Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-30T06:10:42.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Clyde Spillenger
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.”

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Cover, Robert M. 1982. The Origins of Judicial Activism in the Protection of Minorities. Yale Law Journal 91 (7): 1287–1316.Google Scholar
Dinnerstein, Leonard. 1994. Anti‐Semitism in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kalven, Harry Jr. 1965. The Negro and the First Amendment. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.Google Scholar
Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.Google Scholar
Lippmann, Walter. 1925. The Phantom Public. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.Google Scholar
Riesman, David. 1942a. Democracy and Defamation: Control of Group Libel. Columbia Law Review 42 (5): 727–80.Google Scholar
Riesman, David. 1942b. Democracy and Defamation: Fair Game and Fair Comment I. Columbia Law Review 42 (7): 1085–1123.Google Scholar
Riesman, David. 1942c. Democracy and Defamation: Fair Game and Fair Comment II. Columbia Law Review 42 (8): 1282–1318.Google Scholar
Schultz, Evan P. 2000. Group Rights, American Jews, and the Failure of Group Libel Laws, 1913–1952. Brooklyn Law Review 66 (1): 71–145.Google Scholar
Scott, Ellen C. 2012. Black “Censor,” White Liberties: Civil Rights and Illinois's 1917 Film Law. American Quarterly 64 (2): 219–47.Google Scholar
Woeste, Victoria Saker. 1998. The Farmer's Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919).Google Scholar
Beauharnais v. Illinois, 343 U.S. 250 (1952).Google Scholar
Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927).Google Scholar
Feiner v. New York, 340 U.S. 315 (1951).Google Scholar
Kunz v. New York, 340 U.S. 290 (1951).Google Scholar
Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949).Google Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).Google Scholar
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).Google Scholar
Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).Google Scholar

Film

Birth of a Nation (1915).Google Scholar