Where Did the Ford Foundation Get the Money to Get Started with?

The Ford Foundation's first money came from the Ford Family fortune made through the Ford Motor Company. Now the Ford Foundation today likely receives funding from several sources. But how was the family fortune originally made??  Another question: What did Henry Ford do with his money?

One of the ways Ford got rich was to work his factory laborers harder than the other manufacturers in Detroit. It was known there that a job in a Ford factory was more exhausting than jobs in other plants.
Here a Black factory worker up from the South writes about workers' experiences in the Detroit auto plants. His name was Matthew Ward and the following is an excerpt from his book [see below]:
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I never wanted to work for Ford. And I never did work there. Everyone talked about it, they said it was the house of murder. There was a big rumor all over the city [Detroit] that other men had to take care of Ford workers' sexual home affairs. Everybody always asked about a Ford worker's wife, "Who is her boyfriend?" If a man would see a woman and she would say that her husband worked for Ford, he would make a big joke. He would pretend to take a pencil and a pad and ask her for her telephone number. They were all so worked down they couldn't have sexual relations. Mr Gordon's wife had to help him up the steps and feed him in bed. Where he laid on a sheet at night he didn't move from that spot.
Every worker could identify Ford workers on the streetcars going home at night. Every worker who was asleep was working for Ford. You'd see twenty asleep on the cars and everyone would say, "Ford workers." Many times the conductors looked over the car and shook a man to tell him it was his stop. On Sunday Ford workers would sleep on the way to church.
Sometimes some people tried to cover it up. They would say it was working in a foundry that made the men sleep. They said it was the fumes. But everybody knew Ford was a man killing place. That always frightened me. I tried to stay away. But during the Depression, everything closed down once for two or three months. The paper came out asking for men for Ford. The next morning there was a stampede at Ford of two thousand men at five a.m. They were only  hiring fifty or a hundred men. The agent came out and told us they were not hiring but nobody would leave. We thought it was a line to send us away and give jobs to those who remained. We stayed, pushing and shoving. The police rode up on horse and ran at the crowd hitting us with sticks. This didn't disperse the workers. The police called the Fire Department and they hooked up their hoses and shot cold water on us. It was the middle of winter. While we waited for the streetcars our clothes froze on us hard as bricks. That's the first and last time I went  to Ford to look for work.
[Matthew Ward, Indignant Heart (New York: New Books 1952), pp 35-36]
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The Ford plants were cruel places to work, crueler even than the factories of other manufacturers. That's one of the ways in which Henry Ford made his fortune.

Now what were some of the things that Ford did with his money? One thing was to publish an Americanized version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the  notorious plagiarism and forgery.
". . .  the first American edition of the Protocols was published in The Protocols and World Revolution" [in 1920] by one Boris Brasol,  a Russian monarchist exile living in the USA and a leader among his fellow monarchist exiles. This was just three years after the Russian emperor, the Tsar, had been overthrown in March 1917.

It is Brasol who was responsible for convincing Henry Ford of the authenticity of the Protocols, which Ford then published in his International Jew series in the Dearborn Independent. [The Dearborn Independent was a newspaper owned by Ford himself.] [Alex Grobman, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Noble Oklahoma: Balfour Books 2011), p 52]

However, the original Protocols had been worked up to support the Russian imperial government. As a product of the Russian intelligence agencies, it favored the Russian Orthodox Church against the Roman Catholic Church, even making accusations against the Catholic Church. This obviously posed an obstacle to full acceptance of the Protocols in Catholic lands and in the USA which had a large Catholic population. So Ford  made up a new version of the Protocols which was tailored to American tastes. He removed the negative references in the book to the Catholic church and creed which were found in the original Russian version. Along with other deletions and additions and reworkings, this became the International Jew.

. . . the first article in this consecutive series appeared on May 22, 1920, and then sporadically until 1927. [Grobman, p 52]

 The hostile slanderous nature of Ford's anti-Semitic articles is evident in their titles, which included: "The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in America," "Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American Baseball," "How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing," "Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music" . . . . "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold." [Grobman, Ibid.]
For the information of non-Americans, Benedict Arnold was a notorious traitor in favor of the British during the American revolutionary war. At that time, the Jewish population of the United States was a minuscule percentage.

Ford's fortune was based on the most ruthless exploitation and oppression of labor, even by the standards of the time, worse than other automotive manufacturers. And he used a part of his fortune to propagate notions intended to make people hate Jews. Henry Ford died after the Ford Foundation had already been set up. But given the Foundation's stress on funding actions harmful to Jews and Israel --in the name of peace and human rights to be sure-- we may say that Henry Ford's hatred of Jews is still alive in the Ford Foundation.
The Ford Foundation provides a large subsidy to the New Israel Fund which in turn finances a whole series of supposed human rights and peace NGOs operating in Israel whose ulterior motive is to destabilize Israeli society and favor Arab  claims over Jewish human rights. And favor Arab political claims and demands on Israel.
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More on Ford's endeavors to bring the hatred of Jews to the general American public to come in subsequent posts.

 Scholarly article on Ford's Judeophobia [here]
JTA press report on the libel trial against Henry Ford in 1927 -- from JTA's archives [here]