"Smart Money"

"An industrialist, Henry Ford has made one of the greatest contributions ever made by any man. That is mass production. It amounts to first rate genius. But just as I am color blind, Henry Ford has blind spots in his intellect. In my opinion he is mentally unsound on certain questions of race and religion. He has a streak of bigotry on that side of his mind that is totally foreign to his industrial ability."

These words, spoken in a suite at the Book Cadillac Hotel, Detroit, by an industrious Jew, Lawyer Aaron Sapiro, marked the end of the first week of a libel suit. Mr. Sapiro wants to vindicate his race and, incidentally, to obtain $1,000,000 in damages from Mr. Ford for certain articles published in the Dearborn Independent in 1924-25, which pictured a national menace in Mr. Sapiro's farm organization activities (TIME, March 21).

Mr. Ford's opening reply, obviously written by his Voltaire-tongued chief counsel, Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, said that Mr. Sapiro was "a grafter, faker, fraud and cheat"; that his unprofessional acts and conduct have "rendered him obnoxious to the nostrils of American farmers."

Senator Reed, having secured several favorable rulings from Judge Fred Raymond barring the racial issue from the suit, launched the defense with his most inflammatory and satiric senatorial style. Said he: "I think His Honor will tell you that the Hebrew race is not here bringing this suit, and that Mr. Sapiro has no right to come here and recover damages for the Hebrew race, and put the money in his own pocket as damage done to himself. This is not che case of former Gov. Lowden, or Mr. Lasker, or Mr. Baruch, or Mr. Lazinsky, or anybody else. This is the case, I repeat, of Aaron Sapiro or Sapyro--I don't know just which wav to pronounce it."

"Sapeero," snapped Attorney William H. Gallagher, a Roman Catholic, sitting beside his Jewish client.

"Sapiro," continued Senator Reed, "wants a lot by way of 'smart' money for punitive damages. . . . I think that the evidence in this case will show you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that Henry Ford never saw those articles; that he has never read them to this blessed day. . . .

"Now any paper has the right to print of and concerning another the truth, whatever it may be. The law puts no bridle in the mouth of the truth. And so we claim here and shall try to show you that what has been printed of Mr. Sapiro in all of its real essence was the truth. . . . It is no libel to say truthfully of a man who is a Jew that he is a Jew. . . .

"He [Sapiro] conceived this scheme of telling the farmers that if they organized according to his plan they would be able to control the market for their produce and thus fix the price. He told them that they would all grow rich and prosperous. They could educate their children in colleges, they could drive in fine cars--not Fords--but fine ones. . . . Then his mind projected itself across the ocean and he actually proposed to organize and control at least the wheat product of the entire world. Then he expected to have one Aaron Sapiro employed as attorney by all of these concerns. The evidence will show you that it was such a dream of wealth and empire as I have described. . . . His scheme was purely a scheme for the benefit of Sapiro. That was the motive back of his grand idea. ...

"He went to the farmers if not as the Moses who was to lead them out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land of Prosperity, then at least he went to them as the Aaron the Talker."

Then Senator Reed proceeded to tell that Mr. Sapiro had collected some $1,000,000 in lawyers' fees from farmers* that many of his organizations had lost money, that he had threatened to grow grass in the streets of Wilson, N. C., when the local tobacco growers refused to come under his wing. "We shall show you," said Senator Reed, "that instead of grass growing in the streets of Wilson, within two years Wilson was the greatest tobacco market in the world. . . .

"Finally, we will show you that these articles were printed in good faith for the purpose of protecting the farmers and growers of the United States against these schemes of the plaintiff, Sapiro. And having shown all of this, we will ask you to find that Aaron Sapiro was an exploiter of the American farmer."

Lenient Mr. Ford. Later, Attorney Gallagher briefly examined William J. Cameron, editor of the Dearborn Independent. "Did you ever have any discussions with Mr. Ford regarding the policies of the Dearborn Independent?" asked Mr. Gallagher.

Replied Editor Cameron, "Mr. Ford used to drop in occasionally and chat quite frequently."

"Did you and Mr. Ford ever have disagreement ?"

"Mr. Ford, for instance," said the editor in assent, "is strongly set against war. The Dearborn Independent stands for adequate preparedness. I think Mr. Ford looks with lenient eyes on the Russian people's new experiment, and the paper is anti-Bolshevik."

"You mean," said Mr. Gallagher, "that he is pro-Soviet and that you are anti-Soviet?"

"Oh, no," said the editor, "I didn't say that he was proSoviet. He is just lenient."

Mr. Ford, reported to be enjoying New England tranquillity at his Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., was expected to testify.

The Jury, half men, half women, seemed more attentive than the usual run of juries. They are all Michiganders, all know that Mr. Ford makes automobiles--but none of them had ever heard of Mr. Sapiro before the suit. Their religious complexion is: four Roman Catholics, two Presbyterians, one Baptist, one Congregationalist, one. German Lutheran, one Universalist, one with "leanings to Christian Science," one (Mrs. Anna Brown) not asked concerning her religion. A couple of Jews (one Orthodox, one Reformed) and a man who had once joined the Ku Klux Klan out of curiosity were ousted after the original drawings.

And so, with Judge Raymond having barred the question of Mr. Ford's personal race-prejudice, the trial continued. . . .

*Mr. Sapiro later admitted that he and all his associates had received approximately $1,000,000 in fees from 1915 to the present. Senator Reed, it is said, will receive $100,000 for his few weeks' (or months'?) defense of Mr. Ford.

In Tampa

Should two onetime Presidents of the U. S. undertake to manage the government of a city, that city might well expect to get good government. Similarly Tampa, Fla., looked forward last week to having a model newspaper. The local Tribune was sold by the syndicate of Tampa businessmen that had owned it since 1925, to President John Stewart Bryan of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association and his predecessor in that office, S. Emory Thomason. Old friends, the new partners paid a booming price for their property--$900,000--and assumed all liabilities. They said they believed in Tampa, believed northern capital was by no means through flowing south. Publisher Bryan did not announce that he would leave his Richmond (Va.) News-Leader and devote his whole time to the Tampa Tribune. Evidently he is going to leave most of the active management to Publisher Thomason, who last week resigned as general manager of the Chicago Tribune.

"Hurting" Hearst

How much is Publisher Hearst worth, not as a citizen, but in dollars. It would be modest to start at $25,000,000 for his string of magazines. It would be modest to add $20,000,000 for his biggest moneymaker, the New York American. It would be modest to lump his 20-odd other newspapers at $50,000,000. It is hard to price his vast holdings in Mexican realty, but $10,000,000 would not be overrating them. And much property in California and elsewhere must be added. Shrinking the total to be thoroughly conservative, a guesser might safely guess that Mr. Hearst is worth $100,000,000.

How much would it hurt Mr. $100,000.000 Hearst to part with $1,500,000 in a libel suit? No more, and probably less, than it would hurt an urchin with one dollar in his panties to pay a one-cent school fine for having filthy hands. It would probably hurt Mr. Hearst less than the schoolboy because the injustices Mr. Hearst may do an individual here and there are wafted off his conscience by the enormous amount of good he thinks he brings to THE PEEPUL.

Wherefore there was a pitiful absurdity about the $1,500,000 libel suit brought last week against Publisher Hearst by Mrs. Frances Noel Hall and her moonfaced brother "Willie" Stevens and her stock-broker cousin Henry de la Bruyere Carpender, "to hurt Hearst financially" in return for financial hurt he allegedly did them through his mucky Mirror, which reopened and amplified the unsolved murder of Mrs. Hall's preacher-husband and his choir-singer inamorata, Mrs. James Mills (TIME, Nov. 15).

Oddly, the plaintiffs were unaccompanied in their action by Mrs. Hall's marksman brother, Henry Stevens, whose complicity in the murder the Mirror had broadly insinuated. Oddly, the Mirror was not attacked for having insinuated that "Willie" Stevens was a mulatto, sired by a family coachman. Mrs. Hall and her relatives only wanted: 1) to avenge Mirror editorials such as "Can a Rich Family Get Away with Murder in New Jersey?"; 2) to reimburse Mr. Carpender for loss of income during his stay in jail; but above all, implicitly, "to hurt Hearst."

Prone though it is to yearn for a bigbug's discomfiture, the public could not this time anticipate much smallbug success.

Delirium

The bipeds who buy Bernarr Macfadden's N. Y. pornoGraphic were treated last week to something new in sensations. Had the consciousness of a typical Graphic addict been exposed scientifically to the ink-smeared, peach-colored first page, a psychologist might have translated the addict's sensations and reactions somewhat as follows:

GHOST . . . ova . . . TELLS! . . . smear of thin grey . . . Edition . . . shiny-haired man in bed under a white cloud . . . shivering hands in a wild-eyed girl draped in a falling-off sheet in front of white crosses . . . V A L E N T I N O S . . . no? . . . VALENTINO'S . . . VALENTINO'S RUDY-RUDY . . . little dim wings with shafts . . . fog on the mind, feeling dizzy, must begin over . . . must begin over, now . . . MAN-IN-A-HOSPITAL BED-NOT-LOOKING-SICK-TRIES TO-GET-UP (like a man catching a fly in the outfield, ha, ha, ha, ha!). . . . What are those pale guys doing in the corner behind a counter, black coats, leaning forward?? Never! . . . mine . . . York aphic . . . Whatcha mean "Rudy Describes Own Death!"?? . . . Grave . . . . . . type . . . type . . . skinny blonde looking soulful. . . .

The addict would by now have become bored. He would have spit on the floor and said he knew the whole story now. There would be more tomorrow. There was.

The Graphic's mental-opium makers, cleverest in Manhattan and probably the world, prolonged their new delirium for days and days. They paid the late Mr. Valentino's closest friends, enemies and parasites to help them compose kaleidoscopic fake photographs and spirit messages. The dead man described the tearing of his soul from his body, the uprush into the Hereafter, the ghostly hosts, his-mother, memories, women friends, earthly emotions remembered, heavenly sensations. He met Enrico Caruso, who posed with him for the Graphic camera beside a massive pillar, both draped in sheets, smiling clearly, fresh-shaven, pomaded, watching a throng of people or spirits, take your choice, rush up wide steps to a warlike stage setting. Why? Never mind. Don't bother to read the text. And on the Saturday special edition in sepia, "Rudy's Spirit" nakedly muscular from the navel up in a blazing cauldron, posed against a brazen shield, profile turned to heavenly radiance. ... In his private column on the back page Publisher Macfadden asked pornoGraphic addicts, with dizzy irony: "Who owns your mind?"

The Graphic folk no longer pretend their work is journalism. They simply call it "tabloids." Assistant Managing Editor Martin Weyrauch of the "pornoGraphic debated the question with Editor Oswald Garrison Villard of the Nation, and said: "Tabloids are just as inevitable! as jazz. They are as truly expressive of modern America as World's Series baseball, skyscrapers, radio, the movies, Trudy Ederle, Billy Sunday, taxicabs and beauty contests. . . . They are not so far above the common herd as to have no concern in the interests of everyday life."

To the palpable pathology of which, Editor Villard's sane answer was no answer at all: "As to the threadbare argument that these tabloid dailies supply what the people want--why, that has been cited in defense of every stooping to the gutter to win circulation since modern journalism began. Carried to its logical conclusion it would justify complete obscenity and rotogravure-printing of the indecent pictures which are now suppressed by the police when they are sold by degenerates on street corners."

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, professional baseball tsar, added to his reputation by lending his name to a pornoGraphic testimonial. Said he: "They're good enough for me. ... I think those who scoff at tabloids underestimate their value. ... I would rather have my picture published on the front page of a tabloid than two columns of type in a regular-size newspaper. . . ."