by Mark Gullick, The Unz Review:
Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Free Speech
Victoria Saker Woeste
Stanford University Press, 2012
“‘The Jews Try Ford!’ headlined a banner advertisement in the New York Evening Graphic” (ibid.).
On the evening of March 27, 1927, Henry Ford was doing what a lot of other Americans were doing, driving home from work. Like many of his countrymen, he was driving a Ford. However, as he owned the company — possibly the most famous brand-name in the automotive industry even today — Mr. Ford’s customized coupé was a little out of the ordinary for the marque. With a prototype manual transmission and extra gears, bullet-proof windows (against his wife’s fears of kidnapping), and a top speed of 75mph, it was rather different from the famous Model-T, the car anyone could have in any color as long as it was black. In fact, Ford was returning from a late night at his River Rouge plant, just outside Detroit, where he had been working on blueprints for the car with which he wished to replace the “Tin Lizzie”. Chevrolet and GM were already out-selling him in the everyman market.
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Ford took State Route 12 home, connecting as it does Detroit and Ford’s home town of Dearborn. Ford had just crossed the Rouge when another car came up quickly behind him and ran him off the road. The only thing that saved Ford from an impromptu car-wash in the river — and quite possibly death — was the chance placement of a tree. But Ford was alive, albeit dazed and concussed, and was hospitalized until the beginning of April. Under normal circumstances, for the CEO of such a large company, this would have been an inconvenience, and Ford could have delegated his duties with confidence. But Henry Ford was about to take the witness stand in one of the trials of the century: Sapiro vs. Ford. This was ostensibly a libel trial, but its overtones make it clear that what was really on trial was anti-Semitism.
The day after the crash, a statement was made by Harry H. Bennett, Ford’s personal bodyguard and a part of his famed “secret service”. Mr. Ford’s car, said Bennett, “was sideswiped by a hit-and-run motorist driving with one arm about a girl or slightly intoxicated”. The papers, however, stirred up a conspiracy. “Plot to kill Ford suspected”, thundered the New York Times, with other titles following suit. By April 1, four days into the trial, Ford was also saying that the incident was “a deliberate attempt to kill him”. Who would attempt such a thing? Ford certainly had enemies.
A short book with a long title, Victoria Saker Woeste’s Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Free Speech [Ford’s War], gives an extended court report of Sapiro vs. Ford in which she draws each character in the context of the central question around which case revolved. In most cases of this sort, this would be libelous intent. In Sapiro vs. Ford, the invisible and yet-to-be-codified legal principle which hovered ever-present over proceedings was anti-Semitism . This case came as close as any to establishing whether or not “anti-Semitism” had woven itself into the American legal tapestry as far back as the First World War in the same way it has today in the United Kingdom, where only Jews are actually protected by legislation (although this may soon by joined by Islamophobia laws).
This was not Ford’s first time in court. Ten years prior to Sapiro vs. Ford, he had been an involved in a trial concerning the value of Ford dividend stocks, and he had already been involved in one libel case over an article supposedly libeling him in the Chicago Tribune. This was “a dress rehearsal for the Sapiro case a decade later”. Ford had become involved in the “Peace Ship”, a gimmicky environmentalist stunt which Ford sponsored in order, the newspaper claimed, to garner public sympathy for his supposed “good works”:
“The Tribune’s position was that Ford’s pacifism endangered the national welfare and made him fair game for editorial comment”.
Ford won, and later found the experience invaluable when Jewish lawyer Aaron Sapiro took him to court in 1927 over allegedly libelous editorial commentary of his own. A Ford-owned newspaper, the Independent was launched in 1919, intended as a political heavy-hitter with serious literary pretensions. The first issue featured contributions from well-known American poet Robert Frost and Hugh Walpole, a British novelist, critic, and dramatist. Ford also began what the author describes as a new war, “a war on Jews”. Sapiro was joined by Louis Marshall, a Jewish lawyer and anti-immigration restriction activist who saw anti-Semitism in all walks of life and was prepared to take on a man at the top of the heap.
