Henry Ford and Davis Edward Marshall
Davis Edward Marshall first came to my attention as the editor-boss, then film business partner, of William Wesley Young, a Monroe, WI-native who became a spy for the British in the run-up to WWI. In 1919 Marshall and Young established “Films Inc.” to capitalize on their war work editing propaganda films for London. In this post I’m going to look at what Marshall was up to in 1915: setting the stage for the public discrediting of pacifist Henry Ford.
To provide context, I ask readers to cast their mind back to William Wesley Young’s Humanitarian Cult work. Young (most likely) became involved with Mischa Appelbaum’s Humanitarian Cult in November 1915 by chairing cult meetings; he then ran the cult’s magazine from March 1918. The Humanitarian Cult was a scheme to capture the socialist voting block which was organized by wealthy NYC magnates such as Jacob Schiff. Schiff was busy on the world political stage through anti-Russian provokatsiya— he supported the Japanese during their successful naval battles against the Tsar— and his Humanitarian Cult exercise cheered the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The Brooklyn Citizen, Monday April 2nd 1917.
For at least a decade prior, the spectacle of American capitalists financing Russian Revolutionaries was met with apprehension and interest by European statesmen such as the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Russia, Baptist Lexa von Aehrenthal, who in 1903 informed his superior the foreign minister that rewarding Jewish revolutionary activity with full emancipation was a losing strategy: "in such a case, the achievement of a dominant position by the Jews of the tsarist empire will take much less time than in North America, where such a process is now taking place."
This conflation of ‘Jewish’ and ‘Revolutionary’, ‘North American’ and ‘Russian’, didn’t just exist in the mind of Aehrenthal. In Brooklyn, NY, the spiritual home of the Humanitarian Cult, similarly dangerous pictures were painted by civic leaders in the press:
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Monday, April 2nd 1917. Journalist/Ambassador Hermann Bernstein wrote for this paper.
The Humanitarian Cult was not a fringe political movement. It attracted numerous politicians, artists and philanthropists like Teddy Roosevelt, D. W. Griffith, Henry Morgenthau, Samuel Untermeyr, Frederic C. Howe, the explorer George Kenan and industrialist Henry Ford. It’s Henry Ford I’d like to talk about today, because by the time he joined the Humanitarian Cult in May 1916, he already had a painful history with William Wesley Young’s partner, Davis Edward Marshall.
By 1915 Marshall had made a name for himself as a partisan of NY politician Teddy Roosevelt, his “Rough Riders”, and housing tenement reform; he’d set up his own press agency with offices in London and New York City; and he’d given up regular newspaper employment to do feature interviews on an ad hoc basis— or seemingly on an ad hoc basis, as an April 1915 interview with Henry Ford turned into a hit-piece attacking the Detroit tycoon for his pacifist beliefs. Marshall’s interview originally ran in the Detroit Free Press on April 11th, 1915.
As newspapers across the country screamed “Ford calls soldiers murderers”, the base was laid for a nasty legal action that put Marshall in the public spotlight and culminated in Ford’s 1916 libel suit against The Chicago Tribune and The Solomon News Company, which distributed the Tribune’s offending article. Based partly on Marshall’s interview from the year before, The Chicago Tribune called Ford an “anarchist” and an “ignorant idealist”. Ford sued for libel, asking US$ 1,000,000 in compensation.
The meaning of this libel case went far beyond journalistic incompetence because the jury was asked to carry out political judgement on Ford, debating among themselves if the opinions expressed in Marshall’s article were “ignorant” and constituted “anarchist” beliefs. The case was also used to pillory Ford in the press as deficiencies in his general knowledge and education were supposedly brought to light in order to prove “ignorance”. From the point of view of pro-war media magnates, an example was to be made of Ford, the public figure and awkward questioner of Wilson’s unpopular foreign policy.
The headline which started it all. Detroit Free Press, April 11th 1915.
Readers may like to compare this portrait of Ford to the one provided for Marshall’s April 1915 interview in the Detroit Free Press.
Unfortunately, the copy of Marshall’s 1915 Detroit Free Press article available to me is grainy, so I will provide a transcript for each image. In a nutshell, Ford blames war profiteers for pushing politicians into the war and criticizes belligerent US policy toward Imperial-German puppet Pancho Villa.
Detroit Free Press, April 11th 1915. Continued Below.
Detroit Free Press, April 11th 1915.
“To my mind, a good deal of injustice, however, has been done to the European rulers and even to the European politicians. They have been charged variously with entire responsibility for this war. I don’t think they properly can be given so much blame. I think this war is largely the result of greed on the part of those who profit by it.
The Man who manufactures war munitions wants to sell them. The man greedy to lend his capital at large interest wants to loan it for war purposes, which always command the very highest rates of interest. The man who has been trained in military science wants a chance to show off the killing tricks which he has learned, for only in that way can he achieve distinction or any other adequate reward for all the time and effort which his training has required.”
Detroit Free Press, April 11th 1915.
America’s Chance in Mexico.
“That’s where America’s chance comes in. We mustn’t go down there with a rifle. We must go down there with the plow, the shovel and the shop.
If we could put the Mexican peon to work, treating him fairly and showing him the advantage which is sure to come from working fairly and treating his employers fairly, the Mexican problem would disappear from this continent as steam fades from a window pane.
There would be no more talk of revolution, Villa would become a foreman, if he has brains; Carranza might be trained into a good timekeeper, and useful places might be found for all the other various disturbers.”
To modern US citizens, Ford’s ideas might sound eerily prescient. What really gave ‘opportunity’ to British-aligned war-mongers, however, was something Marshall reported Ford to have said about soldiers:
Excerpt from above, Detroit Free Press, April 11th 1915.
“He [Ford] did nothing of the sort. He looked out of the window, saying:
“To my mind the word ‘murderer’ should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier.”
Calls Soldiers Murderers.
Before we [Marshall and Ford] had gone into the powerhouse we had been discussing militarism and the war in Europe. I had traveled from New York to Detroit to have this talk with him.
“If Europe, if the world at large, if the United States had spent upon promoting peace one one-thousandth part of the money which it has spent on military preparedness and the wars which have grown out of military preparedness then the world never would have been shocked by this war or any other,” he went on.”
When examined during the course of the libel trial, Davis Edward Marshall admitted that Ford did not say “To my mind the word ‘murderer’ should be embroidered in red letters across the breast of every soldier.” Instead, Marshall said the quote came from social activist Jane Addams.
(Addams was from Cedarville, IL a town 15 minutes’ drive south of Young’s hometown Monroe, and the neighboring settlement of Orangeville, IL where William Wesley was actually born. “Cedarville” was the name Leon Goetz chose for the fictional village in his pro-temperance movie “10 Nights in a Bar Room”.)
Addams in turn denied ever having said such a thing and in a letter to newspaperman Mr. van Allen, describes how Marshall had attributed this “unsupported statement” to her before and how she had retained a lawyer to prevent Marshall from continuing to publicize the falsehood. Marshall then changed his story and claimed Addams had only (!) said this in relation to German soldiers. Addams maintained that she said nothing like it about any soldier at any time and added:
Excerpt from: Addams, Jane, “Jane Addams to William Harman Van Allen, October 20, 1919,” Jane Addams Digital Edition, accessed December 4, 2020, https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/19871.
Jane Addams: “The whole incident was so obviously an attempt to catch Mr. Ford that it did not occur to me that it would be taken seriously. I have spoken in public and written my views so constantly that it is strange my opinion should have to be set forth by a newspaper man who had seen me but once and was totally unable to corroborate the statement he made.”
If I can say anything about Henry Ford’s political work, it is that he was very good at being used. It turns out that Marshall was in a very good place to use Ford— “catch” him in Addams’ words— because back in 1915, when the first article was written, Marshall had been dismissed from a biography deal he’d arranged with the cagey industrialist. Collaborating with a disgruntled Ford employee named John R. Lee, Marshall worked to undermine Ford’s public persona and peace efforts. Lee’s role in the debacle surfaced in July 1919:
Excerpt from Detroit Free Press, July 24 1919. Continued below.
Excerpt from Detroit Free Press, July 24 1919. Continued below.
Excerpt from Detroit Free Press, July 24 1919.
I’d like to clarify to readers that events comprising the libel and the trial process spanned four years, from Marshall’s first article in 1915, to the 1916 hit-piece from The Chicago Tribune, to the actual trial that lasted for a few months in 1919. At the end of May 1916— when Marshall already knew he was in hot water— Mischa Appelbaum approached Ford to be a Detroit representative of his Humanitarian Cult, Jacob Schiff’s cynical voting-block scheme:
New York Times, May 29th 1916. How an ad for the Humanitarian Cult, an NYC voter’s organization, made it to Detroit and the desk of Henry Ford is a challenging question.
New York Times, May 31st 1916.
By joining Appelbaum’s shoddy political organization, Ford tied himself to an outfit helmed by William Wesley Young, Edward Davis Marshall’s long-time friend and soon business partner. Under Young’s watch, the cult would swerve from a pacifist to a pro-war political organization. The only explanation I can see for Ford’s joining the cult is that he failed to understand the purpose of the group and didn’t know about the relationship between Young and Marshall. Ford would repeatedly show political naivety.
The way that The Tribune libel case was conducted gave hostile press plenty of opportunity to ridicule Ford. Weymouth Kirkland, a lawyer for The Tribune, opined in 1923 that “I have frequently heard it stated by lawyers at Mt. Clemens [locale of trial] that everything was tried excepting the issues of the case”. The necessity of the fighting with Villa and Mexican incursion, the necessity of “war preparedness”, were among the Wilsonian policies that were repeatedly re-justified to the public at Ford’s expense by the Tribune’s defense team. The Chicago Tribune, run by two veterans of the campaign against Villa and the then-current war in Europe, Col. Robert R. McCormick and Capt. Joseph Medill Patterson, were rabid with their criticism. (Wilson was a Democrat, but McCormick and Patterson were Republicans of the stripe I discuss in my post on The Hamilton Club and Imperial German Active Measures and the Founding of the NSA.) In the end, jurors found in favor of Ford, but the damage to Ford’s reputation and peace initiatives was staggering. The judge ruled six cents be paid to Ford in damages. As one of the lawyers for The Tribune stated in 1923:
Excerpt from Weymouth Kirkland in “Some American Causes Celebres: IV Henry Ford vs. The Tribune Company” in American Bar Association Journal, February 1923. Vol. 9, No. 2.
Unfortunately for the political health of the United States, the trouble did not stop at six cents. Ford was embittered by his experiences leading into the 1920s. Toward the end of the drawn-out libel episode, Ford bought the struggling Dearborn Independent newspaper and planned to use it to publicize a series of articles critical of Jewish political power. These articles included a reprint of the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, at that time an obscure Russian political artifact, which Ford said was given to him by Russian immigrant and Brooklyn journalist Herman Bernstein, an intimate of the Humanitarian Cult set. Ford would prove his genius for being used yet again: I will explore William Wesley Young’s connection to the Protocols in an upcoming post.
