On April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan was found dead in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia. Mary Phagan was a pretty, busty 14-year-old pencil factory employee and the object of unwanted at-tention from the factory manager, Leo Frank, head of the local B'nai B'rith Lodge.
Eventually Frank was indicted for her murder. At the time of the Leo Frank case there was next to no anti-Semitism in the South. Jews were perceived as people of the book. Up until the time of the Leo Frank case, the most famous instance of anti-Semitism in the South was perpetrated by a Yankee. On December 17, 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant, writing from his headquarters in Holly Springs, Mississippi, announced that "the Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also departmental order, are hereby expelled from the department within 24 hours from the receipt of this order.''' The North could hardly accuse the South of anti-Semitism because no official in the North had a rank as high as the one which Judah P. Benjamin, Jefferson Davis's right-hand man, held during the period of the Confederacy. After the war Jewish peddlers made their way down South, but, in spite of their often sharp business practices, there weren't enough of them to provoke anti-Semitism. Besides, when it came to racial issues, the South had other more pressing problems.
Racial prejudice in the South was a black and white issue. The Frank trial took place at a time when the South's redemption from reconstruction was an accomplished fact. Lynching was, if anything, on the wane in 1913, and the citizens of the state of Georgia were eager to prove their allegiance to the rule of law. In this regard, most Georgians viewed the Frank proceedings with a sense of pride, as showing how far they had come from their recent troubled past. In spite of the volatile material at the heart of the case-the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl-no one had been lynched-not even the Negro watchman Jim Conley-before the case went to trial. If anything, the Frank trial showed lack of prejudice when it indicted Frank over the pencil company's Negro watchman, Jim Conley.
Once the trial began, Leo Frank's character, specifically his sexual morals became the central issue. Female employees testified that Frank often entered their dressing room and favored them with unwanted attention that included kissing and fondling. A newspaper boy who was a friend of Mary Phagan testified that she had been pursued by Frank and was afraid to be alone with him, as she was on the last day of her life when she went to his office to pick up her paycheck. On that Saturday in April, the city of Atlanta was preparing for a parade commemorating its Civil War veterans, and the pencil factory's office was empty except for Frank and Phagan, a fact Frank would have known when he told Phagan to come in and pick up her pay. Phagan's salary for a week's work at a machine which put erasers on pencils was $1.20.
The Leo Frank case put Atlanta's Jews on trial because they chose to close ranks around Frank even though four Jews were on the panel which indicted him. But the Frank trial also put the new south on trial. The boosters at the local chamber of commerce may have benefited financially from the new southern economy, but the average to poor man in Georgia wasn't particularly happy about the fact that the South had been turned into the cheap labor pool for northern industrialists because it was his daughters who ended up working in their factories. The fact that cheap labor in the South meant child labor made a bad situation even worse.
When the sexual exploitation of child labor was added to the mix, the sullen South reached the limit of its patience and demanded an expeditious trial. The southern ruling class which was trying to ingratiate itself with the northern industrialists by offering the malnourished children of Atlanta as cheap labor knew that justice delayed in this instance was an open invitation to a return to the rule of lynch law.
Leo Frank and his lawyers, however, went to trial blithely unaware of the real dynamics that informed the case. When Leo Dorsey, the state prosecutor called a witness who claimed that he saw Frank engage in an act of sexual perversion with a local prostitute, the defense attorneys woke up to the fact that everyone, including most importantly the jury, felt that Leo Frank's character was on trial.
The fact that they refused to question Frank and let him clear the air on his own character, a move which would subject him to cross-examination of the sort they tacitly admitted would harm his case, only confirmed the character issue as central in everyone's mind. When Frank finally did take the stand he talked for hours about the ins and outs of the pencil business, further alienating his southern audience by giving the impression that he was a totally callous and self-absorbed alien who viewed the girls who worked for him as nothing more than the robots who ran his machines. If the girls were robots, the Georgians reasoned, why couldn't the more attractive girls, like Mary Phagan, be seen as sexual robots as well?
II
Realizing that their strategy was in deep trouble, Frank's lawyers decided to play the race card. Luther Z. Rosser, one of Frank's attorneys, called Jim Conley to the stand and tried his best to entrap the Negro in his own testimony. When that failed, he resorted to naked race-baiting, which took two forms. In the first instance, Rosser claimed that the only reason that Frank had been indicted was because of his race, implying that the South was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. "Gen-tlemen," Rosser told the court, "take a look at this spectacle if you can. Here is a Jewish boy from the North. He is unacquainted with the South. He came here alone and without friends, and he stood alone. He is defenseless and helpless .... ", Frank's other attorney Reuben R. Arnold was, if anything, even franker about the accusations the defense attorneys now leveled against the state of Georgia. "I tell everybody, all within the hearing of my voice, that if Frank hadn't been a Jew he never would have been prosecuted. I am asking my kind of people to give this man fair play. Before I'd do a Jew injustice, I'd want my throat cut from ear to ear.''3
The defense then moved to the other prong of its race strategy, its attack on Jim Conley in particular and all Negroes in general as unreliable and incapable of being trusted. Pandering to the lowest anti-Black sentiments in the South, Luther Rosser told the jury that "Conley is a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger with a spreading nose through which probably tons of cocaine have been sniffed."
"They got a dirty, black Negro," Rosser continued, "and in order to give impetus to his testimony they had a barber cut his hair and shave him, and they gave him a bath. They took rags from his back and he came in here like a slicked onion. They tried to make him look like a respectable negro.''
Rosser and Arnold's strategy was predicated upon a fundamental rule of the South. If a disputed issue comes down to the word of a white man versus the word of a Negro, the nod always goes to the white man. Neither Rosser nor Arnold, however, seemed aware that they had undermined their own case by playing up the fact that Frank was a Jew. If he were a member of an alien race from New York, a section of the United States that had been traditionally hostile to the South, it was not clear that he fulfilled the Southerner's criterion of whiteness. Beyond that, Rosser and Arnold failed to understand that in calling the citizens of Georgia anti-Semites, the defense insulted the very group they needed to persuade. Was the jury supposed to feel that they were somehow above the accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against their fellow Georgians when the jury knew full well that it was nothing more than a randomly chosen sample of that citizenry?
Dorsey, the state's attorney, jumped on an even more glaring inconsistency. If the state's case was motivated by prejudice, why would they ignore a suspect as tempting as the Negro Jim Conley and go after someone whose Jewishness had been irrelevant until the defense raised it as an issue?
"Gentlemen," the state's attorney asked the jury, "do you think that I, or that these detectives, are actuated by prejudice? Would we as sworn officers of the law have sought to hang Leo Frank on account of his race and religion and passed up Jim Conley, a Negro? Prejudice?"
Dorsey reminded the jury that it was the defense which brought up the issue of prejudice in the first case. His rebuttal then "all but obliterated the defense's accusation" and exposed "the cry of anti-Semitism [as] a deliberate ploy to salvage a losing case.''7 A short peroration on Jewish leaders which included praise of Benjamin Disraeli and Judah P. Benjamin, allowed Dorsey to take the high ground and announce to a jury that was already sensitive to the idea that northern capital had unlimited rights over the south, that all men were equal when they stood before the bar of justice.
Having demolished the charge of anti-Semitism, Dorsey could then probe the inconsistencies in the defense's case. "What business did this man have going into those dressing rooms?" Dorsey wondered, resurrecting the moral issue that the defense had been so eager to dodge.8 Oney underscores the shocking nature of the charges leveled against Frank's character and the effect they would have on a jury in Georgia in 1913:
To accuse Frank of attempted rape and murder was bad enough, but to imply that due to some unspecified physical abnormality he had tried to perform what most Atlantans would have considered an act of perversion and what Georgia law regarded as the capital offense of oral sodomy was devastating.9
There were other issues that argued for the truthfulness of Conley's testimony. The defense attorneys tried to discredit Conley's claim that Frank told him he would never go to jail for the crime because he had rich relatives in New York. "Why should I hang?" Frank allegedly told Conley, "I have wealthy people in Brooklyn?" How, Dorsey wondered, did an ignorant Negro like Conley know that Brooklyn existed in the first place and that Frank had wealthy relatives there, and that "they had $20,000 in cool cash out at interest" if Frank hadn't mentioned that fact to him?' How was it that the note which Frank claimed Conley wrote said, "the Negro did it," when Conley would have said, "the Negro done it"?"
As Dorsey bore down on the defense's case, his words began to have their effect on the people in the court room. Both Frank's wife and mother burst into tears. (At another point Frank's mother stood up and called Dorsey "a Christian dog," putting another nail in her son's coffin.)" Even Atlanta's pro-Frank newspa-per, The Georgian, claimed that Dorsey's summation speech to the jury was a "a white hot philippic, the greatest ever heard in a criminal court in the South"
Unaware of the fact that their racial strategy was alienating the very jury they needed to persuade, Frank's defense attorneys continued to invoke racial prejudice without understanding that Frank's failure to confront the Negro's attack on his character condemned him in the eyes of the jury because "never in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, never in the history of the African race in America, did an ignorant filthy Negro accuse a white man of a crime and that man decline to face him". Knowing that he couldn't deal with the issue of Frank's sexual morals directly and fearing that his race-baiting tactics had failed, Defense Attorney Arnold in desperation called for a mistrial.
The plea for a mistrial was based on Arnold's claim that "the behavior of the spectators throughout this trial has been disgraceful.''' That claim was based on the fact that the judge, reacting to the fact that the temperature in the courtroom had reached 91 degrees at the height of the Atlanta summer in the days before air conditioning, ordered the courtroom's windows opened, exposing the proceedings to the scrutiny of the spectators who had assembled in the square in front of the courthouse. The charge of jury intimidation would gain a life of its own as it became embellished by subsequent news accounts ("Kill the Jew or we'll kill you," the most famous line, was totally apocryphal and made up by the press as part of a campaign to exonerate Frank.) Eventually, those claims made their way into the deliberations of Oliver Wendell Holmes, when the Frank appeal was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, no one who was at the trial substantiated the claim.
In the end, the defense strategy failed miserably, and Frank was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The guilty verdict made Leo Dorsey, who was carried on the shoulders of three men through the crowd of 5,000 which had assembled to hear the verdict, a local hero. Dorsey would go on to run for political office based on his conviction of Frank. The people of Georgia felt that the Frank case had vindicated the legitimacy of their state's institutions. Frank had had his day in court. No one had resorted to lynch law. Justice had been served.
The guilty verdict, however, had the exact opposite effect on Atlanta's Jews, who began to talk about Frank as the American Dreyfus and banded together to do whatever was necessary to overturn his conviction. Frank was found guilty during one of the greatest waves of Jewish migration since the flight from Egypt.
Beginning with the assassination of Czar Alexander II and continuing in light of the publicity which flowed from a series of pogroms that the Jews claimed were orchestrated by the czarist government, millions of Russian Jews fled, via ports like Hamburg, to the United States and congregated in places like the lower east side of Manhattan. This huge influx of Russian Jews arrived at a time when the German Jews who had arrived during the middle of the 19th century had achieved unprecedented political power largely because of their influence over publishing, Broadway, and the fledgling motion picture industry. Taken together, all of these factors contributed to a situation in which American Jews were prone to see an anomalous American incident like the Frank case as part of a larger European pattern of anti-Semitism of the sort that had created the Dreyfus incident in France and the pogroms in Russia, and that made them determined to do something about it.
The first indication of what was to come had already happened in Atlanta during the early days of the trial. Upset by what they considered the unfair coverage of the trial in The Georgian, the Jews put editorial pressure on the paper by withdrawing their advertising. The other papers in Atlanta, The Journal and The Constitution, "paid no attention to the demands of the J ews," but they were locally owned. The Georgian was owned by William Randolph Hearst, and soon pressure was brought to bear in New York, where Jewish influence was much stronger than it was in Atlanta. Gradually, Hearst succumbed to the pressure and when he did the editorials in The Georgian began to take a definite pro-Frank stance. In order to placate the Jews, The Georgian created a columnist whose only beat was the Frank trial. That columnist, who was identified only as "the Old Police Reporter," was unfailingly sympathetic to Frank and, before long, the machinations of his Jewish backers.
The Georgian would remain determinedly pro-Frank throughout the trial, something that other papers began to notice. Writing in the American Mercury, Herbert Asbury, who had worked for the Georgian during the Frank trial, admitted that "Although evidence was constantly piling up against [Frank], toward the end we worked as hard trying to prove his innocence and build up sentiment for him and against the Negro, Jim Conley." Reacting to pressure from Hearst in New York, who was in turn reacting to pressure from Atlanta's Jews, The Georgian opined that it was
"the present Grand Jury's DUTY to indict Conley without further ado!''''' When the Grand Jury did not indict Conley, The Georgian ignored the fact that several Jews were on the panel, even though that fact constituted a "stunning victory" for the prosecutor. Shortly after their complaints reached his ears, Hearst arrived in Atlanta, where he met with the city's rich Jews and the newly elected governor of the state John Slaton. Slaton, in addition to having been elected to the highest office in the state, was also a member of the same law firm as Frank's lawyers, a fact which raised questions of conflict of interest which became harder to avoid as the clamor to get Slaton to pardon Frank became greater. Before long, the ramifications of the case became clear for the citizens of Georgia. At issue was the rule of law and whether the law applied to all of Georgia's citizens regardless of their race or wealth or connections. Having suffered through the manipulation of the political process as a form of covert Yankee-inspired social engineering during the Reconstruction era, the South had used the Klan and lynching to restore popular sovereignty. Now with that era safely in the past, Georgians prided themselves on their return to the judicial process, only to be denounced by the nation's press as bigots because they had convicted a Jew in a trial that everyone in attendance had considered fair and above board. To the average Georgian, the fact that the state had not railroaded Jim Conley or the fact that a mob hadn't lynched him was a sign that Georgia's legal system had conquered prejudice. Now the national press was attacking Georgia for a prejudice which it never knew it had, namely, anti-Semitism, and ignoring all of the evidence that the trial had amassed to testify for their belief in the rule of law and the fairness of the proceedings. The Georgians were in effect being called anti-Semitic bigots because they had given Leo Frank a fair trial and not succumbed to the special pleading of the northern newspapers, most of which were owned by Jews.
After Frank was found guilty and sentenced to die on October 10, 1913, Judge Roan went out of his way to assure him that "I have tried to see that you had a fair trial for the offense for which you were indicted." The people of Georgia may have agreed with Judge Roan, but the Jews were convinced that Frank was the victim of an anti-Semitic conspiracy, and it was this view which got trumpeted throughout the northern press.
Once the full fury of the northern press became apparent in the aftermath of Frank's conviction, it became clear that the Jews were going to create the very anti-Semitism they wanted to avoid as the Frank case took on a life of its own as the test case for the moral legitimacy of the New South. Who had more power, Atlantans began to wonder, the state of Georgia, and by extension the people who appointed its judges and representatives, or the New York Times and all of the other Jewish owned newspapers who were demanding Frank's acquittal and then his pardon?
III
Atlanta's Jews were appalled by the verdict and saw it as a personal attack on their community, even though until that time there had been no evidence of in Atlanta. Rabbi David Marx, heretofore leader of Atlanta's assimilationist minded synagogue, decided to make the Frank case his personal cause.
Marx headed for New York, where he planned to elicit support from the heads of organized American Jewry. In a letter to one potential supporter, Marx claimed that the Frank case was "without doubt an American 'Dreyfus' case" because "the evidence against Frank is purely prejudice and perjury. The feeling against the Damned Jew is so bitter that the jury was intimidated and feared for their lives, which undoubtedly would have been in danger had any other verdict been rendered,''''
While in New York, Marx met with Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of the New York Times and that profession's most powerful Jew. Marx was not going to have an easy time selling the Frank case to Ochs, who had the reputation of being a "non-Jewish Jew" who "will have nothing to do with any Jewish movement,''' Ochs had rejected an invitation to join the board of the newly formed American Jewish Committee and had sworn that the New York Times would never become "a Jewish newspaper .... By the end of their meeting, all the zealous rabbi could elicit from Ochs was a promise to look into the matter. In fulfilling his promise, Ochs got a report from the Atlanta stringer for the Times, informing him that it would be a mistake to support Frank, not just for Ochs and the Times but for Frank himself, who would bear the brunt of the backlash. In fact, the stringer said, "that the worst thing for him that could happen would be for Jews to rally to him as Jews .... Ultimately, Ochs made the mistake of ignoring this advice, and as the stringer indicated Frank paid the ultimate price for that mistake.
Marx had an easier sell before him when he met with Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee. Unlike Ochs, Marshall was an openly Jewish advocate who had spent the past ten years fighting anti-Semitism. In 1911 he had persuaded the United States to abrogate a treaty with Russia which prevented "American Jews from freely conducting business in Russia .... That that business involved selling revolvers to Jewish revolutionaries went unmentioned by the AJC and the American press. Marshall agreed with Marx and felt that the Frank case met the criteria for AJC involvement, but he feared open advocacy of the case might backfire, especially in Georgia, and create more anti-Semitism, which would, in turn, make overturning the verdict impossible. According to Marshall, "any action that is taken must emanate from non-Jewish sources,''' This meant creating front groups and giving the impression that the newspapers which orchestrated the campaign were reporting on a groundswell of popular opinion. Marshall proposed working behind the scenes to change Atlantans' thinking. "There is only one way of dealing with this matter," he wrote to another AJC board member, "and that is in a quiet unobtrusive manner to bring influence to bear on the Southern press [to create] a wholesome public opinion which will free this unfortunate young man from the terrible judgment which rests against him ....
By the end of September, articles began appearing in papers like Cincinnati's American Israelite, claiming that "Frank's religion precluded a fair trial.. .. The man was convicted at the dictates of a mob, the jury and judge fearing for their lives ....This, of course, was precisely what Marshall did not want to happen, and it brought about precisely the reaction which Marshall feared. Stung by claims in the press, the jury responded by saying that it had not been influenced much less intimidated by the crowd which had gathered outside the court house. The jury felt compelled to repudiate false reports which had appeared in the press.
The buggy salesman Henslee denied explicitly Samuel Aron's claim that he told the Atlanta Elks Club: "I'm glad they indicted the God damned Jew." The claim was preposterous, Henslee claimed, because the Elks had many Jewish members. Monroe S. Woodward, an Atlanta hardware store salesman who had served on the jury testified that "I did not at any time, while a juror, hear any applause except such as occurred in open court, and which was heard by the judge and attorneys in the case .... There was never any applause or cheering inside or outside of the court within my knowledge while the case was being considered." Accounts of mob intimidation in the press followed by the vehement denials by those who were actually there as participants confirmed the idea in the mind of Georgians that the Frank case was a contest between big northern interests controlled by Jews and the common man, who still had faith in the American legal system.
States Attorney Leo Dorsey articulated these sentiments when he argued in court against the new trial that the newspapers were proposing, claiming that another trial would be an attack on the people of Georgia. "If," Dorsey argued, "the verdict of guilty against Leo Frank is set aside upon such trivial grounds as the convicted man's lawyers recite in their motion, it will justify very largely the contempt in which people are beginning to hold their courts and the administration of their laws.'' Dorsey went on to claim that the Jews were willing to slander the entire state of Georgia in order to overturn Frank's conviction. Dorsey maintained that race had nothing to do with Frank's conviction: "The people were not aroused against Leo M. Frank because he is a Jew but because he is a criminal of the worst type. In the name of the Gentiles of Atlanta, I declare that when the counsel for the defense charges the jury with bias and charges Atlantans with intimidating the jury with a display of mob spirit, they are slandering the citizenship of the entire community.'' Moved by Dorsey's argument, the judge denied the motion for a new trial.
On November 8, 1913, eight days after the motion for a new trial was denied, Jacob Schiff and the board of the American Jewish Committee met at Temple Emanu-EI in New York to discuss their next move. Louis Marshall again warned that any expression of Jewish solidarity which gave the impression that the Jews were determined to get Frank off the hook no matter what would only create the very anti-Semitism their organization strove to avoid. Marshall's caveat, however, was no match for Jacob Schiff. the most powerful Jew in America, who argued for the AJC's open involvement in the Frank case. In the end a compromise of sorts was reached, and the AJC agreed to support Frank's case by manipulating public opinion from behind the scenes. The AJC voted to retain Albert Lasker, head of a Chicago public relations firm who had established famous brands such as Budweiser beer and Quaker Oats, to undermine the legitimacy of the Frank verdict and orchestrate public opinion to get it overturned.
None of the Jews involved in the compromise leading to the approval of this campaign seems to have considered the dangers it involved, especially for Leo Frank, whose life hung in the balance. Even the open publicity campaign which Marshall feared posed fewer dangers. A backlash against Jewish support for Frank had begun to manifest itself-and not just in Georgia. Even in New York, the capital of the Jewish publishing industry, there was no mystery to what was going on if the New York Sun could run headlines like, "Jews fight to save Leo Frank.". If it could be shown that the Jews were working behind the scenes to orchestrate this sort of feeling, the reaction would be that much worse, and Marshall's fears that the very anti-Semitism which they opposed would become a very ugly reality.
Ultimately all of the dire predictions of the Jews became self-fulfilling prophecies. In response to the attack on the state of Georgia, its citizens and its institutions, "Prejudice did finally develop against Frank and against the Jews. But Frank's friends were responsible for this anti-Semitic spirit .... The supposed solidarity of the Jews for Frank, even if he was guilty, caused a Gentile solidarity against him."
Cruse claims that the Frank case revealed that even if Jews experienced discrimination it had no economic consequences. And that fact called the significance of the Black-Jewish Alliance into question. In his view, "It was the crucial disparity between the economic status of blacks and Jews that qualified the meaning of any alleged social significance of the Black-Jewish Alliance." "Black marginality" and "Jewish marginality," far from being "two sides of the coin of racial prejudice" were totally different phenomena because they had no economic common denominator. This double standard would go on to have far-reaching conse-quences, but its existence emerged for the first time in the Frank case.
By late fall of 1913, Albert B. Lasker had not only agreed to orchestrate the publicity campaign to exonerate Frank, he had contributed $1000 of his own money to the cause and had raised equal amounts from his father and fellow Chicagoan Julius Rosenwald, the chairman of Sears Roebuck and Company. At around the same time Adolph Ochs had overcome his scruples about using his paper as a vehicle for Jewish advocacy and had committed the New York Times to Frank's cause as well. From that moment until the time of Frank's death, the Times devoted front-page coverage to every aspect of the story.
The conspiracy to exonerate Frank got into trouble almost immediately, which is not surprising considering the methods it had chosen to use. As one of his first acts, Lasker hired the famous detective William Burns, a celebrity of rock star stature in his day, who in turn set himself up in Atlanta's most expensive hotel and announced that he was going to get to the bottom of the case and solve a mystery which the courts of Georgia had already resolved. "I am in the Frank case to the finish," Burns announced after his arrival in March 1914. Instead of informing Burns that the jury had already rendered its verdict, the Hearst paper in Atlanta went along with this publicity stunt and announced in a front page headline: "Detective promises Decisive Probe."
In the meantime, Albert Lasker, the man who had paid Burns his $4,500 retainer fee, had, seemingly independently, come up with the slogan which would do for Leo Frank what Lasker had done for Quaker Oats and Budweiser Beer. The phrase, "The Truth is on the March," began appearing in articles on Frank across the country and from the lips of Frank himself, who included the phrase in just about all of the interviews he granted from his jail cell . .
"A rallying cry had been born'lIo and it looked as if it were making inroads in Atlanta itself, when one of the locally owned papers, The Journal reversed its previous position and came out for a new trial. Appearances in this instance were deceptive. The publicity campaign may have caused the defection of one paper, but it mobilized the opposition further by bringing another paper into the battle on the side of the Georgians. The Jeffersonian had nowhere near the circulation of the Journal when the Frank case began, but the Journal didn't have an editor like Tom Watson, who turned out to be a genius in articulating the resentment which the common man in Georgia felt over the Frank case and the heavy-handed interference of the Jews which provoked it. For 11 months, Watson had ignored the Frank trial in the pages of the Jeffersonian, which up until that time had distinguished itself by running a series attacking the Catholic Church, in which Editor Watson referred to the pope as "a fat dago." The defection of the Journal had brought Watson into the fight, and Watson was outraged at Yankee Jewish meddling in the Georgia legal system and determined to ask the questions which the other papers had pointedly ignored.
"Who is paying for all this?" Watson wondered when William Burns, the world's highest paid detective showed up in Atlanta. The spike in circulation that The Jeffersonian enjoyed in the wake of Watson's entry into the Frank case indicated that many other Georgians had similar questions on their minds. "Does a Jew expect extraordinary favors and immunities because of his race?'"' Again Watson seemed not only capable but willing to articulate the questions on everyone's mind.
"Is it wise," Watson continued, "for the Jews to risk the good name and the popularity of the whole race in the extraordinary, extra-judicial and utterly unprecedented methods that are being worked to save this decadent offshoot of a great people."
There no indication that the Jews who were bent on orchestrating Frank's pardon were aware of Tom Watson at this stage of the game, nor is there any indication that they would have heeded his warnings if they were. With the machinery of public relations firmly behind their cause and with hitherto hostile newspapers now calling for a new trial, victory seemed within the grasp of the Frank camp. In the meantime, Lasker and his associates were counting the cost for final victory.
On April 20, Lasker came up with another $5,000 for the cause, and estimating that a total of $20,000 would be needed for victory, Lasker wrote what Oney calls "the cordial equivalent of a shakedown letter" to Louis Wiley, the business manger of the New York Times, informing him that "New York ought to give at least $10,000, and much more .... Will you please get the ball in motion and raise the maximum amount you can?" On April 22, Wiley complied with Lasker's demand by writing a letter-on New York Times stationery-to Jacob Schiff asking for the rest of the money, prompting Oney to opine that "by the date Wiley wrote Schiff the Times had clearly crossed the boundary between journalism and advocacy."
Tom Watson had surmised as much from his vantage point in Georgia. The state of Georgia was now on the receiving end of undeserved "Nation-Wide Abuse", as he phrase it in one Jeffersonian headline, and the main culprit in this campaign was the New York Times under the leadership of Adolph Ochs, who serves as "a most useful servant of the Wall Street interests, runs a Tory paper in New York, whose chief end in life seems to be to uphold all the atrocities of Special Privilege and all the monstrous demands of Big Money."
Favorable press coverage was, however, only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the conspiracy to exonerate Frank. Most of the money in that campaign was going to Detective Burns, who was using it to bribe witnesses to recant the testimony they had given under oath. The Jewish plot to exonerate Frank blew up in the faces of the wealthy Jews who were orchestrating it when accusations of bribery began appearing in the Jeffersonian. "How much longer," Watson asked in the April 23 edition of The Jeffersonian, "will the people of Atlanta endure the lawless doings of William J. Burns? What right does this sham detective have to tamper with the witnesses that told the truth on Leo Frank, that foul degenerate who murdered little Mary Phagan?" Watson concluded that "This man Burns richly deserves a coat of tar and feathers, plus a ride on a fence-rail. He has been engineering a campaign of systematic lies tending to blacken this state and tending to provoke an outbreak of popular indignation.''
Popular indignation did in fact break out in Marietta, Mary Phagan's home-town, when Burns and his assistant Dan Lehon showed up, ostensibly to bribe other witnesses. Recognizing Burn's face from newspaper photos, Robert E. Lee Howell attacked him on the street. A crowd quickly formed and soon cries of "Lynch Him!" filled the air, forcing "the great detective," according to Watson's account, to run "through several dark alleys as fast as his legs would carry him." Even the normally hostile New York Times was forced to admit that "outside influence" had become the crucial issue in the Frank case. According to the report in the Times, "Bob Howell's hand, which slapped Burns in the face, struck fire out of all Georgia. In a dramatic way, it focused attention on a growing opinion that money and 'outside influence' were being used to save a rich man from punishment for the murder of a working girl.''
The issue of outside influence went from bad to worse when subsequent events showed that Tom Watson was also right when he leveled charges of bribery against Burns. Burns was using the money of Lasker and Schiff and other wealthy Jews to bribe witnesses to recant their testimony. On April 27, Rev. C. B. Ragsdale "retracted his statement that he had overheard Jim Conley confess to Mary Phagan's murder, asserting that an unnamed Burns agent had paid him to make the claim." Watson felt vindicated by the revelation, but the full extent of Burns' largesse with Jewish money was just beginning to emerge.
Eventually the state became involved in an inquiry into Burns' activity since his arrival in Atlanta. After State Attorney Dorsey put Burns on the stand, the famous detective admitted that he had "spirited Annie Maude Carter out of Atlanta, making it impossible for state's officers to question her." Burns also admitted that he had promised one witness a job as a Pullman porter. Burns coupled that promise with the threat "that if he did not renounce his assertion regarding the superintendent's allegedly suspicious behavior on the day of the murder, 'the Jews' would get him." Dorsey then went to work on "the half-dozen retractions the defense had secured from factory girls who at the trial had sworn to Frank's moral turpitude," discovering that one of Burns' agents posed as an author and promised to share his commission with Carrie Smith if she were willing to sign an affidavit repudiating testimony damaging to Frank's case.
Eventually Burns and his associates were convicted of suborning witnesses and Burns had to close his office when the Atlanta City Council revoked his license. Even though Dorsey was never able to trace Burns' money to Lasker and Schiff, Burn's testimony did "irretrievable damage" (Herbert Haas's words to Lasker) to Frank's cause.
Even though it came close to being named as a co-conspirator in the case, the New York Times did not back off. It continued to find fault with Georgia and its legal system, giving further credence, if that was needed, to Tom Watson's charge of "outside interference." When Judge Hill denied the extraordinary motion for a new trial, the Times fulminated once again that "The trial of Leo M. Frank in Atlanta for the murder of Mary Phagan was from the beginning about everything that a murder trial ought not to be. Judge Hill of the superior court denied the extraordinary motion for a new trial, yet it is impossible to feel that the first trial was fair."
The Burns debacle and the fact that Rabbi Marx had also been implicated in a bribery scheme caused a new eruption of discord among the councils of New York Jewry. "I have been disgusted at the farcical methods to which Burns has resorted," the American Jewish Committee's Louis Marshall wrote the NYT's Louis Wiley. "Every one of his acts has been a burlesque upon modern detective ideas. It is deplorable that a case so meritorious as that of Frank should have been brought to this point of destruction by such ridiculous methods."
"I am afraid," Samuel Untermeyer, Marshall's law partner, concluded, contemplating the indictments that were sure to be handed down against Burns and Lehon, "the whole business has been terribly botched.'''
All of these revelations, of course, meant vindication for Tom Watson, who could crow 'I told you so' and have the common man of Georgia nod in solemn agreement.
As troubling as the "outside influence" issue had been, it was not over when Burns had been exposed as the agent of as yet anonymous Jewish backers. The same forces that gave Burns the money he needed to bribe witnesses could now exert their influence on the governor of the state, a man who had always been involved in a flagrant conflict of interest. "There isn't a right-thinking man of us," Watson wrote, "who does not feel troubled because of Governor Slaton's connec-tion with the lawyers of the defense.''
On October 14, 1914, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld Judge Benjamin Hill's motion denying Frank a new trial. The world of subsidized journalistic fantasy could enflame public opinion, but it was gaining no purchase on the mind of the judiciary. The Supreme Court claimed "There was no abuse of discretion on the part of the trial judge in refusing to grant a new trial, nor was there any error in overruling the motion on any of the grounds set out therein.''''3 Nor did it know of any provision
in the constitution of the United States or of this state ... which gives an accused person the right to disregard the rules of procedure in a state and demand that he shall move in his own way and be grated absolute freedom because of an irregularity (if there is one) in receiving the verdict.
Undeterred by either the Georgia Supreme Court ruling or the failure of their agent to bribe the witnesses in the Frank case, the Jewish campaign to exonerate Frank turned to what had always been their strong suit, orchestrating favorable publicity. To accomplish this end, Lasker tapped Christopher Powell Connolly, an Irish-Catholic journalist from Butte, Montana, to write Frank's story. Connolly was given unlimited access to the prisoner and his legal defense team, and Frank considered him his Zola, whose book J'accuse had cleared Dreyfus's name. It was Connolly who first launched the famous "Kill the Jew or we'll kill you" quote, but he introduced it in a way that was unverifiable, absolving himself of any accountability while at the same time insinuating the idea into an already inflamed public mind. "On the last day I was in Atlanta," Connolly wrote, "I went to the office of one of Frank's lawyers to say good-by. The telephone rang. 'If they don't hang that Jew, we'll hang you,' came the message.'' From Connolly's pen the famous phrase entered the public mind as if it had been shouted by the mob at an intimidated jury, long after the jury itself had denied that this ever happened. At Connolly's hand, the man whom the prosecution had portrayed as a pervert and child molester became a "shy nervous intellectual.'' Unlike the Burns scheme, Lasker picked a winner in Connolly. The Collier's article had its desired effect by introducing the Frank case to the entire nation.
"Outside the state of Georgia," Albert Lasker wrote, "the press of the United States, including the leading papers of every city in the South are editorially agitating public sentiment for the unfortunate Frank. Daily, hundreds of papers are editorially crying out that Frank's execution would amount to judicial murder.'' The New York papers, most significantly, William Randolph Hearst's flagship, the Journal (following in the footsteps of his Atlanta property) took the lead in pleading the case for the condemned man. "If Frank's life is saved," wrote Arthur Brisbane, "Frank will owe [it] not least to anyone of the lawyers you have paid so liberally but to W. R. Hearst, a man of real power and of a kindness of heart that is not appreciated." The Collier's article coupled with sympathetic treatment in the Hearst papers and the New York Times had the desired effect:
"Outside of Georgia, the perception that the state and its citizens were involved in an anti-Semitic persecution of an innocent man became universal." Inside Georgia, however, the opposite was true. Largely as a result of the work of Tom Watson, Georgians came to see the Frank case as an attack on their state and their way oflife that was being orchestrated by the rich Jews who owned the northern press and were using it as a weapon against the South. "Never before in the history of this country," Watson wrote on December 4, 1914, has any convicted criminal been given the freedom of the daily papers that Frank has enjoyed ..... Simultaneously, with the appearance of this stuff in the Georgia papers, it appears in the northern papers which are owned by rich Jews. The Baltimore Sun, owned by the Abells, the New York World, owned by the Pulitzers, the Times owned by Ochs seem to receive Frank's statement by telegraph at the same time that he hands out copy to the dailies in Georgia.
Watson was quick to point out the hypocrisy of the press accounts. Normally, the North criticized the South for its treatment of the Negro. However, groups like the NAACP and other racial watchdogs of the North were silent when Frank's defense team launched into racial tirades which described Jim Conley as a cocaine-sniffing nigger, whose testimony couldn't be trusted because the man giving it was black. Apparently this type of racial slur was acceptable if it was used to get an acquittal for a Jew. Watson was quick to point out other forms of hypocrisy as well:
In the Frank case, the great point emphasized by the Jewish papers is that the main witness against Frank was a Negro! .. It seems that Negroes are good enough to hold office, sleep in our beds, eat at our tables, marry our daughters, and mongrelize the Anglo-Saxon race, but are not good enough to bear testi-mony against a rich Jew!
Watson was not alone in feeling this way. The circulation figures of The Jeffersonian proved that he was adept in formulating the issues in ways that articulated the frustrations which the common man felt in this case. But it wasn't just the common man who was incensed at coverage of the Frank case in the northern press.
Thomas Loyless, editor of the Augusta Chronicle accused the Times and Adolph Ochs of slandering the people of Georgia by making it appear "that Frank's race or religion had anything whatsoever to do with his conviction.'' In mid-January, former Georgia Governor Joseph Brown wondered aloud on the pages of the Augusta Chronicle, "Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime?'' Brown's statement was a sign that the lines were hardening. It was now Georgia versus the World.
Georgians who thought that Frank deserved a new trial were seen as traitors. As the Kansas City Star's McDonald had observed, "The managing editor, associate editor, city editor, assistant city editor and court reporter of an Atlanta newspaper said to me they knew Frank was entitled to a new trial... [but] "We dare not; we would be accused of being bought by Jew money," they answered. On the other hand, the American Jewish Committee was in no mood to back down because they "understood that Supreme Court justices read the New York Times and could be influenced by a national hue and cry. With the case headed back to the capital, Louis Marshall made the calculated decision that continuing coverage by crusading northern newspapers was of greater strategic value than not.''
However, even after the Connolly article appeared in Collier's and caused a stir nationwide, enkindling new hope in Frank, the news on the judicial front continued to be bad. Frank's last judicial hope now lay with the Supreme Court of the United States, and this is where Marshall and Frank's legal team directed their attention. A delegation of AJC lawyers headed by Marshall first paid a call on Supreme Court Justice Joseph R. Lamar, who found the issue unworthy of review. Then on November 26, the AJC turned to Oliver Wendell Holmes, in whom they found a more sympathetic reception.
On February 25, 1914, Frank's case was heard by the Supreme Court of the United States, with Louis Marshall leading off with his version the "Kill the Jew or we'll kill you" story of jury intimidation. "The crowd," Marshall told the court, "almost trespassed upon the jury box, hanging over the jury box, and their whispers were heard throughout the courtroom." Watson attacked Marshall's testimony attacking "the outsiders who cannot or will not weigh the facts which prove Frank's terrible crime .... If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN.'' In the end Marshall and the AJC got no farther with the United States Supreme Court than they had gotten with the legal system in Georgia. By a margin of seven to two, the Court upheld the denial of Frank's petition for a new trial, and denied every point Frank's lawyers made. In his dissent, Holmes claimed "Mob law does not become due process by securing the assent of a terrorized jury,'' but there was no basis in fact to the claim that the jury had been terrorized. It was becoming clear that anything that happened in the South which the northern press disliked could be characterized as mob law. But the seven-member majority on the court was not impressed with this sort of slur. "In our opinion," the Court concluded, "he is not shown to have been deprived of any right guaranteed to him the Fourteenth Amendment or any other provision of the Constitution or laws of the United States.''
Frank took the verdict calmly, claiming that "I will never suffer the death penalty" because "Truth will ultimately prevail.'' In the end, even though, as the New York Times put it, "Justice to Frank Doubted by Holmes," the Supreme Court refused to overturn the decision of the Georgia Court. This meant that there was only one hope left, and that hope resided, as Tom Watson feared, with Governor Slaton, who was now approaching the end of his term as governor.
Having lost their case at the Supreme Court, Lasker, Connolly and Rosenwald focused their efforts on Governor Slaton, who was scheduled to leave office on June 22, 1915. From the time the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Spring of 1915 until late June, Slaton was bombarded with letters and telegrams from "United States Senators representing Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, as well as the governors .of Arizona, Louisiana, Oregon, Michigan, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia."
In addition to the letters from prominent figures, Slaton received more than 100,000 letters from the nonprominent and petitions containing over two million signatures. Everyone seemed convinced that Frank was innocent, everyone that is, but the people of Georgia, and the man who articulated their position best, Tom Watson, urged Governor Slaton to stand firm in the face of a publicity campaign waged by the "millionaire Jews" and their press agents. On May 27, less than a month from Slaton's last day in office, Watson once again brought up the conflict of interest issue, claiming that it was "embarrassing to the majority of Georgians that John M. Slaton is a member of the law firm to which Frank's leading attorney belongs." Watson then went on to deliver a warning: The Governor of Georgia should consider
that if the Law is not allowed to take its course in the Frank case, we might as well abolish the law and save all future expense of similar mockeries of justice.
that if the Prison commission or the Governor undertake to undo-in whole or in part-what has been legally done by the courts that were established for that purpose, there will almost inevitably be the bloodiest riot ever known in the history of the South. Both Watson and Slaton knew that Georgians were united in support of the death penalty for Frank. Georgians were offended by the meddling of outsiders.
They were particularly upset about the machinations of rich Jews. Fred Morris, a lawyer and former University of Georgia football star, weighed in by claiming:
"Mary Phagan was a poor factory girl. What show would she have against Jew money? When they found they couldn't fool the people of Georgia, they got people from Massachusetts, New York and California to try and raise trouble. Well, we throw the advice of these outsiders back in their teeth. To hell with what they think."
A delegation from Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown told the Prison Commission: "we believe the evidence shows Frank guilty. People outside of Georgia who have read biased, I might say subsidized, accounts of this case have been urging you to commute. But if you commute this sentence, capital punishment might as well be abolished. If the extreme penalty should be enforced, it is in this case."
Outside of the building where the commutation hearings were held on Frank's fate, thousands of Georgians gathered to hear Fiddlin' John Carson sing his latest composition, "The Ballad of Mary Phagan," a performance which by the very fact that it took place underscored the widespread sentiment that Georgians had to hold the line against "outside influence" if they wanted to honor the memory of Mary Phagan and prevent the same thing from happening to their other daughters.
In the hearings themselves, Hugh Dorsey hammered away at the line of argument which had sustained Frank's guilty verdict over the course of seven separate appeals. Addressing the issue of jury intimidation, specifically the cry "Hang Frank or we'll hang you," Dorsey declared that "the record shows that at no time from the beginning to the end of the trial did anybody cry out against Frank or offer to do him harm." Dorsey concluded his testimony with a warning: "I am fearful that if the verdict of juries in plain cases, as I conceive this to be, shall not be carried out against the influential as well as the friendless, it would be an incentive to lawlessness in our state, the consequences of which no man can calculate, and I am unwilling even passively to be a party to the encouragement of such a situation."
On Monday morning, Georgians awoke to the news that Governor John Slaton had commuted Frank's sentence, and although some agreed with Slaton's decision, outrage quickly spread through the population and the city's normal routine ground to a halt as people digested what had happened. Before long, the outrage which the majority of people felt at the commutation found expression when at 8:30 AM a mob shouting "Pay the governor a call" started marching toward Slaton's mansion, six miles away. As some indication of what they planned to do when they got to the governor's mansion, the mob broke into hardware stores along the way in search of guns. Police Chief Beavers along with 50 mounted men confronted the mob halfway to Slaton's mansion, turning back roughly half of the men. Which meant of course that 2,000 armed men were headed toward the governor's mansion. What they planned to do had become apparent after another mob hanged the governor in effigy in the town square. Around the effigy's neck hung a sign proclaiming, "John M. Slaton, King of the Jews and Traitor Governor of Georgia." In the end it was only the state militia and its machine guns and the fact that Slaton declared martial law which saved him from the rage of the mob and the noose they had prepared for him.
The reaction to the commutation followed along the lines that had already been established by the publicity campaign to save Frank. Slaton received "hosannas from the national press," and the New York Times led the way, proclaiming that if Governor Slaton
look beyond the boundaries of the State of Georgia, he can know and feel to how high a place he has raised himself in the esteem and admiration of the whole country .... Governor Slaton has saved Georgia from herself. He has made his name illustrious."
Needless to say, the New York Times did not articulate the feelings of the majority of Georgians. As in the past, that job fell to Tom Watson, who, like Hugh Dorsey, claimed that the governor's decision had undermined the rule of law. Watson once again brought up the issue of conflict of interest, claiming that "Either his firm should have withdrawn from the case, or he should have withdrawn from the firm.'' But the big issue was the betrayal of the people of Georgia who had elected Slaton to office. Instead of representing the interests of the people who had elected him, Slaton ended up selling out to the rich Jews from New York. The real issue, as Watson framed it, was money. "Jew money has debased us, bought us and sold us-and laughs at US." In Watson's eyes, Slaton's commutation of Frank's sentence abolished the rule of law in Georgia establishing in its place "One law for the rich and another for the poor.'' According to the new law those with "Unlimited Money and Invisible Power," can prey on young Georgia girls with impunity because "they have established the precedent in Georgia that no Jew shall suffer capital punishment for a crime committed on a Gentile.''
Needless to say, Watson and his readers found this state of affairs intolerable, but when confronted with the question of "what are the people to do?" the only answer Watson could come up with was "Lynch law": "Hereafter, let no man reproach the South with Lynch law: let him remember the unendurable provocation; and let him say whether Lynch law is better than no law at all."
As some indication that Watson was articulating the feelings of a significant percentage of the population of Georgia, a mob of 200 men opened fire on the governor's mansion at two o'clock in the morning of June 22, 1915, Slaton's last day in office. This was just the beginning of what was going to be a long day for the outgoing governor. When Governor Slaton left the capitol after giving his farewell address, a mob descended on his car shouting "Lynch him!" At this point a man in the mob tried to assassinate the governor.
Eventually the governor was able to escape from the mob, but he did not re-turn to his mansion. Instead, he and his wife escaped by train to New York City, where upon his arrival, he checked into the Waldorf Astoria hotel and held a press conference at which he was "accorded ... the sort of welcome usually reserved for war heroes.''
In a move that seemed calculated to confirm the citizens of the state of Georgia in their suspicion that Slaton had sold out to New York money, Slaton and his wife then celebrated a night on the town with William Randolph Hearst after a dinner party at the publisher's palatial apartment. After a summer-long vacation and cross-country train trip, the Slatons joined up with the Hearsts at San Simeon, Hearst's version of Xanadu on the California coast. From there, the Slatons sailed to Hawaii. If this was political exile, the Slatons seemed to be enjoying it.
As the stories of Slaton being feted by the rich New Yorkers filtered back to Georgia, the outrage spiked upward once again. The Georgians who were outraged at the commutation on Frank's sentence were even more outraged at the welcome their traitorous governor received in New York, and at a certain point a group of them decided to take the law into their own hands. A group of 150 Marriettans joined together on the day the commutation was announced to form the Knights of Mary Phagan and vowed revenge on both Slaton and Frank. At around the same time a smaller much more influential group of men came to the same conclusion and hatched a plan that was nothing if not audacious. They planned to abduct Frank from the state prison farm in Milledgeville, transport him halfway across the state, and then hang him in Marrietta, Mary Phagan's home town. Tom Watson was informed of the conspiracy to murder Frank and kept up the drum-beat of publicity throughout the summer of 1915. On August 12, 1915, in response to a blatantly pro-Frank documentary produced by Marcus Loew, Watson wrote: "Let the rich Jews beware!... THE NEXT JEW WHO DOES WHAT FRANK DID IS GOING TO GET EXACTLY THE SAME THING THAT WE GIVE TO NE-GRO RAPISTS!"
Then on August 17, the cabal carried out its threat. Frank was abducted from the state prison farm in Milledegeville, transported to Marietta and hanged. The lynching of Leo Frank set off an orgy of vituperation in the press of the sort the nation had not seen since the hanging ofJohn Brown. Newspaper after newspaper condemned the South, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, as "a region of illiteracy, blatant self-righteousness, cruelty and violence. Until it is improved by the infusion of better blood and better ideas it will remain a reproach and a danger to the American Republic." "If Georgia approves lynching," opined the New York Times, "then honors bestowed upon the lynchers would attest to the shameless courage of the Georgia public and its willingness to defy public opinion in the other States of the Union.''' And for good measure, the Akron Beacon Journal added, "Georgia is a good place for every decent man and woman to stay away from.'''
The outrage continued to grow in New York. Twenty thousand Jews showed up for a protest meeting at the Cooper Union, a crowd which overflowed the hall onto the surrounding streets. At a meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Jews heard speeches whose rhetoric was "equaled in radicalism only in the days before the Civil War" and resurrected memories of the abolitionists. Fired by this sort of rhetoric the crowds demanded retaliation, and suggestions ranged from boycotting peaches and coca-cola to promoting guerilla warfare. Groups of detectives were dispatched to Marietta but they uncovered nothing because, "Every stranger who comes into town is under observation the moment he arrives. The surveillance is not obtrusive, but it is unmistakable. [The town's] mood is one of determination to protect the man who, in its eyes, executed the law after it had been trampled on. It is resolved that not a hair on their heads shall be harmed.''
Tom Watson remained defiant in his defense of the lynching: "In putting the sodomite murderer to death, the Vigilance committee has done what the Sheriff would have done, if Slaton had not been of the same mould as Benedict Arnold. Let Jew libertines take notice. Georgia is not for sale to rich criminals." Watson's defiance coupled with the fact that no one was indicted for Frank's murder caused The Boston Post to wonder, "Is Georgia in America?"'
Sobered by what had happened and now relieved of its duties as what amounted to Frank's propaganda ministry, The New York Times tried to make sense of Frank's killing and the role it had played in bringing it about. In an article entitled "Frank Lynching due to Suspicion and Prejudice," Times reporter Charles Thompson finally got to talk "honestly about the sentiment of Georgia, a verdict which implied that hitherto that had not been the case at the Times. Thompson gave three reasons for the lynching:
First-the [citizens of Georgia] believed that the Jews of the country, hitherto not the object of any hostility or dislike, had banded themselves together to save a criminal because he belonged to their race and religion and thus ranged them-selves in opposition to men of other races and religions. Against this belief no argument was effective, no denial was listened to.
Second-The bitter resentment over what everybody in Georgia to whom this correspondent has talked calls "outside interference": and this does not mean only the "interference" of the New York newspapers by a long shot, though Tom Watson has done his level best to make it appear that the New York newspapers are attempting to govern the state of Georgia
Third-And this is the thing which turned the smoldering fire into a raging flame and maddened men who were merely angered-it is believed that from one end of the State to the other that Governor Slaton was Frank's lawyer and pardoned his client after every court had upheld that client's conviction. The ignorant believed that Slaton was bribed, or that at best he received as Frank's lawyer a share of the fee paid to his firm: the more intelligent believe that he was merely influenced in his judgment by the fact that Frank was his firm's client.
Thompson's article was a rebuke to Adoph Ochs, who was chagrined by what he read because it implied that Tom Watson was right and that ultimately it was the overreaction of influential Jews like Ochs which had led to Frank's hanging. Ochs had gone against his own better judgment in putting the Times at the service of Frank's cause and "The Times ... had overstepped its bounds by persistently editorializing on his behalf." Ochs had ignored repeated warnings, at first from his stringer in Atlanta and then from W. T. Anderson, editor of the Macon Telegraph, a newspaper which had consistently opposed lynching. Anderson had written to Ochs on behalf "of the decent people of Georgia," claiming that "It was the outside interference of the Jews, led by the Times, that had made it necessary to lynch Frank. The Jews in fact were responsible for what had happened to him .... The men responsible are the Strauses, the Ochses, the Pulitizers and other leading Jews of New York and the East generally. These men now hold the comfort, safety, peace and happiness of the Jews of Georgia in the hollow of their hands."
Ochs was shaken by the rebuke. Not only had he turned the Times into "a Jewish newspaper" by his naked advocacy of Frank's case, he had brought about Frank's death as well. Confronted with these arguments at an editorial meeting on the Frank case, Ochs appeared "wan and subdued." As one of Ochs associates put it at this meeting, the "simple facts" of the case were inescapable:
Mr. Ochs was the prominent newspaper publisher in the country. He was a Jew. The Times had printed more stuff for Frank that any other newspaper and [had] a special correspondent in Georgia ... a majority of the people in Georgia approved of the law having been taken into the hand of the mob because they believed that money had been used to thwart justice.
Unable to counter the charges leveled against him and the Times, Ochs decided that the Times was going to drop the Frank case. Ochs then spent the next few days at home "nursing his nerves ....
In his own post-mortem, Tom Watson claimed that the Frank case was punishment for the sinful economic exploitation of children. "The National Pencil Factory, owned by Frank's people, fought our Child Labor bill fiercely and helped to kill it-and in God's mysterious way, it cost the Superintendent his life." In closing ranks behind Frank, the nation's wealthy Jews had "blown the breath of life into the Monster of Race Hatred; and this Frankenstein, whom you created at such enormous expense, WILL HUNT YOU DOWNl"
As a result of the Frank case, the Jews declared war on the South. Louis Marshall of the AJC tried to get Watson tried for obscenity, but Watson remained defiant, informing the attorney general "you cannot remove me from the Southern district of Georgia. If I have to give up my life for having incurred the savage hatred of the rich Jews, it will be given up right here in the same region where my ancestors gave up theirs:"' Marshall's attempt not only failed, in failing it probably bolstered Watson's political career, contributing to his eventual election to the United States Senate. It backfired in other ways as well.
On page one of the September 2 edition of The Jeffersonian, Watson called for the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. "The North can rail itself hoarse, if it chooses to do so, but if [it] doesn't quit meddling with our business and getting commutations for assassins and rapists who have pull, another Ku Klux Klan may be organized to restore HOME RULE:,,The Klan, which Nathan Bedford Forrest had disbanded in 1869, had experienced a surge of renewed interest when D.
W. Griffith turned Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in January 1915, when the clamor over the Frank case had reached its peak. The NAACP had tried to block distribution of the film, but those efforts came to naught when Griffith persuaded his college classmate Woodrow Wilson to view the film in the White House.
Less than two weeks before The Birth of a Nation opened in Atlanta, William Joseph Simmons and 34 other men climbed to the top of Stone Mountain, Georgia and ignited giant cross which had been soaked in pitch and kerosene, announcing the rebirth of the Klan. Simmons had already filed a petition with Georgia's secretary of state on October 16, signaling his intention to resurrect the Klan and become its imperial wizard. Leo Frank's role in all of this became apparent when it was revealed that several of the 34 men who climbed Stone Mountain that Thanks-giving evening in November 1915 were members of the Knights of Mary Phagan. The restored Klan reached the height of its power at the Democratic convention of 1924, but it too fell into decline as a result of a young woman's murder.
In 1926, David C. Stephenson, who had ousted William Simmons from the leadership of the Klan and was at that time Imperial Wizard, was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Madge Oberholzer, whom with the help of other Klansmen, he had kidnapped, raped and abducted to Chicago from Irvington, Indiana. The case, which included some revolting perversions, created a widespread revulsion against the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the 1930S, its influence weakened irreparably. In 1944, it was formally dissolved. The death of Mary Phagan led to the birth of other organizations as well.
Leo Frank was president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith. After his death, B'nai B'rith founded the Anti-Defamation League to combat anti-Semitism in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League would go on to work closely with the NAACP. Murray Friedman calls the Frank case "the defining moment in the partnership between blacks and Jews" even though he admits later on that the case "set Jews and blacks against each other." Friedman, who spent most of his adult life working for the American Jewish Committee, does his best to play down the frankly racist statements which Frank's attorneys made during the course of his trial. He also mentions the fact that the NAACP "expressed resentment at what they saw as an organized effort to implicate Conley simply because he was black." He also mentions that the AJC's Louis Marshall joined the board of the NAACP and served on its legal defense committee as a result of the Frank lynching. The aftermath of the Frank lynching brought Herbert Seligman on board the NAACP as well, as its "new Jewish director of pubicity." Together with Joel Spingarn, these men "campaigned relentlessly against lynching" and "helped to awaken the nation's conscience."
Friedman's book on the Black-Jewish Alliance was written, however, because another interpretation of events had arisen calling the very existence of that alliance into question. In their book Plural but Equal, black revisionists like Harold Cruse and David Levering Lewis called the traditional narrative of black-Jewish cooperation into question by accusing the Jews of promoting a hidden agenda, according to which organizations like the NAACP used front men like W. E. B DuBois to destroy any black leader not acceptable to Jewish interests. Cruse accuses Louis Marshall in particular "of using the NAACP to 'salve the bitter defeat he had experienced in the Leo Frank case.'"
If that were the case, then Marshall's move to the NAACP takes on a sinister hue. Suspicions of this sort first arose during the NAACP's attack on Booker T. Washington. They would deepen in the wake of the Frank case when the NAACP devoted even more of its energies to destroying Marcus Garvey. According to Cruse's reading of these events, there was no Black-Jewish Alliance. What went by that name was really covert Jewish revenge on the South for the role it played in the Frank lynching. The simplest way to visit revenge on the South was the plan first articulated by John Brown: bring the war to Africa by turning the nation's Negroes into revolutionaries. That meant destroying any black leader who wanted to steer his people in another direction. That meant destroying Booker T. Washington, because he wanted to turn the Negro into a skilled craftsman. And it meant destroying Marcus Garvey because he wanted to awaken in the American Negro a racial consciousness which was incompatible with the integration which Jewish organizations like the NAACP seemed determined to impose, as Cruse claimed, on everyone but themselves.
Tom Watson died in Washington of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 26, 1922. At his funeral in Georgia, the most impressive floral arrangement was an eight-foot-high cross of red roses sent by the Klan.
From
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History
By E. Michael Jones
