Republished with permission from Mary Wald
Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. He wasn’t even the first to use it for making cars. That was Ransom Olds. Ford modified it and made it work more efficiently. His new assembly line, unveiled in December 1913, reduced the time it took to produce a car from over 12 hours to an hour and 33 minutes. Now able to roll Model T’s off the line, he got America on the road.
Between 1920 and 1925, as the Ford Motor Company surpassed 10 million Model Ts coming off the line, Henry Ford was the richest man in the world. There was talk of him being a potential presidential candidate.
He was also a virulent anti-semite who helped to finance Adolf Hitler’s rise to power with dealings reaching back as far as the 1920s. In 1931 Adolf Hitler had a life-sized photo of Ford behind his desk in his office in Munich, and referred to Ford as “my inspiration.” He referred to Ford by name in Mein Kampf. He awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi civilian award, in 1938.
German diplomats award Henry Ford, center, Nazi Germany’s highest decoration for foreigners, The Grand Cross of the German Eagle, in Detroit on July 30, 1938, for his service to the Third Reich. Karl Kapp, German consul in Cleveland pins the medal while Fritz Heiler, left, German consul in Detroit shakes his hand.
Ford had purchased his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in 1918. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles about the Jewish conspiracy that was “infecting” America. The series ran in 91 issues of the paper. Ford’s Dearborn Publishing published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious fake that had come out of Czarist Russia and claimed to be minutes of meetings during which “The Elders of Zion,” (which never existed) plotted to control world politics, the economy, financial markets, media, education, and to keep the world in a state of war. The supposed “protocols” were later exposed as a conglomeration of two separate Russian fantasy tales; the villains in the stories had just been switched to “Jews.”
The Dearborn Independent would have been relatively insignificant if it were not for Ford’s commercial network across the nation. Copies of the paper were distributed to all Ford dealerships in the US. If you bought a Model-T in the 1920s, there was a fair chance you would find a copy of the newspaper, with its stories of Jewish conspiracies to destroy America, on the seat of the car. Because they were coming from Ford, they were reprinted in small town newspapers across the country. The articles were also included in Ford’s four volume work, The International Jew—the World’s Foremost Problem.
Aaron Sapiro, an American lawyer in the 1910s. Wiki Commons
Compared to Henry Ford, Aaron Sapiro was a nobody. He had grown up poor, one of seven children of Eastern European immigrants. When he was nine, his father, a peddler, was killed by a streetcar. His mother was forced to place him in an orphanage. Somehow, Aaron went on to earn a law degree. He had some success organizing farmers in California and Western Canada into collectives, convincing them that by engaging in collective marketing they could bypass middlemen and increase their profits. They were essentially unions of small scale farmers.
Sapiro caught the attention of the New York Times; a reporter called him “the leader of one of the greatest agricultural movements of our time.” Then he caught the attention of Henry Ford.
When Ford set his sights on Sapiro and his movement, he unleashed a series of articles in the Dearborn Independent, saying that Sapiro’s movement was trying “to turn American agriculture over to the international Jews, to spread Communism and Bolshevism among our people.” One morning, to hear Sapiro tell it, “Suddenly a great personal calamity struck. I have in front of me the Dearborn Independent. And this was the beginning of Mr. Ford’s attack on me, primarily, saying that the formation of co-operatives was simply a scheme to get farmers to join something so that a lot of Jewish bankers could finally get a hold of them and squeeze them and get control of the wheat and cotton of the world, and that this was simply a great conspiracy. There’s two and a half million copies distributed, so that they wouldn’t miss anybody.”
Sapiro demanded a retraction. Ford replied with more defamatory articles. Sapiro filed a federal libel suit in Detroit, asking for $1 million in damages.
Louis Marshall, an East Coast lawyer and President of the American Jewish Committee, opposed the suit. He wrote letters to the lawyers in Detroit lawyers trying to have the trial killed. Sapiro went forward. The trial began on March 15, 1927.
Read the remainder of this article at Mary’s Substack page.
