Ford's first chapter opens with the claim that the discovery of America by Columbus was partly financed by Jewish conversos — Jews who had converted to Christianity under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition but who maintained their Jewish identity and networks. Ford identified Luis de Santangel (spelled variously Santagel or Santangel in different editions) as the royal treasurer who personally advanced 17,000 ducats of his own money to finance Columbus's first voyage, and Gabriel Sanchez, also a converso, as the royal treasurer of Aragon who co-signed the agreement. Ford wrote that Columbus himself may have been of converso ancestry, citing circumstantial evidence including Columbus's use of Hebrew notation, his familiarity with Jewish cartographers, and contemporary accounts of the proportion of conversos among his crew.
Ford then moved to the colonial period, focusing on Peter Stuyvesant's encounter with the first openly Jewish settlers in North America. In September 1654, a ship called the St. Catarina arrived in New Amsterdam carrying 23 Jewish refugees who had fled Recife, Brazil, after the Portuguese reconquest of the Dutch colony there. Stuyvesant, the Director-General of New Netherland, petitioned the Dutch West India Company to expel them, writing that Jews were a 'deceitful race' whose religion was 'abominable.' The company refused — partly, Ford claimed, because Jewish shareholders in the Dutch West India Company held significant stakes and intervened on behalf of the settlers. Ford used this episode to argue that Jewish commercial and financial networks had been a determining factor in Jewish immigration and settlement from the very beginning of American history.
Ford documented the growth of the Jewish population in America, citing census figures and immigration records. At the time of the Revolution, he estimated the Jewish population at between 2,000 and 3,000. By 1820, approximately 6,000. By 1880, approximately 250,000 — concentrated in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. The great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe, primarily from the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, brought an estimated 2.3 million Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920. By 1920 Ford estimated the Jewish population at approximately 3.3 million, with New York City housing over 1.6 million.
Ford then enumerated what he characterized as industries where Jewish ownership or control was, in his assessment, disproportionate to the Jewish population's share of the overall American population. The list included: the garment industry (Ford cited estimates that Jews owned approximately 70–80 percent of all garment manufacturing establishments in New York City); the scrap metal industry; the tobacco industry; the retail dry goods trade; the motion picture industry (which Ford would address in depth in a later chapter); the wholesale liquor distribution network; and a significant portion of the real estate holdings in major American cities. Ford framed this not as the result of discrimination or industry exclusion but as evidence of what he called the 'racial instinct for trade' and the preference of Jews for commerce over agriculture and manufacture.
Ford also claimed that Jewish financial houses occupied a dominant position in American banking and investment. He cited Kuhn, Loeb & Company — the investment bank founded by Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb in 1867 and subsequently led by Jacob Schiff — as the principal example. Kuhn, Loeb had financed the Union Pacific Railroad, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and other major rail projects. It had also financed the Japanese government's bonds during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 — a transaction Jacob Schiff was open about and that Schiff had stated was motivated in part by his desire to weaken Tsarist Russia in retaliation for pogroms against Russian Jews. Ford cited this episode as evidence that Jewish financiers were willing to use their capital in service of specifically Jewish national interests rather than American national interests.
Ford devoted considerable space in the first chapter to the question of Jewish ownership and editorial control of American newspapers and news wire services. He cited Adolph Ochs's ownership of the New York Times (acquired 1896) as a primary example. He also noted that the Associated Press wire service, which distributed news to papers across the country, had Jewish leadership and that many of the major metropolitan papers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago had significant Jewish ownership stakes. Ford argued that this concentration of press ownership created a systematic distortion in public discourse — that stories unfavorable to Jewish interests were suppressed and stories favorable to Jewish interests were amplified, not through conspiracy but through the natural tendency of owners to protect their community's reputation.