HENRY FORD’S WAR ON
THE JEWS
Victoria Saker Woeste
Sunday, September 8, 2013 at 1:00 PM
at the Kupferberg Holocaust ResourceCenter and Archives
Henry Ford is remembered in American lore as the ultimate entrepreneur – the man who invented assembly line manufacturing and
made automobiles affordable. Largely forgotten is his side career as a
publisher of anti-Semitic propaganda. This lecture is the story of
Ford’s ownership of the Dearborn Independent, his involvement with
the defamatory articles it ran, and two Jewish lawyers, Aaron Sapiro
and Louis Marshall, who each tried to stop Ford’s war on Jews.
In 1927, the case of Sapiro v. Ford transfixed the nation. In order to
end the embarrassing litigation, Ford apologized for the one thing he
would have never lost on in court: the offense of hate speech. Using
never before discovered evidence from archives and private family
collections, Victoria Sacker Woeste, reveals the depth of Ford’s involvement in every aspect of the case and highlights the deep division within the Jewish community regarding Ford.
Victoria Saker Woeste is Research Professor at the American Bar
Foundation in Chicago and has held teaching appointments at Indiana University-Indianapolis, Northwestern University, and Amherst
College. Her first book, The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust, was awarded
the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize.