(Jewish Daily Bulletin)
“I have dedicated my life to getting Henry Ford on the witness stand to show that he has no basis for the anti-Jewish campaign: no basis for his attack on the cooperetive market,” Aaron Sapiro, plaintiff in the $1,000,000 libel suit against Henry Ford, declared in an address before a large audience at the Omaba Jewish Community Center, Monday night.
Sapiro asserted that Ford will take the stand to answer for the “21 articles” published over a period of four years in his publication, “The Dearborn Independent.”
“If he doesn’t know what the articles contained, then he is the biggest fourflusher in America; if he does, then we will make him show what proof he has for those articles.”
What happens to Sapiro personally, means little to him, he declared. “It can break me,” he stated, “but that means nothing.”
Sapiro said that the fight is no longer an individual one, but an attack on the entire Jewry of America. “We Jews are too silent under attacks like that which Ford makes. If there is a super-Jewish conspiracy existing, then we should know it. We should bring it out into the open. On the other hand, if that group ‘who pulls the strings’ is non-existent, we will bring that man into the open and show his utter lack of facts.”
Humorously referring to the difficulties that beset the Sapiro forces in getting the preliminary arrangements for the trial completed. Sapiro spoke of the months required in the subpoening of witnesses, taking of depositions and countless attempts to wear out the opposing forces by the Ford interests with the backing of its millions of dollars. “And he almost did it,” Sapiro remarked. Every cent that has gone toward furthering his case against Ford has been his own money and that raised through a personal note.
Sapiro paid tribute to his lawyer, William Henry Gallagher, whom he described as “a blue-eyed Irishman.” Referring to Senator Reed, Sapiro remarked that he figured that if Ford could have a blue-eyed Irishman for counsel, it was also his right.
Despite the fact that the suit ended as a mistrial, Sapiro pronounced the jury “all right.” “I’m for that jury,” he said. “I figured that it was just the kind that would read the ‘Dearborn Independent’ and that here I would have a chance to convince them of the value of cooperative marketing.”
Punctuating his remarks from time to time with caricatures of Senator Reed, whom he described as one of the most charming personalities he had come in contact with, Sapiro kept his listeners amused as he described the strategy both sides resorted to in the trial sessions, of Ford’s accident that aided in bringing the trial to a close, Sapiro said it was completely manufactured. Admitting that an auto might have been pushed off the embankment where Ford was supposedly injured in an accident he said that it was wholly “an excuse to keep him off the stand.”
Answering the question as to why he had started the suit in Detroit, Sapiro asserted that he would rather try the suit there “in Ford’s own back yard and get licked where Ford thinks he controls the whole situation, than win in any other place.”
Dr. Max Goldslein, of St. Louis, was elected president of the American Otological Society at the closing session of its convention at the New York Academy of Medicine.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
