Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

It’s been noted on a few blogs that in J. D. Hayworth’s Whatever It Takes, he names Henry Ford’s “Americanization” proposal as part of the inspiration for his views on immigration. There are two examples in his book of this:

Henry Ford, a leader in [the Americanization] movement, said, “These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.” Talk like that today and our liberal elites will brand you a cultural imperialist, or worse. But if you ask me, Ford had a better idea. Sadly, Americanization has given way to an insidious multiculturalism, the noxious idea that all cultures are equally valid and worthy… Henry Ford must be spinning in his grave.

And:

Over three decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked, “To what does one assimilate in modern America?” In Henry Ford’s day, we had a great big list of things. But if multiculturalism and diversity are valued above all else, the answer is you can assimilate however you want, or not at all.

Well, the trouble is, when Henry Ford endorsed “Americanism,” it meant a lot more than making sure people learned English. This is from Ford’s own writings:

To “Americanize” means, in our ordinary speech, to bring into sympathy with the traditions and institutions of the United States, but the Jews do not mean only the United States when they say “America.” They mean also South and Central America– where so many revolutions have occurred. There are large numbers of Jews in Argentina, and many are found in other countries. It would probably give a wrong slant to the fact to say that the Jewish leaders are wholly anti-America, but it is true to say that they are against the “Americanization” of the Jewish immigrant stream. That is, that the trend of “Americanism” is so different from the trend of “Judaism” that the two are in conflict. This does not indicate treason toward American nationalisms perhaps, so much as it indicates loyalty toward Jewish nationalism.

This makes it pretty obvious that Ford’s views on immigration were closely tied to his racism against Jews. This is not to say that Hayworth is anti-Semetic, but he (or his ghost writer) needs to understand how quoting Henry Ford’s views on immigration to support his views is opening up, as Former New Mexico Governor Bruce King used to say, a whole box of Pandoras. It makes paranoid liberals like me wonder what sort of people he wants to appeal to, and how far he wants to take this.

Hayworth was one of many Republican leaders in this state that came out against the PAN initiative, partly because they were worried about charges of racism. I guess he isn’t so worried about that anymore.

I don’t buy a lot of the arguments from the anti-immigrant crowd, but there are probably plenty of decent arguments out there for them to use without picking Henry Ford, so famously anti-Semetic that he was awarded with a medal by the Nazis, out as their Godfather. I’m giving Hayworth the benefit of the doubt here, he seems ignorant of large sections of our history and may not know anything about the “red scare” and anti-semitism that drove the anti-immigration movement of the 1920’s. But, someone ought to ask him some serious questions about why he picked a racist like Ford as his model.