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Hate Speech, Group Libel, and “Ford's Megaphone”

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Victoria SakerWoeste, 2012. Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pp. xv, 408. $55.00, cloth; $24.95, paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Clyde Spillenger
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Abstract

This essay on Victoria Saker Woeste's Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012) emphasizes that what made Ford's broadsides against Jews in the 1920s so dangerous was technology—his command of an unparalleled network of distribution, through his nationwide Ford dealerships. In addition, at the time of Ford's libels, US legal culture had not yet absorbed the idea that ideological and psychological subordination of minority groups was the principal harm worked by what would later be called “hate speech.”

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Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , Fall 2015, pp. 1058 - 1066
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015 

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References

References

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Cases Cited

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Film

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