One Summer: America, 1927

enough in other areas to ensure that the Independent was always terrible. He lost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the magazine, and would have lost still more had he not forced his dealers to take copies to sell on to their customers – though it was a rare customer who was eager to read long articles like ‘Famous Frenchmen I Have Met’ by A. M. Somerville Story (a writer about as obscure then as now) or ‘The American Merchant Marine Must Be Built by Business Enterprise and Not by Government Subsidy’ by W. C. Cowling, a Ford executive.
    Regularly, and more notoriously, the Independent ran strident attacks on the world’s Jews. It accused them of manipulating stock markets, working for the overthrow of Christianity, using Hollywood as a propaganda tool for Jewish interests, promoting jazz (‘moron music’, as the Independent called it) to the masses for nefarious purposes, encouraging the wearing of short skirts and rolled stockings, and fixing the 1919 World Series, among much else. Accuracy was not its strong suit. In a 1921 article entitled ‘How Jews Degraded Baseball’, it pilloried Harry Frazee of the Red Sox on the assumption that he was a Jew. In fact, Frazee was Presbyterian.
    The bulk of these essays were gathered together in a volume called The International Jew , which was greatly admired in Nazi Germany, where it was reprinted no fewer than twenty-nine times. Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favourably in Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925. Hitler, it was said, kept a framed photo of Ford on his wall.
    Ford’s anti-Semitism seems to have been of a type peculiarly his own. For one thing, it appears not to have been personal. So far as can be told, he had nothing against Jews as individuals. He happily put the design of his factories in the hands of Albert Kahn, a Jewish émigré, with whom he had a good relationship for thirty-five years. When Rabbi Leo Franklin, an old friend and neighbour, broke with Ford over some of the accusationscontained in the Independent , Ford was genuinely mystified. ‘What’s wrong, Dr Franklin?’ he enquired sincerely. ‘Has anything come between us?’
    Ford’s antagonism was instead based on the conviction that a shadowy cabal of Jews was trying to take over the world. The source of these beliefs was a mystery to all. ‘I am sure that if Mr Ford were put on the witness stand, he could not tell to save his life just when and how he got started against the Jews,’ remarked Edwin Pipp, first editor of the Independent , who soon quit the magazine rather than print the kind of essays Ford wanted.
    Ironically, it was a personal attack that got Ford in trouble now. In the course of its rantings, the Independent libelled a lawyer named Aaron Sapiro by claiming that he was a member of ‘a band of Jew bankers, lawyers, advertising agencies and produce buyers’ who had cheated American farmers as part of a conspiracy to take control of the American wheat market. Sapiro sued for defamation, demanding $1 million in damages. The case would cast a shadow over Ford for much of the first half of 1927.
    Ford was scheduled to give testimony in the trial on 1 April, but the day before his appearance he was involved in a strange accident. According to Ford’s own account to police, he was driving home from work when two men in a Studebaker forced him from the road. Ford bounced out of control down a steep embankment and crashed into a tree on the bank of the Rouge River. The tree very possibly saved his life, for the river was dangerously swollen from recent heavy rains – the same rains that were causing the Mississippi floods further south. Ford arrived home on foot, dazed and bleeding, with a deep gash over one eye and another serious cut on the top of his head. The two men in the Studebaker were never found.
    A widespread presumption was that Ford had faked the crash to avoid having to testify the next day, but the severity of his injuries seemed to belie that. An alternative theory was that Ford, who was a notoriously exasperating motorist to be stuck behind – he droveslowly and in the middle of the road – had been overtaken by a frustrated driver and was accidentally bumped off the road or swerved off in startlement. Whatever the cause, the effect was to stop the libel case from proceeding as planned.
    A new trial was scheduled, but Ford decided not to fight. Instead, after lengthy reflection,