The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

THE DANGER OF PROPAGANDA
The following material is particularly important because propaganda 
fomented the Spanish-American War and both World Wars. Ford (1922, 
p. 203) was actually somewhat ahead of Linebarger’s (1954) Psychological 
Warfare in the identification of honest and dishonest uses of propaganda:
There has been too much of this kind of psychological crime committed 
in the world these past few years—the crime of bringing men to act from 
the highest and sincerest motives of self-sacrifice, and then using that high 
spirit for the lowest purposes.

---

216  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
Ford was doubtlessly familiar with the role of the “yellow press,” the 
competing newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, 
in fomenting the Spanish-American War. There was and is no evidence 
that Spain sabotaged the battleship Maine, but the yellow press proclaimed 
immediately that Spain had murdered American sailors with a perfidious 
attack. Judge Magazine (July 9, 1898) had on its cover Grant Hamilton’s 
“The Spanish Brute: Adds Mutilation to Murder.” This may well have been 
the first widely circulated cartoon that depicted the enemy as a subhuman 
monster; in this case, a fanged ape in a Spanish uniform with blood drip-
ping from his knife.
Ford’s statement, “Make the nation suspicious; make the other nation 
suspicious,” applied to Spanish newspapers almost as much as to the yel-
low press. One Spanish cartoon portrayed the United States as a pig, and 
the implication was clearly that the Spanish people were spoiling for a 
fight. An intelligent Spanish propagandist would have instead attempted 
to derail a war by portraying Hearst and Pulitzer as using the blood of 
Spanish and American soldiers as ink for their newspapers.
Propagandists of World War I transformed Grant Hamilton’s creation 
into a fanged ape in a spiked helmet, with a terrified woman in one paw 
and a bloody club labeled kultur (German for “culture”) in the other. The 
cartoonist W. A. Rogers meanwhile created images of dead American 
children after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The sensationalistic 
portrayal of Germany as the murderer of American civilians overcame all 
inquiries as to whether Germany had a legal right to sink the Lusitania, 
which it did. Greenhill (2008) reported that a diving team found 4 million 
rounds of 0.303 caliber rifle ammunition, that of Britain’s Short Magazine 
Lee-Enfield Rifle, on the sunken wreck. This kind of propaganda, and 
Germany’s failure to respond effectively, drew the United States into a 
war in which more than 100,000 American soldiers died and more than 
200,000 were wounded.
The German who learned the most from Germany’s propaganda fail-
ures and the Triple Entente’s (Great Britain, France, and Russia) success 
was unfortunately Adolf Hitler. His successful application of the lessons 
in question then enabled him to take over Germany and perpetrate World 
War II.
If this is not enough reason for citizens and national leaders to beware 
of dishonest propaganda, it is necessary to add that Ford himself fell victim 
to it despite his explicit knowledge of its dangers. His publication of the 
infamous International Jew was the direct result of his interaction with the 

---

Things in General  •  217
Czarist propagandist Boris Brasol, who presented him with a copy of the 
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The copy was sufficiently authoritative that 
Ford believed its contents to be accurate. Sinclair (1937, p. 55) cites Ford’s 
meeting with Brasol, as does the Jewish Virtual Library.
*
 The result was 
the promotion of anti-Semitism along with enormous damage to Ford’s 
reputation. This, along with the role of propaganda in drawing the United 
States into at least two conflicts (Spanish-American War and World War I) 
in which it had no business, reinforces the need for every citizen to educate 
himself or herself on the subject of propaganda and psychological warfare.
Ford’s description of a “group of men with vast powers of control” 
applies to what President Eisenhower would later call the military-indus-
trial complex. Eisenhower’s observation meanwhile echoes that of Niccolò 
Machiavelli (1965, pp. 17–21), who warned that no country should allow 
anybody to make war his only profession. A company that can make only 
military products is in roughly the same position, and it requires either a 
war or the threat of one to prosper. It also is quite possible that Ford knew 
the reputation of Basil Zaharoff, the arms trader known as the Merchant 
of Death.
The needs of twenty-first century armies admittedly require special-
ized defense contractors, but it is in these companies’ interest to be able to 
make peacetime products to avoid dependence on government contracts. 
Ford’s industries were obviously capable of doing this.
* * *
An impartial investigation of the last war, of what preceded it and what has 
come out of it, would show beyond a doubt that there is in the world a group 
of men with vast powers of control, that prefers to remain unknown, that 
does not seek office or any of the tokens of power, that belongs to no nation 
whatever but is international—a force that uses every government, every 
widespread business organization, every agency of publicity, every resource 
of national psychology, to throw the world into a panic for the sake of get-
ting still more power over the world. An old gambling trick used to be for the 
gambler to cry “Police!” when a lot of money was on the table, and, in the 
panic that followed, to seize the money and run off with it. There is a power 
within the world which cries “War!” and in the confusion of the nations, the 
unrestrained sacrifice which people make for safety and peace runs off with 
the spoils of the panic.
* 
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/protocols1.html (accessed July 2 
2012).

---

218  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
The point to keep in mind is that, though we won the military contest, the 
world has not yet quite succeeded in winning a complete victory over the pro-
moters of war. We ought not to forget that wars are a purely manufactured evil 
and are made according to a definite technique. A campaign for war is made 
upon as definite lines as a campaign for any other purpose. First, the people 
are worked upon. By clever tales the people’s suspicions are aroused toward the 
nation against whom war is desired. Make the nation suspicious; make the other 
nation suspicious. All you need for this is a few agents with some cleverness and 
no conscience and a press whose interest is locked up with the interests that will 
be benefited by war. Then the “overt act” will soon appear. It is no trick at all to 
get an “overt act” once you work the hatred of two nations up to the proper pitch.
There were men in every country who were glad to see the World War begin 
and sorry to see it stop. Hundreds of American fortunes date from the Civil 
War; thousands of new fortunes date from the World War. Nobody can deny 
that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of money. War 
is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood.
And we should not so easily be led into war if we considered what it is that 
makes a nation really great. It is not the amount of trade that makes a nation 
great. The creation of private fortunes, like the creation of an autocracy, does 
not make any country great. Nor does the mere change of an agricultural 
population into a factory population. A country becomes great when, by the 
wise development of its resources and the skill of its people, property is widely 
and fairly distributed.