Triangle-Sitting
On the history of dance and the dance of history, plus an irrelevant cute dog story.
A: In those days this book made such a deep impression on my friends and myself because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success, also the exponent of a progressive social policy. In the poverty-stricken and wretched Germany of the time, youth looked toward America, and apart from the great benefactor, Herbert Hoover, it was Henry Ford who to us represented America.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Sauter, the Tribunal thinks, as I have said twice now, that the educational influences of the defendant are quite irrelevant to us. I do not want to say it again and, unless you can control the defendant and keep him to the point, I shall have to stop his evidence.
DR. SAUTER: But, Mr. President, is it not of interest to the Tribunal when judging this defendant and his personality that they know how the defendant became a National Socialist and how the defendant became anti-Semitic? I had thought...
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not of interest to the Tribunal.
— Nuremberg trial transcripts, 1946
Henry Ford is known as the man who put the world on wheels. This visionary inventor also saw the wisdom in creating a diverse workforce -- long before such concepts were embraced by other business leaders.
Since its founding in 1903, Ford has established itself as a premier American employer by supporting equitable and inclusive employment practices years before the law required it.
— Ford Motor Company, circa present day
History is more or less bunk.
—Henry Ford, 1916
A couple weeks ago, I declined an invitation to go square-dancing. Square-dancing would be a natural fit for me, except I hate crowds, loud music, paying attention to my body, and following orders. So instead, I sat out on the porch with my laptop, my dog Louie, and another dog, Louie’s friend Zuzu. As he often does, Louie came over and sat back-to-back with me, letting us lean on each other while maintaining Constant Vigilance. Zuzu, seeing this, walked over and did the same thing, so that the three of us were each leaning against the other two, all facing different directions.
Naturally, one question comes to mind: What would automobile manufacturer Henry Ford have thought of all this?
Modeling Ford
Ford would have wanted me to go square-dancing. He’s one of two people credited with the modern revival of this traditional American activity—he funded and ran a successful campaign to get wholesome, old-fashioned dance taught in schools. My disinterest in it would probably have disqualified me from the extra $5 he paid to employees of sound moral character.
But Ford, I’m sure, would have found the sight of me and the dogs heartwarming. Like most of us, he was a fundamentally decent person who liked it when others were happy and content. And he was a dog person. He would, perhaps, have frowned at hearing that both dogs were mutts of unknown ancestry. His Newfoundland, Rover, the canine component of his meticulous recreation of an English cottage, was chosen by his secretary after in-depth research into the best lineages. But he’d appreciate that the mutts were “rescues.” All relationships, he felt, should be mutually beneficial.
What about the third point in the sitting triangle? Genetically, I’m about as far from a mutt as you can get. It’s likely that literally every one of my ancestors for the past six hundred years has been a descendant of the same 350 Ashkenazi Jews. How would Ford have felt about that?
This is not straightforward to answer. Ford spent a good chunk of his life believing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were real—that there was a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to destroy other cultures and subjugate other peoples, whose protocols had somehow leaked. In 91 newspaper articles, afterwards collected into a four-volume series The International Jew, Ford did his best to alert the world. This did an incredible amount of damage. Ford is probably the only American whose biographers have to carefully argue that the Holocaust probably was mostly not his fault. In 1931, sitting at his desk in front of a life-size portrait of Ford, Adolph Hitler told a reporter that Henry Ford was his inspiration.
People often draw a straight line from Ford’s bigotry to his love of square-dancing. In those anti-Semitic tracts, he wrote that jazz was a Jewish conspiracy to degrade our music. “The Anglo-Saxon group of qualities, and the Anglo-Saxon point of view, are the vital nucleus of the American temper. The Jewish domination of our music threatens to submerge and stultify them at every point.” Modern music, with its sensuousness and loose form, was a degradation of the stately music of Ford’s youth. (He seems to have had mixed feelings about ragtime—it was a “legitimate development” of African-American music, not part of the conspiracy, but still part of the problem because he was racist.)
But by the time Ford started his square-dancing campaign, in the 1920’s, he was awkwardly sashaying away from those conspiracy theories. He told interviewers, says square dancing researcher Paul M. Gifford, that he wasn’t trying to reform dance culture. In fact, he said, he was trying to promote diversity by preventing the loss of his personal favorite styles. “We are not, as has been imagined, conducting any kind of a crusade against modern dancing. We are merely dancing in the way that gives us the most pleasure,” he told one interviewer. To another, he said of the evolution of dance:
Well, you have to have different movements. You have to have them to keep things stirred up. You have to have an explosion now and then. It’s just like the Jews in this country. We couldn’t get along without them. They keep things stirred up by their business ability.
(I told you it was an awkward sashay).
A large of part of Ford’s motivation for this shift was practical. There’d been some lawsuits and a court-ordered apology. His Jewish employees (1,437 as of 1916) were valuable workers. (The Ford Sociological Department reported that they were the 6th most common ethnicity in the company. The most common was “American.”) If he wasn’t willing to die on this hill, it made sense to leave it.1
But it also seems likely that he just kind of went “oops.” Ford was, in his own terms, an “ignorant idealist.” He grew up in 19th-century rural Michigan, never went to high school, and never saw the point of learning history. While under oath during a civil trial2, he guessed that the American Revolution had taken place in 1812 and that Benedict Arnold was some sort of writer. He didn’t have antibodies against conspiracy theories.
His terrible burst of anti-Semitism came out of his horror at World War I. Ford was an ardent pacifist, and put considerable effort into trying to end it. That’s the source of most of his “history is bunk” quotes—people would cite history, in different ways, as a reason for the Great War, and he would indignantly reply that he didn’t care about tradition and national mythology, he just wanted to move the world forward. But World War I really can’t be explained without reference to the vast impersonal forces of history. To make sense of it, Ford needed a villain with the ability to disguise himself as those vast forces. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were available for the role.
Disregard for history is also part of how you get someone who thinks that the music of his youth was pure and the music of today is corrupt. Ford saw square-dancing as an Anglo-Saxon thing, but it’s just as much the invention of enslaved people from Africa, and their descendants. In early America, they were forced to play the music for stately European dances like the quadrille, and found a way to make it more fun and accessible: having one person call out which moves to do next, rather than requiring everybody to stick to a fixed, memorized choreography.
I don’t know if Ford ever learned the true provenance of square-dancing, but he at least seems to have realized that he should stop finding elaborate intellectual justifications for his personal tastes. He’d expanded his “live and let live” ethos from politics to culture.
Multiple people close to him have said that, while watching a film showing the liberation of concentration camps, he suffered a debilitating stroke from which he never recovered. They may have been exaggerating, or even inventing sincere remorse where none existed. I think Ford was a fundamentally decent man, and one would imagine that any decent man, on seeing the aftermath of a genocide he helped inspire, would collapse in agony. But I don’t think that’s actually true, nor should be. We atone by helping, not by suffering.
The trick is to understand history without being trapped by it. The world’s, and your own. We need to remember the lessons of the past while remaining liberated from it in the present. You don’t need to turn your life into one coherent story.
Speaking of which, I was thinking I was going to do some kind of metaphor here between my dog triangle-sitting story and pluralist societies. But I can’t really think of a compelling one, and it’s not really why I told the story. I just like dogs.
His pragmatic attitude can be demonstrated by his response when the Nazi government offered him a medal in 1938. He accepted on the condition that they come to him. Afterwards, he told the New York Times that he considered it a medal from the German people, not the Nazis. His acceptance didn’t “involve any sympathy on my part with Nazism. Those who have known me for many years realize that anything that breeds hate is repulsive to me.” But he’d still allowed himself to be photographed getting a medal pinned to him, and I doubt Nazi propaganda made the same distinction Ford did.
The Chicago Tribune had published an editorial headlined “Ford Is An Anarchist” in 1916, attacking his pacifism as ignorant and ungrateful. He sued them for libel, and took the stand to defend his political philosophy. Everybody involved was quickly forced to admit that none of them knew what an anarchist was.
There's a lot to digest and dissect in this short piece. But first I'd like to say thank you for watching Zuzu while I took that square dancing lesson. I did not suck, and that in and of itself was revelatory. Also revelatory was the fact in this piece that Henry Ford tried to stop WWI. Was he involved with Emma Goldman and her crew in trying to stop conscription, too, do you know? I never would have thought that Emma and Henry would have something in common, but there you go. And there's one more thing they had in common: Emma loved to dance. But I doubt she liked to square dance.... but who knows? Now all I really want is a dog leaning against my back while I write. I guess that would only work if I didn't sit on a chair at my desk.