by Dale Bennett

ON THIS, the 112th anniversary of the rape and strangulation murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by her sweatshop boss — and Atlanta B’nai B’rith president — Leo Max Frank, let us remember her young life and reflect on the massive Jewish propaganda machine that has been attempting to whitewash her killer’s reputation for more than a century.

Besides the victim, Mary Phagan, there were five people in the National Pencil Company building when she was killed on 26 April 1913. We know that four of them didn’t do it. That leaves Leo Frank.

110 years later, the ADL is still trying to frame the janitor, Jim Conley, for Mary Phagan’s murder: How likely is it that Conley, a Black man—in 1913 Georgia—would rape and kill a White girl just a few feet from the unlocked glass-paneled front entrance door of the National Pencil Company, where people were coming and going all day, right at the foot of an open staircase at the top of which was Leo Frank’s open office door? Preposterous.

Leo Frank was elected the Atlanta B’nai B’rith president of the Gate City Lodge #144 in 1912 and his Summer of 1913 conviction for the rape and strangulation-murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had galvanized B’nai B’rith HQ to found the ADL less than two months after the fact.

Even though Leo Frank was convicted in late August 1913, in September 1913 his 500-member Independent Order of B’nai B’rith fraternal organization in Georgia voted unanimously (see Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1913 at leofrank.info) to re-elect him their president. So while Leo Frank was incarcerated in the city jail as his appeals were wending their way through the appellate courts, he was running the affairs of this powerful Atlanta Jewish group like a powerful mafia boss behind bars until the Autumn of 1914. He was not re-elected once the affidavits, testimony, and evidence of the Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court records were revealed to the public (available at the Internet Archive and leofrank.info).

A must-read on the topic is “100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty” from the American Mercury, and another important source every student of the case must read are the contemporary works of Tom Watson.

I encourage everyone to please listen to the works of investigative journalist Tom Watson in the audio books by Vanessa Neubauer, from the pages of Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine, January, March, August, September and October of 1915.

I promise you won’t be disappointed.

1. Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case

2. Tom Watson: A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case

3. Tom Watson: The Celebrated Case of The State of Georgia vs. Leo Frank

4. Tom Watson: The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert

5. Tom Watson: The Rich Jews Indict a State!

Tom Watson articulated the evidence, testimony and exhibits of the Leo Frank trial with such force and power it is impossible to believe Leo Frank is innocent. Listen and find out why!

Introduction to Mary Phagan-Kean’s Insights into the Murder of Her Great Aunt

HERE ARE SOME of the key points offered by Mary Phagan-Kean in her latest interview with social media activist Ryan Dawson. (video above)

Mary Phagan-Kean’s journey into the dark and complex narrative surrounding the murder of her great aunt, Mary Phagan, began unexpectedly. Her father first shared the story after her name was recognized by a teacher, sparking a lifelong quest for truth and justice. The tale, as recounted by her father, painted a grim picture of Leo Frank, the man convicted of Mary Phagan’s murder. According to testimony, Frank was a sexual pervert who molested numerous young girls and even boys, earning him the moniker “the B’nai B’rith pedophile” — a reference to the fact that he was president of the Atlanta chapter of the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith, the organization which gave birth to the powerful ADL, or “Anti-Defamation League.” Frank was even re-elected president of the group after his conviction for murdering little Mary.

The Vigilance Committee, which consisted of leading community leaders and which sought “Southern justice” after a corrupt governor (who was a partner in the law firm that defended Frank) commuted Frank’s death sentence, played a pivotal role in the case by executing him themselves after, as they saw it, outside influencers had illegally prevented his lawful hanging. (The New York Times-invented “Knights of Mary Phagan” never existed. That moniker was likely invented to link the Vigilance Committee to similar-sounding “Knights” factions of the Ku Klux Klan, in order to smear the Committee.)

The lynching of Frank was the first done by automobile, quite a feat considering the limited ownership of automobiles in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 — further proving that prominent citizens, who were outraged by Governor Slaton’s involvement in the law firm that defended Frank, and his commutation of his sentence, were involved, and not a “mob.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization with a vested interest in the outcome, has been relentless in its efforts to secure a full pardon for Frank for decades. Their tactics, however, have been marred by deception and misinformation, leading to numerous hoaxes, including false claims about a pardon (the existing “pardon” does not address his guilt at all).

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father never mentioned Frank’s Jewishness but emphasized his perverse behavior. Her grandfather, Mary Phagan’s brother, was deeply emotionally affected by the case, becoming distraught when asked about it, particularly noting the resemblance between Mary Phagan-Kean and little Mary.

The narrative surrounding the case is fraught with controversy. Jews have even attempted to portray Mary Phagan as a seducer, a claim that Mary Phagan-Kean vehemently rejects.

There has been documented collusion between Jewish groups and officials to alter the wording on Mary’s commemorative plaque, with the altered plaque suggesting that Frank was exonerated for the murder — which he was not. This alteration occurred under the cover of night and was set up during secret meetings from which the Phagan family — and the public — were excluded, further obscuring the truth.

Rabbi Steven Lebow, a prominent figure in the area Jewish community, demanded that Mary’s marker be changed because it “offended” the Jewish community to tell the truth about the non-pardon. This defense of a convicted child rapist and murderer is a strange hill for Jewish groups to die on.

During the 1960s, when Jewish authors Leonard Dinnerstein and Harry Golden were writing their books on the case, the trial transcript mysteriously disappeared, making it unavailable for public scrutiny.

The best outcome of the efforts of both sides in this case, Mrs. Phagan-Kean says, has been the creation of a team to digitize and make all relevant documents on the case available and searchable online. And the best way to study the case, she avers, is to examine these newspaper articles in conjunction with the Brief of Evidence (all now available on leofrank.info and leofrank.org). Contrary to popular belief, the newspapers were pro-Frank and had Jewish editors, contradicting the notion of an anti-Frank, anti-Jewish atmosphere. Nevertheless, the firsthand reports of the trial at that time were mostly honest and paint a very different picture from that of the “Leo Frank is an innocent victim of anti-Semitism” narrative being pushed today. (One can learn, for example, that the grand jury that indicted Frank included four Jews out of 21 members, and that all voted to charge Frank with the murder.)

The Jewish community’s claims that Frank did not know Mary Phagan are untenable. Frank walked past her daily for a year, handled her pay packets weekly, and even directed police to investigate James Gannt, claiming he was “close to” Mary. These actions suggest a familiarity that contradicts his claim of ignorance.

The Anti-Defamation League’s never-ending defense of Frank has inadvertently contributed to the cause they claim to oppose: anti-Semitism.

Mary Phagan was brutally raped, as evidenced by the autopsy report, which, though difficult to read, showed no markings on her body except those of strangulation. There was blood in her panties, and family proof confirmed she was not on her menstrual cycle. ADL-linked author Steven Oney referred to Mary as a “voluptuous woman,” a claim that Parade magazine attempted to exploit this by implying she was “flirting” before her death, a particularly odious insinuation.

A 1980s miniseries, inspired by Harry Golden’s book and dubious material from Alonzo Mann, was produced without consultation with Mary Phagan’s family. This miniseries further muddied the waters of the case.

In a more recent development, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, under pressure from Rabbi Lebow and the Jewish power structure, established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” in Atlanta. This unit, ostensibly to exonerate falsely convicted individuals, including Blacks, was really created explicitly to push for the exoneration of Frank. They have even floated the idea of a new trial for Frank, despite the extreme improbability of a proper prosecution more than a century later.

Contrary to ADL claims, the “mass exodus” of Jews from the area after the Frank case never occurred. This is one of the many hoaxes that will be debunked in the forthcoming new edition of Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan.

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father’s enduring belief was that “the truth will always win,” a sentiment that continues to guide her quest for justice.

by Benjamin Smith
Edited by John Anderson

ON 11 MARCH 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean — great-niece of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was brutally murdered by Jewish B’nai B’rith official Leo Frank in 1913 — was interviewed on the Stew Peters television program. You can watch that interview by clicking the video link above.

The trial, conviction, and execution of Frank was the major motivation behind the founding of today’s powerful “Anti-Defamation League” (ADL¹), which works to censor and punish those who speak out about Jewish abuses of power. Today, the ADL — along with their allies in the media, academia, and government — maintain that Leo Frank was an “innocent victim of anti-Semitism,” and deliberately ignore and downplay the huge mountain of evidence (the Brief of Evidence alone is well over three hundred pages long and Leo Frank’s appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court are several thousands of pages) proving his guilt, and ignoring the fact that every court from the Grand Jury, the Georgia Court of Appeals, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States — and every court in between — affirmed his guilt (even though he was defended by a team of the most skillful, famous, and expensive lawyers of his time²).

Mrs. Phagan-Kean recounts the emotionally powerful story of how she first discovered that she was related to the girl who is probably the most well-known American murder victim of her generation, and how, after seeing how the vast monetary and political resources of the ADL and other organized Jewish groups were being used to confuse and trick the public into believing that the killer, Leo Frank, was actually the victim in this case, she decided to devote her life to bringing the truth to light.

In this program she discusses how, after Mary’s sex murder, Frank’s team and allies:

• Planted fake evidence to frame two innocent Black men for the crime: When the first frame, of night watchman New Lee, failed (they planted a fake bloody shirt at his home as well as altered his time card for that night³), they tried to frame janitor Jim Conley (with a fake planted bloody club and pay stub) and are still trying to frame him in 2025. Are these the acts of an innocent man?
• Created out of whole cloth, years later, a fake story of how the killer left “bite marks” on Mary Phagan’s body, marks which supposedly didn’t match Leo Frank’s dental X-rays (the autopsy report indicated no such marks whatever, and dental X-rays were not used in any Georgia case until decades after Frank’s trial)
• Tried to falsely imply that 13-year-old Mary Phagan, whose reputation was absolutely unimpeachable, was of low moral character and some kind of “seductress” — again, totally inverting the victim and perpetrator roles in the case.
• Created a false story, months after the trial, that a screaming and seething “anti-Semitic mob” dominated the trial for weeks, shouting “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you” and similar epithets within hearing of the judge and jury. Contemporary pictures and newspaper reports prove that no such mob ever existed.
• Had the audacity to change — in the dead of night and without informing the Phagan family — the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site, so its text reflected the Jewish narrative of Frank’s “innocence.” (See below for further details)
• Have consistently, right up to 2025, held secret meetings with Georgia and Fulton County officials — meetings from which the Phagan family, the press, and the public at large were purposely excluded — in an attempt to get Leo Frank officially exonerated. The meeting minutes also seemingly disappear or are not taken. Mary Phagan-Kean has asked to see these and has been prevented from doing so.
• And much more!

You’ll learn that Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book about the case — The Murder of Little Mary Phagan — is about to be released this year in a brand-new, much-expanded edition.

Make sure and share this interview with everyone you know. You can’t understand what is happening in the world today without understanding the powerful forces that tried — and are still trying — to exonerate this vile rapist and child-murderer.

* * *

1. Leo Frank was president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith twice and was even re-elected after his conviction for the rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan. B’nai B’rith founded the ADL, originally called the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith before being shortened to just the Anti-Defamation League. The indictment, trial, and conviction of Leo Frank are what led to the founding of the ADL, not his execution, as the first announcement of its creation was on September 16th, 1913. Leo Frank was hanged in 1915.
2. An interesting thing to note here is that Georgia Governor John Slaton was a partner at the same law firm as Luther Z. Rosser, Leo Frank’s defense attorney.
3. Below is Defendant’s Exhibit 1, from the Brief of Evidence, showing where Leo Frank erased Newt Lee’s time stamps of 10:00 pm, 11:30 pm, 12:30 am, and 2:30 am to make it appear that he had been too busy with Mary Phagan to punch his time card:

* * *

Below is the original inscription on the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site where it did not hide the fact that Frank’s pardon did not officially exonerate him from the crime of murder. The newer historical marker does not provide this specific fact and implies that the pardon absolved him of the crime which is not true:

Below is what it was then changed to with no vote and no media present, in 1995. Most people, who are not well-researched in the case, would assume that “he was issued a pardon,” means that he was absolved of the crime:

The Marietta Daily Journal published an article describing what happened and why the Phagan family was outraged by this (transcribed below):

“Family of Mary Phagan protests marker change

“Without a formal vote and with the press absent, Marietta City Council has changed the inscription on the city’s historic marker at the grave of rape-murder victim Mary Phagan in the Marietta City Cemetery. The Phagan family is blaming Councilman Philip Goldstein.

“The descendants of Miss Phagan are upset because the family was not notified before or after the change, and only learned of it on a cemetery-cleaning visit. The family says the newly-placed marker – which sits on a city-maintained path near the grave and is not to be confused with Miss Phagan’s ornate tombstone, which makes no mention of the circumstances of her death – omits the reason for the 1986 posthumous pardon given Leo Frank.

“Frank – Miss Phagan’s boss – was convicted in 1913 by a Fulton Superior Court jury of the 13-year-old girl’s murder in an Atlanta pencil factory and sentenced to hang. When Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in 1915, a group of Marietta men abducted Frank from the state prison near Milledgeville and lynched him near what is now the Big Chicken on Frey’s Gin Road in Marietta.

[Years later someone vandalized the elegant white marble flowerpot situated at the footer of the epitaph slab and stole the broken piece of it.]

“The Phagan family initially opposed placing a marker at their ancestor’s grave, fearing there would be increased damage to the cemetery plot and curiosity seekers would leave graffiti. That hasn’t happened. Late Mayor Joe Mack Wilson told east Cobb resident and Cherokee County special education teacher Mary Phagan Keen, a great-niece of Mary Phagan, that the grave was the most sought by visitors to Marietta and should have a marker, along with several other notable graves in the cemetery.

[Newly Concealing the fact that Leo M. Frank was not officially exonerated]

“Mayor Wilson told the Phagan family the city would let them approve the text of the marker. The family insisted the unusual conditions of Frank’s 1986 pardon be explained. That was done. Now controversy has arisen because that portion of the marker has been changed.

“The Georgia Pardons and Parole Board in 1983 turned down a request for a pardon based on Frank’s alleged innocence. [Leo] Frank’s former office boy, Alonzo Mann, told two Nashville Tennessean newsmen he saw black janitor Jim Conley holding a limp body in his arms the day of the murder. In its 1983 denial of a pardon for Frank, the board said after Mann’s testimony it “did not find conclusive evidence proving beyond any doubt that Frank was innocent.”

“A new parole board then granted Frank a pardon in 1986 on the grounds the state did not protect him in prison, thereby allowing him to be lynched and thus ending any further court appeals. Frank’s conviction was appealed unsuccessfully by his lawyers three times to the Georgia Supreme Court and twice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The 1986 pardon said: “Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the state’s failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the state’s failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds…the board hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a pardon.” The family opposed the 1986 pardon, and now is irked at the council and [Philip] Goldstein.

[The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles failed to mention the fact that Leo Frank had fully exhausted all of his trial appeals at the Georgia and Federal Supreme Court in April of 1915.]

“”We are as much a victim as the family of Leo Frank,” said Ms. Keen. For 80 years, we have been the object of the curiosity-seekers and subjected to unfair and untrue books and TV docudramas. The current council didn’t show the same respect to us as did Mayor Wilson and a previous council.” Ms. Keen’s father, James Phagan, said the action was “extremely insensitive of the council” and “disingenuous of Councilman [Philip] Goldstein. How can you separate Mary Phagan and Leo Frank?” he asked. “Can you mention the Holocaust and not mention Hitler? It’s simply pandering by Councilman [Philip] Goldstein to a segment of the community. It’s another effort to change history.”

“The inscription change was made by the Parks and Tourism Committee chaired by Councilman Dan Cox. Members are Councilwoman Betty Hunter and Goldstein. The full council OK’d the action. Cox admitted the committee had yielded to “political pressure” by [Philip] Goldstein and the Jewish community. Calling the change “a no-win situation,” Cox said he reluctantly consented to the change “because it offended a part of the community.”

[August 17, 1995. Leo Frank’s Lynching Site, 1200 Roswell Road, Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia]

“On the 80th anniversary of Frank’s lynching on Aug. 17, [1995] a group of Jewish leaders led by Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb said the historic marker at Mary Phagan’s grave should be removed. The group placed a small plaque in the side of the VPI Corp. building owned by Roy Varner at 1200 Roswell St., near the site of Frank’s lynching. The plaque reads: “Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered.” Attending the ceremony were Marietta Councilmen Goldstein and James Dodd, who told Jewish leaders they would look into removing the line of the marker that refers to the pardon conditions.

“”This is a plaque that marks the grave of Mary Phagan,” said [Philip] Goldstein. “The last two lines deal with information on Leo Frank, and it’s not his grave.” Goldstein was quoted in the Jewish Times as saying: “The wording is factually correct. The mention of Frank [not getting officially exonerated] on Phagan’s marker should be deleted because it is irrelevant, not because it upsets the Jewish community.”

“It was Dodd who brought the matter before council, supported by [Philip] Goldstein. “This is a lose-lose situation for me,” [Philip] Goldstein said. The marker referring to the condition of Frank’s pardon has been removed and replaced with a marker the Phagan family had objected to.”

A letter to the editor regarding the incident (transcribed below):

In this year of 2024, on the 111th anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, we present this article, based on a piece from the alternative media.

by K.A. Strom and Valdis Bell

I BELIEVE IT was the great writer Daniel Concannon who first said that in America, no matter who you vote for you always get Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt looks like a particularly filthy gunsel from a 1940s gangster movie. He makes Peter Lorre look handsome. He’s the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (or ADL), which is perhaps the foremost anti-Gentile hate operation in America today. It is the ADL who decides what you get to hear or see in the media, and what you are allowed to say in public and on social media. It would be better named the Defamation League, as one of their main activities is defaming and deplatforming and smearing and financially and personally ruining anyone who exposes Jewish crimes or the genocidal nature of the Jewish agenda.

As proof that the ADL gets what it wants, and what it wants is to silence anyone who inhibits the Jewish agenda of a brown America, look at what happened to populist Tucker Carlson last year. The most highly-rated talk show host on the dinosaur media, so well-liked that a recent poll puts his popularity higher than that of the entire Fox News Network where he appeared, Carlson was fired by mega-Zionist and possibly crypto- or part-Jew Rupert Murdoch without reason being given. Jonathan Greenblatt has been pushing for Carlson to be fired for at least two years. Take a look at this softball CNN interview with Greenblatt from 12 April 2021. CNN is owned and run by Jews.

Greenblatt gets all worked up emotionally when he tells Brian Stelter, “Tucker Carlson has got to go!” calling for him to be deplatformed, and literally a few seconds later screeches “This is not cancel culture.” Right. Greenblatt and the ADL goddamned invented cancel culture, for the gods’ sake. It’s the very basis of their existence. Apparently Tucker had mentioned the increasingly obvious fact that there a media agenda to replace the heritage population of the US and Europe and other Western nations. (It’s okay for the controlled media to mention this, they often do, so long as they frame it as a good and inevitable thing. But Tucker hadn’t made the obligatory ritual incantations, and that might stir up the peasants and get them thinking maybe, just maybe, someone is trying to hurt them — something that Greenblatt and his ilk cannot tolerate.)

Now, I’m not a hod carrier for Tucker Carlson. He articulates many of the problems we face well. He informs us about a few parts of the media’s agenda that the rest of the Jewish-controlled media try to downplay or keep hidden. But, like Lucy Van Pelt and her football with Charlie Brown, at the last moment he always pulls away and leaves us without knowing who is behind these things and why they do what they do. In some cases he out-and-out misdirects our people into thinking that Democrats are the real problem — not Jewish power — and that Republicans, some of them anyway, are the real solution. He scrupulously and cleverly and rather disgustingly dances around the issue of Jewish/Zionist power. Sometimes he tells us that it’s some shadowy “woke” conspiracy or airheaded “groupthink” trendiness that’s “behind it all.” (Truth be told, we as people need “groupthink.” All peoples need groupthink — that is, thinking of themselves as a group and committing themselves to their group’s survival — in order to even exist at all. Tucker Carlson says that’s a bad thing, promoting some vaguely libertarian strain of populism — or maybe it’s a populist strain of libertarianism; it doesn’t really matter, either one is death for us. So I am not a big fan of Tucker Carlson.

But Carlson went too far for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. And he was hugely popular. So he had to go. And, going against — insanely against, I might add — their own economic interests, the Murdochs fired him. Pleasing Jews is more important, apparently, than billions in revenue.

And it is this same Greenblatt and same ADL that is allowed to give “training courses” to police officers nationwide, telling the officers just who it is who is “dangerous” and who should get especially intense law enforcement scrutiny. It is this same ADL that meets with social media executives — including Elon Musk — and tells them who it is who should have a voice and who should be stifled or silenced. It is this same ADL that tells our national and state and local legislators what laws should be passed and what speech should be banned.

Speaking of pleasing Jews, witness the shocking behavior of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. For the second time in history — and DeSantis did it the first time, too — an American governor has signed a bill into law while in a foreign country. It was a bill supported by the ADL and specifically crafted to make distribution of fliers criticizing Jews into a felony. And guess which country DeSantis was in when he signed it? If you guessed Israel, you’re right. DeSantis, who, like Tucker Carlson, makes a lot of noise in apparent opposition to certain of the most outrageous parts of the Jewish agenda, knows who he has to please. Don’t fool yourself; DeSantis still has ambitions to be a major elite political player. His signing of this flagrantly immoral and illegal restriction on our speech while in Israel is deeply significant: a symbolic bowing to his masters, in a place sacred to his masters, signaling he wants their approval for a “move up” in status, something that only they really decide.

I’ll embed the tweet from neocon Jew Rep. Andy Fine, who said: “made a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) to deliver @GovRonDeSantis HB 269, the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States. To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison. Never again means never again.” All of this surmounts a picture of DeSantis signing the sacred bill, with two smirking Jews looking on. Do I have to tell you that the bill has nothing to do with “attacking” Jews, but only with distributing literature that criticizes them or exposes their activities?

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with Mary Phagan. And who is she, anyway? Well, you need to understand the murder of Mary Phagan in order to understand how we got from the Land of the Free to the point where a greasy, sleazy item like Greenblatt gets to decide what our laws should be and what you can say without getting fired or going to prison.

It all began when 19th-century Americans, woefully unaware of reality when it came to Jews, mistakenly thought that Jews were just another kind of European and let them stream into our country in huge numbers. Jews, knowing they were a separate race and with fanatical racial loyalty, immediately began to organize and acquire power for themselves, especially power over the press and eventually all mass media as they emerged.

Initially, Jews in the southern US adapted themselves to the reality of Jim Crow and positioned themselves publicly as “White” and supportive of White institutions.

But all that changed at high noon on 26 April, 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia.

It happened on the second floor of the National Pencil Company building on Forsyth Street. It was a sweatshop where child laborers, mostly White girls, spent their youth making pencils for the company’s Jewish owners for 60 hours a week and more, earning only pennies an hour.

13-year-old Mary Phagan was one such girl. She came that day to the office to collect her pathetically meager $1.20 pay. There she met the sweatshop’s Jewish boss and stockholder, Leo Frank, in his office on the second floor. Leo Frank was also the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization that would spawn the ADL later that same year.

It was a holiday and no one else was on that entire floor. Frank paid her, and then took her into the factory’s “metal room,” in the rear part of the second floor, as far as possible from the stairway and elevator, and from prying eyes and ears, on the pretext of checking to see if the metal supplies she needed for her work had come in. He closed the doors behind them as they walked.

Near the rear wall, standing in front of a metal lathe next to the toilet entrance, Leo Frank did to Mary Phagan what he, according to numerous witnesses, had often done with his teenage girl employees: He attempted to take sexual liberties with her. She resisted. Frank knocked her down forcibly, hitting her in the eye and striking her head against the unyielding metal lathe, opening a bloody gash that he may or may not have seen at first. While she was stunned, he pulled her garments up above her waist and raped her right on the red-stained floor in front of the toilet, lying in her own flowing blood.

When he was “done,” seeing the blood and doubtlessly realizing his predicament should Mary tell others of his actions, he found a piece of the twine used to pack supplies in his factory, wound it tightly around Mary’s neck, and strangled her to death. He then tore off a piece of her lace underwear, placed it around her neck as if it were a lace necklet and so it covered the marks of the strangling.

He then summoned the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, to enlist his aid in the moving and, he hoped, the burning of Mary Phagan’s body. Conley knew that Frank liked to “chat” in private with the prettier of his young White employees, as he had kept watch for Frank on several occasions while such “chatting” took place. And, in fact, he was keeping watch for him near the factory’s first-floor entrance at that very moment. Frank told Conley that he had struck the girl and accidentally killed her. The lace “necklet” might have served to conceal the strangling — at least conceal it from Conley. It could never fool police investigators. But, if Conley had burned the body for Frank as planned (as it turned out, he never did), there might never be any police investigators. Conley and Frank moved Mary’s body to the basement.

Frank and his legal team tried to frame the Black night watchman, Newt Lee, for the murder. Among other things, they forged his time card, and planted a fake bloody shirt at his residence. When that framing attempt failed, they tried to frame Jim Conley — and, 111 years later, they’re still trying to frame him. They planted a fake “bloody club” and pay envelope near the place where Conley kept watch for Frank that day. But that fake was exposed, too. The true evidence kept building up, and the proof was overwhelming that Frank was the killer. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

But Frank had something that ordinary defendants, Black or White, never have. He was not an “ordinary citizen.” He was a Jew, a member of the supposedly “chosen people.” He was also an actual official of the Jewish power structure — the head of Atlanta’s division of the B’nai B’rith. He had the already massive power, money, media ownership, and political influence of the organized Jewish community nationwide behind him. They refused to let the verdict stand. They funded a multimillion-dollar legal and PR campaign to get him a new trial, to make millions of gullible people believe he was innocent and a saintlike “victim of anti-Semitism,” and to get his sentence commuted. They were only partially successful. All his numerous and expensive appeals, which went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, failed. And the death sentence was carried out by an outraged citizenry after a corrupt governor commuted it. The Jews did fool a great number of Americans about Frank, however.

And the Frank case galvanized Jews to see heritage Americans as their enemies. The Leo Frank case was not only the first time the Jewish power structure flexed its muscles so openly to change public opinion and to get what it wanted from the political and legal systems. It was also when they decided that their alliance with White people was at an end. From that day forward, and intensifying greatly after World War 2, the Jews have been ramping up a (slighty) covert war on White people at the very same time that they made overt war on Arabs and others in the Middle East.

Everything else flows from that day. What that Jew pervert did to Mary Phagan on the metal room floor that day 111 years ago this week led directly to Jonathan Greenblatt telling you what you can and cannot say today — led directly, in fact, to the founding of the ADL just a few months after Mary Phagan breathed her last.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story.

***

Source: based on an article at National Vanguard

by Ron Unz

About a week ago both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal devoted considerable space to the coverage of “Parade,” the revival of a 1998 Broadway musical on the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history.

Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. The incident was portrayed in both the musical and the associated media coverage as a particularly horrifying example of American anti-Semitism.

However, the actual facts of that case were quite different than that and in 2018 I’d discussed them at considerable length as part of a longer article. Given the recently renewed spotlight on the issue and the fascinating implications of the true story, I’ve decided to extract and republish my analysis in hopes of bringing it to wider current attention.

Although I had long recognized the power and influence of the ADL, a leading Jewish-activist organization whose officials were so regularly quoted in my newspapers, until rather recently I had only the vaguest notions of its origins. I’m sure I’d heard the story mentioned at some point, but the account had never stuck in my mind.

Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL’s 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Southern Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. In the past, Frank’s name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, only half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as one of the most notable early KKK victims in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I’d read Albert Lindemann’s highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.

Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete mastery of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the various primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case they made for Frank’s guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.

The basic outline of events is not disputed. In 1913 Georgia, a 13-year-old pencil company worker named Mary Phagan was last seen alive visiting the office of factory manager Leo Frank on a Saturday morning to collect her weekly paycheck, while her raped and murdered body was found in the basement early the next morning and Frank eventually arrested for the crime. As the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, Frank ranked as one of the most prominent Jewish men in the South, and great resources were deployed in his legal defense, but after the longest and most expensive trial in state history, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.

The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank’s behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.

The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl’s body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank’s extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the evidence against him planted.

The case against Frank steadily mounted. He was the last man known to have seen the young victim and he repeatedly changed important aspects of his story. Numerous former female employees reported his long history of sexually aggressive behavior toward them, especially directed towards the murdered girl herself. At the time of the murder, Frank claimed to have been working alone in his office, but a witness who went there reported he had been nowhere to be found. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence implicated Frank.

A black Frank family servant soon came forward with sworn testimony that Frank had confessed the murder to his wife on the morning after the killing, and this claim seemed supported by the latter’s strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.

Two separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank’s lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.

As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank’s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank’s accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, Frank had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley’s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank’s guilt.

By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank’s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank’s Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.

Those attorneys were the best that money could buy and the lead counsel was known as the one of the most skilled courtroom interrogators in the South. But although he subjected Conley to a grueling sixteen hours of intense cross-examination over three days, the latter never wavered in the major details of his extremely vivid story, which deeply impressed the local media and the jury. Meanwhile, Frank refused to take the stand at his own trial, thereby avoiding any public cross-examination of his often changing account.

Two notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan’s body, and everyone soon agreed that these were written by the murderer in hopes of misdirecting suspicion. So they were either written by a semi-literate black such as Conley or by an educated white attempting to imitate that style, and to my mind, the spelling and choice of words strongly suggests the latter, thereby implicating Frank.

Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank’s legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who have endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.

In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish leaders began mobilizing to save him from the hangman. They soon established the ADL as a new vehicle for that purpose and succeeded in making the Frank murder case one of the most famous in American history to that date.

Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life’s blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion’s share of the funds for Frank’s defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America’s most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta’s own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank’s innocence.

Lasker also enlisted other powerful Jewish figures in the Frank cause, including New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, and leading Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff. The Times, in particular, began devoting enormous coverage to this previously-obscure Georgia murder case, and many of its articles were widely republished elsewhere. The NOI authors highlight this extraordinary national media attention: “The Black janitor whose testimony became central to Leo Frank’s conviction became the most quoted Black person in American history up to that time. More of his words appeared in print in the New York Times than those of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington—combined.”

Back a century ago just as today, our media creates our reality, and with Frank’s innocence being proclaimed nationwide in near-unanimous fashion, a long list of prominent public figures were soon persuaded to demand a new trial for the convicted murderer, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams.

Ironically enough, Lasker himself plunged into this crusade despite apparently having very mixed personal feelings about the man whose cause he was championing. His later biography reveals that upon his first personal meeting with Frank, he perceived him as “a pervert” and a “disgusting” individual, so much so that he even hoped that after he managed to free Frank, the latter would quickly perish in some accident. Furthermore, in his private correspondence he freely admitted that a large fraction of the massive funding that he and numerous other wealthy Jews from across the country were providing had been spent on perjured testimony and there are also strong hints that he explored bribing various judges. Given these facts, Lasker and Frank’s other major backers were clearly guilty of serious felonies, and could have received lengthy prison terms for their illegal conduct.

With the New York Times and the rest of the liberal Northern media now providing such heavy coverage of the case, Frank’s defense team was forced to abandon the racially-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at his black accuser which had previously been the centerpiece of their trial strategy. Instead, they began concocting a tale of rampant local anti-Semitism, previously unnoticed by all observers, and adopted it as a major grounds for their appeal of the verdict.

The unprincipled legal methods pursued by Frank’s backers is illustrated by a single example. Georgia law normally required that a defendant be present in court to hear the reading of the verdict, but given the popular emotions in the case, the judge suggested that this provision be waived, and the prosecution assented only if the defense lawyers promised not to use this small irregularity as grounds for appeal. But after Frank was convicted, AJC President Marshall and his other backers orchestrated numerous unsuccessful state and federal appeals on exactly this minor technicality, merely hiring other lawyers to file the motions.

For almost two years, the nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank’s supporters covered the costs of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia’s system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to subvert the local criminal justice system.

One of the very few journalists willing to oppose Frank’s position was Georgia publisher Tom Watson, a populist firebrand, and in an editorial he reasonably declared “We cannot have…one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile” while he also later lamented that “It is a bad state of affairs when the idea gets abroad that the law is too weak to punish a man who has plenty of money.” A former Georgia governor indignantly inquired “Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime.” The clear facts indicate that there was indeed a massive miscarriage of justice in Frank’s case, but virtually all of it occurred in Frank’s favor.

All appeals were ultimately rejected and Frank’s execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near. But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia’s outgoing governor commuted Frank’s sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protest, especially since he was the business partner of Frank’s chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. Given the enormous funds that Frank’s national supporters had been deploying on his behalf and the widespread past admissions of bribery in the case, there are obviously dark suspicions about what had prompted such a remarkably unpopular decision, which soon forced the former governor to exile himself from the state. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank’s prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.

Naturally, Frank’s killing was roundly denounced in the national media that had long promoted his cause. But even in those quarters, there may have been a significant difference between public and private sentiments. No newspaper in the country had more strongly championed Frank’s innocence than the New York Times of Adolph Ochs. Yet according to the personal diary of one of the Times editors, Ochs privately despised Frank, and perhaps even greeted his lynching with a sense of relief. No effort was ever made by Frank’s wealthy supporters to bring any of the lynching party to justice.

Although I have now come to regard the NOI volume as the most persuasive and definitive text on the Frank case, I naturally considered conflicting works before reaching this conclusion.

For nearly a half-century, the leading scholarly account of the incident had probably been Leonard Dinnerstein’s book The Leo Frank Case, first published in 1966, and Dinnerstein, a University of Arizona professor specializing in Jewish history, entirely supported Frank’s innocence. But although the work won a national award, carries glowing blurbs from several prestigious publications, and has surely graced the reading lists of endless college courses, I was not at all impressed. Among other things, the book appears to be the original source of some of the most lurid examples of alleged anti-Semitic public outbursts that apparently have no basis in reality and seem to have been simply fabricated by the author given his lack of any citations; the NOI authors note these stories have been quietly abandoned by all recent researchers. Even leaving aside such likely falsifications, which were widely cited by later writers and heavily contaminated the historical record, I found the short Dinnerstein work rather paltry and even pitiful when compared to that of its NOI counterpart.

A far longer and more substantial recent work was Steve Oney’s 2003 And the Dead Shall Rise, which runs nearly 750 pages and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel, probably establishing itself as today’s canonical text on the historical incident. Oney had been a longtime Atlanta journalist and I was favorably impressed by his narrative skill, along with the numerous fascinating vignettes he provided to illustrate the Southern history of that general era. He also seemed a cautious researcher, drawing heavily upon the primary sources and avoiding much of the falsified history of the last century, while not entirely suppressing the massive evidence of bribery and perjury employed by the Frank forces.

But although Oney does mention much of this information, he strangely fails to connect the dots. For example, although he occasionally mentions some of the funds spent on Frank’s behalf, he never attempts to convert them into present-day equivalents, leaving a naive reader to assume that such trivial amounts could not possibly have been used to pervert the course of justice. Furthermore, his entire book is written in chronological narrative form, with no footnotes provided in the text, and a large portion of the content being entirely extraneous to any attempt to determine Frank’s guilt or innocence, contrasting very sharply with the more scholarly style of the NOI authors.

To my mind, a central element of the Frank case was the massive financial temptations being offered by Frank’s Jewish backers, and the huge number of Atlanta citizens, both high and low, who apparently shifted their positions on Frank’s guilt in eager hopes of capturing some of that largess. But although this important theme was heavily emphasized in the NOI book, Oney seems to mostly avoid this obvious factor, perhaps even for personal reasons. Print publications have suffered massive cutbacks in recent years and I noticed on the book flap that although Oney is described as a longtime Atlanta journalist, he had subsequently relocated to Los Angeles. Once I checked, I immediately discovered that Oney’s book had became the basis for an independent film entitled The People v. Leo Frank, and I wonder whether his hopes of capturing a sliver of Hollywood’s vast lucre may not have encouraged him to so strongly suggest Frank’s innocence. Would an account of Leo Frank as rapist and murderer ever be likely to reach the silver screen? The quiet influence of financial considerations is no different today than it was a century ago, and this factor must be taken into account when evaluating historical events.

The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank’s killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank’s legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.

As Prof. Shahak has effectively demonstrated, traditional Talmudic Judaism regarded all non-Jews as being sub-human, with their lives possessing no value. Given that Frank’s backers were followers of Reform Judaism, it seems quite unlikely that they accepted this doctrine or were even aware of its existence. But religious traditions of a thousand years standing can easily become embedded within a culture, and such unrecognized cultural sentiments may have easily shaped their reaction to Frank’s legal predicament.

Influential historical accounts of the Frank case and its aftermath have contained lurid tales of the rampant public anti-Semitism visited upon Atlanta’s Jewish community in the wake of the trial, even claiming that a substantial portion of the population was forced to flee as a consequence. However, a careful examination of the primary source evidence, including the contemporaneous newspaper coverage, provides absolutely no evidence of this, and it appears to be entirely fictional.

The NOI authors note that prior to Frank’s trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on his plight, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending the story to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.

As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank’s 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons’ reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.

The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly the 1917 release of D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular landmark film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film’s financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film’s distribution throughout the South actually financed Samuel Goldwyn’s creation of MGM, Hollywood’s leading studio.

In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley’s role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors not unreasonably argued that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case entirely misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.

These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar from the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.

We should ask ourselves whether it is appropriate for an organization with such origins and such recent history to be granted enormous influence over the distribution of information across our Internet.

The lengthy 2018 article I’d published attracted considerable readership and more than 750 comments. Perhaps partly as a consequence, a few months later Amazon purged the scholarly book on the Leo Frank case that had so impressed me, ironically doing so during Black History Month. However, it’s still available for sale on the NOI website.

DeWitt H. Roberts, 83 Ivy Street, N. E.
Atlanta, Georgia

ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE LEO M. FRANK MURDER CASE

A memorandum for Alex Miller, and the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith upon some aspects of the case and its consequences.

by DeWitt H. Roberts

---

The trial of Leo M. Frank was concluded more than forty years ago. Many articles, books, pamphlets and memoranda have been written in the intervening period. Most of these have been devoted to a discussion of the murder of Mary Phagan, to a search of the record to determine whether the evidence justified a verdict of guilty in a legal sense, and to speculation as to whether the defendant might have committed the crime.

In most of these studies, which rely all too heavily upon the transcript of the evidence and upon private documentation, the case has been torn from its context completely. Some time relationships have been grossly distorted. The social, economic and political contemporaneous events have been relentlessly disregarded, as if Mary Phagan, Leo Frank, Jim Conley, the battery of trial lawyers, and the unhappy Judge Roan lived in a vacuum. Georgia of 1913 has been equated variously with Georgia of 1900 and with Georgia of 1928 and with Georgia of 1950; in no instance has it been equated with its own date.

This treatment does not undertake to solve the mystery surrounding the murder of Mary Phagan. Only in passing is it related to the guilt or innocence of Leo Frank. Only in passing is it concerned with the mishandling of his defense. It is concerned with the personal prejudice that developed toward Frank only as it is important in the aspect of its transference to the entire Jewish community.

The function of this brief treatment is clarification of the background, so that the essential questions can be determined. These are:

1. 1. How and at what point did anti-Semitism enter the case?
   2. How did the Jewish community fail, not Frank, but itself?
   3. Could a similar thing happen in Georgia today, and, if so, where?
   4. What should and could the Jewish community do in such a case?

To answer these questions even partially, it is sometimes necessary to go far-afield, to explore various by-paths, to reconstruct with greater accuracy than heretofore the period in which the events took place, to rectify the chronology frequently assumed, and to interpret the prejudices of 1913 in terms of that day instead of a later period.

Regretably [sic], except for a few valueless journalistic treatments, most studies of the Frank case have been made by specialists in the law or in social science. The former have assumed a legal climate essentially different from that actually prevailing. The latter have failed in their reconstruction of the socio-economic structure of 1913 Georgia. Both have wanted experience in public affairs, and both have misunderstood completely the role of the newspapers of Atlanta, as factional organs, and of the Atlanta Jewish community.

The Chronology of the Case

1913

April 26 Murder of Mary Phagan; Saturday; Memorial Day.

April 27 Body found, 3:30 A.M.; Frank called, 7 A.M. and urges immediate arrest of Jim Conley and J. M. Gantt.

April 28 Frank asks Herbert Haas to protect interest of company, and engages Pinkerton detectives. Coroner calls jury.

April 29 Investigation continues until…

May 1 Epps youth accuses Frank of attentions to Mary Phagan

May 2 Col. Thos. Felder enters case, and seeks funds to hire W. J. Burns for investigation. Milton Klein issues statement.

May 3 Sol. Gen. Dorsey takes over investigation; Frank denies making confession

May 6 Coroner’s jury resumes hearing; Frank testifies; Rosser enters case as his attorney. Frank and Newt Lee held.

May 24 Frank Indicted; Conley “confession” revealed

July 28 Trial opens

Aug. 25 Frank found guilty

1914

Feb. 17 State Supreme Court affirms lower court’s action

1915

April 19 U.S. Supreme Court renders decision.

April 22 Judge B. H. Hill denies extraordinary motion for new trial

June 9 Prison Commission, with one dissent, refuses action.

June 21 Sentence commuted by Gov. Slaton

Aug. 16 Mob breaks into State Prison; Frank lynched near Marietta

Georgia in 1913

Social & Economic: The State was in the midst of very bad times. The banks were having difficulty in financing the cotton crop, and large Federal deposits to assist them had been promised by Pres. Wilson, who had recently taken office. The State was predominantly agricultural. Employment of women in industry, except textiles, was exceptional except in a very few places.

The Jewish Community: Georgia had the largest Jewish population in the Southeast, a condition that had existed almost from Colonial days, since this was the only wholly secular colony and the only one except Rhode Island in which they enjoyed full political rights. The Jewish population in Georgia, proportionately, was four times as large as that in South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi or Alabama. The Atlanta Jewish community, though newer, less integrated with the community, and possibly less influential that those in Savannah and Albany, for example, was probably in about the same ratio to the population as today. There had never been any outbreak of anti-Semitism in the State at any time.

Georgia Politics: At the time of the murder, Joseph M. Brown was Governor; he was succeeded, about the time the trial opened, by John M. Slaton. Watson was influential as a balance of power in many State races, but the fight was chiefly between the Smith and Brown factions.

Atlanta Politics: James Woodward, Mayor of Atlanta, was engaged in his perennial war with Chief-of-Police Beavers. “Vice” was the major issue, with various side-scandals in municipal affairs.

The Newspapers: Dominant was the Constitution, owned by the Howell family, and bitterly antagonistic to Senator Hoke Smith’s faction. Locally it supported Beavers. Dorsey was a protege. The Journal, rapidly growing, was owned by the Gray family, although it was the political organ of the Smith faction. It was somewhat anti-Beavers, but, for reasons of respectability was not a Woodward supporter openly. The Georgian had recently been acquired from the Seely interests by Hearst, who had provided it with the finest staff of any paper in the country, drawn from his New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles papers. The Constitution, as will be shown, assumed Frank’s guilt. The Journal, it is believed because of inside information from certain of the anti-Beavers officers on the force, started with an anti-Frank attitude, but became, through those sources, convinced of his innocence. The Georgian played the case in a spectacular manner, with utter recklessness that probably hurt the defendant, but without actual bias in its writing.

Attitude of Public: Frank’s guilt seems to have been assumed from the first, probably based upon the Constitution’s highly exaggerated stories. Five prominent members of the Jewish community served in the list of twenty-three grand jurors indicting him, and voted for the indictment. Apparently, except for close personal associates, his family and in-laws, Herbert Haas, some members of the Journal staff, a few anti-Beavers officers, and Rabbi Marx, no one believed Frank innocent until after his conviction. The clumsy efforts of the defense, the lurid accounts of the crime and the trial, the want of sophistication of the community and its press, the stories in all papers on child-labor, white slavery, vice and similar topics, the exceptional talents of Asst. Sol. Gen. E. A. Stephens, who prepared the case for the prosecution, the personality of the defendant — all these made it incredibly difficult for the public to accept a theory of Frank’s innocence. The initial prejudice against him was as a “foreign exploiter of our young women”; next it became a prejudice against a “voluptious [sic] Sodomite”; finally it became “a rich man trying to buy his way out of killing a poor girl”.

The Newspaper Coverage

The coverage of the murder and the preliminary investigations were sensational, but did not become prejudicial to Frank until May 1. On that date, the Constitution gave sensational display to a charge by George Epps, a boy of about Mary Phagan’s age who claimed, and later testified, that he rode to Atlanta from Marietta with her on the day of the murder, that Frank had “paid attentions” to the slain girl. On the following day, Milton Klein’s statement of confidence in Frank was given a rather snide play, while the Felder efforts to get Burns to make an investigation were given attention. On May 3, while featuring the story that the Solicitor General was taking over the investigation, the Constitution carried a story captioned: “Frank Denies Confession”.

On the following day, a Sunday, May 4, the Constitution carried a full page feature on the murder, while the front page featured a head:

Fake Detectives;

Impostors Busy

In Sleuth Roles

In Phagan Case

This story suggested by innuendo that the fake detectives were in the employ of Frank or his friends. Undeniably, such persons had forced their way into the home of the murdered girl’s mother and step-father and had questioned other witnesses.

Headlines as they appeared on subsequent crucial days before the trial are cited below. From April 27 until June 4, a period of 39 days, the murder story remained on the front page. It moved inside briefly, with daily stories of some kind, until the opening of the trial.

Files of the Georgian are not fully available; its stories, while sensational, cut in both directions. The Journal never printed immoderate accounts, although its handling of its “exclusive” on the Felder dictophone expose probable damaged the defense badly. The Constitution, however, persistently assumed Frank’s guilt.

Sleuths Believe
They can Convict
Phagan Murderer     Constitution, Monday, May 5.

Quinn Declares That Officers
Accused Him of Being Bribed
To Come to Aid of Superintendent     Constitution, May 6 (coroner’s inquest story)

Officials Plan
To Exhume Body     Constitution, May 7

Chief (of Detectives) Lanford
Reports Someone
Bribing Witnesses,
Planting Evidence     Constitution, May 8

The Constitution of May 9 featured charges that Frank had made improper advances to many female employees. On May 12 it featured the defense employment of Pinkerton detectives. On May 15, it featured a story implying that Mary Phagan expected to be murdered and had prepared an “identification paper” for her purse. On May 16, it supported Felder’s idea of getting in Burns by popular subscription. Some headlines were:

Girl Will Swear Office
Of Frank was Vacant
Between 12:05 and 12:15     Constitution, May 10

Officer Swears
He Found Frank
With Young Girl     Constitution, May 11

In Loop of Death
Dorsey May Have
Clue to Murderer     Constitution, May 17

This contrasts with the Journal head for May 17:

Phagan Case Will
Go to Jury In
Present Form

Documentary Evidence
Sufficient to Convict,
Says Chief Lanford     Constitution, May 18

Rooming House
Sought by Frank,
Declares Woman     Constitution, May 23

This story was especially prejudicial to the defense; the woman, impliedly the operator of a house of assignation, claimed that Frank called her on the day of the murder and sought to engage a room. On the same date, May 23, the Journal obtained an exclusive break on the efforts of Col. Felder to obtain affidavits given by the mother and step-father of the slain girl. On May 24, the date the indictment was returned, the Conley confession, the indictment and the following were featured in the Constitution:

Frank not at Home
Hours on Saturday,
Declares Lanford     Constitution, May 24

Frank Guilty — Lanford     Constitution, Sunday, May 25

Scott Says
Frank Guilty     Constitution, May 26
(Scott was head of the Pinkerton office, employed by Frank)

Burns Agency
Quits Case     Constitution, May 27

Conley Says He Helped Frank Carry     (full page streamer)
Body of Mary Phagan to Cellar     Constitution, May 30

Mary Phagan Murder Work of Negro,
Says Leo M. Frank     Constitution, May 31

The bordello keeper’s story crept back into the news presently. Her testimony was not used; first, because it was inadmissible; second, because it was at complete variance with all the other State evidence. But it had prejudicial value:

Frank Asked Room
To Conceal Body,
Believes Lanford     Constitution, June 2

The mistress of the house of assignation then vanished, but the Constitution hailed her return on June 19: “Mrs. Formby Here for Phagan Trial”.

In the meantime, on June 3, Minola M’Knight, a servant in the Frank home, had been released after four weeks of questioning. Mrs. Frank issued a statement, deploring police methods, which was featured by the Constitution under the following:

Dorsey Replies
To the Charges
Of Mrs. L. Frank     Constitution, June 3

The Georgian meantime had printed a story suggesting that Leo Frank had been bigamously married in Brooklyn, which was refuted by the Journal. The story did not appear in the Constitution.

From June 4, until the opening of the trial, the papers carried few stories. With its opening on July 28, all papers had a field day. The Journal relied largely on courtroom sketches; the Constitution and Georgian had photographers.

The Constitution’s front page of August 29 was garnished with a six column picture of the court room, showing six lawyers and various other persons at the defense table.

The Constitution apparently had no doubts as to Frank’s guilt. In addition, it was strangely pro-Beavers and was a sponsor for Solicitor General Dorsey, whom it afterward supported for Governor (1916, successfully) and for Senator (1920, unsuccessfully). The Georgian played both sides luridly, leaning to the prosecution. The Journal, which had seemed to accept the community verdict of Frank’s guilt, but which had been moderate in its coverage, seems to have become convinced of his innocence on May 21, and took a moderate but partisan position thereafter in the handling of the news of the case.

Contrasting handling of the stories speaks from the headlines:

Conley’s Main Story Still
Remains Unshaken     (1 line, 8 col. streamer)

Grilled 12 Hours
By Luther Rosser,
Jim Conley Insists
Frank Guilty Man     Constitution, Wed., Aug. 6

Dalton Tells About
Visits Paid Pencil
Factory With Women     Constitution, Friday, Aug. 8

The Sunday stories were more moderate, but, probably by chance, a violently anti-Semitic article, with a London, England, dateline appeared in the Constitution: “Lord Newton is fighting to make loan sharks use real names as Moses and Aaron”. Since the defense was presenting evidence, the Constitution played the trial down somewhat, feating the testimony of Schiff, an employee.

The State had become committed to the theory that Frank was a sexual pervert, there being definite evidence that Mary Phagan had not been raped. So on Wednesday, August 13, the Constitution led off with a head: “Office boy asked whether Frank did not make advances to him”. (This element will be discussed later)

The Constitution’s headlines for Sunday, August 17, were:

“Serious Blow is Dealt Defense by Its Own Witness”

Girl Says Frank
Often Looked In
Dressing Rooms

Wealth of Frank’s Relatives Injected
In Cross-Examination of Mother

On Thursday, August 21, as the evidence ended, the Constitution’s front page displayed a picture of the most photogenic of the girls used by the State as rebuttal witnesses after Frank’s character was put at stake by the defense. The picture was captioned: “Girls Tell Jury Frank’s Character is Bad”.

The drop-off head on the lead Sunday story, August 24, in the Constitution read:

“Solicitor Takes up Alibi of Prisoner, Picks it to Pieces; Tells About Minola McKnight (sic) Affidavit and Defends Detective Department. No Doubt Frank Dictated Murder Notes, He Declares.”

The story on the verdict was not overplayed, but a feature showed the bias:

As Bells Tolled, Dorsey Closed
Magnificent Argument Which
Fastened Guilt on Frank     Constitution, Tues., Aug. 26

The Journal’s headlines reflect its belief in the innocence of the defendant. Some are quoted:

“Its Terrible for An Innocent
Man to be Charged With Crime”     Journal, Sunday, Aug. 3
(This captioned a boxed story, leading the general trial story, and is a quotation from a brief interview with Leo M. Frank.)

Jim Conley’s Memory Proved
Bad Under Cross-Examination     Tuesday, Aug. 5

Sheriff Mangum Explains
Why he did not put
Handcuffs on Frank     Friday, Aug. 8

Franks Story of Before and
After the Crime Corroborated     Thurs., Aug. 14

Dalton Excoriated, Conley
Annihilated and Solicitor
Charged With Persecution     Friday, August 22

The story of Arnold’s argument, which introduced the theme of racial and religious persecution, was treated exceptionally fully in the Journal of Thursday, August 21. Their story on the verdict, Monday, August 25, was strongly pro-defense, expressing the belief that Frank’s friends would continue to have complete faith in his innocence.

Anti-Semitism Enters the Case

The verdict of the jury did three things. It sobered the press of Atlanta; the game, played between Dorsey-Hooper and Arnold-Rosser, was concluded, and it could be observed that the prize was the neck of a man. Secondly, it roused the Jewish community, heretofore very largely indifferent to Frank’s fate. Thirdly, it touched off a tremendous outburst of anti-Semitism.

Some people began to consider the evidence impartially; others heard, as undoubtedly Judge Arthur G. Powell was to hear a little later, the quite possibly true story of Conley’s confession; both of these groups began to believe Frank innocent. On far less rational grounds, the Jewish community — in Atlanta. throughout the Southeast — assert his innocence.

It is possible to determine the precise moment when the public became conscious of Leo Frank’s Jewishness. It is, however, quite improbable that more than two members of the jury were affected by the realization, for it was not obtrusive nor a major factor in his conviction. Nevertheless, it entered the trial during the cross-examination of the senior Mrs. Frank on Saturday, August 16. Mrs. Frank previously had irritated the Solicitor by interrupting him with an hysterical outburst during the examination of another witness, and in his cross-examination he turned to the theme of the family’s “great wealth” and the fact that some relatives were “retired capitalists”.

A few anti-Jewish expressions had been heard before, but it became obvious from that date forward that some of the prejudice against Frank had an anti-Semitic flavor. Reuben Arnold, attorney for the defense, in his opening argument turned to the theme, charging religious persecution as the basis for the prosecution. But although some members of the mob outside the court room shrieked to “Hang the Jew”, contemporary accounts and memories unaffected by the trauma of the subsequent events would be inclined to cause adoption of the view that even that cry did not evidence antipathy toward Frank because he was a Jew.

The anti-Semitic aspects entered the case with full violence only with the entrance of Thomas E. Watson into the picture. But ill-advised efforts on behalf of Frank while the State Supreme Court was considering the case prepared the path for Watson’s advent.

It is generally believed that Watson caused Frank’s death. In the sense that he provoked the lynch mob to action, that is true. But Watson made no comment upon the case in his magazine or newspaper* until a month after the Supreme Court of Georgia had waded through the voluminous record and rationalized affirmation of the conviction. In no way did Watson take part in any of the events that preceded the trial, nor did he write anything during the trial.

*See preceding page. Watson published Watson’s Magazine, a monthly, and the Jeffersonian, a weekly.

But in March 1914, he struck with unmitigated venom.

Watson’s political history, including his vendetta with the Atlanta Journal and Hoke Smith, is too well known to require any retelling. He had become almost the balance of power in State elections. He was, in 1914, conducting a mild sniping at Woodrow Wilson, whom he disliked, and a rabid campaign against the Pope, whom he termed “Jimmy Cheesy, a fat old dago who lives with voluptuous women”. That, however, was mild language for one who called rival politicians “keepers of Negro concubines and minions of Rome”.

It was probably the stand the Atlanta Journal took in demanding a new trial for Frank that precipitated Watson into the case with such energy. At any rate, culling over all the anti-Semitic literature of the ages, he produced a wealth of invective against the Jew.

Among his more original and vitriolic pieces were “Jesus was no Jew”, “Leo Frank: A Jew Pervert”, “The Jewish Conquests” and a serial upon the history of the Jews that is extraordinary for imaginative effort and provocative language; indeed, the lecherous monk with his breed of nuns was replaced in both publications by the lecherous Jew with his harem of child-Christians.

The circulation of the Jeffersonian rose from 25,000 to 87,000.

The vehemence of the anti-Semitic campaign undoubtedly was very greatly stimulated by two factors: first, the natural but clumsy efforts of the Jewish community to save Frank; second, by the acute depression, which hit rural merchants more severely than any other class in Georgia.

As appeals for clemency came from the Texas and Tennessee legislatures and many other sources, as the courts debated the case and Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was making his observations about due process of law to an unheeding majority, as the Prison Commission and Governor Slaton considered commutation, the fever of anti-Semitism increased.

In many rural communities there were handbills: “Buy your clothes from an American Store. Or shall your money go ‘to buy Governors'”. These appeared immediately after Governor Slaton acted.

On August 12, 1915, Watson wrote: “The next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing that we give to Negro rapists”.

On August 16, 1915, Frank was killed by the mob.

The Mistakes of the Defense

The defense of Leo Frank was one of the most ill-conducted in the history of Georgia jurisprudence. The defendant made all possible mistakes in handling himself before his arrest. His attorneys completely misunderstood the nature of the evidence against him. His defense was handled by so many people, diverted into so many directions, that it is now impossible to determine responsibility.

It is certain that the defense counsel depended very heavily upon Judge Roan. The trial judge was eminently fair, but it was apparent that he did not think Frank guilty. His rulings leaned toward the defense on almost every close point. It is apparent that both Judge Roan and Frank’s counsel expected a verdict of “not guilty”, and that the absence of Frank and his lawyers from the court room when the verdict was brought in arose from that expectation.

Frank was less than candid with officers. A natural nervous shyness doubtless with the case. His four-hour appearance on the witness stand was disingenuous in the extreme, and marked by a factual error (the statement that the noon whistle blew) that completed the case against him.

Undoubtedly some one interested in the defense employed dishonest detectives, and, possibly, induced at least one of the Pinkerton operatives to deviate from propriety; the action of Scott, head of the Pinkerton office, in declaring Frank guilty is explicable only on the theory either of police pressure or personal indignation at tampering with his staff. The mysterious “pay envelope”, bearing not a single fingerprint of any kind — even a smudge, had to have been a plant.

It is uncertain whether friends of Frank were behind the insidious operations of Col. Thomas B. Felder, but the public so believed.

The presence of some seven lawyers and several relatives at the defense table prejudiced the jury. The fashionable dress of some of the Frank relatives was in too sharp contrast to the simple clothes that Stephens, the real genius of the prosecution, saw that Mary Phagan’s mother were.

Introduction of a horde of character witnesses by the defense was one of the three major mistakes of the actual trial. The Brooklyn and Texas delegations created prejudice; the local witnesses were compelled, upon cross-examination to admit that Frank “looked into the women’s dressing room” – – a sure proof, in the eyes of a 1913 jury, of the charge of perversion.

(Whether Frank was or was not tainted with a mild voyeurism can not be determined from the documentary evidence. It is not improbable, since the witnesses summoned on his behalf, all of whom testified to his good character and denied that he had made any ‘advances’ to employees, also gave testimony that supports that view. On the other hand, Frank’s explanation of his looking into the dressing room is consistent with the savage employer mores of 1913, and may have been completely true.)

The second major mistake made at the trial was the verbose cross-examination of Jim Conley. The Pettibone trials were close enough in time for Frank’s attorneys to have known better.

The third major mistake was the parading of a spurious witness, one Mincey, before the jury during the cross-examination of Conley, and the subsequent failure to place him on the stand. Not having him testify was, however, wise enough; the State would have riddled both men and his “evidence” with ease, and has called some sixteen witnesses for the purpose, as Dorsey managed to inform the jury.

It is difficult, at first glance, to understand the mistakes made in organizing the case for trial.

However, a careful reading of actually contemporary documents and the application of even a slight knowledge of human nature will reveal precisely what happened.

The defendant was an acutely nervous individual, a newcomer to Atlanta without very many intimate friends. His life seems to have been very largely devoted to his family, including his wife’s parents and other relatives. His one thought, and theirs, appears to have been: “How can we hush up this mess and avoid a scandal?” It is quite apparent that there was little or no consciousness of his danger until far too late.

As for his attorneys, the answer is even simpler. First, they were far too numerous. At the actual trial, there appear to have been but four attorneys-of-record: Messrs. Arnold, Rosser, Hopkins and Haas; but at least two or three more always occupied space at the defense table, and certainly at least seven or eight individual attorneys busied themselves with one or another aspect of the initial defense.

The leading counsel, Arnold and Rosser, were acknowledged powers as trial attorneys. They had handled many important cases. Arnold, a great figure before juries, had a marvelous range of forensic arguments. Rosser excelled on cross-examination. Undoubtedly they underestimated the skill with which Dorsey, guided by the technical genius of Stephens, had prepared the case. (Actually, the pair went into retirement for more than two weeks to map the trial. Not only were they prepared as to witnesses and cross-examination, but they perfected the timing with absolute skill. It was no accident that Dorsey’s concluding [peroration] coincided with the bells of the Catholic church a half-block away. Their handling of the prosecution was a masterpiece of meticulous detail. Dorsey certainly believed that Frank was not only guilty but a “monster of iniquity”. Stephens, who dominated the Solicitor-General office in Fulton county for more than thirty years under several chiefs, was an extraordinary character. He seldom touched a case until after indictment; he believed that the prosecutor’s office was supposed to prosecute; he had the tenacity of Javert; he was the greatest expert on homicide law and the law of evidence in the South; he was wholly incorruptible; he was entirely without feeling or sentiment in the conduct of the office. Whether Stephens held any opinion at all about Frank’s guilt or innocence could never be determined; discussing the case, almost twenty years later, he said: “The jury thought him guilty. The evidence authorized the verdict. When the appeal came down, I dismissed it from my mind”.)

In addition, the defense attorneys, especially Rosser, appeared to desire to make this “big case” a demonstration of virtuosity. Pulled from the context of the trial, Rosser’s cross-examination of Conley was a marvel of art. But the Negro had been coached far more competently than McPharland had coached Orchard, in the only comparable American trial. A different line of cross-examination would have [produced] acquittal.

Arnold’s injection of the race-religious issue into the trial was a matter of mere calculated risk. With a different stage setting, it might well have succeeded. His speech was intense, brilliant and moving. considering his temperament, he could not have made a better one. Had he been Frank’s only attorney, had the defense rested its case wholly on Frank’s unsworn testimony and a different type of cross-examination, if the ninety-nine character witnesses not prejudiced the jury already, had Arnold, Frank and his wife been the only occupants of the defense table, the Arnold speech might well have swept the jury to an acquittal. If the entire group of defense attorneys and official and unofficial advisers, only Arnold seems to have apprehended any of the true atmosphere of the trial.

The Appeal and Thereafter

Frank would have been well advised to have dismissed all the attorneys who participated in the trial and predicated his appeal solely on the issue of his absence from the court room when the jury returned the verdict. Under these circumstances, it is possible that a new trial might have been directed. In general, the rulings of the trial Judge had been favorable to the defense. Although some members of the highest court felt otherwise, the case could not properly, under Georgia precedents, have been reversed on the general grounds, i.e. that the verdict was not supported by the evidence.

Similarly, in the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court from the denial of the writ of habeas corpus in the Northern District of Georgia (Frank v. Mangum) the present tendency is to consider the current interpretation of “due process” instead of that prevailing in 1913. Likewise, the Frank case is not clearly distinguished from subsequent “due process” case in which a somewhat different doctrine was enunciated; Frank’s attorneys had not sought a mistrial because of the outrageous clamor of the mob, and under the chain of decisions relied upon by the U.S. Supreme Court, he could not invoke his constitutional rights belatedly. That was the general concept the bar and courts held in 1913; it was erroneous, but the erroneous philosophy was not uncovered until more than a decade later, and Frank was not the only man to be convicted without genuine due process.

In some circles, the applications to various State legislatures for resolutions appealing to Georgia to grant Frank a new trial or commutation or a pardon have been severely criticized. Due to the belated interest in the case by the general Jewish community, it is true that this action was a fan to the flames of anti-Semitism and was something of a mistake; but it […] necessary again to consider the emotional climate and the semantics of 1913. For example, the words ‘nationalism’, ‘radical’, ‘Israel’, to select but three examples, did not have the meanings of 1953. In 1913, States rights had no such meaning as in 1953, and States like individuals understood the meaning of the words ‘a decent regard for the opinions of mankind’ in the identical sense of the author.* Colorado probably would today take a far different attitude about “outside interference” in a parallel to the case of Joe Hill; it is very unlikely that the prison authorities of any State would permit the removal of an executed prisoner’s body for the express purpose of spreading his ashes “where some flowers grow”, or that the press would recount in detail such a dispersal of ashes in every State of the Union and in more than forty foreign countries. There were too many ashes at Dachau for men to be concerned longer, in this year of human progress, with the fate of one individual.

*The words appear in the Declaration of Independence.

However, the open efforts to raise money for use in the Frank case was injurious. It provided the anti-Semite groups with arguments. Likewise, the silence of the Jewish community about the case until far too late, and its sudden concern after the conviction — while obviously now attributable to a reversal of attitude as to Frank’s guilt — was interpreted as a mass decision that “none of the Chosen shall die for murdering a gentile girl”.†

† One of the Jeffersonian articles contains this phrase.

A Minor Footnote on the Future

The explosions of the Populist and Free Silver period had brought the ‘Negro question’ to the attention of the South. Among the books most popular in the decade preceding and including the Frank trial were Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots.

In the late summer of 1915, shortly after the lynching of Leo Frank, a small gathering of robed-and-hooded figures met on Stone Mountain and burned a cross.

Southern white, Gentile, Protestant womanhood henceforth would be protected from being forced into concubinage to the Negro, into the brothels maintained by Catholic monks, and into the harems maintained by lecherous Jews.

The Klan was created by naive men, intensely emotional. It did not remain their property long.

The Klan was born out of the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of a man who did not kill her. There is a certain irony in the fact that its death came because of the murder of Madge Oberholtzer at the hands of […] the Klan for Indiana.

Could the Frank Case be Repeated?

Could there be another Leo Frank case? That is the question that troubles seriously every member of a racial, ethnic, political or religious minority.

There are many changed factors. The legal background, especially as to what constitutes “due process of law”, is vastly different. Police methods have improved immeasurably; blood-typing, fingerprint identification, chemical analysis of soils and dusts, handwriting analysis, and other scientific approaches to the solution of crime have become commonplace. If Frank were alive today, if there were a similar crime in Atlanta, the investigation of the case would take a totally different turn; his guilt or innocence would rest of less subjective factors than in 1913.

Likewise there is a greater sophistication. In 1913, only Savannah among Georgia cities had a truly urban background; Atlanta’s population was swollen by a rural influx. In 1913, the names of Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, Jung and Kinsey were not household words. In 1913, the socio-industrial pattern did not provide for the employment of 54% of all women in Atlanta, more than half of them in industry. In 1913, newspapers were generally wholly irresponsible in the coverage of crime, which was a [diversion] somewhat similar to television; the spectacular methods of Pulitzer, the smug pornography of Bennett, the mercurial sensationalism of Hearst dominated press thinking.

Likewise, the Jewish community has (1) a greater unity; (2) added facilities within their own ranks and within the general community with which to deal with such a problem; and (3) increased experience in combatting the forces of prejudice.

Therefore, it would appear superficially that there could not be a repetition of the Frank case. But beneath the surface…

There are areas in the United States, especially in parts of New England, on the Pacific Coast, and in the newly industrialized rural-urban fringe areas of the Southeast, were a reasonable facsimile of the Frank case could occur. Of these regions, the Pacific Coast is inviting because of the presence of irresponsible smalltown newspapers; the West Coast of Florida because of the impact of industrialization within the citrus industry and a hostility toward the East Coast, and because of probably the highest incidence of latent anti-Semitism to be found outside a few areas in New England.

A depression, with economic stresses in operation in emotional areas, could produce a dangerous condition.

How Can This be Avoided?

In the combatting of overt anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League has been extraordinarily effective. It has been able to mobilize its natural allies among the Protestant and Catholic clergy, among groups zealous in the defense of civil rights, and among those who abhor intolerance and injustice.

But while the Jewish community can protect itself more effectively than before, when it is attacked, it is obvious that the solution lies partly in yet another field.

Had the Jews of Atlanta looked into the Frank case before it was too late, the situation would have been vastly different.

Had not the Jews of Atlanta taken, quite generally, the attitude that Frank was unquestionably guilty, until his cause became their cause because they too were attacked, the flames of bigotry would have expired.

If anybody had listened to Leo Frank…

Conclusion

No one listened to Leo Frank.

Almost from the day of his arrest until eleven months later, there were very few who concerned themselves with the question of his innocence. He was shunned as one who had brought shame and disaster on his coreligionists. There was no true appraisal of the case; his guilt — the guilt of a man who was a ‘moral monster’, a ‘pervert’, a ‘sex fiend’, a man who habitually consorted with lewd women — was assumed. That he was none of those things, and that not a single fact was ever produced to support the wild charges made in the press, never occurred to anyone until he had been found guilty and until that guilt had been transferred to the Jewish community as a whole.

Since his death, Leo Frank has been received, as the victim of a legal blunder and subsequently of a lynch mob, into the Jewish hagiology, and most of the events of 1913 inconsistent with that viewpoint have been thrust out of the mind, together with the guilt of his contemporaries. He is denied the humanity of being a very frightened, myopic, nervous, twitching, perhaps slightly unpleasant young man from Brooklyn; he is a cause celebre, and not a man who was alone, a stranger and afraid…

“It is terrible for an innocent man to be charged with crime…”