When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president on Feb. 13, Jewish groups were quick to voice outrage with his choice of venue: the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Ford, after all, was a notorious anti-Semite who used his weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, as a conduit for his hateful messages.

Every purchase of a Ford automobile came with a subscription to the publication, which had a circulation of more than 700,000 at its peak. Until the paper folded in 1927, Ford took every opportunity to rail about Jewish influence in the United States. His zealousness was even recognized by Adolph Hitler, who presented Ford with the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle in 1938.

“[The Independent] aimed their canon at every institution they could find: banking, the judiciary, entertainment — and baseball,” said writer Glenn Stout in a telephone interview from his home in Alburgh, Vt.

“Ford got this obsession and ran with it, but eventually he learned it was bad for business. He came under intense criticism in 1920s, and most of his repugnant comments started disappearing.”

Before they did, however, Ford’s paper published two articles in 1921 by W.J. Cameron: “Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American Baseball” and “The Jewish Degradation of American Baseball.”

In his Sept. 3 “Gamblers” article, which focused on the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Cameron wrote, “If fans want to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words — too much Jew.” His follow-up piece on Sept. 10 concocted a conspiracy theory that Jews were behind the scheme to depose Ban Johnson, head of the American League, a dictatorial personality who made it difficult for men he didn’t like to buy into the league.

When Harry Frazee bought the Boston Red Sox in 1916, Johnson tried almost immediately to get rid of him. According to baseball lore, it was Johnson who started the rumors that Frazee was Jewish and thus not fit to be part of the noble national pastime.

Cameron picked up on the theme. “Another club was placed under the smothering influences of the ‘chosen race,’” Cameron wrote of Frazee, “like so many of his kind…in the ‘show business,’ a manager of burlesque companies.”

The problem with the whole scenario: Frazee wasn’t Jewish.

In “A Curse Born of Hate,” a 2004 article for ESPN.com, Stout wrote that Cameron’s second piece served as a foundation for one of the most enduring legends in sports, “the Curse of the Bambino.”

For almost 90 years, Frazee, who owned the Red Sox from 1916 to 1923, had been considered evil personified by Bosox fans for selling the legendary Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. This became the basis for “the Curse,” which, until 2004, was used to explain (or rationalize) why the Boston team had not won a world championship since 1918.

“Almost from the beginning, since he took over the team, there was mystery about his religion,” said Stout, author of several books about the Red Sox.

In his article, Stout wrote that Frazee’s detractors considered him “too New York.” “I learned that the expression was a code word for Jewish,” he told NJJN.

For some reason, Frazee didn’t refute the rumors. “In fact, it might have worked to his benefit in New York to have people in the theater think he was Jewish,” Stout said. Frazee was also in the midst of divorce proceedings and “[the accusations] might have been something that washed over him.... He may have felt it’s just not worth it. Frazee was an incredibly confident and accomplished guy. It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that he just didn’t want to bother with it.”

Although Stout is not Jewish, he felt strongly about the pernicious allegations over Frazee’s religion. “Prejudice is a dangerous thing,” he said. “You don’t even realize how you’ve been affected by it, it’s so endemic.”