Confronting antisemitism in America: Louis Marshall and Henry Ford.

Louis Marshall served as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) from 1912 until his death in 1929. In that capacity, he became the man to whom "all Jewish issues of the time" were referred. (1) He brought to that task both a passionate commitment to the well-being of the Jewish people and a blend of principle and pragmatism that reflected his long experience as a lawyer, his faith in America's constitutional democracy, and a deeply considered view of the status of Jews in America. American born, he felt confidently at home both as an American and a Jew. He moved easily between his role as a busy and successful lawyer and his representation of Jewish institutions and the causes they embodied.

Most notably, in a period of increasingly outspoken antisemitism, Marshall gave vigorous expression to the view that the protection and promotion of Jewish interests in America required neither self-ghettoization nor self-denial but rather the skillfull and tenacious invocation of undeniably American values--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for human equality and diversity. Articulating Jewish communal interests in terms that resonated with America's self-proclaimed aspirations, he was neither timid nor insecure but vociferously refused to recognize any legitimate distinction between the rights of Jews and all the other minorities of which America is composed. In doing so he shaped the strategy that guided the Jewish community through the 20th century and down to the present day. Marshall's response to a particularly dramatic antisemitic challenge, the campaign against American Jews by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent, provides an illuminating case study.

On May 22, 1920, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly journal owned by Ford, published the first of the extended series of antisemitic articles for which it soon became infamous. The first two issues were on Marshall's desk almost immediately. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had recently surfaced in the United States, broadcasting its paranoid fantasy of a Jewish cabal orchestrating international banking, Bolshevism, and Zionism in a diabolic plot to take over the world. (2) The Dearborn Independent disseminated the main themes of this potent myth and domesticated it for an American audience.

More ominous still, the Dearborn Independent appeared under the aegis of Henry Ford, a man who not only had virtually unlimited financial resources and a vast marketing organization at his disposal, but was himself a titanic and quintessentially American figure. Emblematically, in the novus ordo secularum of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the years would be counted "A.F."--after Ford. That this renowned avatar of modernity should be the sponsor of what Marshall was to call "a recrudescence of ancient superstition" was deeply shocking--more shocking indeed than the tsarist forgery on which it drew. And to Marshall, who believed in American exceptionalism, it was in some ways more startling than the ongoing antisemitic outrages of eastern Europe with which he and the founders of the AJC had been occupied from the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.

Marshall was not one to mince words. On June 3 he sent off a telegram to Henry Ford, as follows:

 
   In the issues of May twenty-second and May twenty-ninth of the 
   Dearborn Independent which is understood to be your property or 
   under your control there have appeared two articles which are 
   disseminating antisemitism in its most insidious and pernicious 
   form.... The statements which they contain are palpable 
   fabrications and the insinuations with which they abound are the 
   emanations of hatred and prejudice.... They constitute a libel upon 
   an entire people who had hoped that at least in America they might 
   be spared the insult, the humiliation and the obloquy which these 
   articles are scattering throughout the land and which are echoes 
   from the dark middle ages.... On behalf of my brethren I ask you 
   from whom we had believed that justice might be expected whether 
   these offensive articles have your sanction, whether further 
   publications of this nature are to be continued and whether you 
   shall remain silent when your failure to disavow them will be 
   regarded as an endorsement of them by the general public.... Three 
   million of deeply wounded Americans are awaiting your answer. (3) 

Two days later Marshall got the answer. A telegram signed only "The Dearborn Publishing Co." replied: