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Insecure Equality: Louis Marshall, Henry Ford, and the Problem of Defamatory Antisemitism, 1920–1929
Victoria Saker Woeste
| During the 1920s, Henry Ford gained as much fame for his antisemitic views as for his cars. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published dozens of articles between 1920 and 1925 naming prominent Jewish Americans as conspirators in a plot to overthrow governments all over the world. Though hardly the first of their kind, the accusations in the Dearborn Independent represented the broadest, most sustained published attack on individual Jews and Jews as a group in the nation's history. The articles created clear grounds for defamation and libel actions against Ford and the newspaper, and several were filed. In 1927 one lawsuit, Sapiro v. Ford, made it into court, generating international headlines, only to end in mistrial. Ford then disposed of the distasteful affair by signing a statement in which he apologized for the wrongs he had "unintentionally" done to Jews.1 |
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Ford's campaign against the Jews, as historians have recognized, reflected the renewed racial tribalism that characterized post–World War I American society. A rising tide of private social discrimination spilled into the public realm after the armistice, affecting the racial, religious, and ethnic dimensions of Jewish identity. As much as American Jews believed that they had fully embraced American civic ideals and saw themselves as distinct from nonwhite minorities, the dominant culture regarded them as "the white other," neither clearly marked by color as a subordinate class nor fully welcomed as citizens. The antisemitic articles in the Independent, coupled with Ford's public avowal of his intent—to prove the influence of the "International Jew" on American government, politics, and finance—gave dangerous credibility to racist thinking and amplified the prejudices that threatened the civic equality of minorities.2 |
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The Independent campaign, which intensified the postwar climate of hate and intolerance, both appalled Jews and placed them in an awkward position. Though deeply involved in fighting for civil rights for nonwhite racial minorities, most leading Jewish lawyers and activists were unwilling to bring the fight against antisemitic defamation and discrimination to the courts.3 Defying that careful, long-standing strategy, a prominent California lawyer, Aaron Sapiro, brought his libel case against Ford without the sanction or encouragement of Jewish leaders or organizations. The lawsuit brought Ford's antisemitic diatribe into the public forum of the federal courts and put the substance of his allegations on national display. The trial accentuated the divergent views of those interested in combating antisemitism on how best to contain and discourage group defamation. As the trial unfolded, events moved beyond the control of the parties to the suit. Circumventing the legal process, Ford secretly commissioned an interested observer, the constitutional lawyer and Jewish activist Louis Marshall, to write his apology. In doing so, Marshall ended the public controversy and foreclosed further legal action in the case. Ironically, contemporary observers greeted Ford's statement as a historic act of repentance, and historians have viewed it uncritically ever since.4 |
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