BETWEEN 1920 AND 1922, the legendary auto magnate Henry Ford published a series of four paperbound books entitled "The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem." These amounted to a collection of anti-Semitic articles from his privately owned newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, a mouthpiece whose independence was ensured by the fact that Ford, the richest man in America, neither needed nor accepted advertising. The paper and the anti-Semitic anthologies were obediently hawked by Ford dealers.

On December 31, 1927, following a libel lawsuit filed by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish organizer of farmers’ cooperatives, Ford journeyed to New York to meet with attorney Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee. As Neil Baldwin recounts in his timely, richly detailed study of Ford’s anti-Semitism, the automaker had lately signed, apparently without reading it, a letter of apology drafted by Marshall in consultation with Ford’s representatives. In it Ford purported to be "deeply mortified" by his newspaper’s attacks on the Jews, the particulars of which, he claimed, had been scripted by underlings without his approval. At their closed-door session, Ford assured Marshall that he had destroyed every copy of "The International Jew" that he could find. Needless to say, this was a fatuous claim.