Leo Frank

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucille and Leo Frank at Frank's trial.

Leo Max Frank (17 April 1884 - 17 August 1915) was an American Jew convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl. His trial and lynching by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia in 1915 led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League.^[1]

The manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, Frank was convicted of murdering and raping an employee, 13 year old Mary Phagan. The case is widely regarded as having been a miscarriage of justice.^[2] The trial was sensationalized by the media. The Georgia politician and publisher Tom Watson used the case to build personal political power and support for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. ^[3]

Shortly after Frank's conviction new evidence emerged that cast doubt on his guilt. After the governor commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a mob of prominent citizens calling themselves 'The Knights of Mary Phagan.'^[4] The mob is reported to have included the son of a senator, a former governor, lawyers, and a prosecutor.^[5]

[edit] Childhood

Leo Frank was born in Cuero, Texas, to Rudolf and Rae Frank. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York, shortly after his birth. He was a student at Brooklyn Public Schools and Pratt Institute, and graduated from Cornell University.^[6][7]

[edit] Background

Leo Frank and Lucille Selig, 1909, a year before their marriage.

In the early 1900s Atlanta had a large Jewish population which had become highly assimilated under the leadership of Reform rabbi David Marx. The Franks were part of its upper economic class. Leo Frank's father was a German-born physician who worked as a postmaster and salesman in the United States.

Leo Frank earned an engineering degree at Cornell in 1906, and married Lucille Selig in 1910. Lucille came from a wealthy family of industrialists who two generations earlier had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta. An uncle of Frank's was a Confederate veteran who owned a large percentage of National Pencil Factory. Through that connection, Frank was hired and promoted to the factory's superintendent. He had traveled to Massachusetts, New York, and Germany for further apprenticeships in pencil manufacturing. He was president of a local chapter of the B'nai Brith. The Franks moved in a cultured and privileged milieu whose leisure time included opera, bridge and tennis.

Mary Phagan

Mary Phagan had begun working from a young age to support her widowed mother and five siblings.^[8] By age thirteen, when she died, Phagan was living in an Atlanta suburb. The week before her murder, a shortage of supplies at the factory had led to a reduction in her hours. She was paid only $1.20. On April 26, 1913, (known locally as Confederate Memorial Day), she came in to the factory to claim her pay before going to see the parade. Her pay was issued to her by Frank.

[edit] Murder investigation

A political cartoon, Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 1913. Atlanta carries a newspaper with the headline 'Mary Phagan Mystery,' and asks 'I wonder if they're all asleep in there?'

At three in the morning on April 27, the police received a call from the factory's night watchman, Newt Lee, reporting the discovery of a dead white girl.

When the police arrived at the factory, they found Phagan's body in a dark, dirty basement. Phagan's body was very dirty. She had been strangled with a 2-cm (3/4-inch) cord, and apparently raped. Some evidence at the crime scene was lost, including bloody fingerprints, and a trail in the dirt along which Phagan had been dragged.

At first Frank said that Lee's time card was complete. It was supposed to be punched every half hour during the watchman's rounds. Later Frank said Lee had not punched the card at three intervals.

The police investigated a variety of suspects, and arrested both Newt Lee and a young friend of Phagan's for the crime. Gradually they became convinced that they were not the culprits. A detective sneaked into Lee's apartment and found a blood-soaked shirt. The prosecution later claimed that the shirt had been planted by Frank in order to incriminate Lee.

Suspicion did not at first fall on Frank. The police later noted that he had not answered the phone when they called his house at 4 a.m., and that he seemed extremely nervous when they forced him to go to the factory with them before dawn. They took his detailed answers on minor points as a sign of suspicion. Frank was trembling so strongly that he could not carry out simple physical tasks. Frank pointed out at the trial that the police had refused to tell him the nature of their investigation when they came to his house and made him accompany them.

One of the 'murder notes.'

The Atlanta Constitution broke the story. Soon there was a frenzied competition for readers between the Constitution and the Georgian, a formerly sedate local paper that had recently been bought by the Hearst syndicate and revamped to compete using the standard Hearst formula of yellow journalism. As many as 40 extra editions came out the day of Phagan's murder. The Georgian published a doctored morgue photo of Phagan, in which her head was shown spliced onto the body of another girl. Some evidence went missing when it was 'borrowed' from the police by reporters. The two papers offered a total of $1,800 in reward money for information leading to the apprehension of the murderer. The reward caused many false or irrelevant leads being given to the police.

Two notes were found in the plant, supposedly written by Phagan as she was dying and accusing a 'Negro' of killing her. These came to be known as the 'murder notes'. Jim Conley, the plant's black janitor, later claimed that the notes were dictated to him by Frank.

[edit] Suspicion falls on Frank

Phagan's friend, 13-year-old pencil factory worker George Epps, came forward to say that Frank had flirted with Phagan and had frightened her.

The police appeared to intimidate and influence witnesses, such as Nina Formby, the madam of a bordello, and the Franks' housekeeper. They both recanted statements made to the police when they were away from them.

A newspaper headline trumpeting Frank's guilt.

Frank hired two Pinkerton detectives to help him prove his innocence. Some observers interpreted this negatively, as the Pinkerton agency had a reputation as the violent enforcers for American industrialists. Frank produced alibis for the entire time during which the crime could have been committed. Suspicion was aroused by the fact that he waited a week to bring forward one crucial witness, Lemmie Quinn, saying that he had forgotten. Gradually, however, the Georgian began to take Frank's side, responding to outrage from Atlanta's Jewish community at what they saw as a grave injustice being committed. Meanwhile, the Constitution continued to criticize the police for their lack of progress.

[edit] Jim Conley

Jim Conley, 1913.

On May 1, Jim Conley, age 29, the pencil factory's janitor, was caught by the plant's day watchman, E.F. Holloway, washing a shirt. Conley tried to hide the shirt. Then he claimed the stains on the shirt were from rust. Conley denied under oath that he had had a grade-school education, and could read and write. This fact was crucial later with regard to the murder notes. He had a record of drinking and violence, and had served a sentence on the chain gang.

The factory foreman Holloway told the Georgian that he believed Conley 'strangled Mary Phagan while about half drunk,' resulting in a May 28 headline reading 'SUSPICION TURNED TO CONLEY; ACCUSED BY FACTORY FOREMAN.' Seeing the headline, Conley provided a new story. He then stated that an agitated Frank, in a dramatic meeting in the dark, made him hide in a wardrobe to avoid being seen by two women, dictated the murder notes to him, gave him cigarettes, and told him to leave the factory. Afterward, Conley went out drinking and saw a movie. Phagan's $1.20 in pay had also disappeared, leading the police to wonder if Conley might have killed her for the money. The police asked Frank to confront Conley. Frank refused because his lawyer was out of town. Even when Rosser returned, no meeting took place.

Under further pressure from the police about the discrepancies in his story, Conley gave another version. In this account, Frank asked Conley for help in moving Phagan's body, and gave Conley $200. When the police asked where the $200 was, Conley said that Frank had taken it back. Conley also said that Frank told him on the day of the murder, 'Why should I hang, I have wealthy people in Brooklyn.'

William Smith, the lawyer who represented Conley yet offered circumstantial evidence implicating Conley in the murder.

The Georgian hired William Smith to be Conley's lawyer and offered to pay his fees. Smith was known for specializing in representing black clients. Although this put Smith at the bottom of the professional totem pole, he had successfully defended a black man against an accusation of rape by a white woman. He had also taken an elderly black woman's civil case as far as the state Supreme Court. Although Smith believed Conley had told the truth in his third affidavit, he became concerned that Conley was giving long jailhouse interviews with crowds of reporters. Smith was concerned about reporters from the Hearst papers, who had taken up Frank's side. Smith arranged for Conley to be moved to a different jail. He also severed his own relationship with the Georgian.

Two witnesses came forward to incriminate Conley. Will Green, a carnival worker, said that he had been playing craps at the factory with Conley, and had run away when Conley had declared his intention to rob a girl who walked by. William Mincey, an insurance salesman, had met a drunk Conley on the street. He said that Conley, trying to brush Mincey off, said, 'I have killed one today and do not wish to kill another.' Mincey had thought it was a joke. Neither man testified in court.^[9]

[edit] Trial

The first day of the trial. The area shown in the photo was surrounded by racially segregated seats for spectators. The stenographer can be seen squatting next to Newt Lee, who is being questioned by prosecutor Hugh Dorsey.

On May 24, 1913, a murder indictment was returned against Frank by a grand jury. After the panel's term expired in July, there was considerable sentiment, even among some members of the new panel, for indicting Conley. In the end Conley was not indicted.

Frank's trial began on July 28. Because of the heat, the windows were left open. In addition to the hundreds of spectators inside, a mob gathered outside the city hall to watch the trial through the windows, a circumstance that became important as a factor in witness and jury intimidation.^{[citation needed]}

The prosecutor was Hugh M. Dorsey. Frank was represented by eight lawyers (some of them jury selection specialists), led by Luther Rosser. The defense used peremptory challenges to eliminate the only two black jurors.

Lead defense lawyer Luther Rosser.

The prosecution's theory was that Conley's last affidavit was true, Frank was the murderer, and the murder notes had been dictated by Frank in an effort to pin the crime on Newt Lee. The defense's theory was that Conley was the murderer, and that Lee helped Conley write the notes. The defense brought numerous witnesses who attested to Frank's alibi, which did not leave him enough time to have committed the crime.

Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey.

Conley reiterated his testimony from his final affidavit. He added to it by describing Frank as regularly having sex with women in his upstairs office on Saturdays while Conley kept a lookout. Another witness, who, like Conley, had a criminal record, testified to the same thing. Although Conley admitted that he had changed his story and lied repeatedly, this did not damage the prosecution's case as much as might have been expected. Conley admitted to being an accessory, so it wasn't surprising that he had lied at first. Also, many white observers did not believe that a black man could have been intelligent enough to make up such a complicated story. Conley intentionally hid his education, lying about his ability to read and write.

The Georgian said, 'Many people are arguing to themselves that the negro, no matter how hard he tried or how generously he was coached, still never could have framed up a story like the one he told unless there was some foundation in fact.'

Defense witnesses testified that there were too many people in the factory on Saturdays for Frank to have had trysts there. They pointed out that the windows of Frank's office lacked curtains. A large number of female factory workers testified for the defense of Frank's good character when it came to women.

Frank spoke on his own behalf, by making an unsworn Statement as allowed by Georgia Code, Section 1036; it did not permit any cross-examination without his consent. Most of his 4-hour speech consisted of an extremely long and detailed analysis of the accounting work he had done the day of Phagan's murder, meant to show that the act was too time-consuming for him to have committed the murder. He ended with a description of how he viewed the crime, including an effective, and by some accounts moving, explanation of his nervousness: 'Gentlemen, I was nervous. I was completely unstrung. Imagine yourself called from sound slumber in the early hours of the morning ... To see that little girl on the dawn of womanhood so cruelly murdered — it was a scene that would have melted stone.'

In its closing statements, the defense attempted to divert suspicion from Frank to Conley. The prosecutor compared Frank to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He said that Frank had killed Phagan to keep her from talking.

With the sensational coverage, public sentiment in Atlanta turned strongly against Frank. The defense requested a mistrial because it felt the jurors had been intimidated, but the motion was denied. In case of an acquittal, the judge feared for the safety of Frank and his lawyers, so he brokered a deal in which they would not be present when the verdict was read. Frank was convicted of murder.

The Constitution described the scene as Dorsey emerged from the steps of city hall:

'The solicitor reached no farther than the sidewalk. While mounted men rode like Cossacks through the human swarm, three muscular men slung Mr. Dorsey on their shoulders and passed him over the heads of the crowd across the street.'^{[citation needed]}

Dorsey was later elected governor of Georgia.

[edit] Appeals

Tom Watson

Frank's appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court failed in November. Supreme Court Justice Joseph R. Lamar denied a writ of habeas corpus sought by Frank's lawyers, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes also denied habeas corpus, although he wrote a short opinion stating that 'I very seriously doubt if the petitioner ... has had due process of law ... because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.'

Subsequently, Justice Lamar granted a writ of error allowing Frank to appeal to the full U.S. Supreme Court, which heard Frank's appeal in April 1915. On April 19, in the case of Frank v. Mangum Frank's appeal was denied on a 7-2 vote. Holmes and Justice Charles Evans Hughes dissented, with Holmes writing that 'Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.'

Populist politician and journalist Tom Watson's continued his campaign against Frank. He used the Jeffersonian to write, 'If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN.'^[10]

[edit] Clemency

Indignation in the press about the commutation of Frank's sentence.

Frank applied for clemency from the departing Governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton. Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and examined new evidence that tended to incriminate Conley, including studies comparing Conley's speech patterns to the language of the murder notes.

Convinced that Frank was innocent, on June 20, 1915, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, 'assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free'.^[11]. 'I can endure misconstruction, abuse and condemnation,' Slaton said, 'but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience which would remind me that I, as governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right . . . It means that I must live in obscurity the rest of my days, but I would rather be plowing in a field than to feel that I had that blood on my hands.'^[12]

Watson railed against the decision and urged the lynchings of both Frank and Slaton. A mob threatened to attack the governor at home. A detachment of the Georgia National Guard under the command of Major Asa Warren Candler, along with county policemen and a group of Slaton's friends who were sworn in as deputies, dispersed the mob.^[13]

[edit] Lynching

The lynching of Leo Frank.

A group calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan began openly^[14] organizing a plan to kidnap Frank from the state prison farm and take him to Marietta, 386 km (240 miles) away, to lynch him. They recruited between 25 and 28 men with the necessary skills. The ringleaders were:^[5]

• Joseph Mackey Brown, the former governor who had threatened lynching during the clemency hearings;
• Judge Newton (Newt) Morris, who concealed a period of his life in California that may have included cattle rustling and skipping bail on a murder charge;
• Eugene Herbert Clay, the scandal-plagued but widely loved son of a U.S. senator; Alexander S. Clay, and former mayor of Marietta;
• John Tucker Dorsey, a lawyer and state legislator who had served a sentence for killing a man in a drunken brawl;
• Fred Morris, a lawyer; and
• Bolan Glover Brumby, owner of a furniture factory.

Among the participants in Frank's lynching, the Washington Post reported, 'Herbert Clay, son of a U.S. senator, ... was perhaps the most prominent person on the list. He was identified as one of the lynching's 'planners,' as were Moultrie McKinney Sessions, a lawyer and banker, and John Tucker Dorsey, a Georgia legislator and prosecutor. Others named as among the lynchers were Gordon Baxter Gann, later mayor of Marietta and a state legislator; ... In all, there were 26 names on the list, some of whom may never be adequately identified.'^[15]

Newspaper article after the lynching.

In addition to these leaders, the group also included a doctor, another lawyer, and the former sheriff of Cobb County. John Tucker Dorsey was also the solicitor general for the Blue Ridge Circuit, and would theoretically have been in charge of prosecuting the lynchers, none of whom were indicted.

Criticism of the lynching.

On August 17, the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm. The kidnapping was highly organized. They forced their way into the prison with a display of their weapons, and took Frank. The lynching site at Frey's Gin, two miles (3 km) east of Marietta, had already been prepared, complete with a rope and table supplied by conspirator Sheriff William Frey. Frank's only requests were that they allow him to write a note to his wife, that they return his wedding ring to his wife, and that they cover his lower body before hanging him, since he was wearing nothing but a nightshirt. Frank's last words were, 'I think more of my wife and my mother than I do of my own life.'

Crowds descended on the site of the lynching, snatching up pieces of the tree and the rope as souvenirs. Frank's body was eventually transferred to an undertaker and buried in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing New York..

[edit] Aftermath

After Frank's lynching, approximately half of Georgia's 3,000 Jews left the state.^[16] Many American Jews saw Frank as an American Alfred Dreyfus. The intensity of the national and international attention focused on the case was comparable to that in the Lindbergh kidnapping. Frank's lynching led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League.

Southerners who believed Frank was guilty saw similarities between the Frank trial and The Birth of a Nation. Watson used sentiments aroused by sensational coverage of the Frank trial to build up power. Some members of the lynching mob decided to create a new Ku Klux Klan. The new Klan was inaugurated in 1915 at a mountaintop meeting, led by William J. Simmons, and attended by a few aging survivors of the original Klan, along with members of the Knights of Mary Phagan. Throughout the south, postcards featuring pictures of the Knights of Mary Phagin posing with pride in front of Frank's hanging dead body were made and sent to friends and relatives. Pieces of cloth from the clothing Frank was wearing when he was murdered were torn off of his body as souvenirs and bought and sold as memorabilia.^[17]

In keeping with fears of rapid social change in America, including the waves of new Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe that poured into late 19th and early 20th century United States, the Klan had an antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and nativist slant. The Klan was able to tap into fears aroused by staggering rates of population growth and shifts to industrialization in major cities of the Midwest, such as Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis, where the Klan grew rapidly. The Klan also grew in Southern industrializing cities that grew rapidly from 1910-1930, such as Dallas and Houston. In all these cities, neighborhoods changed quickly, competition for jobs and housing was fierce, the housing market could not keep up with demand, and competition led to violence among groups struggling for place. After WWI, the Klan also grew as a result of postwar social strains, and the effort to assimilate thousands of veterans in the job market.

In 1982, Alonzo Mann, by then an old man, volunteered that he had seen Jim Conley dragging Mary Phagan's body at the factory. Mann swore in an affidavit that as a thirteen-year-old office boy at the pencil factory, he had been threatened with death by Conley not to tell what he had seen. Alonzo Mann died in 1985.

With Alonzo Mann's testimony, the Anti-Defamation League convinced the Georgia Board of Pardons to grant Leo Frank a posthumous pardon.

On March 11, 1986, Frank was issued a pardon by the Georgia pardons and paroles board. In 1983 they had denied a pardon.^[18] They did not clear him of the crime, but agreed the state had not kept him safe while in its custody.

Phagan's family continued to insist on Frank's guilt, even after Conley's repeated confessions were revealed. They disassociated themselves from the Klan's use of Mary's murder to further its own purposes. Mary Phagan's great-niece, also named Mary Phagan, wrote a book about the case in 1987.

[edit] Dramatizations

The Leo Frank story has been explored in various art forms. The earliest version, They Won't Forget (1937), was a fictional movie inspired by the events, with the Leo Frank character portrayed as a Christian.

After the 1980s testimony of Alonzo Mann, the case was revisited in the 1988 made-for-TV movie, The Murder of Mary Phagan, starring Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher, and Kevin Spacey. David Mamet explored the case in his 1997 novel The Old Religion

A musical Parade, created by playwright Alfred Uhry and composer Jason Robert Brown, was produced on Broadway in 1998, winning the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score and Best Book of a Musical. Although it received mixed reviews and was short lived in New York, the production started a national tour in 2000. Parade is still produced around the world.

[edit] Current events

March 7, 2008, a "marker was placed in front of the building at 1200 Roswell Rd in Marietta, near the location where Frank was lynched."

"Rabbis, news crews, local politicians and onlookers attended the unveiling of the marker Friday afternoon. Keynote speakers included Bill Nigut, Southeast Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League; Cobb [County] Chairman Sam Olens; former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes; state Senator Steve Thompson; Rabbi Steven Lebow; Georgia Historical Society President Todd Groce; and attorney Dale Schwartz."^[19]

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

• James Allen (editor), Hilton Als, Jon Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palms Pub: 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1. Includes photo of the public murder of Leo Frank.
• Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (Athens, GA, 1987). Dinnerstein is a historian.
• Leonard Dinnerstein, 'The Fate of Leo Frank,' American Heritage 47 (October 1996), pp.98-109.
• Harry Golden, The Lynching of Leo Frank (Cassell & Co. 1966)
• Steve Oney. And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. New York: Random House, 2003. According to Publishers Weekly, 'Oney carefully maps the history of the Jewish community in the South; the role that New York newspapers played in publicizing the trial and attacking anti-Semitism; and the complex role that racism and the interactions between black and white Georgians played in Frank's conviction.'
• Mary Phagan. The Murder of Little Mary Phagan. Far Hills, NJ: Horizon Press, 1987. The author, Mary Phagan Kean, is the great-grand niece and namesake of the murder victim.
• Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• 'Leo Frank case' New Documents Found.
• Little Secrets on About North Georgia
• The Leo Frank Case compiled by Charles Pou
• 'Marietta's Shame: The Lynching of Leo Frank' (from the Atlanta Nation)
• "Letters probe killer's mind: Frank pleads his innocence", The Cincinnati Post (Associated Press), E. W. Scripps Company, 2002-08-05. Archived from the original on 2006-06-04. 
• 'The Case of Leo Frank' (Court TV's Crime Library)
• 'The Mystery of the Pencil Factory' a virulently racist 1929 account
• Rabbi Steven Lebow lays plaque commemorating lynching site
• The Murder of Mary Phagan on the Internet Movie Database
• Leo Frank and the murder of Mary Phagan
• MSN movies: The Murder of Mary Phagan
• The murder of Mary Phagan and the Leo Frank case
• New York Times archive of The Murder of Mary Phagan
• The Murder of Mary Phagan
• The Murder of Mary Phagan at MyMovies.com
• And the Dead Shall Rise: book about Leo Frank
• Leo Frank at the Jewish Virtual Library
• Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan, says grand-niece Mary Phagan
• Review of Leo Frank book The Old Religion by David Mamet
• Mamet Book and Broadway Play on Leo Frank in Salon Magazine