Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech by Woeste Victoria Saker;

Author:Woeste, Victoria Saker;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

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On Tuesday morning, March 15, the trial officially convened. Judge Raymond, the New York Times reported, “regards court proceedings as something as sacred as a service in a cathedral.” Working in concert, Judge Raymond, Reed, and Gallagher took four hours to impanel a jury of six men and six women. Gallagher dismissed the wife of a Detroit police officer and a former Klan member. Reed saw to it that the jury included no Jews, excusing two from service after they acknowledged having read the articles. Judge Raymond’s main concern was to ensure that jurors had no personal relationships with Ford or his family.9

The jury resembled a cross-section of Detroit and its suburbs. Of the men, only one was a farmer. The others came from a variety of occupations in small business and middling professions such as sales and accounting. Three were Catholic, although one of those professed a turn to Christian Science; the others belonged to various Protestant denominations. Observers learned more about the women jurors. Four married women jurors gave their occupations as “housewives”; a fifth, a single woman in her twenties, kept house for her brother; and the sixth was recently widowed. Four of the six were Protestant, the others Catholic; most wore their hair fashionably “bobbed.” The hairdos and marital status of male jurors escaped comment. What only the Ford lawyers knew was that one male juror had expressed favorable opinions about Ford and was “radically against” Jews; he and another belonged to the Masons, as did one woman juror’s husband. The jury’s picture made the papers in Detroit, Washington, and New York. For deciding whether Henry Ford had damaged Aaron Sapiro to the sum of $1 million, the jurors earned $4 per day.10

After the jury was sworn in, Gallagher launched into his opening statement. Defining libel as “a written publication concerning a person tending to bring that person into disrepute,” he pointed out that publishers reach the limit of “this right of fair comment and criticism” when they “make a personal assault upon the character or the motives of individuals who are involved in the advocacy of the other side of the question.” It would be the jury’s duty to determine whether Ford and the Independent crossed this limit, whether they did so knowingly, and whether in so doing they acted with the malice necessary for an award of damages. Gallagher then addressed the specifically racial character of Ford’s attack on Sapiro. “Henry Ford has a perfect right, so far as the law is concerned, to make an attack on the Jewish people and to continue it as long as he wishes; but just as soon as an attack against a race is centered upon an individual of that race, just as soon as an individual is singled out and made the butt of the attack,” he declared, “then that individual has the right to come into court and ask for a determination of the justice of that attack.”11

The Dearborn Independent, Gallagher continued, “is merely a means of expression for Henry Ford.

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