Dearborn Independent

Dearborn Independent was a local weekly newspaper purchased by Henry Ford in 1918. Under his ownership, it became the platform for a sustained campaign of antisemitic propaganda: its articles portrayed Jews as conspirators and falsely presented a fabricated text as evidence of a plan for world domination. The paper's history shows how a privately owned publication could turn prejudice into a repeatable, widely circulated product—and how its reach was supported by Ford's business network.

Ownership and publishing campaign

In May 1920, Dearborn Independent published the first of ninety-one detailed articles devoted to exposing what it called the Jewish world's problem. In subsequent issues it serialized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent document, while claiming that it was authentic and revealed a Jewish plan for world domination. The series gave the conspiracy claim the appearance of sustained investigation by presenting it across a succession of articles.

The campaign was not confined to the newspaper's regular readership. Subscriptions were imposed on Ford dealers as a company product, linking the paper's distribution to Ford's commercial organization. The articles were also collected in a four-volume edition, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, extending the campaign beyond the weekly format.

Circulation and closure

The paper's circulation rose to nearly 300,000 by its second year of publication. That scale, together with dealer subscriptions and the collected edition, made the newspaper a prominent channel for distributing the campaign. The paper's reach did not, however, make it financially successful: it was described as a deficit enterprise that had cost Ford close to five million dollars.

After a Chicago Jewish lawyer filed a defamation suit that was settled out of court, Ford retracted his attacks on Jews, agreed to discontinue the antisemitic publications, and shut down Dearborn Independent in 1927. Its closure marked the end of this particular publishing operation, though not the end of the political relationships connected with Ford's views.

Place in the later narrative

In August 1927, Charles Lindbergh met Ford when he flew the Spirit of St. Louis to Detroit; Ford took his first flight in the plane, and Lindbergh interested him in aviation manufacturing. The two met repeatedly afterward. In a 1940 interview, Ford said that when Lindbergh visited, they talked only about Jews. The account places the newspaper's closed campaign alongside the continuing connections between Ford's antisemitism and Lindbergh's political circle, without suggesting that the paper itself remained in operation.