who put the nazi in avant-engineering?

a closer look at Henry and Elon

This is my second story about how Elon Musk is repeating history. In the first story I asked if he was going crazy like Howard Hughes and Nikola Tesla. In this story I ask if he is a fascist like Henry Ford.

But first, a reminder about the test screening of my short film mentioned in my last story. I've received some great feedback so far and there's still time to take part. The test screening will be available until June 16. Send me an email if you want the link (rick@rickrees.com).

Now for part 2 of how avant-engineering history repeats itself. Obligatory and painfully obvious disclaimer: I'm not an historian. If you can add to or correct anything I've said, please do.

You may recall from the first story, who put the crazy in avant-engineering? that last summer I found myself standing in awe in front of the Spruce Goose, the giant airplane built by Howard Hughes in 1947. This led me to ask: could the personality traits and mental strain shared by these 3 boundary pushing engineers lead to each of them going crazy?

In my research for that story I discovered that Elon's behavior also had a lot in common with Henry Ford. Ford didn't go crazy, but after he became rich and famous he started shooting his mouth off about the Jews and he kept doing so in spite of the urgings of his business advisors to knock it off.

I wrote that story just before the US election last November. I didn't plan on doing a followup until a few months later when the news of a boycott of Musk's car company started making the rounds. Did Ford Motor Company also go through a boycott in reaction to the loudmouth behavior of its leader? The answer is YES. That was enough for me to take another dive down this rabbit hole and try to uncover the ways that history was repeating itself .... again.

Musk became CEO of Tesla in 2008. Musk purchased Twitter (now X) in 2022.

The Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. Ford purchased the Dearborn Independent newspaper in 1918.

It took both men about 15 years to come to the conclusion: "Hey, I'm rich and famous enough now. Everybody MUST hear my opinion about everything."

Let's take a look at what was going on in the world around each in 1918 and 2022.

For Ford the big event was WWI. He was a pacifist and was active in politics already, leading up to a run for US Senate. He lost. He believed the election was stolen from him. He bought the newspaper so he could attack those who had wronged him. By 1926 circulation reached 900,000.

For Musk the big event was a global pandemic. This threatened to slow down the growth of his car company. Not liking the way he was being censored on the Twitter soapbox, he bought it so he could say whatever he wanted, and attack those who had wronged him. In 2024 X (formerly called Twitter) had 336 million users (down 5% since Musk bought it).

Another major event swirling around Ford was Prohibition which would become law in 1920. Before it was repealed in 1933, Ford published an article declaring it a success with not 1% of the drinking done as before, AND that banning alcohol was NOT responsible for the increase in crime appearing in many major cities. Thank goodness Ford was there to correct the fake news.

The lead up to Prohibition is just one indicator of the conservative zeitgeist building up at the time. There was also a rise in anti-semitism and a growing fear of immigrants. If the KKK is a good measuring stick for this, and why not, its reformation in 1915 saw its membership peak in the early 1920's at around 4 million.

Today the KKK may be small in numbers, but other groups have picked up the slack. The recent pardoning of the leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys has “brought back two organizations that have extremely long track records of violence” said Dr. Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, when she talked to The Independent last January. She likened the current moment to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

Speaking of zeitgeist, fans of the avant-garde will note that the Dada movement was born in 1916 in Zurich and saw its peak in New York and Berlin in the early 1920's. Anti-war and anti-authoritarian activism was at its core, often making absurd and mocking public statements/performances. How much significance this had on global events unfolding is debatable. But the conservative elite loved to point at movements and "art" such as this as a clear example of the degeneration of society as a whole that needed forceful fixing.

We see both Ford and Musk swimming in a high tide of right-wing conservatism and both dive head first into the political maelstrom around them. They can't resist getting their 2 cents, or 250 million dollars, into the game. Did they think about what this would do to their business? Of course. They expected the money to pay big dividends as has always been the case in US elections. Money talks, and so did Henry and Elon. No one could shut them up.

It turns out that the car buying public has its limits on how much BS they will take from the leader of a company that makes cars they may even love. Can you separate the art from the bad behavior of the artist? The product from the CEO?

In Elon's case, the backlash started making its appearance in the form of bumper stickers: “I bought this before Elon went crazy”. Then, in the shall we say "heady" exuberance of seeing his election "investment" starting to pay off so soon, he starts throwing kisses to large crowds of supporters to thank them ... except they weren't kisses. They were Nazi salutes. The bumper stickers turned into boycott banners that read: “Tesla the swasticar... 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds." Protests at Tesla dealerships soon followed. Sales plummeted.

For Henry, the backlash started not long after his anti-Jewish stories began appearing in his newspaper. The buildup was slow at first, but Ford got word that sales were taking a nosedive at his dealerships near Jewish communities, so he stopped the stories in 1922, only to start them up again in less than a year. At the time, popular humorist Will Rogers wrote that the boycott "may not be a complete success yet-- but it will be as soon as someone learns how to make a cheaper car."

Ford now had presidential aspirations and was convinced his anti-Jewish stories were appealing to the masses. In March of 1923, The Chicago Tribune interviewed Adolf Hitler and asked him about Ford's possible presidential run. Hitler commented, "I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany." By November of 1923, Hitler would make his first violent run at power by orchestrating the Beer Hall Putsch.

By this time, the fear generated by Ford's rhetoric had spread outside of the Jewish community. The ADL organized a boycott of Ford products that was joined by many liberal Christian groups. As the heat got turned up, so did Ford's rage and in April 1924 he lashed out at several prominent Jewish businessmen and professionals. One of them was Aaron Leland Sapiro, a Jewish American cooperative activist, lawyer and major leader of the farmers' movement during the 1920s.

Sapiro wasn't going to take this lying down. He brought a lawsuit against Ford to debate his claims in front of the entire country. Some of the others named by Ford also decided to participate in the trial. Eventually Ford couldn't take the heat any more and was looking for a way out. He secretly commissioned the constitutional lawyer and Jewish activist Louis Marshall to write an apology for him. This ended the trial in December 1927. Ford was seen publicly to have repented, but his support for German fascism would continue into the war.

As I wrote last November in my first story:

It was not until after the war, when he was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps, that Ford had a moral awakening resulting in a stroke. He died in 1947 from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 83.

Henry Ford wasn’t crazy. Was he a Nazi? Kinda looks that way. If Germany had won the war, maybe he would’ve become Minister of Government Efficiency. That last sentence is supposed to be a humorous quip taken from recent headlines, but reading it back makes me want to laugh and cry.

Is Elon Musk a Nazi? I sure hope not.

If he acts like a nazi, talks like a nazi, and salutes like a nazi ... I'd say he's a nazi.

In 1938 Ford received the highest award the Nazi regime could give to a foreigner called the "Grand Cross of the German Eagle."

In 2025 Musk received a gold key to the White House.

Can his car company survive? Will he try to rehabilitate his image like Ford did? Since he can't run for president, will he start a third political party?

Is history rhyming again?

For more on this topic see:

Ford and Musk. They Made Cars. They Backed Fascists.
by Harold Meyerson January 6, 2025

---