Aaron Sapiro

Aaron Shapiro
before 1925
Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

Aaron Leland Sapiro (born February 5, 1884 in Oakland , California ; died November 23, 1959 in Los Angeles ) was an American attorney and agricultural cooperative .

Life

Working as a cooperative

Aaron Sapiro came from a poor background and grew up in an orphanage. He began training as a rabbi and then studied law. He worked as a lawyer in Chicago and San Francisco . Sapiro worked for the California Department of Agriculture and reorganized the cooperative and sales structures for the fruit produced in the country. In 1923/24 he was brought to Saskatchewan by Canadian wheat farmers to reorganize the sales channels there. After his experience in California, he set up a Sapiro plan named after him for the USA, with which the existing cooperatives were to be geared towards sales, the distribution channels were to be reorganized and intermediate trade levels were to be eliminated. This enabled the producers to increase their sales. In 1925, 890,000 farmers throughout the USA were affiliated to the “California Plan” or “Sapiro Plan”; the reorganization was supported by the National Council of Farmer's Cooperative Marketing Association. Sapiro's organization was considered one of the largest agricultural organizations of its time. Sapiro also represented the interests of the cooperatives as a lawyer before the US Supreme Court .

Sapiro's work attracted opponents and envious people, and his personality and work style made himself vulnerable. His opponents also clashed with the high membership fee rates in the organizations he set up and his legal fees.

Sapiro was received by cooperative research in the 1960s. In 1986, the Cooperative Development Foundation inducted Sapiro into the Cooperative Hall of Fame, established in 1974 .

Litigation with Henry Ford

In the weekly newspaper The Dearborn Independent , published by the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford , Sapiro was attacked by its editor Ernest G. Liebold as a Jewish exploiter of the American farmers' organizations. The Dearborn Independent propagated since May 1920 the contents of the anti-Semitic combat pamphlet Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the allegedly proven secret plan of a Jewish world conspiracy . Sapiro's work was considered proof of this. In 1924, excerpts from these 91 newspaper articles appeared in the four-part publication The International Jew . Although names of the US financial world such as Bernard Baruch , Otto Kahn , Albert Lasker , Eugene Meyer and Julius Rosenwald were mentioned in the articles, Shapiro was the specific target, as he had brought the American farmers behind his organization.

Sapiro saw himself and American Judaism being unlawfully attacked, and in April 1925 filed a lawsuit for defamation at Ford's Detroit headquarters, which was heard in 1927. In the meantime, Ford had lawyers and agents across the country gather incriminating material against Sapiro in order to personally disavow him if necessary. Sapiro was also criticized by the Jewish activist and lawyer Louis Marshall , because anti-Semitism would get a boost from the public discussion of the International Jew . The New York Rabbi Stephen Wise, however, supported the goals associated with the lawsuit.

Ford's chief attorney became the politician James A. Reed , who succeeded in reducing the process to the individual insult for which the editor of the Dearborn Independent William J. Cameron had to take responsibility: Henry Ford had the articles and the book, so assured us Cameron, never seen. However, after James Martin Miller, a former biographer of Ford, testified otherwise, Ford suffered injuries in an alleged traffic accident that temporarily saved him from cross-examination by the court. Furthermore, Ford's detectives succeeded in portraying a lay judge as partisan, so that the court proceedings began to falter. After the summer break, Ford urged Louis Marshall and other representatives of the American Jewish Committee for an out-of-court settlement. On the one hand, Ford stuck to his claim that he did not know the articles in the Dearborn Independent nor the book, on the other hand he now praised American Judaism and apologized for the attacks from his newspaper.

The New York press derived the expectation from the statement that Ford would cease its anti-Semitic activities. The songwriter Billy Rose summed up in an (ironic) song that he has now found a new friend: Since Hen-ry Ford a-pol-o-gized to me . Sapiro accepted Ford's public apology and rectification of the Dearborn Independent's charges , and Ford promised to pay Sapiro's legal costs. Ford did the same to Herman Bernstein , who had sued him for anti-Semitic insults as early as 1923, but was unable to assert himself against Ford's legal superiority. Ford publicly promised to crush the International Jew and to stop the international licensing business for the book, which would also have applied to the German publisher Theodor Fritsch . In fact, that was only lip service, the withdrawal of the licensing was only implemented very slowly, and Fritsch was able to continue printing under Ford's eyes.

Fonts (selection)

• Co-operative marketing. American Farm Bureau Federation, Chicago 1920
• True Farmer Cooperation . 1923
• Why farmers must organize for business: commodity coöperative marketing: an economic remedy for an economic ill based on sound business and financial principles . Departments of Information of the Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association and the North Carolina Cotton Growers Co-operative Association, Raleigh, NC 1923?
• Cooperative wheat marketing . 1924.
• An experience with American justice . New York, 1927/1928 (Free Synagogue pulpit, vol. 8, no.5)
• Book Review: Trade Associations: The Legal Aspects. In: The Yale Law Journal. 1929, pp. 555-558.
• with Eugene H Frank: Mutiny at the Dock. In: California Law Review. 1936, pp. 41-51.

literature

Cooperatives

• Leon Garoyan: A Comment on Sapiro's True Farmer Cooperation .
• Leon Garoyan: Aaron Sapiro's Contributions to Cooperative Philosophy and Development . o. O., o. J.
• Grace H. Larsen; Henry E. Erdman: Aaron Sapiro: Genius of Farm Co-operative Promotion. In: The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 49 (2), 1962, pp. 242-268.
• Grace H. Larsen: Cooperative Evangelist: Aaron Sapiro. In: Joseph Grant Knapp et al. a. (Ed.): Great American Cooperators, biographical sketches of 101 major pioneers in cooperative development. American Inst. Of Cooperation, Washington 1967.
• Roger G. Ginder: Aaron Sapiro's Theory of. Cooperatives: A Contemporary Assessment. In: Journal of Agricultural Cooperation. 8, 1993, pp. 93-102.
• Therese C. Tuttle: Champagne vs. Grape Juice: Defending, Adding, or Discovering Value at the Farm-Gate: New Strategies for the California Cooperative. In: Drake Journal of Agricultural Law. Volume 5, No. 1, Spring 2000.

Henry Ford

• Victoria Saker Woeste: Lawyers, public service, and anti-Semitism: Aaron Sapiro's libel suit against Henry Ford, 1922–1927. American Bar Foundation, Chicago 1996.
• Jonathan R. Logsdon: Business and the Holocaust - Power, Ignorance, and Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford and His War on Jews. In: The Hanover Historical Review. Hanover 1999. Link at Stockmaven
• Victoria Saker Woeste: Modernism, anti-semitism, and agriculture: the Sapiro-Ford case, 1920–1928. American Bar Foundation, Chicago 2000.
• Victoria Saker Woeste: Insecure Equality: Louis Marshall, Henry Ford, and the Problem of Defamatory Antisemitism, 1920-1929. In: Journal of American History. 91 (3) 2004, pp. 877-905.
• Victoria Saker Woeste: Henry Ford's war on Jews and the legal battle against hate speech. Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, Calif. 2012, ISBN 978-0-8047-7234-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Aaron Sapiro in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Aaron Sapiro. at: Cooperative Hall of Fame, 1986.
• Sapiro v. Ford. In: Time magazine . March 21, 1927.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The information from Jonathan R. Logsdon: Business and the Holocaust. 1999.