Forging Global Fordism by Link Stefan J.;

Author:Link, Stefan J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

In 1938, German consular staff in the United States decorated two prominent American businessmen with an award that the Nazi regime bestowed on foreigners who, according to the official designation, “had been of service to the Reich.” One of the recipients was GM’s overseas chief executive James Mooney, who accepted the Order of Merit of the Cross of the German Eagle, First Class, from the German consul in New York on August 17. The other awardee was Henry Ford. In a brief ceremony at the Dearborn Laboratory, two German diplomats pinned the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the award’s highest rung, to Ford’s chest. The occasion was Ford’s seventy-fifth birthday on July 30. A year earlier, Thomas Watson, IBM’s chief executive, had received a similar decoration from Hjalmar Schacht at the occasion of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Berlin conference.

There were two contexts for these remarkable gestures of recognition. Mooney’s and Ford’s awards occurred, first, as part of an effort of Nazi diplomats to strengthen pro-German voices on the American right at a time when diplomatic relations were deteriorating. Over the course of 1938, German consular staff gave more than a dozen eagle crosses to Americans. Apart from one celebrity, Charles Lindbergh, the other awardees were lesser-known figures, such as the Stanford historian Ralph Haswell Lutz and Oberlin professor Karl Geiser, the translator of Sombart’s works for Princeton University Press. Such bestowals ceased after the pogroms of November 1938 had turned American public opinion firmly against Nazi Germany.148 An equally important reason for the decorations of Watson, Mooney, and Ford was the Nazi regime’s transnational industrial politics. The awards reflected the close, if tense and quarrelsome, relationships that American multinationals developed with the Nazi regime over the course of the Thirties. Watson received his decoration for “bettering economic relations,” as the New York Times reported; Mooney his “in recognition of his services in the development of the Adam Opel AG in Germany,” as American military officials later concluded.149

Connections such as these have prompted historians to ask questions about complicity. Did American businesspeople sympathize with the Nazi agenda? Did their firms collude with the Nazi regime? Were there alternative courses of action they chose to forgo? Though these questions remain urgent, this chapter has adopted a different angle: we asked how the Nazi regime managed to rope the powerful American carmakers into serving the needs of motorization and rearmament in the first place.

It turns out there was a certain method to the madness. The regime subjected Ford and GM to the general line of economic steering. The framework mechanism was capital controls. By refusing to allocate foreign exchange, the authorities pushed GM and Ford to support the exports of their German branches and to provide them with crucial raw materials against barter or book debits. The branches also acquired American machine tools without taxing the Nazi hard currency coffers. Since Ford and GM were debarred from repatriating profits, they recycled earnings into plant, machinery, and other fixed investments. Thus GM’s

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