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Gleaners. As always in such case, men hastened to glean personal benefits from the situation. Arthur Brisbane, Hearst editor, established his intimacy with Mr. Ford; said: "Twice this year I have gone to Dearborn and have talked to him about the Dearborn Independent articles. On my most recent visit—on May 11—Mr. Ford, with whom I spent five hours at his experimental plant, told me he had made up his mind to discontinue absolutely and permanently in any publication owned by him all articles such as those that had given offense to Jews. He added that if his orders were violated he would—I quote his words—'shut the thing down completely and throw out the machinery.'
"Under what circumstances he eight weeks later wrote and signed the statement that he sent to me for publication I do not know." The effect of this was discounted by the interpretation furnished the New York World by its Washington correspondent, Charles Michelson: "Henry Ford's recantation of his anti-Semitism ... is taken by the politicians to be his first step towards entering the 1928 campaign for the Presidency. The circumstance that he made the Hearst newspapers his vehicle for the dissemination of his change of heart is interpreted as indicating that William Randolph Hearst is about to push the candidacy of the flivver king. . . . Obviously it would have been embarrassing for the publisher of a chain of newspapers, greatly depending upon department store advertising, to appear as the champion of the country's chief exponent of anti-Semitism."
Less solemn than this, more comical was the letter sent Mr. Ford by airmail from the Welcoming Committee of the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce. The Rockaways are a group of up-&-doing suburbs of New York. Charles A. Levine, transatlantic flyer, has friends there, and it is to do him honor when he returns from Europe that the Welcoming Committee is functioning. Its Chairman, shrewd Richard M. Gipson, wrote Mr. Ford: "At this time, when you have magnanimously attested your faith in the Jewish people, it would seem fitting that you should be present at the banquet to be held upon Mr. Levine's return from France. The Rockaways, so cosmopolitan in population, are the home of many distinguished representatives of the Jewish race, and your presence here would be striking evidence of the faith that you attest in them."
Edsel Ford. To Edsel Ford, only child of Henry Ford, and President of the Ford Motor Co., the Chicago Journal of Commerce imputed credit for Henry Ford's face-about: "It seems reasonable to suspect that Edsel Ford has had a hand in these evolutions and revolutions. Edsel has given a general impression of steadiness, of balance. In this respect he has been much unlike his brilliant father. Ordinarily a poor man, grown rich, must take pains so that his son shall not be spoiled. In the case of the Fords the procedure has been reversed. . . . Meanwhile Edsel Ford, growing up in the shadow of his father's greatness, seems to have taken a true measure both of his father and of himself."