History Lesson: Henry Ford Was the World’s Biggest Sore Loser

No doubt that angered Ford, but not nearly as much as criticism from the campaign of the Republican who stepped up to challenge him. Ford cultivated a contempt for the very idea that someone would stand in his way. He was convinced that even the effort was illegitimate.

The candidates in Michigan’s Senate election that year were both extravagantly wealthy. That’s where their similarity stopped. The contest pitted bootstrapper Henry Ford against society industrialist Truman H. Newberry. With his Tin Lizzie, Ford was producing unadorned, functional transportation for the everyman. Newberry was an investor in the clubman’s land-yacht of choice, the Packard. Ford was a wiry farm boy without much in the way of formal schooling. Newberry was a “rotund, jolly fellow, highly educated and with polished manners,” the Washington Post wrote. Ford was the most prominent of American pacifists. Newberry was an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt and as a young lieutenant had sailed with the Michigan Naval Brigade to blockade Cuban harbors during the Spanish-American War. T. R. would later name Newberry secretary of the Navy. Newberry was a gentleman: When he lost a 1904 bid for a U.S. House seat, he said of the voters’ choice, “They have elected a good man.” Ford was a sore loser, tenacious as a terrier and bitter as cinchona bark. When Newberry bested him, Ford blamed a Jewish conspiracy for the setback.

The battle for the Michigan Senate seat in 1918 had everything a connoisseur of hardball politics—of that era or ours—could possibly want: a vote margin close enough to invite a recount two years after the ballots had been cast; an army of partisan, paid investigators funneling oppo dirt to special prosecutors; aggressive prosecutorial use of false-statement charges; multiple grand juries employed to secure well over a hundred indictments, which ultimately would lead to a raft of convictions; the intervention of a closely divided Supreme Court followed by a trial in the Senate itself. Ford’s years-long pursuit of Newberry involved a superabundance of political abuses meanspirited enough to make our own politics look semi-civilized by comparison.

The clash would make for boldface, banner headlines for years. Papers across the country—from the Washington Herald to the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier, the Appleton, Wisconsin, Post-Crescent, and everywhere in between—followed the grand political ruction for four years. But when the frenzy finally fizzled, the whole affair was almost completely forgotten, an irony noted by historian Paula Baker in an admirably concise and readable narrative published in 2012 by the University Press of Kansas. Her Curbing Campaign Cash is one of only two comprehensive chronicles of the dispute; the other is a sprawling account of the legal minutiae by lawyer Spencer Ervin that was published in 1935.

The century-old battle has new relevance today, and not just because the question of how to regulate campaign expenditures has still not been answered, even with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. A central question of our politics is whether endless investigations are a good-government scourge of the corrupt or if an abusive policing of politics is just a way for electoral losers to preen while they scheme to undo the will of the voters.

The eventual smashup in Michigan would have seemed unlikely from the electoral contest itself, which did not feature any campaigning by the candidates themselves. Ford was shy about talking in front of crowds and avoided public appearances; Newberry was in the Navy and, though he was sailing a desk on the East Coast, his duties kept him from the stump. Which isn’t to say things weren’t getting nasty in the absence of the candidates.

There were posters and pamphlets and handbills and buttons and—this being a modern election—radio, billboard, and newspaper ads. All of it was paid for by committees of the candidates’ friends. Newberry’s friends included not only family but such society connections as Frederick Brooks of a certain Madison Avenue clothier. A common Newberry advertisement featured a photo of the stolid Navy man flanked by his twin sons, spiffy in uniforms of their own. This was understood to be a rebuke of Ford’s son Edsel, who, thanks to his job at the family factory, had enjoyed a war-worker draft deferment.

Ford was spending money too, and not all of it was going to newspaper advertisements and self-hagiographic pamphlets. In something of an innovation, Ford was paying for a new sort of campaign worker—the detective. Ford would eventually have dozens of private investigators in the field scouring Michigan for evidence that Newberry had violated recently passed campaign-finance laws. The Ford team spread the word that Newberry was corrupting the election with his “excessive spending.” Newberry beat Ford in the Republican primary nonetheless, setting up a showdown between the two in the general election.

That election, like the primary, would be fought under the strictures, such as they were, of the Federal Corrupt Practices Act. In effect for less than a decade, the FCPA governed congressional elections and was designed to eliminate “extravagant campaign contributions” that “have degenerated into a moral, a social, and a political evil.” Well, perhaps not eliminate so much as make transparent: The law didn’t limit what campaign committees could spend but required that all expenses over $10 be listed in “detailed and accurate reports” filed with Congress. The legislation was an essential progressive reform of the early 20th century. It embodied “a principle of honest government, of pure government,” New York congressman Michael Francis Conry preached during House debate over the 1910 bill. The law, he said, would strike “at conditions that have been a reproach to our institutions for years and a blot on our civilization.” It would also be a cudgel with which Henry Ford would batter Truman Newberry.

In reality, the “FCPA did not regulate much,” writes Baker, because its “spending caps applied to candidates, not to committees formed to advance their campaigns.” It was a regulatory regime not unlike our current one: We allow “independent” groups to spend all they like, as long as they don’t explicitly advocate any particular electoral outcome, while we set limits on how much donors can give to candidates, political parties, and political action committees.

But such systems can be legally convoluted. What counts as a campaign expenditure, for instance? Is hush-money to a porn performer a campaign expense or personal business? Such are the legal questions of our own day. A similar sort of question—whether a particular hotel bill, for instance, was a personal or campaign expense—troubled candidates under the FCPA. After all, they had to endorse the documents listing their own spending and did so under penalty of perjury.

Penalty of perjury was just what Ford had in mind for the man he considered a usurper. President Woodrow Wilson having recruited Ford to run, the Wilson Department of Justice proved all too eager to prosecute Newberry—so eager that a little over a month before the general election, the DoJ named a special prosecutor to present a grand jury in the Southern District of New York with false-statement charges against Newberry.

There was an October surprise: The old saw about a ham sandwich notwithstanding, the grand jury, just a week before the election, refused to indict Newberry or any of his associates. The election went forward, and come November 5, 1918, over 430,000 Michiganders voted to send a new senator to Washington. The final split was 220,054 for Newberry, 212,487 for Ford.

What should have been the end of their contest was just the beginning. A little more than a week later, Ford was demanding a recount and contesting Newberry’s fitness to be seated in the Senate.

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One thing we learn from Ford vs. Newberry is that the psychology of politicians has changed little in a century. Writing several years before Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, Baker describes Ford’s bitter reaction to his 1918 defeat. It’s a description that neatly limns the stunned attitude of the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate. “Ford felt cheated,” the historian writes. “The ‘downright cruel’ assurances of victory by the yes-men around Ford left him believing that fraud was the only possible explanation” for his loss. Which explains why Ford, in a fury at losing to Newberry, ordered his associates to “put a gang on ’em.”

The “gang” was 40 private detectives on the Ford payroll. They were led by Bernard Robinson, a lawyer for Firestone, the company that made the tires for all those Ford automobiles. The gang surveilled Newberry’s friends and, when necessary, seduced lonely witnesses. They produced a “Report of Private Investigation of U.S. Senatorial Primary and Election in Michigan in 1918.” This dossier, if we may call it that, was some two inches thick. Ford’s head lawyer took it to Washington, where he told the Wilson Department of Justice they owed it to his boss to take Newberry down.

The DoJ named a new special prosecutor, Frank Dailey, who happened to be pals with Firestone’s Robinson. Dailey took the dossier to a handpicked jurisdiction, Grand Rapids, where a friendly judge presided over a willing grand jury. So efficient was the setup that Ford soon grew worried—not that they wouldn’t get indictments, but that they would get too many. As Baker tells it, Ford secretary Ernest Liebold, having learned there might be 150 indictments, went and woke up Dailey in the middle of the night. “Heavens, you are going too far on this thing! That will react against us,” Liebold pleaded. “If you can cut it down to about 50, it wouldn’t be so bad.” In the end, Dailey demonstrated his independence by bringing indictments against 135 people, with Newberry at the top of the list.

Justice rattled along like a flivver. Arraignments began in December 1919; Senator Newberry and dozens from his campaign were put on trial the following February, accused of false statements and excessive spending in the Republican primary. Newberry and 16 others were convicted March 20, 1920. The senator was sentenced to two years of hard time in Leavenworth prison and a $10,000 fine. Mrs. Newberry “patted her husband on the shoulder as the verdict was read,” reported the New York Times, “but in the corridor after adjournment of court she broke down and wept.”

In the wake of the conviction, there were calls for Newberry to resign his seat. He refused. And so the Senate, hoping to find a face-saving resolution to the fiasco, finally got around to recounting the original ballots, as Ford had first demanded in 1918. The emphasis here is on “finally.” As Spencer Ervin explains in his 1935 account of the Ford vs. Newberry prizefight, the ballots weren’t at the Michigan statehouse but in the possession of 1,700 township clerks. “It seems to have taken from March 23, 1920, to January 4, 1921, to get the ballots to Washington and be ready to begin the recount.” Which is when the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections started tallying them by hand.

The count went on nearly nonstop for a month. The senators doing the counting had Sundays and “half-Saturdays” off. They finished their work on February 2, 1921: Newberry’s vote count had fallen from 220,054 to 217,085, but Ford had gained little, going from 212,487 to 212,751. Newberry was still the winner, if one facing two years in the pen.

A solution to the Senate’s quandary presented itself in the form of a legal appeal Newberry had made to the Supreme Court. While the senators had been counting ballots, arguments were being heard before the High Court. On May 2, 1921, the justices delivered a ruling: By a 5-4 decision, the court overturned Newberry’s conviction on the grounds that the Federal Corrupt Practices Act was unconstitutional. Congress, according to the court’s opinion, did not have the power to regulate state primaries.

There it might have ended, but Ford wasn’t done. He still had a petition before the Senate contesting Newberry’s election. Ford had a problem: His argument to the Senate was based on the same legal claims that the Supreme Court had just rejected. But Ford’s team had an answer: “Mr. Newberry was convicted under the National Corrupt Practices Act,” the lawyers wrote in their brief to the Senate committee. “By a decision of five to four of the judges of the Supreme Court it was held, not that Mr. Newberry was innocent but that the National Act, regulating primaries, was unconstitutional and that the proper place to present the charges was before the Senate of the United States.”

Had Newberry merely escaped on a legalistic quibble? Not so, thought Charles Evans Hughes. Between stints on the Supreme Court in the 1910s and the 1930s, Hughes was secretary of state. He also found time to argue before the High Court for the reversal of Newberry’s conviction. Later he would insist that it had been no mere technicality on which he prevailed. The conviction of Newberry, Hughes told Walter Lippmann, had been “as gross a miscarriage of justice as had ever come under my observation.”

By the time the Senate heard arguments on Ford’s motion to have Newberry declared unelected, the debate divided along ideological lines, with Democrats and progressive Republicans on one side and old-fashioned Republicans with a slim majority on the other. Even so, it’s clear that members of the august body were growing tired of Henry Ford’s antics. Historian Paula Baker notes that Ford’s forces lost ground when Newberry’s campaign chairman was given the opportunity to tell of a private meeting with the plutocrat. Allen Templeton testified that Ford had harangued him with a nasty-minded theory about how Newberry had won the election. An “influential gang of Jews [was] behind Mr. Newberry,” Ford told Templeton. They “were making a tool of Mr. Newberry.” They had funded him “to gain control of the Senate and the country.”

January 12, 1922—more than three years after the ballots had been cast—the Senate voted 46-41 to affirm that Truman Newberry was legitimately elected. The resolution was not without criticism of Newberry; his fellow lawmakers chided him for harming “the honor and dignity of the Senate” by spending so much on his campaign. But the question of whether he was a senator had been answered conclusively.

Or maybe not. Ford had failed to overturn the election with a recount; he had failed to get his opponent jailed; he failed to persuade the Senate to kick Newberry out. The result of all this partisan warfare was not unlike that of the Great War that had ended just days after the 1918 election: After years of brutal political combat the trenches remained mostly where they had first been dug. But there would be no armistice. Ford made it clear he would be coming back for more, signaling he would put the matter to the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections once again. He “hates a quarrel but he loves a good fight,” the Ford Motor Company’s Samuel S. Marquis would later write of his boss. He “never forgets. The long years of struggle against poverty and ridicule in the development of his car is the evidence of the presence in him of a quality to be admired by his friends, but to be most seriously and fearfully contemplated by his enemies.”

Newberry, by contrast, had had more than enough.

The election of 1922 brought an abundance of Democrats and progressive Republicans into the Senate. “Regular Republicans,” as the U.S. Senate historian puts it, were no longer going to be able to muster the votes to spare Newberry the humiliation of being kicked out. Newberry didn’t give them the chance. Complaining of “over four years of continuous propaganda of misrepresentation and untruth,” Senator Truman Newberry up and quit in the middle of November 1922.

“The Senate Chamber never had any attraction for me,” he told fellow Michigan senator Charles Townsend. “I am thankful every hour that I do not have to stay and associate with many of the personalities and mentalities that infest that room.”

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Ford’s insistence that Newberry was some sort of cancer on the republic lived on. One of the magnate’s publications, the Searchlight, shouted “Newberryism Means Death to Democracy.”

“Newberryism” became an all-purpose term for dirty money, which was an odd thing for one of the richest men in the world to complain about. But Ford hadn’t expected he would have to spend his way into office. Not just a businessman but a celebrity, Ford had been certain his fame would carry the day. He and his team were more certain when the Republicans had chosen a fellow familiar to everyone at the best country clubs but whose name was otherwise little known. The unshakable belief that Ford’s fame should have carried the day was even one of the arguments the carmaker’s lawyers used against Newberry in the Senate trial: “Mr. Newberry was little known in Michigan” was “POINT 1” in the Ford lawyers’ 173-page brief before the Senate. The Republican’s relative obscurity was what had necessitated “a large and expensive campaign of publicity.”

Was that really such a bad thing? A century ago, celebrity was already a currency. Those who enjoyed an excess of it could be forgiven for trying to make celebrity the only legitimate and moral appeal to the electorate. Still, the high moralizing of the (very well-paid) Ford team, who suffered a case of the vapors at the thought of someone using money—money!—to promote a candidate, is comic. Buying advertisements and hiring campaign staff were “infamous practices” that meant seats in the U.S. Senate “may as well be auctioned off.” Is it a better system to hand offices to those with the most name recognition? Ford would have had us institute what, in modern terms, we might call a Kardashianarchy.

Maybe money isn’t so bad when it functions to give an unknown candidate the name recognition needed to compete. “We complain because so many voters stay away from the polls on election day, and at the same time we place hindrances in the way of those campaign activities which would be most effective in bringing them there,” prolific historian of American politics William B. Munro wrote, summing up his views of the Ford-Newberry contest. “The way to bring out the vote is to bring out the issues. The way to bring out the issues is to use the channels of publicity, which of course cannot be done without spending money.”

Ford was sure that the money Newberry spent was corrupt and justified his Inspector Javert-like obsession that Newberry had colluded with Wall Street bankers, which is to say Jews. Ford and his lawyers presented themselves as the champions of virtue: With his “unlawful expenditures and infamous practices,” Ford’s lawyers lectured the Senate, to let Newberry keep his seat was to make “manifest that seats in the United States Senate are for sale to the highest bidder.” Ford, on the other hand, deployed his fortune to investigate his opponent, hound Newberry’s associates, and tee up prosecutions. In doing so, he was convinced that he was acting on a commitment to justice itself.

Newberry might be forgiven for seeing it otherwise. “For regular Republicans, the investigations violated a different sense of justice, one connected to the rule of law,” Baker writes of the aftermath of the Ford-Newberry contest. Newberry’s Republican supporters “described the investigatory fury as just politics—mere politics that covered mundane motives with a scrim of principle.”

A century later we’re in for an investigatory fury that may end up dwarfing Ford’s relentless attack. Will it prove to be justice or just politics? That may turn on whether the prosecutorial enthusiasts of today’s politics find a way to fend off the seductive perils of Fordism.