The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America

Ford begins to publish Brasol’s information in the Independent, making it into a mouthpiece for anti-Semitic propaganda for twenty weeks in a row. Specifically, he advocates a conspiracy theory that alleges the existence of a Jewish World Programme: a plot for world domination and the destruction of Gentile civilization that is secretly responsible for such diverse phenomena as “the world’s troubles, wars, strikes, insurrections, revolutions, crime, drunkenness, epidemics, and disasters,” all of which as “the work of organized, malignant, corrupting Jews” (109). The paper claims that it publishes only information that has been thoroughly fact-checked and proven, and members of the public who believe Ford to be an honest person take the paper’s claims at face value.

Some Jewish Americans protest the claims Ford’s paper makes. In response, Ford “set[s] to work to get the facts about the American Jews and what they [are] doing” (109). The results of this “investigation,” which he publishes in the Independent, are more anti-Semitic tales from Ford’s “spy department,” which moves from Dearborn to New York and claims that the various perceived moral ills of the time (drunkenness, licentiousness, jazz music, short skirts, and Bolshevism) are the deliberate work of Jewish conspirators set on destroying American society.