Confronting Antisemitism in America: Louis Marshall and Henry Ford

Abstract

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 Jewish issues of the time were referred.' 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, Mar shall gave vigorous expression to the view that the protection and promo tion 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 legiti mate 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.