The machine that started it all/Wikimedia Commons
More than a century on from when Henry Ford changed America forever with the introduction of the Model T, the time has come to ask whether we still own motor vehicles or whether they now own us.
When driving on such cobblestone-like roads, the solution to protecting the equipment is to slow down. But Anchorage drivers, like those in the rest of the country, can’t slow down.
Why?
Motnormativity: A term a team of British psychologists coined to describe the “cultural assumptions about the role of private cars.” The psychologists were interested in “How social norms hide a major public health hazard,” according to the title of their paper, which examined how people now consider their car or truck a basic necessity.
This sort of thinking has reached the point that some even believe there is a “right” to drive. There isn’t, although in almost every case of bad driving other than that involving alcohol or drugs the authorities sometimes act like they believe there is such a right.
And such a belief is understandable given that motor vehicles, especially in the U.S., have for decades now dictated how cities and suburbs are designed, and the result is that many people today need some sort of motorized transport to get from their home to work or shops or the homes of friends or just about anywhere.
If cars and trucks had brains, you could accuse them of conspiring to addict Americans to driving so as to ensure generation after generation after generation of new cars and trucks would always be produced.
Not that this was their intent.
Mind-boggling freedom
The first motor vehicles were like psychedelic drugs opening the mind to all sorts of new visions. No longer did people need to keep horses or dogs, which require daily care, to be able to travel distances greater than a day’s walk or to move goods.
Early motor vehicles were by no means maintenance-free, but there was no regular feeding or shit shoveling required when they were parked. And jumping into one of them to drive somewhere was a lot easier than harnessing up a dog team let alone a team of horses, oxen or mules.
Ease and convenience – or “greater utility and more luxury,” as a story in The Scientific American once put it – led to motor vehicles pushing aside horses and bicycles to takeover American roads only about a decade after mass production of the vehicles began.
Americans went charging into the 1910s in Ford Model Ts, and then came World War I to further speed the move to mechanization.
The Second World War coming so soon after only turbocharged these changes. The first Jeep, the forerunner of the sport utility vehicles (SUVs) now everywhere on the roads of the these unUnited States, rolled off the assembly line on July 16, 1941.
“More than 637,000 Jeeps were built by Willys and Ford during World War II,” AutoWeek observed on the vehicle’s 75th anniversary, and by the time the GIs came home from the war they were well-conditioned to how mechanized transport changed the perception of distance.
Construction of Levittown, now recognized as the nation’s first suburb, started in 1947. Los Angeles Times reporter James Peltz would decades later describe the development as “rows of relatively inexpensive two-bedroom houses ” going up “10 miles east of New York, on a potato field in Long Island” at “breakneck speed.”
Ten miles was a long walk even in those days, and still a pretty good distance by bicycle. But motor vehicles changed all that.
Levittown became a prototype for residential development to this day, and all that ever changed was the distance. To find cheap land, developers kept moving farther and farther from the hearts of cities.
The 10 miles from the centers of commerce and industry became 20 miles, 30 miles and more. By 2021, so many were traveling so far that the U.S. Census had to invent a new word to describe them based on data from the 2010-2016 American Community Survey.
“Mega-commuters” was the term unveiled in 2021 to describe these people.
“Extreme commuting has been increasing since at least 1990,” the Census said. “Extreme commuters are defined as workers who travel 90 minutes or more to work, one-way – a definition based on time. Additionally, this research defines long-distance commuters as workers who travel 50 miles or more to work, one-way. And mega commuters as those who combine these two definitions and travel 90 minutes or more, and 50 miles or more to work, one-way.”
Changing behaviors
As the number of commuters grew over the years, the number of people needing cars increased, and the volume of cars and trucks in turn changed cities and transformed shopping because if you are driving everywhere, you, of course, need somewhere to park.
“There were 4,500 malls in 1960 accounting for 14 percent of all retail sales in the US. In 1975, there were 30,000 malls accounting for more than 50 percent of the retail dollars spent.”
Sam Walton took the 1956 mall concept, added discount pricing, and in 1962 opened the first Walmart because, according to a company history, opened a store in the northwest corner of Arkansas because, according to a company history, his wife “Helen wanted small-town living, and Sam could take advantage of the different hunting seasons that living at the corner of four states had to offer.”
Plenty of companies would come to mimic the Walmart model in the years to follow, leading to the death of a lot of neighborhood businesses as ever more Americans drove somewhere to do their shopping.
And the more people drove, the greater the demand for more and bigger roadways to accommodate all the cars and trucks, a demand that hasn’t diminished to this day because all the roads made it harder and harder to get around anyway except by motor vehicle.
Most American families had a car in 1960, according to The Geography of Transport Systems, but the number of them with more than one car was equal to the 22 percent of Americans still living without a car.
In a lot of American homes today, mom has an SUV; dad has a car or truck; and one or more teenagers have some sort of motor vehicle. And most family members use that vehicle like most Americans once used the bicycle to get themselves around town.
“Single-occupant vehicles (a person driving alone) accounted for 40 percent of all person trips,” the Federal Highway Administration reported in 2010, but that was later found to be an obvious undercount of how many one-passenger motor vehicles were on the road.
“Carpoolers showed the greatest change in their comparison of usual to actual travel between 2001 and 2009; in 2001, 75 percent of workers who reported they usually carpooled did carpool on their travel day, but by 2009, only about 55 percent of those who reported that they usually carpooled actually did carpool, and 43 percent of those who reported that they usually carpooled actually drove alone. Finally, for those who said they usually took transit, about 68 percent actually did take transit on Travel Day, and when these individuals did change their mode, about 13 percent of these then switched to driving alone and another 9 percent carpooled.”
An explosion of drivers
All these people driving alone to all the places they now have to drive to, or think they have to drive to, helps explain why the number of vehicle miles annually driven in the U.S. grew by 300 percent from 1.1trillion in 1971 to 3.3 trillion in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, even though the nation’s population grew by only 38 percent over the same span of years.
The U.S. answer to this has been to build ever more and bigger roads that encourage ever more driving which, if polls are to be believed, leave Americans ever more frustrated.
The Zebra, an insurance shopping website, said it surveyed drivers across the nation earlier this year and found a lot of frustration. A majority, 52 percent, were angry about being cutoff; just under half (49 percent) were fed up with tailgaters; 46 percent had had it with distracted drivers; and plenty of others had complaints about the others ills of their fellow drivers.
Road-rage-related deaths, however, appear to have gone up.
Everytown Research & Policy said its search of the Gun Violence Archive database found that “the number of road rage injuries and deaths involving guns has increased every year since 2018.
This shouldn’t come as a big surprise given some of the results of American Automobile Association (AAA) polling of driver attitudes. Triple-A as it is called found that more than a third of drivers aged 19 to 39 disagreed with the idea that it is “very or extremely dangerous” to speed through a red light, and more than half in that age group disagreed with the idea that it is “very or extremely dangerous” to drive 10 mph or more over the speed limit on residential streets.
And in the many urban areas where speeds are posted at 30 mph, driving 10 mph faster nearly doubles the chances that a driver who hits a pedestrian will kill her or him. And if a motor vehicle going 55 mph in a 45 mph zone – a pretty common occurrence on Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard – when the driver hits a pedestrian, there is about a 90 percent chance the pedestrian will end up dead.
Cars don’t kill people….
As with firearms, so too with motor vehicles.
Motor vehicles don’t kill people; people driving motor vehicles kill people.
But machines do alter how people think, and in that regard, motor vehicles – which killed a reported 42,795 Americans in 2022 – might be more dangerous than firearms – which were involved in 20,958 deaths the same year – in that the latter are recognized as deadly weapons and their used treated accordingly while the former are seldom recognized as deadly weapons and rarely treated as such.
When South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg drove onto the shoulder of a state highway there in 2020 and hit a pedestrian who he left to die, there was outrage that his punishment was a $1,000 fine after pleading guilty to charges of an illegal lane change and using his phone while driving.
But South Dakota Public Broadcasting, one of the few news organizations in the nation willing to dig into how motor vehicle fatalities involving so-called “vulnerable road users” are treated, dug into state records and discovered that “the attorney general did not receive lighter charges or punishment than other South Dakota drivers involved in comparable fatal accidents. ”
Between 2016 and 2020, the outlet reported, “Ravnsborg was among at least 31 other drivers who were not legally intoxicated when they accidentally hit and killed pedestrians during this time period.
The story is much the same all over the country, and in much of the Western world, which is what led those British researchers to coin the word motonormativity to describe a machine-driven problem that goes far beyond deaths in collisions or the damage done to natural ecosystems.
“Here in the United Kingdom, like in many societies around the world, we are in the midst of environmental degradation and no fewer than three parallel health epidemics thanks to the easy hypermobility afforded by private motor vehicles,” they wrote.
“We have an epidemic of collisions, with 1752 deaths and 25,945 serious injuries in 2019, the last year before the Covid pandemic; we have an epidemic of physical inactivity – responsible for 22 to 23 percent of coronary heart disease, 16 to 17 percent of colon cancer, 15 percent of diabetes, 12-13 percent of strokes and 11 percent of breast cancer despite 24 percent of car trips being under two miles and so mostly amenable to walking or cycling; and we have an epidemic of pollution with vehicle exhaust fumes causing cancer, heart disease and diabetes at such levels that estimates have put the United Kingdom air pollution death toll at 40,000 per year (Royal College of Physicians, 2016).
“Even a future switch to electric vehicles would address only one of these three epidemic. It is clear we must acknowledge a simple fact: transport issues are not just environmental issues: they are also inherently public health issues.”
The researchers did not mention Covid-19 deaths during the pandemic, but they could have given that death rates have been directly tied to lack of physical fitness, which helps explain why America has among the world’s highest pandemic death rates despite the generally held American belief that the nation has the best health care in the world.
On our butts
Unfortunately, medicine couldn’t overcome the fact that so many Americans when not sitting behind some sort of viewing screen are sitting behind the wheel of a car. The newest research, published last year, concluded that Americans are now “spending an average of 9.5 hours sedentary each day.”
Sitting time has been steadily increasing year by year with apparently few paying attention to a 2018 study by the American Cancer Society that found prolonged “sitting was associated with a 19 percent higher rate of death from all causes combined compared to sitting less than three hours per day. The study defined prolonged sitting time as six or more hours a day.”
The study blamed “screen time” for much of this, but according to the website Ridester, the average American commuter is now spending almost an hour per day behind the wheel and 17 percent are now spending more than an hour and a half per day commuting.
And that is only the count on hours for commuting. Time spent behind the wheel to run errands or drive for pleasure just adds to the sitting time. Ridester also suggested some are not overjoyed about all this driving.
“Though we all hope to see reform and improvements in the tortuous daily commutes, we can still make the best of our lot until quicker and more efficient methods are introduced,” Ridester added. “Perhaps the best remedy to the curse of a long drive is to transform your attitude about it.”
What those “more efficient methods” might be the website didn’t say. Mass transit over various sorts is much discussed in many places, but it took a pounding from motor vehicles in the 1920 and 1930s, and has never really come back despite the efforts of some cities to revive it.
“In 1926, American transportation systems carried 17.2 billion passengers,” Nicole Gelanis reported in City Journal this spring. The number was down to less than half that – 7.5 billion – by 1993″ despite the nation’s population more than doubling in the intervening years.
“…National transit ridership started a steady upswing, peaking at about 10.5 billion in 2015,” she added. “(But) America remains a car country. Even at the 2015 national peak of transit usage, fewer than 7.8 million workers regularly used public transportation to get to work, census data show – just 5.3 percent of commuters, the large plurality of them in or near New York.”
In most of the country, motor vehicles own us, and electric cars – the great hope of the climate change fearful – aren’t going to change that. Neither are more and bigger roads because no matter how many more we build or how big they get, they seem to end up congested for significant parts of the day.
Working from home seemed to help, but Americans are returning to cubicles and offices because people are social animals and because it is really hard for middle managers to manage people remotely.
Redesigning cities to make them friendlier and safer for pedestrians and cyclists could help, but Americans seem to hate getting around under their own power – or their fellow citizens doing so – even more than they hate mass transit.
Why? Motonormativity.
We’ve become a country of addicts, and addictions of any kind are hard to break.
Categories: Commentary, News
Craig,
Every(?) poll shows about 70% of Palestinians supports the Goals of Hamas and the rape and murder of children by Hamas. These are peace seeking citizens? We should feel for the other 30%, but 70% is more support than Biden or Trump will ever get it. 70% is a mandate to kill jews everywhere.
Stephen….you really should leave the colonies….I mean America….because by your logic your a perpetuator of Genocide by living here. Shame on you, and shame on you for hating Jews and hiding behind bumbo jumble words and logic to “defend” your hate. Israel is a recognized country. Where muslims, christians, jews, gays, women, transgenders live in harmony. How are women treated in Palestinian culture? Gays? Hamas shot woman in the knees on 10/07/23 so when they rapped them there would be less resistance. This is the chosen government body who you defend? With a 70% popularity rating in Gaza. Oy
“Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America.”
After World War II, Nazi scientists joined NASA through Operation Paperclip. By the fall of 1945, German scientists started arriving on U.S. soil. Not all the men recruited were Nazis or SS officers but the most prominent and valued among them were, having worked either directly with Hitler or leading members of the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Herman Göring.
Wernher von Braun, a rocket engineer, was instrumental in developing the first U.S. ballistic missile, the Redstone, and later the Saturn V rocket while serving as director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. As a Nazi ideologue and member of the SS, he traveled to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he “handpicked slaves to work for him as laborers,” said Jacobsen in a 2014 interview with NPR.
Hubertus Strughold, a physiologist and medical researcher, headed the German Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine, known for its torturous medical experiments on inmates from the Dachau concentration camp. Strughold claimed ignorance of any such activity until after the war, yet he appeared among a list of 95 doctors at an October 1942 conference discussing their findings. In the U.S., he was chief scientist of the aerospace medical division at Brooks Air Force and has since been credited as the father of space medicine.
Walter Schreiber, a former Nazi general, also oversaw inhumane medical experiments involving bioweapons that resulted in countless of deaths. Following the war, he was captured by the Soviets but defected to the U.S. He worked for various government entities before finally settling in Texas at the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, Jacobsen writes.
While Schreiber would later serve as a witness during the Nuremberg trials, he, von Braun, Strughold and the rest of their fellow Nazis brought to the U.S. would never be held accountable for their own atrocities. Operation Paperclip remained secret throughout much of the Cold War.
Yes a tribe being as they acted as a tribe in ancient times yet they are significantly genetically related to the middle east people in general . Genetically it would be odd to separate them out when we are so intermixed.
I guess if ford considered them a race then it would be racism even if he didn’t exactly know the technical details of the situation. If that was his intent.
Interesting he wasn’t as prejudiced against other races.
I guess its kinda foolish to use the term race when we are all related. ( really one race)
human race.
Or should it be the mammalian race ? Idk
Judaism is a religion.
So is Christianity.
You can be both a Christian and part of a
Tribe, breed, race, genetic unique population.
The Jewish people are genetically unique, if that is not a race-breed-tribe, than am not sure what is?
Ironically the claim that Jews are not a race, is often used to promote racism against Jews.
Regardless, if you are treated with Racism because folks think u are part of a race, racism is occurring. Ie Henry Ford and Hitler were racists!
Jeff
Why do you say the jewish people are genetically unique?
They always mixed with the population they were around just like everyone else.
Jews are spread and mixed world wide .
Muslims and Christians and many other religions come from similar genetic peoples. Palestinians are very closely related to many Israelis. Basically the same people. ( the closest relatives as a group)
Its all mixed up at this point.
Of course there are certain small segments of the population that are genetically isolated but that is the exception .
What stands out more than genetics is their neat tendency for certain cultural and religious practices.
Focusing on race and genetics in this era serves very little purpose. Its just a wedge to divide.
Foolish.
We are all one people that have many ways of living life that makes the world colorful.
The Palestinian population has been and continues to rise(at about the same rate as Israel’s). What in the world are you talking about? If Israel is performing Genocide on the Palestinian people, they sure suck at it.
1942 Poland 3,000,000 million Jews
2005? 3,000
That is how you do genocide
“Genocide” might be the most misused word in this country today. The word didn’t come into use until 1944 when Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin came up with it as a description for the Holocaust. It’s meaning has been somewhat shifty ever since, but the generally agreed upon definition is that of the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.”
The word is now too often used to describe the American Indian wars during which no end of atrocities were committed, but which lacked any desire on the part of the U.S. governmeng to cause the “systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group.” If that had been the policy, there would be no Indians alive today becuase the American government at the time was perfectly capable of hunting down and killing them all.
Instead it brokered “peace treaties,” which weren’t always kept, that moved nomadic tribes onto “reservations” where for a time the U.S. government engaged in a policy of trying to assimulate them into American society, a rather misguided idea at the time that had plenty of negative consequences. But it was pretty much the opposite of the genocide the Nazis committed against the Jews, which they wanted removed from the population and killed. https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/indigenous/allotment#:~:text=The%20Allotment%20and%20Assimilation%20Era%20built%20upon%20the%20goals%20of,Americans%20into%20Anglo%2DAmerican%20culture.
In some ways, maybe all of us alive today should be thankful the Nazis followed such a misguided policy. As the Atomic Heritage Foundation notes: “One of the ironies of Hitler’s desire for racial purity was that it drove out of continental Europe or into the camps many individuals who would have been extremely useful to the Axis war effort. Nowhere was this more evident than in the effort to produce an atomic bomb. A startling proportion of the most famous names on the project belonged to scientists who came to England or America to flee from the Axis. The large number of refugees and immigrants working on the Manhattan Project gave the American nuclear program an international character unusual in such a top-secret program—and unique amongst the nuclear programs that followed in other countries—and helped give life in Los Alamos, NM during the war its unique character.” https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/scientist-refugees-and-manhattan-project/
If Hitler had followed a policy of assimilating the Jews of Europe, or otherwise co-opting them into the Nazi fold, London and Moscow might well have gone the way of Hiroshima and Nagaski, and we might all be speaking German today.
Craig,
The oxford dictionary describes Genocide as: the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Looking today at the Palestine people, they only inherit less than 10% of their land that they held in 1948…hence I would argue that the US & Israel is committing Genocide on that nation.
As far as the Jewish Genocide, Hitler did not start the expulsion of Jews from Europe…this was started by England in 1898 when the Zionist movement was founded.
There was a large purging of Jews from Britian beginning in 1920 after many wealthy Jews started issuing loans on interest that were not able to be paid back as the great depression was approaching the west.
Hitler gets the fall guy as his extermination methods were barbaric yet, the attack on Jews in Europe started in Britian and there is NO way Hitler would have built the SS Army without US & European Corporations fueling his war machine.
Lastly, the Americans use this as a shield to deter from the millions they killed in the war…remember we are the only country to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population and many question why those bombs were dropped in Japan since the country was already at the table to surrender.
Your ignorance of history here is pretty well summed by that last statement that the Japanes were “already at the table to surrender.” That’ds revisionist bunk. No substantive evidence has ever emerged to support the claim. The ruling Japanese power repeatedly denied offers to surrender, sadly, until the bombs were dropped.
And as to your persistent reference to the “Palestine people,” what is going on in the region today isn’t about them but about Hamas, a barbaric, terrorist organization driven by religious fanatics who want to drive the Jews into the sea. I’d expect most of the Palestine people, like most Israelis, want to live in peace but the “Palestine people” appear cursed by having never fostered a peacemaker because/
There has always been a significant and powerful minority among them that wants the Jews gone, and somehow that group has always maintained control.
Heil al-Husseini!
Gaza strip population
1950 245,000
2023 2,038,000
That is inverse to how genocide math works.
USA population growth 2021
.1%
Gaza strip?
~2%
I get folks hate Jews, but really if you are going to spread lies and conspiracy could ya at least not make claims that can be fact checked in seconds?
Leave it to Steve Stine, the noted antisemite, to defend Hitler while accusing Israel of genocide…sheesh, what a twisted mind all because of the hatred of Jews.
If the population of Gaza is more than 2,000,000 and if the death totals presented by the terrorist organization known as Hamas who are well known for lying (as one of their least objectionable actions) then somewhere around 0.5% of their population has been killed. I wonder if Oxford Dictionary would count 0.5% as a “large number”? Doesn’t look like it because large is defined as: Of considerable size or extent; great, big. Designating a quantity, amount, measure, etc., of relatively great magnitude or extent.
Meanwhile we know for a fact that Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields to hide behind because they are cowards with a moral compass that can only be called broken beyond repair. Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau recently said “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” The blood of these dead children, just like the blood of the innocent Jews that were slaughtered on October 7th is on the hands of Hamas and their supporters.
The US didn’t kill millions during WWII, the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki likely totalled less than 250,000 people and likely saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives by bring the war to an end.
Jeff
I don’t think percentage of success regarding an action is the deciding definition.
I think it’s about intent .
What do you think about how motorists are so careless on the highway?
How do we get better non motorized access throughout cities and connecting communities ?
Israel has never had the intent to erase the Palestinian people from the face of the earth or Gaza or the West Bank for that matter…and the numbers I quoted back up this fact up. Hamas, Fatah, the PLO, every (?) governing body of the Palestinian people has wanted to wipe out all Jews everywhere. The intent is well documented both in their actions and written word/objectives from the PlO to Hamas.
You do know Israel gave the Sinai to Egypt? Israel is a country that wants security not war.
Sure the concept of race is dumb, but when am not served because I am a brown guy….I am confronted with racism. As my mom told me when I was 12: It does not matter if you think your a Jew or not, they will.
“I don’t think percentage of success regarding an action is the deciding definition.”
If you think genocide is Israel intent (and I’m not saying that is what you, DPR, think) then you are horribly misinformed. Israel has gone out of its way to inform Palestinians when and where they are going to bomb. If Israel was intending to annihilate Palestinians, the way that Hamas has sworn to do with every Jew and Israeli, then why would they tell the Palestinians where and when they would be attacking knowing that this also gives Hamas a heads up? Israel has enough fire power to conduct a whole scale bombardment of every city and village in Gaza, why would they send troops in to get killed? If Hamas didn’t surround themselves with human shields and terrorists supports didn’t volunteer to martyr themselves, the death toll would be much much lower. If the intent were there for Israel to commit genocide then the made up headlines ( https://david-collier.com/doctors-shifa-hospital/ )would read much differently than they do.
Thanks for another great article, Craig. I don’t know how you do it: keeping up on so many fronts with quality content. The current one on our relationship with cars made me think of a related issue: I work with a church that has a lot of concern about pornography, so much that we have special classes and help/recovery groups based on AA concepts. This is all great but I often ask “What is the most common addiction in our congregation?” and get answers of alcohol or porn. The listener is then shocked with I answer with “food” but once their consciousness is raised, they don’t disagree . . . and they can’t because just look around you !
Call it Corporatism or Inverted Totalitarianism, either way we are living in a media driven (propagandic) narcissistic society in which the automobile plays an integral role in people’s identity and perceived Capitalistic “class”.
Fascism was always defined as the marriage between government & corporations.
Hitler had a picture of Henry Ford on his office wall & developed the SS uniform from early race car drivers with helmets & leather gloves / googles.
As billions more are sent to Israel for further genocide on the Palestinian people, we can clearly see what Amerika’ has become today.
Of note, Henry Ford was such a vehement racist he was an inspiration to Hitler and was even awarded a medal by Germany for spreading his racist filth.
GM & FORD controlled 70 percent of the automobile market in Nazi Germany & were quick to re-tool their vehicle factories to produce all the rigs needed by the SS Army.
If it wasn’t for US corporations propping up Hitler, then WW2 would probably never have happened…and NO ONE in Congress made any attempts to sanction this activity, instead the ALL bought stock in these companies.
All of them ?
All corporate and business money and lobbyists need separation from government at all levels imo .
I think vehement racist is wrong description.
He was anti Jew . Which is a religion.
Yes, but the Nazis considered the Jews a race, and there are indications Ford shared that view. He was definitely an aggressive anti-semite. So much so, that The Henry Ford center now goes into the subject at length on its website where it admits “Ford’s anti-Jewish sentiments ran deep.” The Jews were Ford’s scapegoat to blame for almost everything wrong with the world and the U.S. in the 1920s. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-and-anti-semitism-a-complex-story
Sadly, this has often been the fate of the Jews through history. There are elements involved that run deeper than religion. Maybe the best description for the Jews would be a “tribe,” an entity that isn’t necessarily purely racial but which goes beyond a shared religon..