothers by asking their forgiveness for the harm I have done them, retracting so far as lies within my power the offensive charges laid at their door by these publications, and giving them the unqualified assurance that henceforth they may look to me for friendship and goodwill.'
In the introduction to the collected volumes, Ford's editors laid out the goal of the series. They framed it not as hostility toward Jewish people but as a look into what they called 'the Jewish Question.' That term was used across 19th and early 20th century politics in Europe and America. It named debates about the legal, social, and civic status of Jewish populations. The editors said they were following a tradition of public inquiry that included Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S. Grant, and various European statesmen, all of whom had raised public questions about Jewish economic and political organization.
The introduction stated: 'The Dearborn Independent is not anti-Jewish. It does not attack the Jews as a people. It is anti-certain things which Jewish individuals and organizations have done and are doing. The distinction is important. Our aim is to deal honestly and constructively with the facts as we find them — not to persecute but to inform.' This claim — that the target was actions and organizations, not Jewish people as a whole — runs through all 91 articles. But critics and courts found the line too thin. To them the series still worked as a systematic attack on Jewish people as a group.
The introduction also said Ford was driven by what he called the 'non-Jewish view' of a 'question which non-Jewish Americans are at present shy of discussing.' It leaned on the idea of free inquiry and the right of Americans to examine any group or institution with real power. The series was framed as a free press at work, in the tradition of American muckraking — exposing powerful interests that would rather avoid public scrutiny. Ford cast himself not as an enemy of Jewish people but as a journalist serving the public by examining what he called outsized Jewish influence in major institutions.