The Sioux City family that risked its livelihood to fight anti-Semitism
It had been 65 years since Henry Ford, the pioneer automaker and one of America’s most outspoken, hateful, and prominent anti-Semites, had yielded to pressure and ended his overt effort to promote the hatred of Jews.
My mother, in her early 70s, asked me for assistance in finding and purchasing her first new car. Among other things, I asked whether she had any preferences regarding make and model.
“Well, not a Ford,” she replied.
This was 1992. Henry Ford had been dead for more than 40 years, but my mother had neither forgotten nor forgiven him. She was standing at the end of a very long line of Jews in America. Up near the front of that line was a Jewish family from Sioux City, Iowa, that stood alone against Ford when he was at the height of his anti-Semitic rampage.
The Barish family of Sioux City was guided by determination, principle, and courage. More about this unusual family to come.
Henry Ford’s road to anti-Semitism
Henry Ford had decided during World War I – in which he strongly opposed American participation – that the Jews had been responsible for America’s entry into the war so that they could profit from it. He further believed that Jews were responsible for everything he did not like about the direction America was heading — the growing national debt, jazz music, and short skirts.
In 1918, he purchased a struggling community weekly newspaper in Dearborn, Michigan, where Ford Motor Co. had begun building the world’s largest manufacturing plant a year earlier. He began publication of his transformed Dearborn Independent the following January. Within a few years, it would be one of the largest circulation newspapers in the U.S.
What? How did that happen in a town of less than 3,000 population in 1920?
Answer: The Ford Motor Company. As the overline above the nameplate of the Dearborn Independent explained, the newspaper also had become "The Ford International Weekly.”
Ford had launched its revolutionary Model T in 1908, a car that would come to account for one-half of all the automobiles on the road, worldwide.
As Ford sales grew, their dealerships everywhere grew and profited. Henry decided that these dealerships also would provide him with a national, or even international voice for disseminating his outrageous religious bigotry.
Ford dealers everywhere began receiving weekly shipments of the Dearborn Independent, just as they received shipments of automobiles and parts. Suddenly, just as Ford had become the largest-selling automobile in America, the Dearborn Independent, became America’s first nationwide print “news” product.
Then, on May 22, 1920, Henry shifted his anti-Semitism campaign into high gear. He began publication of a years-long screed of anti-Semitic stories on the front page of his newspaper every week. The title of this continuing series: “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.”
It was vicious and untruthful in virtually every respect, blaming Jews for all of the world’s problems. Much of it was based on an anti-Semitic hoax that originated in Russia in 1903 under the auspices of Czar Nicholas II. The Czar’s Secret Service instigated a forgery of what was purported to be a recorded series of lectures by a Jewish elder outlining a conspiracy to overthrow European governments.
It played to all of Henry’s prejudices. He obtained a copy of the book for his newspaper and instructed the staff to use it as a foundation for weekly stories to expose what he saw as a Jewish blueprint for world domination.
With 10,000 Ford dealership locations in America, Ford had a guaranteed and unmatched mass distribution mechanism. He also sent his newspapers to schools and libraries across the country.
Soon, however, Ford tired of waiting for customers at his dealerships to voluntarily pick up one of his newspapers. The Dearborn Independent would become a Ford product, just like his Ford automobiles. His dealerships would be required to be proactive in distributing his newspaper.
Ford dealers, on their way to becoming some of the wealthiest men in their towns across the entirety of America, were in no position to do anything but comply.
The Barish family story
Ben Barish, and his sons, of Sioux City, Iowa, would be the exception.
There had been nothing for Ben Barish in his native Russia except an anti-Semitic Czar, poverty, and guaranteed conscription in the Russian Army – often a death sentence – for his sons. The Barish family immigrated to America in two shifts beginning in 1901. Ben and two of his children settled first in the prairie of North Dakota where they obtained a homestead grant. The rest of the family followed 18 months later with all of them relocating to Sioux City, one of the largest and fastest-growing cities in the region.
The Barish family began life in Sioux City the way many immigrant Jews did across the country – collecting scrap metal and selling it to steel producers for reuse. It was hard work, even dangerous, but required virtually no capital to get started and provided a decent living.
By 1906, they had saved $100, enough to purchase a small neighborhood coal and feed business, delivering these products to customers’ homes. Additionally, they dabbled in used furniture and a downtown grocery store in Sioux City. They also added residential ice delivery to their coal and feed delivery business. By 1916, their $100 investment was generating a half million dollars a year in revenue – about $14 million annually in today’s terms.
It was time to take the next big step. Barish Bros. Company became local agents for the Ford Motor Company. They immediately began planning for construction of a downtown Ford dealership building at the corner of Fifth and Pearl Streets – three stories at a cost of $90,000. The building opened in January 1918.
No more than a year later, a top Ford advertising executive visited the Barish Ford dealership in Sioux City. The executive openly praised the Barishes in a speech at a community luncheon. An account of the luncheon published by the Sioux City Journal stated that the Ford representative told the gathered group, “Nowhere in the United States could a better Ford distributing agency be found than that maintained in Sioux City by the Barish Bros. company.”
The executive also appeared to allude to Henry Ford’s growing reputation for anti-union activities, and racism, along with his anti-Semitism, noting that Ford employed many disabled veterans and immigrants. “Henry Ford is a much misunderstood man by the public at large . . . and if his many acts of sincere patriotism were known all criticism would disappear,” the newspaper said in paraphrasing the Ford executive. There was no mention of the fact that Ford employed disabled veterans and immigrants in the least desirable and often dangerous jobs that provided no chance of advancement.
“Take this job (dealership) and shove it”
The Barish Bros. car sales business continued to grow for the next 2 ½ years.
Then, in September of 1921, after 18 months of Henry Ford’s weekly bashing of the Jews through his newspaper, dealers were notified that they would be required to sell paid subscriptions to his newspaper.
It was a step too far for the Barishes.
They walked away from Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. It is possible that other Ford dealers took similar action, but there does not appear to be any record of that happening.
The Sioux City Journal published a small news article on Page 9, which can only be described as obligatory but inadequate in proportion to the significance of the announcement.
The Barishes purchased advertisements in other Sioux City newspapers announcing and explaining their decision to dump their lucrative Ford dealership.
The headline and a major portion of the text of their letter of cancellation to Ford from their full-page ad in the Sioux City Tribune:
We have given up the Ford Agency
“In order that you may be fully advised as to our reasons for taking this step, we are enclosing herewith a brief review of the treatment afforded us by you for the past five years, but the straw that broke the camel’s back is your recent appeal to dealers to endeavor to boost circulation of the Dearborn Independent by persuading customers to subscribe for it, emphasizing the point that the magazine is decidedly a “Ford product,” and that it is a wonderful organ of knowledge and information. If trying to discredit the Jewish nation before the eyes of the American public by prejudice, hatred and intrigue is what you conceive as “knowledge,” then the saying “Ignorance is bliss” is quite appropriate. Since you choose to classify your magazine as one of Ford’s products, you are welcome to all of the Ford products, and you may count us out. None of your honey, and none of your sting!”
In the Sioux City News, their ad stated, “We are Jewish and we are successful. And money is less important than loyalty, dignity and truth. Stop the lies and we’ll return. But until you do, we will find another way to make an honest living.”
Within about two weeks, a competing automotive dealer in Sioux City announced that he would become the city’s Ford dealer while giving up two lesser-known automotive nameplates.
Two months after Barish Bros. dumped their Ford dealership, they arranged to become the Dodge dealer in Sioux City. In 1923, they switched to Chevrolet and also opened branch dealerships in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Norfolk, Nebraska, both operated by family members.
Ben Barish died at age 60 in August 1923.
Max Barish moved to Omaha in 1929, just weeks before the stock market crash, opening a car dealership that eventually became a home for Dodge-Plymouth.
Ultimately, Max and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership on La Brea in 1950.
He made sure the city knew he had arrived. There were billboards everywhere with his name and picture on them. He also hired a relatively unknown local television personality to promote his dealership: Johnny Carson — whom Barish may have known from Carson’s time on local TV in Omaha, 1949-1951.
Max died at age 80 in 1967. His son, Howard took over the business and ran it until his retirement in 1992.
The Barish family may not have liked the way Henry Ford mixed anti-Semitism with his business, but Adolph Hitler loved it. Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, then Germany’s highest award for a non-German, as a birthday present in 1938. Ford died at age 83 in 1947.
Thank you to my reader Bill Douglas for alerting me to the Barish family story after reading my recent column, The things you never knew about Jewish Iowa https://arnoldgarson.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/156714486?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts. Douglas also is working on a book, The People Are Kind: A Religious History of Iowa.
Sources for this column include but are not limited to: A Small-town Jewish Family’s Rebuke of Car Maker Henry Ford, The Forward, December 18, 2013, by Galia Miller Sprung (granddaughter of Max Barish); Iowa’s Antisemitism Bioll and 101 Years Since My Grandpa Confronted Henry Ford, Jewish Journal, April 13, 2022, by Galia Miller Sprung; Max Barish, Inc. Chrysler-Plymouth Dealer, www.nicksgarage.com; How American Icon Henry Ford Fostered Anti-Semitism, June 4, 2021, updated August 22, 2023, HISTORY.com, by Becky Little; Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism:; A Complex Story, www.thehenryford.org; Anti-Semitism in the United States: Henry Fort Invents a Jewish Conspiracy, The Jewish Virtual Library, by Michael Feldberg; various news articles referencing the Barish family published in the Sioux City Journal, 1902-1929; Sleeper Agent, The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away, Ann Hagedorn, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2022.
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Beautiful story, Mary. Thank you for reading and for sharing. Was this by chance Mort Greenstone, who had an insurance agency? His wife would have been Edith. He was my cousin, though I never met him. His grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers. I have been in touch with his daughter, Ellen, who lives in LA.
Wow! What a story! And a timely tale about standing up for what is right.