When Henry Ford’s Antisemitism Came to Idaho

For one month in 1927, Idaho was at the center of a world-famous libel trial involving automobile baron Henry Ford, local potato growers, and antisemitic allegations of a Jewish banking ring. The story that follows, which explores the trial and its aftermath, is an interesting but largely forgotten piece of Idaho’s Jewish history.

Aaron Sapiro (1884–1959) was one of the most prominent Jewish attorneys involved in organized labor in the 1920s and 30s. His brother Morris Sapiro played an active supporting role in his efforts. (Image credit: Wayne State University Digital Collections)

The plaintiff in the trial was Aaron Sapiro, a young Jewish lawyer and labor organizer from Chicago. Sapiro was born in 1884 to parents who had emigrated to the United States from eastern Europe. He traveled widely in the 1920s across North America, encouraging farmers to establish cooperative associations that would eliminate middlemen and wholesalers and, in the process, increase farm profits. The New York Times called Sapiro “the leader of one of the greatest agricultural movements of modern times.”

Sapiro’s organizing efforts included working with potato growers in Idaho. He crisscrossed the southern portion of the state between 1920 and 1924, holding meetings in Idaho Falls, Blackfoot, and Burley and lecturing potato growers about the benefits of forming a cooperative association. Once he had generated enough interest, he helped the potato growers write articles of incorporation and develop an organizational structure, and he secured a $4,000 loan on their behalf from the Weyl-Zuckerman Company — the state’s largest buyer and seller of potatoes.

“[Aaron] Sapiro is the most sought after man in the country,” wrote The Idaho Republican in May 1923, “and Idaho potato growers are indeed fortunate in securing his services.”

The defendant in Sapiro’s libel trial was Henry Ford, the nation’s leading industrialist and wealthiest man. In 1918, Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and began using the paper to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. The paper — which was distributed at Ford Motors dealerships around the country — alleged that Jews secretly controlled the media, labor unions, and banks. The false claims were made in a long-running series of front-page articles titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem,” which were also published as a booklet and distributed to half a million people.

The Dearborn Independent leveled particularly harsh and frequent attacks against Aaron Sapiro and his cooperative farming movement, which Ford believed were integral to the Jewish conspiracy. One headline about Sapiro’s organizing efforts read “Jewish Exploitation of Farmers’ Organizations.” In response, Sapiro sued Ford for libel in federal court. The trial that ensued, Sapiro v. Ford, began on March 15, 1927 and attracted attention around the world.

This article was one of many printed in Henry Ford’s newspaper, “The Dearborn Independent,” that blamed Jews for the nation’s problems. (Image credit: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers)

Sapiro’s organizing efforts in Idaho became a central issue during the trial. Ford’s attorneys focused on the loan Sapiro had secured from Weyl-Zuckerman, which came from the company’s coffers but which Sapiro told the potato growers had come from his own pockets. Weyl-Zuckerman was, conveniently for Ford, owned by a Jewish immigrant in Los Angeles named Morris Zuckerman. Sapiro and Zuckerman were presented as liberal, big-city Jews maliciously collaborating in order enrich themselves at the expense of small potato growers.

Ford’s attorneys also cast aspersions on Sapiro over a dispute that arose between him and the Idaho potato growers in 1924, when the farmers unlawfully withheld Sapiro’s organizing fee. The farmers blamed the withheld fee on a poor growing season, asserting that payment of Sapiro’s fee was contingent upon the new cooperative association’s success. In response, Sapiro suggested he would sue them in order to recoup the fee he had been promised.

To prepare for the trial, Ford’s attorneys spent months traveling across the United States, including Idaho. They visited the same places Sapiro had a few years earlier, crisscrossing farming communities around the state and meeting with local potato growers to gather evidence that would implicate Aaron Sapiro and exculpate Henry Ford. They eventually compiled 40,000 pages of depositions.

The complex details of the interactions between Aaron Sapiro, Morris Zuckerman, and the Idaho Potato Growers’ Association were published in newspapers around the country during the trial. Given Ford’s significant influence in American public life, and the prominence of his newspaper The Dearborn Independent, many small-city newspapers uncritically printed his attorneys’ courtroom allegations against Sapiro and spread his conspiracy theories to new audiences.

Despite Ford’s fervor for spreading hateful lies, he was increasingly embarrassed by the public attention on his libel trial and wary of repeating an experience a decade earlier in which he had humiliated himself during cross-examination in a different trial. So one month into Sapiro v. Ford, just before it was time for Ford to take the witness stand, his attorneys reported that he had been injured in a car accident and would be unable to testify. Soon after, they asked the judge to end the courtroom proceedings altogether, making the bizarre allegation that Aaron Sapiro had attempted to bribe the jurors with a box of candy.

Potatoes weren’t always Idaho’s most famous export. It was due to 20th century economic and agricultural innovations — like Aaron Sapiro’s cooperative marketing associations — that the state’s potato business became so successful. (Image credit: Idaho Potato Commission)

Few observers at the time believed Ford’s story about the car accident, or his accusation about the box of candy, but it was sufficient for the judge to declare a mistrial. Once the mistrial had been declared, Ford reached out to American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall and asked for assistance coming to a settlement with Sapiro outside of court.

Louis Marshall’s creative solution is what concluded Sapiro v. Ford and ultimately made it such an important case for the history books. As part of the settlement arranged by Marshall, Ford would issue a public apology for his antisemitic articles and, in return, Sapiro would drop the lawsuit and avoid a second trial. Both parties agreed.

Marshall drafted this statement for Ford: “To my great regret, I have learned that Jews generally, and particularly those of this country, not only resent these publications as promoting anti-Semitism, but regard me as their enemy. Had I appreciated even the general nature, to say nothing of the details of these utterances, I would have forbidden their circulation without a moment’s hesitation.” Ford, without making a single edit, signed his name to Marshall’s statement and published it on July 8, 1927.

Henry Ford’s statement brought an end to the multi-year dispute between him and Aaron Sapiro, and the world’s attention quickly moved on from the Idaho Potato Growers’ Association. Ford remained an influential purveyor of antisemitism, despite his public apology, and went on to win an award from the German Nazi regime in 1938. Sapiro remained a leader of the cooperative farm movement and a highly-visible labor attorney. Idaho potato growers found continued success, expanding their annual production and eventually surpassing Maine potato growers to make Idaho the largest potato-producing state in 1957.

Next time you cut into an Idaho baked potato, think about Ford, Sapiro, Morris Zuckerman, and the interesting chapter of Idaho’s Jewish history that potatoes now represent.

This essay was originally published in the fall 2021 edition of the Wood River Jewish Community’s quarterly magazine, The Shofar.