Ford's eighth chapter on Jewish political influence opens with Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party political machine that controlled New York City politics for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ford argued that the Jewish community's relationship with Tammany represented an early example of the political method he was describing throughout 'The International Jew': the use of organized communal power to extract benefits from political institutions in exchange for votes and campaign financing.
Ford focused particularly on August Belmont Sr. — born August Schönberg in Alzey, Germany, in 1816, who had emigrated to New York and become the American agent for the Rothschild banking house. Belmont (who took the name from the French translation of Schönberg — 'Beautiful Mountain') was a major figure in New York Democratic politics for decades, serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1860 to 1872. Ford argued that Belmont's role as both the principal American representative of Rothschild financial interests and a central figure in Democratic Party organization was an early example of the integration of Jewish financial power and American political machinery.
Ford argued that by 1920, Jewish lawyers had achieved disproportionate representation in the American judiciary, particularly in New York, and that this representation was the product of systematic communal organization rather than simply individual merit. He cited the growth of Jewish enrollment at law schools, the formation of Jewish lawyers' associations, and the organized support of Jewish political networks for Jewish judicial candidates as the mechanism by which this representation had been built. Ford did not argue that Jewish judges decided cases in the Jewish interest — he acknowledged that this would be difficult to demonstrate — but that a judiciary with significant Jewish membership was less likely to rule against Jewish interests in cases where those interests were at stake.
On elections, Ford cited the concentration of Jewish voters in large urban states — particularly New York — as giving the organized Jewish community disproportionate influence in presidential elections. At the time Ford was writing, New York was the largest state in the Electoral College. Ford argued that Jewish voting in New York, organized through community networks and communal leaders, could determine the outcome of the state and therefore of presidential elections. He cited the role of Jewish newspaper editors, Jewish fundraisers, and Jewish political operatives in both parties as evidence that the Jewish community had established leverage over both Democratic and Republican party leadership.
Ford also raised the question of naturalization — the process by which immigrants became citizens and voters. He claimed that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had naturalized at higher rates and more rapidly than other immigrant groups, and that this rapid naturalization was partly the result of organized assistance from Jewish communal organizations that helped immigrants navigate the naturalization process. Ford presented this not as illegal but as evidence of the same communal organization he had been describing throughout: the Jewish community acting as a coherent political entity to maximize its members' civic participation and political influence.