Ford's second chapter introduces what he called the central distinction in Jewish economic life: between 'making' and 'getting.' Ford argued that non-Jewish productive activity was primarily organized around making — the production of goods, the cultivation of land, the construction of buildings, the manufacture of machinery. Jewish economic activity, Ford claimed, was primarily organized around getting — the acquisition of what others had made, through finance, trade, brokerage, and distribution. Ford was careful to note that this was not a moral judgment about Jewish people but an observation about a different mode of economic organization — one that he argued placed Jews structurally in control of distribution and finance while non-Jews performed production.
Ford extended this analysis to the labor movement. He argued that the leadership of the major American labor unions — particularly the garment workers' unions — was predominantly Jewish, and that this Jewish leadership was using the labor movement not primarily to improve conditions for workers but to gain control of entire industries. He cited 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), as primary examples. Ford argued that the same community that owned the garment factories also led the unions that bargained against those factories, and that this structure allowed Jewish interests to dominate the industry from both sides.
Ford devoted a substantial section of the second chapter to claims about Jewish influence on Protestant Christianity and American educational institutions. He argued that the interdenominational movement — the effort to unite Protestant denominations across doctrinal differences — was being used to liberalize and ultimately secularize American Christianity. Ford identified the Federal Council of Churches (founded 1908) as a vehicle for this effort and claimed that several of its major financial supporters were Jewish. He did not argue that Jews were directing the theological content of Protestant teaching but that Jewish financial support for liberal Protestant institutions was part of a broader strategy to weaken the specifically Christian character of American civic life.
On education, Ford focused on the major American universities, particularly the Ivy League institutions. He cited the growth of Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other elite universities and quoted Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell's 1922 statement that Harvard was considering implementing a Jewish enrollment quota — Lowell had said publicly that the proportion of Jewish students had grown to a level that was creating social friction on campus. Ford presented this not as evidence of antisemitism among university administrators but as evidence of the same pattern he had identified throughout American society: a Jewish population that, because of its academic performance and commercial success, was acquiring influence in institutions disproportionate to its share of the overall population.
Ford also cited the involvement of Jewish-funded foundations in the reform of American public school curricula. He was particularly focused on the influence of John Dewey's progressive education movement, which Ford argued was being spread through Jewish-funded philanthropic organizations. Ford did not claim Dewey was Jewish — Dewey was from Vermont and raised Congregationalist — but he claimed that Dewey's educational philosophy, which de-emphasized traditional religious and patriotic content and emphasized social integration and critical thinking, served Jewish interests by weakening the specifically Christian and Anglo-Saxon cultural content of American public education.