One Summer: America, 1927

he issued a seemingly heartfelt letter apologizing to Sapiro personally (and enclosing a cheque for $140,000 to cover his costs) and to Jews generally, and promised never to attack either again. The letter was dated 30 June, but made public on 8 July.
    In the letter, Ford claimed that he had been unaware of the terrible things that the Independent had been saying about Jews. ‘Had I appreciated even the general nature, to say nothing of the details, of these utterances, I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment’s hesitation,’ he declared in language that was patently not his own. ‘I have been greatly shocked as a result of my study of the files of The Dearborn Independent and of the pamphlets entitled “The International Jew”.’ All this was a little rich, as many of the charges made against the Jews had been contained in a column signed by Ford or in interviews that he had given to other publications. Joseph Palma, a Ford official who was closely involved with drafting the letter, confided afterwards that Henry Ford had never in fact read his own letter of apology and was only loosely acquainted with its contents.
    At all events, the Independent ceased its vituperative attacks. With the paper’s circulation falling, Ford halved the cover price to a nickel, but still no one bought it, so in late 1927 he closed it. In eight years, it had cost him nearly $5 million.
    Ford remained true to his word and never publicly criticized Jews again. That isn’t to say that he necessarily abandoned his beliefs, however. Just over a decade later, on his seventy-fifth birthday, he accepted one of Nazi Germany’s highest civilian honours – the Grand Cross of the German Eagle – which came garlanded with praise from Adolf Hitler. Only one other prominent American of theperiod was so admired and honoured by the Nazis (or so openly admired them in return): Charles Lindbergh.
    But in 1927 all that lay in the future. For now, with the Sapiro affair out of the way, Henry Ford could turn his attention to some other, more pressing matters. One was a mad scheme to grow rubber in South America. The other was trying to save his business.
     
    fn1 The background to the case was complicated. In 1916, the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa led a raid that killed seventeen Americans in New Mexico. This inflamed American sentiment against Mexico and led President Woodrow Wilson to dispatch National Guardsmen to the border. Henry Ford reportedly declared that he would not pay the wages of any employees called up and sent to New Mexico, causing the Tribune to criticize him and leading to the libel suit. In fact, it appears that Ford never made the assertion that provoked the libel.
    fn2 The Model T was preceded by eight other models: A, B, C, F, N, R, S and K, in that order. If there was a logic to that sequence, Ford failed to explain it in his memoir, My Life and Work.

C HAPTER 18
     

     
    IN 1871, A twenty-five-year-old English adventurer named Henry Wickham moved to the steamy far north of Brazil, just below the equator, with his large extended family – wife, mother, brother, sister, sister’s fiancé, brother’s fiancée and brother’s fiancée’s mother – and two or three other prospective adventurers who signed on as help. This unlikely group settled at Santarém, at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, with high hopes of becoming rich as planters. The experience proved disastrous. Their crops repeatedly failed and tropical fevers carried off three members of the group in the second year and two more in the third. By 1875, only Wickham and his wife remained. The other survivors had gone back to England.
    In an attempt to salvage something from the experience, Wickham travelled upriver and into the jungle, and laboriously collected 70,000 seeds of the Brazilian rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis . Rubber was becoming a valued product in the world and had brought great wealth to Manaus, Pará and other Amazonian ports. Brazil controlled – and jealously guarded – most of the world’s output, so Wickham’s seed-collecting had to be done furtively and involved a certain measure of personal risk. He brought the seeds back to England, and sold them for a good price to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.
    With the money thus made, Wickham went to Queensland, in Australia, to start a tobacco plantation. That failed. Then he went to Central America, to British Honduras, to grow bananas. That venture