In the 1920s the auto magnate, Henry Ford, bought a small newspaper with one purpose in mind, to spread his hatred of the Jews.  He brought out the American edition of the infamous forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and his own rant, “The International Jew.” One man, Aaron Sapiro, dared to take Ford on, and did so at the cost of his professional reputation, practice, and financial resources.  In his fight, which today we applaud, he got no help from the leaders of the American Jewish establishment, especially the head of the American Jewish Committee, Louis Marshall. Victoria Saker Woeste’s study of the events, and the roles played by Ford and his minions, Marshall, and Sapiro, as well as the legal developments involved, is the best account to date, and its impressive and exhaustive research, as well as its clear writing, will in all likelihood make it the definitive work for years to come.

Ford’s anti-Semitism is well known, and even admiring biographers have found it difficult to explain away.  The man who set America on the path to modern technology never lost his sense of being a farm boy, and even though he did more than anyone to destroy the type of rural community in which he had grown up, he blamed these changes on Jews in general and Jewish bankers in particular.  Although many of his contemporaries—such as Thomas Edison—also disliked Jews, none carried their Jew hatred as far as the Flivver King.

Aaron Sapiro was a young, idealistic lawyer who spear-headed the farmers’ cooperative movement in the United States, and thus earned Ford’s wrath. Instead of recognizing that cooperatives gave growers greater bargaining power and profits, Ford claimed that it was a Jewish plot to increase the profits of the middlemen and bankers while impoverishing the farmers.  He launched a series of articles in the Dearborn Independent attacking Sapiro as the Jew responsible for the plight of American farmers.

Sapiro, a proud man, fought back, and by all the rules of libel should have won.  The Independent articles were full of inaccuracies and had the case gone to a jury, even in Detroit, a fair-minded jury should have found for him.  But Sapiro made one mistake—he also claimed that Ford had libeled him and all other Jews by his articles, and as Woeste shows, the notion of group libel was to some extent a stranger to American law. Even so, the two issues, the libel against Sapiro as an individual and the group libel against the Jews, could have been separated.

Ford used his money to hire an army of investigators to examine the jury panel, Sapiro’s business dealings, and a host of other extraneous matters.  He hired one of the best trial lawyers of the say, Senator James A. Reed, who in the course of several grueling days of cross-examination completely failed to trip up Sapiro, and resorted to cheap displays of anti-Semitism by mispronouncing his name and trying to ridicule him.  The highlight of the trial was supposed to be Ford’s appearance on the witness stand, but his lawyers managed to get one delay after another until some casual remarks by one of the jurors led to a mistrial.  Sapiro vowed to go on, but at this point Ford, beset by business problems (the public had grown weary of the Model T and wanted something jazzier) and tired of the bad publicity, called in Louis Marshall.

There is no doubt that Marshall did good, perhaps even great, things for the American Jewish community, and the list of accomplishments of the American Jewish Committee, which he helped to found and which he led for many years is not to be dismissed. Marshall, however, has never had a critical biography by a trained historian, and it is an interesting lacuna in American Jewish historiography.  When historians run across Marshall in relation to events in his life, such as Woeste does here, the man whom some called a saint comes across as anything but. (In terms of truth in advertising, I will admit that in my work on Louis Brandeis, Stephen Wise, and American Zionism I also found Marshall to be less than admirable.)

Marshall had no interest in helping Sapiro or Herman Bernstein, a reputable Jewish journalist who also sued Ford for libel. Like the other German Jews of his generation, Marshall believed that the airing of Jewish problems was a mistake.  (Stephen Wise characterized them as the “sh-sh Jews.”) He preferred to ignore anti-Semitism when he could, confident that this ancient virus would eventually die in the free atmosphere of the United States.  Aside from a few close colleagues on the Committee, Marshall acted alone and resented it whenever anyone suggested that perhaps he should confer with others, or perhaps discuss matters with people who were knowledgeable about local affairs.  Within the Jewish community, there were many complaints about “Marshall law.” As one journal commented on the “The Reign of Louis M,” he acted as “absolute ruler of four million Jews in the United States” in the style of a French king or a Russian czar.

When Ford approached Marshall, the lawyer took it as his due; after all, he was the head of American Jewry.  He crafted a statement which Ford signed that apologized for his past behavior and said he would destroy copies of “The International Jew.”  There was not a word in the apology to either Sapiro or Bernstein, although both men eventually settled with Ford for minimal amounts. Ford evaded most of the conditions of the apology, and had no qualms in 1938 about accepting the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from the Hitler regime.  By then Marshall had died, unaware that the apology he had drafted had done little good.

There is plenty of detail in this book, and in some places perhaps the author could have condensed the tedium of the trial.  But that is more than compensated for by her pain-staking investigation of what Ford and his lieutenants did, as well as Marshall’s involvement with Ford as well as in the Massena, New York, blood libel in 1928.  Although Marshall is often praised for his work on Massena, in fact there were others who also played an important role, and whom Marshall resented as “getting in his way.” One of these days perhaps we shall get a study of Marshall that will not only praise his accomplishments, but also point out his egotism and the harm he did to American Jewry in many areas.  Such a study will rely heavily on Woeste’s book when dealing with the Ford matter.

This is a book that should be in every library of American Judaica.  It is a sobering tale of what one wealthy bigot could do, and how a fractured community led by an egotist failed to respond in a meaningful manner..

Melvin I. Urofsky