Sapiro v. Ford, or how to cut an antisemite down to size

Every once in a while, part of a film’s or a book’s importance lies in what it does not tell us explicitly.

This is the case with Gaylen Ross’s outstanding new documentary, Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford. The film chronicles the landmark defamation lawsuit brought in 1924 by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer and farmers’ cooperative activist against one of the wealthiest and most influential Americans at that time.

As is made clear in the film, long before Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist movement emerged as the poster children for Jew hatred, Ford was arguably the most prominent and the most dangerous antisemite in the world. By 1920, his fortune was second only to John D. Rockefeller.

Unlike Rockefeller, however, Ford had a nefarious political agenda. Through a newspaper he had acquired in 1918, The Dearborn Independent, he promoted and popularised false claims of an insidious Jewish plot to dominate the world that were then widely disseminated in book form as a four-volume series entitled The International Jew.

Among the catchphrases featured in The Dearborn Independent, with more than 2,000,000 copies distributed throughout the United States, were “Jews are the curse of America,” “It is not merely that there are a few Jews among international financial controllers—it is that these world controllers are exclusively Jews,” and “Jewish Jazz—Moron Music—Becomes Our National Music.”

In his complaint, Sapiro alleged that Ford and his Dearborn Independent had falsely and maliciously disparaged him on no less than 21 occasions as belonging to an international Jewish conspiracy that sought to control American wheat farming.

“A band of Jews—bankers, lawyers, money-lenders, advertising agencies, fruit-packers, produce-buyers, professional office managers and bookkeeping experts—is on the back of the American farmer,” read one article published on April 12, 1924, with “millions” diverted “from the pockets of the men who till the soil and into the hands of the Jews and their followers”.

In the film, actor Ben Schenkman quotes Sapiro’s own words to explain the origins of the litigation: “I felt that it as time for someone to stop Mr. Ford and his Dearborn Independent. I knew in advance what he would do to me. I knew that if any of us would dare to fight him, he would tear him to pieces with bitter personal attacks, but I was willing to face all that. So I decided to sue Henry Ford.”

In Sapiro v. Ford, director Gaylen Ross does a superb job of making this David and Goliath confrontation relatable to contemporary audiences, including how the litigation ended in a mistrial in 1927, followed by a less than satisfactory settlement that essentially let Ford off the hook.

Still, Ford ostensibly did apologise to America’s Jews as part of the settlement, even though the apology was written and forced upon him by Louis Marschall, the president of the American Jewish Committee. And it gave rise to a popular song that mocked the multi-millionaire automobile manufacturer and cut him down to size in a way that would have been inconceivable only a few years earlier: “I was sad and I was blue, but now I’m just as good as you, since Henry Ford apologised to me, I’ve thrown away my little Chevrolet and bought myself a Ford Coupé.”

Yet another important, albeit unexpected, element of the film is that it allows us to speculate what would have happened – how much worse things might have become – if Sapiro had not brought his lawsuit.

We know that in all likelihood, Ford provided much of the Nazi Party’s early financing and that Hitler first became exposed to global antisemitic conspiracy theories through the German translation of Ford’s The International Jew. “We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America,” Hitler told the Chicago Tribune in March 1923. “We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy, which is the Bavarian fascist platform.” Indeed, Ford was the only American mentioned by name in Hitler’s Mein Kampf as “the single great man” who “maintains full independence in the United States” to the “fury” of the “Jews who govern the stock exchange forces in the American Union”.

One of the conditions of the settlement that ended the Sapiro v. Ford litigation was the discontinuance of The Dearborn Independent. It ceased publication in 1927.

As I was watching Sapiro v. Ford, it occurred to me that this newspaper’s disappearance from the scene deprived the Nazis and their American acolytes such as Father Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh of a major media platform through which they would have been able to spread their antisemitic bigotry in the U.S. in the 1930s. Also, Ford lost much of his luster and bravado after the trial. We can only speculate how vicious and, yes, effective he and the Dearborn Independent might have been in support of the Nazis’ antisemitic agenda in the decade leading up to the outbreak of World War II but for Aaron Sapiro.

This realisation is yet another reason why we should be profoundly grateful to Gaylen Ross for making this film.