Taking on the World's Richest Man
It was 1927. No one thought it would work. It did.
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.1 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.
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.
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.2
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.”3
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.
Ford’s lawyers tried for two years to prove the charges were true to avoid the libel charges. They failed. As newspapers across the country covered the trial, with headlines like “Ford vs. The Jews!”, Jewish leaders, including Marshall, began to see its potential.
Ford on the other hand began to become desperate; particularly desperate to avoid taking the witness stand. He ordered his bodyguard, Harry Bennett, to secure a mistrial. Bennett cooked up a fake story of Sapiro trying to bribe a juror with a box of candy (which the juror denied) and got a mistrial declared. The judge, however, stated in his judgement that a new trial would begin “without delay.”
Ford had no intention of suffering through a second trial. He sent emissaries to Marshall’s office to negotiate an end to the ordeal.4 The result was a letter, drafted by Marshall, and signed by Ford on June 30, 1927. For most of the letter he pinned the blame on the subordinates and pretended things had been done in his name without his knowledge. But the last two paragraphs are the ones that counted:
I deem it to be my duty as an honorable man to make amends for the wrong done to the Jews as fellow-men and brothers, by asking their forgiveness for the harm that I have unintentionally committed, by retracting so far as lies within my power the offensive charges laid at their door by these publications, and by giving them the unqualified assurance that henceforth they may look to me for friendship and goodwill...
It is needless to add that the pamphlets which have been distributed throughout the country and in foreign lands will be withdrawn from circulation, that in every way possible I will make it known that they have my unqualified disapproval, and that henceforth The Dearborn Independent will be conducted under such auspices that articles reflecting upon the Jews will never again appear in its columns.
It didn’t end antisemitism in the US. And no, it didn’t make Henry Ford a better person. He went on to produce military vehicles and equipment for Nazi Germany. He converted Ford plants in Germany to military production. The photo at the top is Ford receiving the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honor, from the German General Consuls for Cleveland and Detroit, in 1938. (Photo by AP).
There are two takeaways from Aaron Sapiro’s story. One, Ford’s admirable accomplishments in the world of manufacturing do not erase the fact that he did irreparable harm when he used the admiration and money he had earned to spread hatred and disinformation in support of the man who would create the next World War and kill millions.
Secondly, one man, whose name you have likely never even heard, determined not to let this pass unanswered, bucking even the leaders of his own community, managed to gag the world’s richest man’s massive propaganda machine.
Next time you find yourself asking what one person can do in the face of all of this, remember him.
Klepper, Michael; Gunther, Michael (1996), The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates – A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present, Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group, p. xii
Woeste, Victoria Saker, Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech, June 27, 2012, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804772347
Sapiro: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford, King Rose Archives, February, 2024,
Woeste, 2012