On This Day

Saturday 31st December 1927

92 years ago

The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper published by Henry Ford, printed its last issue. At the peak of its popularity in the mid-1920's, the paper had about 700,000 readers. Since 1920, Ford had used the paper as a platform for his anti-Semitic ideas, and many of its articles and essays were collected and published in a book called "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem." It was a bestseller in Germany during the Nazi regime, and remains in print today. Henry Ford was an innovative entrepreneur, but he was also a flagrant and unapologetic bigot: He hated immigrants, thought labor unionists were "the worst thing that ever struck the earth" and made no secret of his belief in "the Jewish plan to control the world, not by territorial acquisition, not by military aggression, not by governmental subjugation, but by control of the machinery of commerce and exchange." In 1927, a Jewish lawyer and farm cooperative organizer named Aaron Sapiro sued Ford for defamation. In court, Ford refused to take responsibility for the articles that appeared in his newspaper. Instead of testifying, he faked a car accident and hid in a hospital. When the suit ended in a mistrial, all the bad publicity the trial and the newspaper forced Ford to agree to a private settlement with Sapiro. He issued a public 'apology' for his newspaper's years of defamatory content: "to my great regret," he wrote, "I have learned that Jews...resent this publication as promoting anti-Semitism"--and at the end of the year he closed down the Independent for good.