Ford Mistrial

"Justice has been crucified upon the cross of unethical and depraved journalism."

So said Judge Fred M. Raymond of the U. S. District Court at Detroit, in announcing last week that the $1,000,000 suit of Aaron Sapiro, farm organizer, against Henry Ford, publisher of the allegedly libelous Dearborn Independent, had come to a mistrial.* It was a bad end. Detectives had snooped. Insults had climbed upon the backs of innuendoes. Some of the principals were sick and injured. Everyone was vexed.

Henry Ford's detectives had been ferreting around the courthouse since the trial started, six weeks ago. Last week they charged Mrs. Cora Hoffman, one of the jurors, with perjury. She had said, at the time of the jury examination, that she was unbiased, whereas she had told friends that she hoped to make matters unhealthy "for old man Ford." She had said that her husband was a plumbing contractor, whereas Mr. Ford's detectives found him to be the operator of a "blind pig" (saloon). According to detectives, she had held mysterious conversations involving palatable sums of money with a Jew named "Kid" Miller at the courthouse.

Equipped with these charges and with contempt of court rules, a reporter of Publisher Hearst's scurrilous Detroit Times approached Mrs. Hoffman, questioned her. The Times published her denials of the charges, along with this statement: "It seems to me," said she, "that someone is trying to keep this case from the jury."

The publication of this interview prompted Federal Judge Raymond to grant the motion of the Ford attorneys for a mistrial. He dismissed the charges against Mrs. Hoffman and started contempt proceedings against the Detroit Times. Thus, it was decided that the Hearst type of journalism is a greater menace to justice than the indiscreet babbling of a woman juror.

In the festival of hard feeling which marked the end of the trial, Aaron Sapiro and his lawyer, William H. Gallagher, had leading roles. They insinuated that the Ford attorneys had forced a mistrial to prevent Henry Ford from taking the witness stand. Incidentally, Mr. Sapiro was no doubt annoyed to have spent a round sum of money--only to find far distant the $1,000,000 which he hopes to get from Mr. Ford because of certain anti-Jewish articles published in the Dearborn Independent (TIME, March 21, 28). It did not seem likely that a new trial could be arranged before next autumn. During the life of the Sapiro-Ford trial the following events were chronicled: Henry Ford was badly battered in an automobile accident. Stuart Hanley, lawyer for Mr. Ford, suffered a back strain. Two of Aaron Sapiro's children came down with scarlet fever. Milton Sapiro (brother) splintered a wrist in another automobile crash. Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, chief counsel for Mr. Ford, went to the Henry Ford hospital with an acute attack of gastrointestinal trouble. ... Superstitious observers whispered that the trial was hoodooed.

Conventions

Manhattan, seat of the nation's best--and worst--journalism, was host to all U. S. journalism last week. Grey men, flushed men, paunchy men, lean men, came. Those who wheedle dined with those who inform. A shiny printing press in the lounge of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel put on pulp a few of the happenings. Officially there were three distinct conventions:

United Press. On the opening night, President Coolidge heralded the 20th anniversary of the United Press in person. He commended journalists in general, spoke reassuringly about Latin-American ructions. No doubt President Coolidge thought it wise to give the United Press a little of his time, inasmuch as he had given the Associated Press an intimate story of his life, last summer at White Pine Camp.

The U. P., founded by the late Publisher Scripps as a protest against the monopoly of the A. P., entered its 20th year as a liberal and potent news broadcaster. It now serves some 1,200 newspapers, chiefly evening ones, many in South America. Its foreign bureaus in obscure corners of the globe are its greatest distinction. Its reporting of the World War events was particularly swift and nonpartisan. It even announced the Armistice a few days early. It will serve any newspaper which desires its despatches, while the A. P. limits its membership with a rigid rule.

Associated Press. There was once an old maid, famed for her spreading of cold, hard, bold facts. She was not very stimulating, but she covered the field. Now she has a new dress with ruffles, gaudy and multicolored. She rouges her cheeks. She goes out and gets warm interviews. She "jazzes up" her language and is accepted by a jazz age.

Such is the rejuvenation of the Associated Press, which city editors cheer and which the American Mercury taunted in its April issue (TIME, April 4). It has been growing younger ever since its

"splurges of flowery writing" that greeted the entombment of the Unknown Soldier in 1921.

The A. P., loth perhaps to shout forth its new colors nevertheless hinted indirectly at them last week in the annual report of General Manager Kent Cooper. Said he: "The work of the staff, with a low percentage of disappointments, is credited with a large number of unusual examples of ingenuity in developing matter which is not confined precisely to spontaneous happenings." As an example of what he meant, Mr. Cooper cited the A. P.'s "word picture of Mexican emotion"* and other feature stories of 1926-27.

A. N. P. A. The annual convention of the American Newspaper Publishers' Association, wherein A. P. and U. P. men and press potentates throughout the land met to discuss the common weal, began with golf and continued through advertising, features, crime news, jokes, chuckles, snores.

Dodger

Ship reporters are instructed to make their victims talk, willy-nilly. Last week they set upon Horace E. Dodge Jr., blond playboy of Detroit, son of one of the original Dodge Brothers (automobiles). The fortnight before, chasing out to Hawaii in his wife's wake, he had assumed an alias, put pressmen to the trouble of identifying him by telephotograph. Now, arriving back at San Francisco on the Dollar Line steamer, President Madison, he persisted in being mysterious. On the same boat was his wife. The question was: Were the Dodges reconciled ?

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Dodge wished to make public their matrimonial affairs. Reporters insisted, grew bothersome. Irate and perhaps a bit mischievous, Mr. Dodge locked a few of them in his stateroom, escaped, knocked down a photographer, smashed his camera, engaged in a fist fight with an uncaptured newsgatherer.

While leaving the President Madison, Mr. Dodge covered his head with an overcoat, bumped into an iron girder and "dropped momentarily unconscious"--to quote one report. He was soon arrested for his conduct on the ship, later released on bail. But the reporters were not finished with him. Some of them were not even sure then that he was Mr. Dodge--and all of them had to get that interview. In the automobile of Conrad R. Kahn, son of U. S. Representative Florence Prag Kahn, Mr. Dodge led the newsgatherers a roaring chase through the downtown streets of San Francisco. Finally, Mr. Dodge must have become either tired or bored, for he stopped and cast these words to the reporters: "I went to Honolulu not to seek reconciliation with my wife but on a matter involving the signature of some papers. It just happened that my wife was on the same boat on which I returned to San Francisco. We did not see each other during the voyage. . . .

"I'm sorry about the rumpus on shipboard. I want to pay for the cameras I broke. I have already apologized to the camera men."

Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge had told the gentlemen of the press: "I am through with men."

Thievery

The Atlantic Monthly had a treasure in the letter of Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith of New York, wherein he told his creed as a Roman Catholic and a U. S. public official (TIME, April 25). It was laid up where moths and rust would hardly corrupt, where thieves would scarcely break through and steal--at the Rumford Press in Concord, N. H., where the Atlantic Monthly is printed.

Yet last fortnight it became evident that some thief had broken through and stolen the treasure. The Boston Post, followed by the tabloid New York Daily News, published Governor Smith's letter, badly mangled by their characteristic handling, ahead of all other newspapers and of the Atlantic Monthly itself. The Atlantic Monthly was obliged to rush its May issue to the newsstands ahead of schedule, to release the Smith letter to the press at large.

The Rumford Press investigated to see what sort of thief had broken through. "Some one who purported to be a representative of an out-of-town newspaper" had approached a Rumford employe and presumably cajoled, bribed or browbeaten advance copies of the magazine out of him. The Atlantic Monthly contemplated suing the Boston Post and New York Daily News.

Other magazine publishers watched with great concern. If newspapers become so unscrupulous that they will cheat and pilfer from fellow publishers, said magazine men, no flight of imagination is necessary to picture printing plants patrolled by armed guards; skulking reporters filled with buckshot.

Tobacco Joan

"I just sat on that little old model stand and trembled. I imagined the magazine, with me sitting in it smoking a cigaret, going into homes all over the country. 1 thought of people coming across it and glaring right into my face. Why, they might even throw me in the fire! I felt like Joan of Arc."

With these words, one Betty Honeyman of the Bronx, who has posed in many an artist's studio, in various stages of dress, broke into the news last week. She had posed for the first cigaret advertisement ever to appear in a U. S. publication showing a woman in the act of smoking.

Other women in advertisements have looked as if they had just finished a cigaret, or wanted one, or asked to have some smoke blown their way. But here was the first woman to be "caught with the goods."

Marlboro cigarets (Philip Morris & Co. Ltd., Inc.) published the advertisement in the April number of Vanity Fair, with the following caption: "Women--when they smoke at all--quickly develop discerning taste." The Pictorial Review was reported planning _to print the same advertisement--its first of tobacco--after carefully lopping off the cigaret-holding arm.

It is said that more women than men smoke Marlboro cigarets, famed for mildness. Shrewd Lee Brown, of the agency which handles the Marlboro account, announced last week:

"We thought the time had come to take the sex out of cigarets."

Marlboros have long been advertised with drawings of a dainty feminine hand holding a cigaret, but now the face behind that hand has appeared.

MacCracken's Crack. Last week, President Henry Noble MacCracken of Vassar College, where the young women themselves regulate all questions of smoking, said: "Tobacco is one of the country's most important crops. The men can't smoke it all up. Why shouldn't the women help?"

* Mistrial = failure of a trial to reach its legal end because of an error in the proceedings.

* Not to be confused with the famed propaganda despatch of the A. P. on Nov. 17, which said: "The specter of a Mexican-fostered Bolshevist hegemony intervening between the United States and the Panama Canal has thrust itself into American-Mexican relations, already strained."