Henry Ford and Antisemitism

About this event

We investigate whether economically powerful individuals leverage their business influence to advance political or ideological agendas. We study the impact of Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, which disseminated anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in the early 1920s, on the diffusion of antisemitism across the United States. To measure local antisemitic sentiment, we construct a novel granular index based on digitized data from discriminatory classified advertisements in local newspapers. Exploiting variation in exposure arising from the geographic distribution of Ford dealerships—since newspaper subscriptions were distributed with Ford car purchases—and the timing of the campaign’s onset, we employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate its effect. To isolate exogenous variation, we instrument for local exposure using market saturation with competing automobile brands, while controlling for detailed demographic characteristics. Our results indicate that the Ford campaign significantly increased antisemitic classified ads in counties with more Ford dealerships. Event-study estimates show no pre-trends and reveal that the effects persisted until World War II. These findings demonstrate how businesspeople can shape social and political attitudes over the long term without going into politics.