Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm in Dearborn Township, Michigan, to William Ford, an Irish immigrant, and Mary Litogot Ford. He showed early aptitude for machinery, leaving the farm at 16 to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. By 1896 he had built his first gasoline-powered horseless carriage in a backyard shed. In 1903 he incorporated 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 — more than double the prevailing wage for factory work — which drew national and international attention and established him as a figure in American public life far beyond the automobile industry.
By 1920, when the Dearborn Independent began publishing the series that would be collected under the title 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem,' Ford was 56 years old, worth an estimated $1 billion (equivalent to roughly $15 billion in 2025 dollars), and the head of an enterprise that was producing more than half of all automobiles in the United States. He had run for U.S. Senate in 1918 as a Democrat, losing narrowly to incumbent Republican Truman Newberry. He had been the subject of a sustained 'Ford for President' movement throughout 1923. He was, in short, one of the most powerful and influential private citizens in America — and arguably in the world.
The Dearborn Independent was a weekly newspaper that Ford purchased in 1918. He installed Edwin Gustave Pipp as editor, and later William Cameron, who would become the primary voice of the paper's editorial content and the writer most closely associated with 'The International Jew' series. Cameron maintained for the remainder of his life that Ford did not personally write the articles, though Ford's name appeared on them and Ford supervised and approved the editorial direction. The paper was distributed through Ford dealerships across the country, effectively conscripting Ford's dealer network into a subscription sales force. Circulation reached approximately 900,000 at its peak, making it one of the largest-circulation papers in the United States.
The first article in the series ran on May 22, 1920, under the headline 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.' Over the following two years, the Dearborn Independent published 91 articles on the theme of Jewish influence in American and world affairs. The articles were then collected and printed as four volumes under the title 'The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.' 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 multiple languages and distributed internationally. In Germany, the four volumes were translated and published by Theodor Fritsch, a prominent German antisemitic publisher, under the title 'Der internationale Jude.' The German edition went through numerous printings throughout 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,' writing: 'Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.' Hitler told a Chicago Tribune correspondent in 1923: '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 that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreign citizen.
In 1927, Herman Bernstein and Gaston Means both published information suggesting the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion — a document Ford had heavily promoted — was a forgery. Simultaneously, Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer and agricultural cooperative organizer, sued Ford for libel, specifically over Dearborn Independent articles that Sapiro claimed falsely portrayed him as part of a Jewish conspiracy to control American agriculture. Ford settled the suit, issued a public apology in June 1927 — drafted 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 'International Jew' volumes, Ford's editors set out the stated purpose of the series. The introduction frames the publication not as hostility toward Jewish people but as an investigation into what the editors called 'the Jewish Question' — a term used throughout 19th and early 20th century political discourse in Europe and America to describe debates about the legal, social, and civic status of Jewish populations. The editors stated that they were following a tradition of public inquiry that included figures such as 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 framing — attacking actions and organizations rather than the Jewish people collectively — appears consistently throughout the 91 articles, though critics and courts found the distinction insufficient to prevent the series from functioning as a systematic attack on Jewish people as a group.
The introduction also stated that Ford was motivated by what he called the 'non-Jewish view' of a 'question which non-Jewish Americans are at present shy of discussing.' It invoked the idea of freedom of inquiry and the right of Americans to examine any institution or group that wields significant power. The series was framed as the exercise of a free press in the tradition of American muckraking journalism — exposing powerful interests that preferred to operate without public scrutiny. Ford positioned himself not as an enemy of Jewish people but as a journalist serving the American public interest by examining what he characterized as disproportionate Jewish influence in major institutions.