Story

The American Dreyfus

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Authors: Gene Smith

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

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November 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 7

On an October afternoon in 1918, Major Alexander Pennington "Buddy" Cronkhite took practice with a .45 at a tobacco can atop a post at Camp Lewis, Washington. With him were a sergeant and Captain Robert Rosenbluth, recently back from France, where he had been gassed and wounded on the Western Front. “I got it that time, Rosie,” Cronkhite said, putting a shot through the can. The next one entered his chest. He was dead in minutes.

 

His mother could not accept that such a tragedy had overtaken her only son. Theirs was an old military family. Mrs. Cronkhite’s father had been a Union Army major general. Her husband, the son of a Yankee colonel, was an American Expeditionary Forces divisional commander in the Great War, which was entering its final stage. An Army board of inquiry might rule that the death was accidental and self-inflicted; but Mrs. Cronkhite’s fevered questions gave birth to certain doubts at Camp Lewis. An officer remembered Buddy Cronkhite’s saying that having the flu made him feel so lousy that he’d like to shoot himself. And how could a West Point graduate so mishandle a weapon?

It could not have been an accident, and, even less, suicide, Mrs. Cronkhite maintained, so it must have been murder. When, after the armistice, Major General Adelbert Cronkhite returned from France, he instantly accepted his wife’s view. He was a major general, so the case was reopened and exhaustively gone into. The original verdict held. It was a tragic accident, the Army said, but no more. Then, the matter came to the attention of one of the richest men on the face of the Earth.

Henry Ford was a countryman mechanic and tinkerer who, in a remarkably short time, made himself the sole proprietor of the largest industrial empire the world had ever known. Simple in his tastes and ways, a neatly dressed rustic, he seemed to the American public an unspoiled fellow who was, at the same time, a genius of the very highest order. A 1920 survey of college students ranked him as the third-greatest man who ever lived, his only superiors being Christ and Napoleon.

Henry Ford had an obsession that began early and lasted all his life. He detested Jews. There was nothing he would not attribute to them. They had ruined one of his favorite candy bars; it didn’t taste nearly as good as it used to. They had been behind Lincoln’s assassination. They had put Benedict Arnold up to his evil deeds. These financiers and middlemen and money-lenders were dedicated to cheating and corrupting God-fearing, hardworking people. No one could tell him otherwise.

In November of 1918, just a month after Major Cronkhite’s death, Ford purchased his local weekly newspaper, the Dearborn, Michigan Independent. The city-slicker big papers, he said, were afraid to give the facts about bankers and Wall Street and big business. His paper would. It would be, he said, "the Chronicler of the Neglected