World War I era
Henry Ford was an Episcopalian Christian who opposed war which he thought was a waste of time.[28][29][30] Ford became highly critical of those who he felt financed war and seemed to do whatever he could to stop them. Ford felt that time was better spent making things. In 1915, Jewish pacifist Rosika Schwimmer had gained the favor of Henry Ford who agreed to fund a peace ship to Europe, where World War I was raging, for himself and about 170 other prominent peace leaders. Ford's Episcopalian pastor, Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, accompanied him on the mission. Marquis also headed Ford's Sociology Department from 1913 to 1921. Ford talked to President Wilson about the mission but had no government support. His group went to neutral Sweden and the Netherlands to meet with peace activists there. As a target of much ridicule, he left the ship as soon as it reached Sweden.
An article G. K. Chesterton wrote for the December 12, 1916, issue of Illustrated London News, shows why Ford's effort was ridiculed. Referring to Ford as "the celebrated American comedian," Chesterton noted that Ford had been quoted claiming, "I believe that the sinking of the Lusitania was deliberately planned to get this country [America] into war. It was planned by the financiers of war." Chesterton expressed "difficulty in believing that bankers swim under the sea to cut holes in the bottoms of ships," and asked why, if what Ford said was true, Germany took responsibility for the sinking and "defended what it did not do." Mr Ford's efforts, he concluded, "queer the pitch" of "more plausible and presentable" pacifists.
On the other hand H.G. Wells, in "The Shape of Things to Come", devoted an entire chapter to the Ford Peace Ship, stating that "despite its failure, this effort to stop the war will be remembered when the generals and their battles and senseless slaughter are forgotten". Wells claimed that the American armaments industry and banks, who made enormous profits from selling munitions to the warring European nations, deliberately spread lies in order to cause the failure of Ford's peace efforts. He notes, however, that when the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Ford took part and made considerable profits from the sale of munitions.
The episode has recently been fictionalized by the British novelist Douglas Galbraith in his novel King Henry.[31]
World War II era
By the time of World War II, Henry Ford was old, rich, eccentric, and as stubborn as ever. He disliked the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and he did not approve of U.S. involvement in the war. Therefore, from 1939 to 1943 at least, the War Production Board's dealings with the Ford Motor Company were with others in the organization, such as Edsel Ford and Charles Sorensen, much more than with Henry Ford. During this time Henry Ford did not stop his executives from cooperating with Washington, but he himself did not get deeply involved. He watched suspiciously, focusing on his own pet side projects, as the work progressed.[32] After years of Great Depression, labor strife, and New Deal, he suspected that people in Washington were conspiring to wrest the company from his control. Ironically, his paranoia was trending toward self-fulfilling prophesy, as his attitude inspired background chatter in Washington about how to undermine his control of the company, whether by wartime government fiat or by instigating some sort of coup among executives and directors.[33] In 1945, the war ended, Henry Ford II became company president, and the storm was past.
