William J. Cameron

William John Cameron (born December 29, 1878 in Hamilton , Ontario , † August 4, 1955 in Oakland ) was a Canadian - American journalist . As a close confidant and ghost writer Henry Ford , he wrote from 1920 to 1922 in charge, the anti-Semitic series of articles The International Jew (dt. The International Jew ) in the Dearborn Independent . During the 1930s he lectured on the national radio show The Ford Sunday Evening Hour. As a supporter of sectarian Anglo-Israelism , he contributed significantly to the increasingly anti-Semitic and racist orientation of this movement.

Life

journalist

The son of a Scottish immigrant family was still in school in Hamilton. The family moved to Detroit in 1887 , where Cameron's father worked in a foundry . William Cameron attended Webster Elementary School in Detroit and did a grocery delivery for the holidays. He completed his college education at the Hamilton Collegiate Institute , including courses at the University of Toronto .

Cameron initially worked as a time employee on the Michigan Central Railroad in Jackson . At the same time he worked as a lay preacher in the Sunday service of the People's Church in Brooklyn , Michigan , where he also met his wife.

Back in Detroit, Cameron wrote commentaries for the Detroit News and became a permanent reporter for the newspaper in 1904. National attention was drawn in 1909 to his comment, Don't Die at Third, on baseball player George Moriarty . In 1918 he followed his editor-in-chief Edwin Gustav Pipp to the Dearborn Independent , a weekly newspaper recently bought by Henry Ford.

Ford was at the time in a legal battle with the journalist Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune , who had described him in a commentary as an " anarchist ". Ford set up its own news agency at the Mount Clemens court . Cameron was given the task of formulating print-ready statements from Ford's opinions. In doing so, he built a close relationship of trust with Ford and acted as its spokesman for the public in the decades that followed. As a ghostwriter, Cameron Ford wrote the column “Mr. Ford's page ”in its Dearborn Independent newspaper .

Editor-in-Chief of the Dearborn Independent

Cover of the first part of the series of articles The International Jew in the Dearborn Independent, May 22, 1922

The Dearborn Independent was originally supposed to support Ford's election campaign for a senatorial post. In order to attract attention, it was decided in 1920 to represent sensationalist anti-Semitism. When Pipp protested and resigned, Cameron took over editor-in-chief. He researched, wrote and published from May 1920 the anti-Semitic series of articles The International Jew . In doing so, he relied on books and articles such as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911, 1913) by Werner Sombart , but also from August 1920 on the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , which he wrote in this way USA popularized. By the abrupt end of the series in January 1922, 91 articles had been published, which had also been distributed as pamphlets since November 1920 . When it ended, the series was split into four parts under the title The International Jew. The World's Foremost Problem in a nutshell . Since Ford made no copyright claims on Liebold's advice , the work quickly found worldwide distribution in reprints and translations. In Germany, for example, an edition provided by the anti-Semitic publisher Theodor Fritsch appeared in early 1923 .

It is not entirely clear who the intellectual creator of the series was. When Ford was sued for libel by attorney Aaron Sapiro in 1927 for anti-Semitic articles in the Dearborn Independent , Cameron took full responsibility for the articles, claiming that Ford had no knowledge of or preprinted articles. Historians have questioned this account. Since Cameron had built up a close relationship of trust with Ford and interpreted his comments and statements and prepared them in a journalistic way, it seems unlikely that Ford did not agree with the series of articles. Ford's anti-Semitism was also well known. Reference is also made to the role of Ford's private secretary Ernest G. Liebold , who in mid-June 1920 had probably received an English translation of the minutes from the Russian emigrant Boris Brasol and forwarded it to Cameron. Cameron is therefore also described as someone who was not an anti-Semite until he was commissioned by Ford to write the articles.

Leading Anglo-Israelite

Cameron was a staunch supporter of Anglo-Israelism. Together with Howard Rand , whom he apparently met in 1930 at a meeting of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in Detroit, he played a key role in the development of the movement that later became the Christian Identity . For Anglo-Israelites like Cameron, the Anglo-Saxons were the lost tribe of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and thus the actual Israelites , while Jews were actually descendants of the Asian tribe of the Khazars . While Anglo-Israelism was originally primarily philosophical , Cameron linked it with racial theory and anti-Semitism. In sermons and publications, he claimed that the Bible portrayed the struggle of the Anglo-Saxon race with the Esau race, which was destroying the Jewish religion from within. These views were taken up by the Christian Identity movement. According to an unsubstantiated theory, which Albert Lee defended in his book Henry Ford and the Jews , the Ku Klux Klan leader Reuben H. Sawyer , who is also counted among the formative influences of the Christian identity movement, does not exist but was a pseudonym of Cameron. After Cameron was elected to the board of directors of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in May 1930 and became its president in the mid-1930s, in early 1938 Cameron's alcohol addiction possibly caused his abrupt separation from the Anglo-Israelite movement, which at the same time lost its most prominent advocate.

On the radio

As a result of the Sapiro trial, to the end of which Ford undertook to make a public apology out of court, the Dearborn Independent was discontinued in December 1927. At this point, Cameron had already taken on all of Henry Ford's public relations work without getting an official job at the Ford factory . From October 1934 he appeared on a national radio program, Ford's Sunday Evening Hour with the Detroit Philharmonic Orchestra , which was broadcast by CBS through 86 stations and reached an estimated 10 to 16 million listeners. Cameron gave short, approximately six-minute speeches during the music breaks, the subjects of which he usually chose himself. He benefited from his experience as a lay preacher. Ford had 285 of Cameron's speeches published as brochures with a total circulation of 45 million. In 1935, Cameron received an honorary law degree from Washington & Jefferson College .

When the Ford Sunday Evening Hour closed in March 1942, Cameron remained Ford's press secretary. However, he had lost his monopoly in dealing with the media. He has now appeared as a speaker in churches, at graduation ceremonies and in front of various organizations and associations. He also wrote speeches for Henry Ford II . He retired in April 1946 and moved to Oakland in 1949. He made contact with Unity Church from Missouri , swore under their influence in 1947 to alcohol and worked from then on as an assistant preacher for the church.

literature

• Michael Barkun: Religion and the racist right. The origins of the Christian Identity movement. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-4638-4 .
• Ford R. Bryan: Henry's lieutenants. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Mich 1993, ISBN 0-8143-3213-7 , pp. 53-58.
• Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford's war on Jews and the legal battle against hate speech. Stanford UP, Stanford 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-7234-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about William J. Cameron in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford's was on Jews and the legal battle against hate speech. Stanford UP, Stanford 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-7234-1 , pp. 24f.
2. ↑ Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford's was on Jews and the legal battle against hate speech. Stanford UP, Stanford 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-7234-1 , p. 112.
3. ↑ Michael Barkun: Religion and the racist right. The origins of the Christian Identity movement. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-4638-4 , p. 35.
4. ^ Steven Watts: The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century . Vintage, NY 2005, pp. 381f.
5. ↑ Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford's was on Jews and the legal battle against hate speech. Stanford UP, Stanford 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-7234-1 , pp. 48f.
6. ^ Mary Elizabeth Brown: Henry Ford (1863-1947). The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In: Patrick J. Hayes (Ed.). The Making of Modern Immigration. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2012, ISBN 0-313-39203-X , p. 240.
7. ↑ Michael Barkun: Religion and the racist right. The origins of the Christian Identity movement. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-4638-4 , p. 38.
8. ↑ Barkun, Religion, p. 21.
9. ↑ Michael Barkun: Religion and the racist right. The origins of the Christian Identity movement. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, ISBN 0-8078-4638-4 , pp. 41f.
10. ^ Ford R. Bryan: Henry's lieutenants. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Mich 1993, ISBN 0-8143-3213-7 , p. 55.
11. ↑ Michael Barkun: Religion and the racist right. The origins of the Christian Identity movement. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1997, p. 43.