Reed’s Objections to Reference to Ford’s Attacks on Jews in Sapiro Case Are Sustained by Judge Raymo

(Jewish Daily Bulletin)

Contending again that the Jewish issue is not involved in the Sapiro-Ford libel suit, Senator James A. Reed, chief counsel for Ford, today launched his opening statement, immediately following the conclusion of Gallagher’s address.

Describing the workings of the cooperative farm associations established through Sapiro’s efforts, Reed declared he would prove that Sapiro used the farmers for his own ends and that everything Ford’s organ, the “Dearborn Independent,” said about Sapiro and his marketing associations “was the truth.”

Reed charged that the salaries in these organizations for executives ran from $30,000 to $40,000 and that these executives “were placed there by Mr. Sapiro and were thereby subservient to him.”

He further charged that organizers for Sapiro cajoled farmers into signing contracts which contained clauses that “gave the pre-organization committees, already formed, wide powers under which they could, among other things, say when the contracts became effective.

“The farmers had no right to say when or where their products were to be marketed,” Reed said. “And the managers were at liberty to give them any advance on their products they saw fit.

“To make these advances the associations, evidence will show, had to make the loans on the farmers’ products, and when they settled with them they took out the interest they had paid on the loan.”

Neither the Jewish race nor the cooperative organizations were concerned in the libel suit, Reed said. “It is a case of Aaron Sapiro against Henry Ford,” he declared.

Regarding the articles published in the “Dearborn Independent,” Reed said: “There is, we claim, a privilege that is absolute; that is, the right to bring the truth, whatever it may be.

“And as the case develops we think evidence will show it is no libel to say of a man, ‘He is a Jew’.”