Ford's second chapter sets out what he called the key split in Jewish economic life: 'making' versus 'getting.' Ford said non-Jewish work was built around making — growing crops, putting up buildings, building machines, producing goods. Jewish work, he claimed, was built around getting — taking what others made, through finance, trade, brokerage, and distribution. Ford said this was not a moral judgment but a description of a different way of doing business — one that, he argued, put Jews in charge of finance and distribution while non-Jews did the producing.
Ford applied this to the labor movement too. He argued that the leaders of the big American unions — especially the garment workers' unions — were mostly Jewish, and that they used the labor movement not mainly to help workers but to take control of whole industries. His main examples were the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), founded in 1900, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, led by Sidney Hillman (born Simcha Hillman in Zagare, Lithuania). Ford argued that the same community owned the garment factories and led the unions that bargained against them, which let Jewish interests run the industry from both sides.
Ford spent a large part of the second chapter on claims about Jewish influence on Protestant Christianity and American schools. He argued that the movement to unite Protestant denominations across their differences was being used to loosen and eventually secularize American Christianity. He named the Federal Council of Churches (founded 1908) as a tool for this and claimed several of its major funders were Jewish. He did not say Jews were shaping what Protestants taught. He said Jewish money behind liberal Protestant institutions was part of a wider plan to weaken the Christian character of American public life.
On schools, Ford focused on the big American universities, especially the Ivy League. He noted rising Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other elite schools. He quoted Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell's 1922 statement that Harvard was thinking about a Jewish enrollment quota. Lowell had said in public that the share of Jewish students had grown enough to cause social friction on campus. Ford did not read this as antisemitism among administrators. He read it as the same pattern he saw across America: a Jewish population that, through strong grades and business success, was gaining more influence in institutions than its share of the population.
Ford also pointed to Jewish-funded foundations that were reshaping public school programs. He focused on John Dewey's progressive education movement, which Ford said was spread through Jewish-funded charities. Ford did not claim Dewey was Jewish — Dewey was from Vermont and raised Congregationalist. But he claimed Dewey's approach, which played down traditional religion and patriotism and played up social integration and critical thinking, served Jewish interests by weakening the Christian and Anglo-Saxon content of American public education.