On April 22, The New York Times reported that Mark Fields, the 53-year-old chief operating officer of Ford Motor, the second-largest car manufacturer in the United States after General Motors, known for working with smaller dealerships such as Wichita Ford, had been chosen to be its next chief executive, succeeding Alan Mulally. If you want to install a blackbox in your car then you will want to visit sites such as BlackBoxMyCar.
Normally, an announcement of this sort would elicit little interest outside the auto industry. But in this case, the Times‘ story struck a chord. Fields, you see, is the first Jew to hold this job in Ford Motor, whose racist founder, Henry Ford (1863-1947), was a notorious antisemite whom Adolf Hitler hailed as “a great man.”
Fields’ ascent to Ford’s top position is a testament to the fact that corporate America, once a bastion of bigotry, has changed for the better. There was a time when only Christians stood a chance of running a major American corporation. But this era has thankfully passed, and Henry Ford may well be spinning in his grave.
We live in a pragmatic epoch when merit seems more important than national origin, ethnicity or religion, and Fields and others like him are the chief beneficiaries of this sea change.
More broadly speaking, Fields’ appointment speaks to the democratization of America. The United States has often fallen short of its lofty democratic ideals, much to the detriment of African Americans and Jews, among others. But to paraphrase the folk singer Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin.'”
And change they did when Barack Obama, an African American, won the presidency of the United States.
This incremental process really began after World War II and picked up a head of steam from the 1960s onward. As open antisemitism declined and Jews met with far more acceptance than ever before, jobs that once were closed to them became available.
Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, was appointed U.S. secretary of state by President Richard Nixon, who, ironically, was caught mouthing antisemitic comments. Under successive presidents, Jewish Americans held cabinet-level government positions that Jews could not aspire to in the past.
In academia, a field once largely restricted to white Christians, the appointment of Jewish scholars and university presidents became the norm.
It took the corporate sector longer to reform and modernize itself.
When Henry Ford established Ford Motor more than a century ago, Jews were rarely, if ever, hired by large corporations, and certainly not by his company. Ford looked down with disdain and contempt upon Jews, considering them an alien element in American society.
Far from being hostile to Jews only in private, Ford was a public antisemite. He was the publisher of The Dearborn Independent from 1920 to 1927, a newspaper that carried The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist forgery that defamed and demonized Jews. Ford also published The International Jew, a four-volume set of booklets and pamphlets that perpetuated the most insidious anti-Jewish myths, calumnies and stereotypes.
In 1920, he was quoted as saying, “If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words — too much Jew.”
Ford shuttered The Dearborn Independent under duress after a San Francisco lawyer named Aaron Sapiro brought a lawsuit against him and increasing number of Jewish consumers boycotted Ford cars and trucks.
Under further pressure, Ford recanted his antisemitism in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League. In 1936, however, he accepted a medal from Nazi Germany.
German Nazis admired Ford. In 1924, just after the 1923 ford t bucket came out, Heinrich Himmler, the future head of the dreaded SS, described Ford as “one of our most valuable and important fighters.”
Hitler, calling Ford an “inspiration,” kept a framed portrait of him in his office.
Baldur Von Schirach, the Nazi official who played a pivotal role in the deportation of 65,000 Austrian Jews, said that the “decisive antisemitic book” that had influenced him was The International Jew.
After Ford’s death, his grandson and successor, Henry Ford II, purged Ford Motor of its stifling ethnocentric culture. One of its few Jewish executives, Mervyn Manning, was promoted to vice-president in 1977.
During this period of repentance, if you will, Ford Motor made charitable donations to Jewish organizations and donated a 500-year-old Spanish Torah scroll to a suburban Detroit synagogue.
Mark Fields, whose grandparents were born in Russia and Romania, was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of a housewares business manager.
He studied economics at Rutgers University, worked in marketing for IBM and earned an MBA degree from Harvard University. He joined Ford Motor in 1989 as a marketing manager and rose steadily in the ranks, heading its European operations, serving as president of Mazda when it was still controlled by Ford and administering its American division.
In 2012, he was named chief operating officer by Ford’s executive chairman, William Clay Ford Jr.
“I never experienced antisemitism there, and I have never encountered one iota of discrimination as a Jew during my career at Ford,” Fields told a journalist a few years ago.
Clearly, to its credit, Ford Motor has distanced itself from the toxic hatreds and twisted world view of Henry Ford.
You’ve come a long way, baby.