It has to do with the fact that Ford, for all his greatness, is an Irish egomaniac, as anyone who knows him will say.
There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.
If you try to go beyond your interests just for the sake of pretensions or wealth, your art becomes less legitimate.