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.

Click to play here: [sc_embed_player fileurl=”http://leofrank.org/audio_books/de_nugent/Tom%20Watson%20-%20Leo%20Frank%20Jew%20Pervert%20Sept%201915%20-%20read%20by%20John%20de%20Nugent.mp3″]

Download audio file

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National Vanguard Presents:

EDITOR’S NOTE: National Vanguard now makes available this, the fourth audio book from Tom Watson’s series on the Leo Frank case, read by Vanessa Neubauer (without commentary).

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An audiobook version of ‘The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert’ (Watson’s Magazine, September 1915) with commentary and analysis by Alex Linder from the VNN Free Learning College (Centennial, 2015) is available for your listening pleasure.

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Omniphi Media Presents:

‘The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert’ by Tom Watson Published in Watson’s Magazine, September 1915, transformed in 2015 into audiobook by Oscar Turner of Omniphi Media (without commentary about text).

Introductory Notes from National Vanguard (2015):

Eventually, all of Watson’s long-suppressed essays on the Frank case will be available in audio format, in time for 100th anniversary of Leo Frank’s death in 1915. As the reader for this series, Vanessa Neubauer, states: “It’s important that Watson’s work get out there into the public eye this year, because he’s a major — yet suppressed — author on the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank was a Jewish factory owner who was convicted of the sex murder of a teenage White girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his sweatshop. His arrest, conviction, and eventual lynching was the impetus for the founding of the Jewish ADL. The Jews will be making a major media push, climaxing this August on the 100th anniversary of Frank’s death, to convince the public that Frank was innocent. We need to counter all that, and tell the truth to give some sort of justice to Mary Phagan and her family. And the facts are on our side.”

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The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert by Thomas E. Watson (pictured), Watson’s Magazine, Volume 21 Number 5, September 1915.

IN NEW YORK, there lived a fashionable architect, whose work commanded high prices. He was robust, full of manly vigor, and so erotic that he neglected a handsome and refined young wife to run after little girls.

As reported in the papers of William R. Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Adolph Ochs, the libertine architect had three luxurious suites of rooms fitted up for the use of himself, a congenial company of young rakes, and the young women whom they lured into these elegant dens of vice.

Stanford White’s principal place, however, was in the tower-apartments of Madison Square Garden. In this building, his preparations for sensual and sexual enjoyment were as carefully elaborated and as expensively perfected, as though wine, women and song were the chief end of man’s existence. The excavations at Pompeii have revealed no Rose-door voluptuousness more Oriental than that of Stanford White. Like the Roman sensualist who stimulated his amorous passions by surroundings that promoted desire and prolonged the pleasure, White was artistic in his vices; and it was the nude girl, of perfect symmetry and beautiful face, that he bore into his seraglio, where rich and splendid appointments, soft lights, hidden musical instruments, fragrant flowers, and choice wines intoxicated every sense to the highest pitch of epicurean ecstasy.

Into this golden harem, he took the young, lovely and unmoral Evelyn Nesbit; and, according to her statement, she was brutally used. A shocking fact in the case is, that White seems to have given money to the girl’s mother, and that the mother had, in effect, surrendered the maid to the man—knowing why he wanted her.

Whatever the girl felt as to the manner in which White had accomplished his purpose, she soon afterwards returned to him, and their relations continued for some months. Then Harry Thaw happened to see her, fell in love with her, and desired so ardently to possess her, that he married her.

They went to Europe, and during the tour, the wife told the young husband her terrible story. On their return to New York, the architect had the insane folly to again enter into correspondence with Evelyn—this time knowing that he had an excitable young man to encounter—a husband who might be supposed to have learned his wife’s secret. All the world knows how Thaw was inflamed beyond bounds, by seeing White sitting in the eating-room, at the Garden; and how the young husband immediately shot the satyr who had doped and ruined his wife.

The great legal battle that Thaw’s devoted mother has waged in her boy’s behalf, is a part of the history of the times. For nine long years, that fine old woman has borne her cross, and made her fight, her son behind the bars, all those bitter years.

At last, after nine years of imprisonment, Harry Thaw is a free man—for the court which tried him for murder, pronounced him insane; and the jury which recently tried him for insanity, said that he is sane.

At least one of these verdicts was correct, and both may have been; but the jurors in the last trial have since declared that Thaw ought to have killed White, anyway; and about three-fourths of the red-blooded men and women of the country are of the same opinion.

But the Jew-owned papers, and the Jew-hired papers, and the Hearst papers take a different view. They are outraged. Their feelings are deeply hurt. They lament the failure of the Law to hang this hot-tempered boy who shot the man that had virtually bought Evelyn from her monstrous mother, and had then drugged and forced her. In their wrathful eyes, nine years’ imprisonment is no punishment at all. They rail at the influence of Money, and deplore the disgrace which has fallen upon New York—the righteous town where Jacob Schiff, the banker, could give a forty-year sentence to an humble Jew, for entering clandestinely the dwelling of a Jewish millionaire; the righteous town wherein the Roman priests could have the Mayor assassinated without provoking hostile comment from the Hearst papers, the Jew-owned papers, or the Jew-hired papers; the righteous town where the priest, Hans Schmidt, can cut his concubine’s throat, dismember her body, fling the pieces in the river, and still escape punishment!

Let us regale our minds by reading what the Hearst papers say about the case of Harry Thaw:

It is quite true that but for the lavish outpouring of the family fortune, Thaw might have been electrocuted, or would still be confined in a madhouse. It is equally true that but for the contributions of other rich young men, whose money cursed them, his fight for liberty would not have been so prolonged or so costly.

Many will moralize over the power of money as manifested in the escape of Thaw from paying the extreme penalty for the murder of Stanford White.

Fewer will stop to think of the malign power of money that pressed this rich young man along the primrose path that ended in the murder on the roof garden, his prolonged imprisonment, and the ineradicable disgrace which rests upon his name.

As it is, about the most the public can say of him is to express the hope that the public mind shall not longer be assailed by the fulminations of spectacular lawyers, the imaginings of alienists, and the bathos of hired pamphleteers. The world is weary of Thaw.

The world is not weary of Hearst, fortunately; and if he can explain his prolonged hostility to Thaw, and reconcile it with his determined championship of Frank, the world will peruse his statement with interest.

Let us now read what another New York paper—Jew-owned or Jew-hired—published about the two cases, Frank’s and Thaw’s. Concerning Thaw, the New Republic says:

In the case of Harry K. Thaw, it looks as if the State of New York had thoroughly well got its leg pulled. The State deserved it richly, for it asked a judge and a jury to decide a question which they are simply incapable of deciding. Those laymen could no more pass on Thaw’s sanity than upon the condition of his liver. Thus a man may be highly educated, courteous, genial in every relation of life, and still bear within him a murderous disposition, which breaks out only on special occasions. The voluble juryman who has been so much interviewed came pretty close to the truth when he said that Thaw would never kill except when a woman was involved.

What freed Thaw was in reality a combination of prejudices. He behaved well in court. The State’s alienists behaved badly in court. Thaw fought a long fight, and men admire persistence. He had murdered Stanford White, a man who happened to be a genius, but whose genius was forgotten in the deep moral prejudice against him. The brutal fact is that an American jury is very ready to flirt with the idea that there are unwritten laws to justify the killing of men who seduce young girls.

Concerning the Frank case, the same New York paper says:

It is often too foolish to indict a whole people. But in this instance the guilt of the people is clear. They wrecked the only trial Frank has had, they believed every lie about him, they terrorized their public officials. They have made democracy hideous—they, the men and women of the State. There was a minority that knew better, a minority that did not wish to make the courts of the State a vile spectacle to the whole nation. But of that minority many were too cowardly to speak out. They allowed the mob to stamp its own imprint upon the public character of the State. The Governor who acted, and the opinion which supported him, were not enough to save Georgia from its degradation.

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, communities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

It is a disagreeable discovery of the New Republic, that American juries harbor a perverse sympathy for fathers and brothers who kill the seducers of young girls, and thus rid the earth of the most dangerous vipers that crawl. The New Republic says that it is not only a fact that juries do sympathize with the men who give shot-gun protection to womanhood, but that this fact is brutal.

When the human race ceases to be capable of brutality of that sort, civilization will be the soup-kettle of molly-coddles; and literature will degenerate into a milk-sop effeminacy that won’t be worth hell’s room.

Coming to the Frank case, the New Republic condemns, not only the jury and the judges, but the whole State in which the horrible crime was committed. “It is often foolish to indict a whole people,” says this magazine. Edmund Burke said it was always foolish to do so.

The State of Georgia, as a whole, is pronounced guilty. It has had no evidence against Frank; it has been possessed of a Devil of blind hatred; it has relentlessly persecuted; it has tried to lynch an innocent man, under legal forms. Its mobs terrified the witnesses; terrified the jurors; terrified the trial judge; terrified the Supreme Court of Georgia in both of its decisions, the last of which was unanimous. Finally, the Georgia mobs terrified the Supreme Court of the United States, which, under duress, decided that Frank’s lawyers—after having had all the time, money and opportunity needed—had utterly failed to show that Georgia had not given to Leo Frank every right to which he was entitled.

What do such editors care for the calm decision of the highest court on earth? Nothing.

“The guilt of the people is clear.”

“They have made democracy hideous.” Where? When? And how?

When justice was mocked in San Francisco, some years ago, and William T. Sherman (afterwards the great General) led the “mob,” did the riotous tumults of an indignant democracy make it hideous? When justice was derided and defied in New Orleans, and the outraged democracy flamed into a vengeful conflagration, did it become hideous?

When our Revolutionary Fathers lynched Tories, and drove traitors into hasty flight, did they make democracy hideous?

When the Commons of old England rose in bloody riots against the Lords of Church and State, during the Epoch of Reform, did these insurrectionary Englishmen, battling for human rights, make democracy hideous?

When the Athenians of old furiously fell upon and killed the Greek who advised that Grecian freedom be surrendered to the Persian King, did those rioters make democracy hideous?

Away with milk-sops and molly-coddles! Whenever the human race degenerates to the point where intense indignation is not aroused by enormities of crime, then mankind will be ready for the last Fire; and the sooner this scroll is given to the Flames, as the trump of doom sounds the requiem of a dying world, the less will be the sum total of human depravity.

In Georgia, there was never a mob collected while the Frank case was on trial; never a scene of tumult, never a disorder in the court room. It was not until after the State had patiently waited for two years, while the unlimited Money back of Frank was interposing every obstacle to the Law, travelling from court to court, on first one pretext and then another; offering new affidavits which soon appeared, confessedly, to have been falsehoods, paid for with money; resorting to every criminal method to corrupt some of the State’s witnesses, and to frighten others into changing their testimony; it was not until the people of Georgia had waited so long, and seen Frank’s lawyers defeated at every point, by the sheer strength of the State’s case against a most abominable criminal; it was not until, after all this, when one of Leo Frank’s own lawyers basely betrayed the State, upset all the courts, and violated our highest law; it was not until John M. Slaton, the partner of Leo Frank’s leading lawyers, corruptly used the pardoning power to save his own guilty client—it was not until then that the people broke into a tumult of righteous wrath against the infamous Governor who had put upon our State this indelible stain.

And because our indignation took the same direction as that of our Fathers, in the days of ’76; the same direction as that of the Frenchmen who stormed the Bastille; the same as that of the Englishmen who sacked the Bishop’s palace, and the nobleman’s castle; the same as that of the Viennese who rose in fury against the Emperor and his Metternich, forcing that crafty and coldly ferocious old democracy-hater to flee for his life—because of the fact that we Georgians are just human, we must be relegated to a San Domingo basis, and treated by other States as though we were woolly-headed worshippers of Vaudoux!

HOW ABOUT BECKER AND NEW YORK?

The Becker case created a profound and painful impression everywhere, because of its contrast to the case of Leo Frank. The Hearst papers, the Jew-owned, and Jew-hired papers, have found this contrast embarrassing to them, and they are endeavoring to “distinguish the cases.”

For example, the New Orleans Daily States says:

A patient perusal of all the mass of evidence, considered in the light of the clashing interests of those involved, directly and indirectly, in the Rosenthal tragedy, has left us unconvinced that the law’s reasonable doubt of Becker’s guilt was removed. That Becker was a police tyrant and grafter, was amply proved. The fact that he was more or less endangered by Rosenthal’s promised revelations of police corruption furnished a motive which made it easy for others who confessed they were in the murder plot to fasten the crime on him. But there will always be ground for the suspicion that the Rose-Webber crowd “framed” Becker to insure their own immunity.

But whereas Frank was denied the safeguards and privileges which the State pledges any person accused of a capital crime, and was convicted in a community rank with prejudice and mob spirit, on the testimony of a vicious negro criminal, Becker was robbed of no technical right the law guaranteed him.

Few more deliberate and cold-blooded murderers have been committed in New York than the assassination of Rosenthal, and public sentiment was powerfully exercised against Becker in the face of clear evidence that he was a grafter with a motive for sealing Rosenthal’s lips. But it would be absurd to liken the atmosphere in New York during the Becker trial to that in Atlanta during the Frank trial, or to find any points of resemblance between the orderly conviction of Becker and the utterly disorderly trial of Frank.

So! Another case of my bull and your ox. Do we not all remember that when Bourke Cockran moved for a continuance in the Becker case, and Judge Samuel Seabury refused it, the great lawyer threw up his brief, and passionately exclaimed, “This is not a trial; it is an assassination?”

No lawyer said that to Judge Roan, trying Frank; and there never was the slightest evidence that Frank’s trial was “disorderly.”

The Daily States asserts that “Becker was robbed of no technical right the law guaranteed him.”

Does the States know that the U.S. Supreme Court used those very words in the case of Frank—used them in a well-considered decision, which is the amplest vindication of the Georgia courts?

When the highest court in the world judicially affirms that the State which tried and convicted Frank accorded him every right guaranteed to him under the highest law, ought not the decision to be respected?

Before the United States Supreme Court vindicated Georgia, the agencies working for Frank expressed the most exultant confidence in the outcome of the appeal; and declared that, at last, the case had reached a tribunal which would not be influenced by “mob frenzy, psychic intoxication, jungle fury,” and the rest of it.

After the United States Supreme Court patiently heard Frank’s lawyers, and solemnly assured “mankind” that the State of Georgia had not been shown to have denied Frank any legal right, was “mankind” satisfied? By no means. “Mankind” gasped in silence a few days, and then broke out into a more furious roar than ever, just as though the highest of courts had not decided the case in our favor.

It must have cost “mankind” millions of dollars to lynch the Georgia courts, with outside mobs.

Frank “was convicted on the evidence of a vicious negro criminal.” So says the Daily States, saying it, not because it is true, but because all the other Frankites say it. Without the negro, James Marshall, Becker could not have been convicted, and the highest New York court so held. Whether James Marshall is a criminal, I do not know; but the official record in the Frank case shows that Jim Conley was never a criminal until he became the accomplice of his master, Leo Frank.

May I ask the Daily States to take my word for it, that the law of Georgia does not allow any man to be convicted on the testimony of an accomplice?

The so-called vicious negro criminal was confessedly the accomplice of Leo Frank; and therefore the law made it necessary for Solicitor Dorsey to practically make out the whole case against Frank, without relying at all upon the negro’s evidence.

When that miserable little Jew jackass, Clarence Shearn, of the New York Supreme Court, was sent by his owner, Mr. Hearst, to review the record in the Frank case; and when he wrote an opinion in which he stated that there was no evidence against Frank, save that of the accomplice, he virtually charged our Supreme Court—as well as Judge Roan—with having violated their oaths of office.

Little Shearn does not know enough of Georgia law to be aware of the fact that nobody can be convicted on the evidence of an accomplice; and that, under our Supreme Court decisions, such evidence is almost valueless. The case must be made out independently of the accomplice, to well-nigh the same extent as though he had not testified.

This being the law in Georgia, how can editors who wish to tell the truth, continue to say that Frank was convicted by his accomplice?

Assuming that the great majority of the American people want to know the truth, and want the law enforced wherever crime is proved, I invited every fair-minded reader to come with me as I go into the official record—a summary of the sworn testimony, agreed on by the lawyers for both sides, and sanctioned by the trial judge.

But before turning to the dry leaves of the Brief of Evidence, let me ask you to look upon the girl herself, as she appeared in life to one who seems to have known her well. Writing to The Christian Standard, in protest against an editorial in the Christian-Evangelist, A.M. Beatty says:

Mary Phagan was a member of the Adrial class of the First Christian Bible School, and the last act she did on earth was to iron with her own hands her white dress that she might present the next day and help in winning a contest. The Sunday she expected to be at Bible School she was lying on a slab in an undertaker’s in the same block as the First Church is located, having met death in a horrible manner.

It is very complete—that little picture, drawn in two sentences. Mary Phagan, not quite 14 years old, ironing the white dress she meant to wear to the Bible school, the next day. The First Christian Church stands near the morgue, and as she day-dreamed of the morrow, and the contest in her class, she saw the temple, and the white-dressed girls who would be her companions: she did not see the morgue.

The pity of it! The garment which she washed and ironed became her shroud, after she had been to the morgue, instead of to the church! Surely, fate has seldom been more cruel to a perfectly innocent child.

Mrs. J.W. Coleman was the first witness for the State. She testified:

“I am Mary Phagan’s mother. I last saw her alive, on April 26^th, 1913. She was getting ready to go to the pencil factory to get her pay envelope. About 11:30 she ate some cabbage and bread. She left home at a quarter to twelve. She would have been fourteen years old on the first day of June. Was fair complected, heavy set, very pretty, and was extra large for her age. She had dimples on her cheeks.”

(Witness described how her daughter was dressed, and identified as Mary’s, the articles of clothing shown her—clothing taken from the corpse.)

George Epps, a white boy, was the next witness. He was fourteen years old, and was neighbor to Mary’s family. He rode on the street car with Mary as she came into the city. She told him she was going to the pencil factory to get her money, and would then go to the Elkin-Watson place to see the Veterans’ parade at 2 o’clock. “She never showed up. I stayed around there until 4 o’clock, and then went to the ball game.

“When I left her at the corner of Forsyth and Marietta Streets…she went over the bridge to the pencil factory, about two blocks down Forsyth Street.”

The boy put the time of his separation from the girl at 12:07, but on cross-examination, he said, first, that he knew it by Bryant Kehelye’s clock, and then, by the sun.

(The immateriality of the variations in time, except on Leo Frank’s own clock, will be shown directly.)

The next witness for the State was Newt Lee, the negro night-watch at the factory. He had been working there only about three weeks. Leo Frank had taken him over the building, and instructed him in his duties. On every day, except Saturdays, he was to go on duty at 6 o’clock p.m. On Saturdays, at 5 o’clock.

On Friday, the 25^th of April, Frank said to Newt, “Tomorrow is holiday, and I want you to come back at 4 o’clock, I want to get off a little earlier than usual.”

Newt then went on to say that he got to the factory on Saturday about three or four minutes before four. The front door was not locked; he had never found it locked on Saturday evenings. But there are double doors half way up the steps, which he had always found unlocked before, but which, this Saturday evening, he found locked.

He took his keys and unlocked this stair-way door, and went on up-stairs to the second floor, where Frank’s office was.

Newt announced his arrival, as he had always done, by calling out, “All right, Mr. Frank!”

“And he come bustling out of his office,…and says, ‘Newt, I am sorry I had you come so soon; you could have been at home sleeping. I tell you what you do; you go out in town and have a good time.’”

Newt stated that always before when Frank had anything to say to him, he would say, “Step here a minute, Newt.”

This time, Frank came bustling toward the negro, rubbing his hands; and when Newt asked to be allowed to go into the shipping room to get some sleep, Frank answered, “You need to have a good time. You go downtown, stay an hour and a half, and come back your usual time at 6 o’clock. Be sure to come back at 6 o’clock.”

Newt did as he was told, returned to the factory at two minutes before six, and found the stair doors unlocked. Frank took the slip out of the time-clock and put in a new one.

“It took him twice as long this time as it did the other times I saw him fix it. He fumbled, putting it in.” After the slip had been put in, Newt punched his time, and went on down stairs.

Mr. J.M. Gantt came to the front door and asked Newt for permission to go up stairs after an old pair of shoes he had left there, some time before when he was employed at the factory. Newt answered that he was not allowed to let anyone inside after six o’clock.

“About that time Mr. Frank came bustling out of the door, and ran into Gantt unexpected, and he jumped back frightened.”

Gantt asked Frank if he had any objection to his going up stairs after his old shoes.

Frank answered, “I don’t think they are up there. I think I saw a boy sweep some up in the trash the other day.”

Gantt asked what sort of shoes he saw the boy sweep out, and Frank said they were “tans.”

Gantt replied, “Well, I had a pair of black ones, too.”

“Frank says, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ and dropped his head down, just so”—illustrating.

“Then, he raised his head, and says, ‘Newt, go with him and stay with him, and help him find them.” And I went up there with Mr. Gantt, and found them in the shipping room, two pair, the tans and black ones, too.”

That night, after seven o’clock, Frank telephone to Newt, and asked, “How’s everything?”

That was the first time he had ever phoned the night watch on a Saturday night. He did not ask about Gantt.

There is a gas jet in the basement at the foot of the ladder, and Frank had told Newt to keep it burning all the time.

“I left it Saturday morning burning bright. When I got there, on making my rounds at 7 o’clock p.m. on the 26^th of April, it was burning just as low as you could turn it, like a lightning bug. When 3 o’clock came” (after midnight, of course,) “I went down to the basement….I went down to the toilet, and when I got through I looked at the dust bin back to the door” (the back door opening on the alley) “to see how the door was, and it being dark, I picked up my lantern and went there, and I saw something laying there, which I thought some of the boys had put there to scare me; then I walked a little piece towards it, and I saw what it was, and I got out of there.

“I got up the ladder, and called the police station; it was after 3 o’clock.

“I tried to get Mr. Frank, and was still trying when the (police) officers came. I guess I was trying (to get Frank to answer the telephone) about eight minutes.

“I saw Mr. Frank Sunday morning (the same morning), at about 7 or 8 o’clock. He was coming in the office. He looked down on the floor, and never spoke to me. He dropped his head down, right this way”—illustrating.

“Boots Rogers, Chief Lanford, Darley, Frank and I were there when they opened the clock. Mr. Frank opened the clock, and saw the punches were all right. I punched every half hour from 6 o’clock p.m. to 3 o’clock a.m.

“On Tuesday night, April 29^th, at about 10 o’clock, I had a conversation at the station house with Mr. Frank. They handcuffed me to a chair.

“The went and got Mr. Frank and brought him in, and he sat down next to the door. He dropped his head and looked down. We were all alone. I said, ‘Mr. Frank, it’s mighty hard on me to handcuffed here for something that I don’t know anything about.’

“He said, ‘What’s the difference? They have got me locked up, and a man guarding me.’

“I said, ‘Mr. Frank, do you believe I committed this crime?’

“He said, ‘No, Newt, I know you didn’t; but I believe you know something about it.’

“I said, ‘Mr. Frank, I don’t know a thing about it, more than finding the body.’

“He said, ‘We are not talking about that now; we will let that go. If you keep that up, we will both go to hell.’

“Then the officers came in. When Mr. Frank came out of his office that Saturday (evening) he was looking down, and rubbing his hands. I had never seen him rub his hands that way before.”

Newt stated, on cross-examination, that he would not have gone so far back in the basement, and would not have seen the body, if a call of nature down there had not caused him to use the toilet which was near the corpse.

“When I got through, I picked up my lantern; I walked a few steps that way; I seed something over there, about that much of the lady’s leg and dress”—illustrating.

“I think I reported to the police that it was a white woman. When I first got there, I didn’t think it was a white woman, because her face was so dirty, and her hair crinkled.

“When I was in the basement (the morning the body was found), one of the policemen read the note that they found. They read these words, ‘The tall, black, slim negro did this, he will try to lay it on the night’ and when they go to the word ‘night,’ I said, ‘They must be trying to put it off on me.’”

(Note that the negro is corroborated on this point by Sergeant Dobbs, the next witness; and bear it in mind because of its extreme importance—as you will soon see.)

Sergeant L.S. Dobbs testified that a call came to the police headquarters at about 3:25, on the morning of April 27^th, and he went to the pencil factory, descended to the basement by means of the trap-door and ladder. The negro led the officers back to the body, about 150 feet.

“The girl was lying on her face, not directly lying on her stomach, with the left side up just a little. We couldn’t tell by looking at her whether she was white or black, only by her golden hair. They turned her over, and her face was full of dirt and dust. They took a piece of paper and rubbed the dirt off her face, and we could tell then that it was a white girl. I pulled up her clothes, and could tell by the skin of the knee that it was white girl. Her face was punctured, full of holes, and swollen and black. She had a cut on the left side of her head, as if she had been struck, and there was a little blood there. The cord was around her neck, sunk into the flesh. She also had a piece of her underclothing around her neck. The cord was still tight around her neck. The tongue was protruding just the least bit. The cord was pulled tight, and had cut into the flesh, and tied just as tight as it could be. The underclothing around the neck was not tight.

“There wasn’t much blood on her head. It was dry on the outside. I stuck my finger under the hair and it was a little moist.

“This scratch pad was lying on the ground, close to the body. I found the notes under the sawdust, lying near the head. The pad was lying near the notes. They were all right close together.

“Newt Lee told us it was a white woman.

“There was a trash pile near the boiler, where this hat was found, and paper and pencils down there, too. The hat and shoe were on the trash pile. Everything was gone off it, ribbons and all.

“It looked like she had been dragged on her face by her feet. I thought the places on her face had been made by dragging. That was a dirt floor, with cinders on it, scattered over the dirt.

“The place where I thought I saw some one dragged was right in front of the elevator, directly back. The little trail where I thought showed the body was dragged, went straight on down (from in front of the elevator) where the girl was found. It was a continuous trail.

“The body was cold and stiff. Hands folded across the breast.

“I didn’t find any blood on the ground, or on the saw dust, around where we found the body.

“The sign of dragging…started east of the ladder. A man going down the ladder to the rear of the basement, would not go in front of the elevator where the dragging was.

“A man couldn’t get down that ladder with another person. It is difficult for one person to get through that scuttle hole. The back door was shut; staple had been pulled.”

“The lock was locked still. It was a sliding door, with a bar across the door, but the bar had been taken down. It looked like the staple had been recently drawn.

“I was reading one of the notes to Lee, with the following words, ‘A tall, black negro did this; he will try to lay it on the night,’ and when I got to the word ‘night,’ Lee says, ‘That means the night watchman.’

“I found the handkerchief on a sawdust pile, about ten feet from the body. It was bloody, just as it is now.

“The trap-door leading up from the basement was closed when we got there.”

City Officer John N. Starnes was the State’s next witness. He testified to reaching the factory between 5 and 6 o’clock that Sunday morning. He called up Leo Frank, and asked him to come, right away.

“He said he hadn’t had any breakfast. He asked where the night watchman was. I told him it was very necessary for him to come, and if he would come, I would send an automobile for him.
I didn’t tell him what had happened, and he didn’t ask me.

“When Frank arrived at the factory, a few minutes later, he appeared to be nervous; he was in a trembling condition. Lee was composed.

“It takes not over three minutes to walk from Marietta Street, at the corner of Forsyth Street, down to the factory.

“I chipped two places off the back door, which looked like they had bloody finger prints.”

(Let me here remind the reader, that Jim Conley, a State’s witness, could have been required by Leo Frank’s lawyers to make the imprint of his fingers while he was on the stand, and if these finger marks had resembled those made on the back door, Frank would have gone free, and the negro would have swung. The State, however, could not ask Leo Frank to make his finger-prints, for to have done so, would have been requiring him to furnish evidence against himself.

My information is that Conley’s lawyer, W.M. Smith, after he had agreed with the Burns Agency to help them fix the crime on his client, went to the convict camp, where Conley was working out his sentence, and got his finger-prints, twice.

Be that as it may, Frank’s attorneys dared not ask the negro to make the prints, when they had him on the stand.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Burns and Lehon do not amount to anything much as detectives; but even these amateurs know something of the Bertillon system; and if those finger-prints on the back door had not been Leo Frank’s, Burns and Lehon would most certainly have proven that much, by actual demonstration, and thus put the crime on Jim Conley, or upon some other person than their client, Frank.)

The next witness was W.W. Rogers. He and John Black went after Frank, following Starne’s telephone communication. Mrs. Frank opened the door, and was asked if Frank was in. He came forward, partly dressed, and asked if anything had happened at the factory. No answer being returned, he inquired, “Did the night-watchman call up and report anything to you?”

Mr. Black asked him to finish dressing, and accompany them to the factory, and see what had happened.

“Frank said that he thought he dreamt in the morning, about 3 o’clock, about hearing the telephone ring.”

Witness said Frank appeared extremely nervous, and called for a cup of coffee. He was rubbing his hands. When they had taken their seats in the automobile, one of the officers asked him if he knew a little girl named Mary Phagan.

Frank answered, “Does she work at the factory?”

Rogers said, “I think she does”; and Frank added, “I cannot tell whether she works there or not, until I look at my pay-roll book. I know very few of the girls that work there. I pay them off but I very seldom go back in the factory.”

The witness spoke of Frank’s conduct at the morgue, and although the purpose of taking him there was to have him view the corpse, the witness never saw Frank look at it, but did see him step away into a side room.

From the morgue, the party went to the pencil factory, where Frank opened the safe, took out his time-book, consulted it, and said: “Yes, Mary Phagan worked here. She was here yesterday to get her pay.”

He said: “I will tell you about the exact time she left here. My stenographer left about 12 o’clock, and a few minutes after she left, the office boy left, and Mary came in and got her pay and left.”

(Note, later on, that other girls were at Frank’s office, the same Saturday morning, and that he nevertheless fixed the exact time of the arrival of the girl he did not know. And he fixed it right.)

“He then wanted to see where the girl was found. Mr. Frank went around to the elevator, where there was a switch box on the wall, and put the switch in. The box was not locked. As to what Mr. Frank said about the murder, I don’t know that I heard him express himself, except down in the basement.

The officers showed him where the body was found, and he made the remark that it was too bad, or something like that.”

(Frank was not under arrest at this time, and Newt Lee was. Nothing, as yet, had been said about Conley.)

On cross-examination, the witness stated that “we didn’t know it was a white girl or not until we rubbed the dirt from the child’s face, and pulled down her stocking a little piece. The tongue was not sticking out; it was wedged between her teeth. She had dirt in her eye and mouth. The cord around her neck was drawn so tight it was sunk in her flesh, and the piece of underskirt was loose over her hair.

“She was lying on her face, with her hands folded up. One of her eyes was blackened. There were several little scratches on her face. A bruise on the left side of her head, some dry blood in her hair.

“There was some excrement in the elevator shaft. When we went down on the elevator, the elevator mashed it. You could smell it all around.

“No one could have seen the body at the morgue unless he was somewhere near me. I was inside, and Mr. Frank never came into that little room, where the corpse lay. When the face was turned toward me, Mr. Frank stepped out of my vision in the direction of Mr. Gheesling’s (the undertaker’s) sleeping room.”

Miss Grace Hicks testified that she worked on the second floor at the factory. Mary Phagan’s machine was right next to the dressing room, and in going to the closet, the men who worked on that floor passed within two or three feet of Mary. Between the closet of the men and of the women, there was “just a partition.”

The witness had identified the body at the morgue early Sunday morning, April 27^th. “I knew her by her hair. She was fair-skinned, had light hair, blue eyes, and was heavy built, well developed for her age. She weighed about 115 pounds. Magnolia Kennedy’s hair is nearly the color of Mary Phagan’s’.”

John R. Black, the next witness for the State, testified that he went with Rogers to Frank’s house. “Mrs. Frank came to the door; she had on a bathrobe. I started that I would like to see Mr. Frank, and about that time Mr. Frank stepped out from behind a curtain. His voice was hoarse and trembling and nervous and excited. He looked to me like he was pale. He seemed nervous in handling his collar; he could not get his tie tied, and talked very rapid in asking what had happened. He kept on insisting for a cup of coffee.

“When we got into the automobile, Mr. Frank wanted to know what had happened at the factory, and I asked him if he knew Mary Phagan, and told him she had been found dead in the basement. Mr. Frank said he did not know any girl by the name of Mary Phagan, that he knew very few of the employees.

“In the undertaking establishment, Mr. Frank looked at her; he gave a casual glance at her, and stepped aside; I couldn’t say whether he saw the face of the girl or not. There was a curtain hanging near the room, and Mr. Frank stepped behind the curtain.

“Mr. Frank stated, as we left the undertaker’s, that he didn’t know the girl, but he believed he had paid her off on Saturday. He thought he recognized her being at the factory Saturday by the dress that she wore.

At the factory, Mr. Frank took the slip out (of the time clock), looked over it, and said it had been punched correctly. (That is, the slip showed that Newt Lee had punched every half-hour during the night before.)

“On Monday and Tuesday following, Mr. Frank stated that the clock had been mispunched three times.

“I saw Frank take it out of the clock, and went with it back toward his office.

“When Mr. Frank was down at the police station, on Monday morning (the next after the corpse was found), Mr. Rosser and Mr. Haas were there. Mr. Haas stated, in Frank’s presence, that he was Frank’s attorney. This was about 8, or 8:30 Monday morning. That’s the first time he had counsel with him.”

(Observe that the Jews employed the best legal talent, before the Gentiles had even suspected Frank’s guilt.

Why did his rich Jewish connections feel so sure of his need of eminent lawyers, that they employed Rosser, evidently on Sunday, since city lawyers do not open their offices before 8 o’clock.)

“Mr. Frank was nervous Monday; after his release, he seemed very jovial.

“On Tuesday night, Frank said, at the station house, that there was nobody at the factory at 6 o’clock but Newt Lee, and that Newt Lee ought to know more about it, as it was his duty to look over the factory every thirty minutes.”

(Note Frank’s deliberate direction of suspicion to the “tall, slim night-watch,” upon whom the notes place the crime. Frank was virtually telling the police the same thing that the notes told, viz., that Newt Lee committed the crime.)

“On Tuesday night, Mr. Scott and myself suggested to Mr. Frank to talk to Newt Lee. They went in a room, and stayed about five or ten minutes, alone. I couldn’t hear enough to swear that I understood what was said. Mr. Frank said that Newt stuck to the story that he knew nothing about it.

“Mr. Frank stated that Mr. Gantt was there on Saturday evening, and that he told Lee to let him get the shoes, but to watch him, as he knew the surroundings of the office.

“After this conversation Gantt was arrested.”

(Observe that Frank’s allusion to Gantt could have had no other purpose than to direct suspicion toward him; and that, while Frank was seeking to involve two innocent men, he did not breathe a suspicion of Jim Conley, whom he knew to have been in the factory when Mary Phagan came for her pay.)

After the visit to the morgue, the party went to the factory, where Frank got the book, ran his finger down until he came to the name of Mary Phagan, and said: “Yes, this little girl worked here, and I paid her $1.20 yesterday.”

“We went all over the factory. Nobody saw that blood spot that morning.”

Mr. Haas, as Frank’s attorney, had told witness to go out to Frank’s house, and search for the clothes he had worn the week before, and the laundry, too.

Frank went with them, and showed them the dirty linen.

“I examined Newt Lee’s house. I found a bloody shirt at the bottom of a clothes barrel there, on Tuesday morning, about 9 o’clock.”

On re-direct examination, the witness stated that Frank said, after looking over the time sheet, and seeing that it had not been punched correctly, that it would have given Lee an hour to have gone out to his house and back.”

(Evidently, Frank knew where this negro lived, and how long it required for him to go home that Saturday night, and return to the factory where the girl’s body lay. This new time-slip gave Newt an hour unaccounted for; and, in connection with the bloody shirt, the new time-slip began to make the case look ugly for Newt, “the tall, slim night-watch,” whom the writer of the notes accused.)

J.M. Gantt was next put up by the State, and his evidence, in substance, was:

That he had been shipping clerk and time-keeper at the pencil factory, and that Frank had discharged him on April 7^th, for an alleged shortage of $2 in the pay-roll.

He had known Mary Phagan since she was a little girl, and that Frank knew her, too.

One Saturday afternoon, she came in the office to have her time corrected, by Gantt, and after Gantt had gotten through with her, Mr. Frank came in and said: “You seem to know Mary pretty well.”

After Gantt was discharged, he went back to the factory on two occasions. “Mr. Frank saw me both times. He made no objections to my going there.”

One girl used to get the pay envelope for another, with Frank’s knowledge. Gantt swore he knew nothing of how the $2 shortage in the pay roll occurred. Frank discharged him because Gantt refused to make it good.

Gantt described how Frank had behaved at 6 o’clock Saturday evening when he, Gantt, went for his shoes. Standing at the front door, Gantt saw Frank coming down the stairs, and when Frank saw Gantt, “he kind of stepped back, like he was going to go back, but when he looked up and saw I was looking at him, he came on out, and I said, ‘Howdy, Mr. Frank,’ and he sorter jumped again.”

Then Gantt asked permission to go up for his shoes, and Frank hesitated, studied a little, inquired the kind of shoes, was told they were tans, and stated that he thought he had seen a negro sweep them out. But when Gantt said he left a black pair, also, Frank “studied” a little bit, and told Newt to go with Gantt, and stay with him till he got his shoes. Gantt went up, and found both pair, right where he had left them.

“Mr. Frank looked pale, hung his head, and kind of hesitated and stuttered, like he didn’t like me in there, somehow or other.”

(On the strength of what Frank insinuated against Gantt, he was arrested before Frank was, and not released until Thursday night.)

Mrs. J.A. White, sworn for the State, said that she went to the factory to see her husband, who was at work there, on April 26^th. She went at 11:30, and stayed till 11:50, when she left. She returned about 12:30, and saw Frank standing before the safe, in his outer office. “I asked him if Mr. White had gone back to work; he jumped, like I surprised him, and turned and said, ‘Yes.’”

She went up stairs to see her husband, and while she was up there, about 1 o’clock, Frank came up and told Mr. White that if she wanted to get out before 3 o’clock, she had better come down, as he was going to leave, and lock the door, and that she had better be ready by the time he could get his coat and hat.

Mrs. White testified to this tremendously important fact:

“As I was going on down the steps, I saw a negro sitting on a box, close to the stairway on the first floor.

“Mr. Frank did not have his coat or hat on when I passed out.”

On cross-examination, this lady swore: “I saw a negro sitting between the stairway and the door, about five or six feet from the foot of the stairway.”

While Mrs. White was talking to her husband, between 11:30 and 11:50, she saw Miss Corinthia Hall and Mrs. Emma Freeman there, and they left before she did.

(Mrs. White did not work at the factory, and did not know Jim Conley. The place where she saw a negro sitting, was where Jim sat when he had nothing else to do. Picture to yourself the interior of the factory, as Mrs. White departs at about 1 o’clock that fatal Saturday.

Two carpenters are at work on the fourth floor, tearing out a partition and putting up a new one, and they are 40 feet back from the elevator.

Frank is sitting on the second floor, near the head of the stairs; and Jim Conley is seated at the foot of the same stairs, on the floor below, not more than thirty feet from his white boss.

The lady passes on out, leaving these two men practically together. According to his own statement to the police officers, Frank has already had Mary Phagan, in his office, in his possession, between the first departure of Mrs. White at 11:50 and her second coming at 12:30!

Frank’s own admission put the girl alone with him in his private office, shortly after the noon hour; and when Mrs. White returns at 30 minutes after the noon hour, the girl is nowhere to be seen.

Who can account for Mary between these times? And who can account for Frank?

Here is the tragedy, hemmed within the first departure and the second arrival of Mrs. White—a space which could not be filled by any two human beings, excepting Jim Conley and Leo Frank.

(We will see, later, how each of the two filled it.)

Harry Scott, the State’s next witness, was Superintendent of the local branch of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. He was employed by Frank for the pencil factory.

In Frank’s private office, Monday afternoon, April 28^th, the detective heard Frank’s detailed account of his movements the Saturday before. Frank told of his going to Montag’s, and of the coming of Mrs. White.

“He then stated that Mary Phagan came into the factory at 12:10 p.m., to draw her pay; that she had been laid off the Monday previous, and she was paid $1.20, and that he paid her off in his inside office, where he was at his desk, and when she left his office and went into the outer office she had reached the outer office door, leading into the hall, and turned around to Mr. Frank and asked if the metal had come yet. Mr. Frank replied that he didn’t know, and that Mary Phagan, he thought, reached the stairway, and he heard voices, but he couldn’t distinguish whether they were men or girls talking.”

Later, a witness stated that it was before Mary came that Frank said he heard voices—before 12 o’clock.

(Let me explain that Mary worked on Frank’s floor, some distance back of his office, and that she placed metal tips on the pencils. The supply of this metal gave out, and more was ordered, but in the meantime Mary was unemployed. Her question, “Has the metal come?” was therefore equivalent to, “Will there be work for me next Monday?”

Note particularly that in his private conference with his own detective, he did not pretend that he had not known Mary Phagan. On the contrary, see what Scott says further on.)

“He (Frank) also stated, during our conversation, that Gantt knew Mary Phagan very well, and that he was familiar and intimate with her. He seemed to lay special stress on it, at the time. He said that Gantt paid a good deal of attention to her.”

(The morning before, he did not know her, and had to consult his book! Although he had passed within three feet of her, every day when he went to the toilet, and had paid her off every week, for about a year, he did not know any girl of that name!)

Mr. Herbert J. Haas (later the Chairman of the Frank Finance Committee) told the detective to report to him, first, before letting the public know “what evidence we had gathered. We told him we would withdraw from the case before we would adopt any practice of that sort.”

Scott asked Frank to use his influence as employer with Newt Lee, and to try to get him to tell what he knew. Frank consented, and the two were put in a private room, in order that Frank might get something out of the “tall, slim night-watch.”

“When about ten minutes was up, Mr. Black and I entered the room, and Lee hadn’t finished his conversation with Frank, and was saying: ‘Mr. Frank, it is awful hard for me to remain handcuffed to this chair, and Frank hung his head the entire time the negro was talking to him, and finally, in about thirty seconds, he said, ‘Well, they have got me, too,’ After that, we asked Mr. Frank if he had gotten anything out of the negro, and he said, ‘No, Lee still sticks to his original story.’

“Mr. Frank was extremely nervous at that time. He was very squirmy in his chair, crossing one leg after the other, and didn’t know where to put his hands; he was moving them up and down his face, and he hung his head a great deal of the time while the negro was talking to him. He breathed very heavily, and took deep swallows, and hesitated somewhat. His eyes were about the same as they are now.

“That interview between Lee and Frank took place shortly after midnight, Wednesday, April 30. On Monday afternoon, Frank said to me that the first punch on Newt Lee’s slip was 6:33 p.m., and his last punch was 3 a.m. Sunday. He didn’t say anything at that time about there being any error in Lee’s punches. Mr. Black and I took Mr. Frank into custody about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, April 29^th.

“His hands were quivering very much, he was very pale. On Sunday, May 3, I went to Frank’s cell at the jail with Black, and I asked Mr. Frank if, from the time he arrived at the factory from Montag Bros.’, up until 12:50 p.m., the time he went upstairs to the fourth floor, was he inside of his office the entire time, and he stated, ‘Yes.’

“Then I asked him if he was inside his office every minute from 12 o’clock until 12:30, and he said, ‘Yes.’

“I made a very thorough search of the area around the elevator and radiator, and back in there. I made a surface search; I found nothing at all. I found no ribbon or purse, or pay envelope, or bludgeon or stick. I spent a great deal of time around the trap door, and I remember running the light around the doorway, right close to the elevator, looking for splotches of blood, but I found nothing.”

(No effort was made to impeach Harry Scott, and the whole brunt of Rosser’s cross-examination was to compel the witness to admit that Frank answered the girl’s question about the metal, by saying, “No,” instead of, “I don’t know.”

If Frank answered, “No,” her inquiry ended right there, and there was nothing for the girl to linger for; she would go on down stairs. But if her question, “Has the metal come?” was answered by, “I don’t know,” the girl herself would want to learn, for certain, whether there would be any need for her to return Monday morning. As the next day was Sunday, there would be no work for her on Monday, unless the metal were already on hand, because, if it reached Atlanta Sunday, it would not be delivered at the factory until some time after the work hours began on Monday.

Therefore, when Frank told his own detective, in their first confidential talk, that he gave the girl’s question a reply which necessarily left her in doubt, he stated a fact that leads to the reasonable, if not inevitable conclusion, that either he or she proposed that one or the other—or both—go to the metal room, and see!

To make certain whether the new metal had come, she would go to the room where she worked, and look. If the metal had come, and was ready for use next week, it was there!

Now, when you examine page 25 of the official Brief of Evidence, and find that Rosser’s assault on the witness was directed chiefly to this point, you naturally ask, Why did it make such a difference? Why did Frank’s lawyer so strenuously endeavor to make it appear that the girl’s inquiry was answered, “No,” instead of, “I don’t know?”

If she was murdered below, on the first floor, or in the basement, what did it matter, whether or not she went to the metal room, on the second floor?

If Jim Conley, sitting at the foot of the stairway, assaulted the girl as she was passing out, and either killed her there, or threw her down into the basement, where he afterwards killed her, what difference did it make, if the white man, at the head of the stairway, told the girl he didn’t know whether the metal had come?

If the evidence places the crime on any other floor than Frank’s own, why battle with the witness as to what was said and done on Frank’s floor?

There is but one answer: the physical indications were on Frank’s floor, partly in the metal room, and partly in the next, on the way to the elevator. Rosser wanted to keep Frank and Mary away from that metal room, where a tress of her hair hung on the projecting crank of a bench-lathe, and where some of her blood had stained the floor.

Rosser dared not leave unassailed the answer of Frank to Mary, which opened the way naturally for a visit to the metal room, at the back end of the building, where he could close the door, and have her securely entrapped.

Let us now take the next witness, Monteen Stover—a girl of about the same age as Mary—and who also worked at the factory. She, too, came for her wages on Memorial Day, April 26^th. She testified:

“I was at the factory at 5 minutes after 12 o’clock that day. I stayed there 5 minutes and left at 10 minutes after 12. I went there to get my money.

“I went in Mr. Frank’s office; he was not there. I didn’t see or hear anybody in the building.

“The door to the metal room was closed.

“I looked at the clock on my way up.

“I went through the first office into the second office.”

Pray note that the crucial minutes in this terrible case are fixed by Frank’s own clock. The witnesses are in full view of it, as they go up and down the stairs. Newt Lee, Mrs. J.A. White, Miss Monteen Stover, and all the others who testify as to what happens in the factory, that Saturday, go by this clock. Presumably, Frank himself does so, in telling his detective about his movements that morning.

The gubernatorial Benedict Arnold who betrayed his people and became the national hero of rich Jews, declared to the world that Leo Frank must have been in his inner office when Monteen Stover called. I mention the fact, because it proves that John M. Slaton must be morally certain where his client and his client’s victim were, while Monteen was waiting in the vacant offices. Nothing but the closed door of that metal room kept Monteen from catching Slaton’s guilty client in the very act!

While the one girl was waiting in the empty and silent offices, the other was in the metal room, unconscious, and soon to be dead.

Slaton ravished the official record, by telling an easily duped public that Leo Frank was in his second office at from 12:05 to 12:10. This corrupt traitor knows that unless Frank can be stationed in his office, at that identical time, he assaulted and murdered the girl. Consequently, Slaton rapes the record, and puts his client where he was not, in order that the world may not know where he was; namely, behind the closed door of the metal room, where the crime was being committed, as Monteen Stover waited for the missing Frank.

On page 243 of the official record appears a statement made by Frank to N.A. Lanford, Chief of Detectives, on Monday morning, April 28^th, 1913:

“The office boy and stenographer were with me in the office until noon. They left about 12, or a little after.”

(This was true.) After they left, “this little girl, Mary Phagan, came in, but at the time I did not know that was her name.

“She came in between 12:05 and 12:10, maybe 12:07, to get her pay envelope, her salary. I paid her, and she went out of the office….It was my impression that she just walked away.”

This statement, which Frank knew was being reduced to writing, accords with what he told the officers who went to his house Sunday morning. He was accurate in fixing the time when his stenographer left (as you will see later), and he was also accurate in fixing the time of Mary Phagan’s arrival.

He did not then know that Monteen Stover had followed so closely upon the heels of Mary, and was in his office at the very time when an innocent Leo Frank would have been there.

Slaton knew that Frank had to be in his office from 12:05 to 12:10, else he killed the girl; and of course Frank knew it, too.

Therefore, the murderer tells his detective, and the city officers, that he was in his office, at the crucial time; and when an unexpected, and unimpeachable, witness turns up, and swears that he was not in his office, at the crucial time, one of his attorneys issues a gubernatorial proclamation which obliterates Monteen Stover’s testimony, and restores his guilty client to the place of innocence which the murderer took for himself, before he knew of Monteen’s being in his office while he was committing the crime in the metal room.

After an intelligent white girl—of flawless character, and with no conceivable motive for perjury—swears positively that she went to Frank’s office to get her money, and that she looked for him in both rooms—the outer and the inner offices—Governor John M. Slaton argued to the public that his client was in the second office, during the whole five minutes that the girl was looking and waiting for him!

Could there be moral turpitude blacker than that of a Governor who prostitutes his office to protect blood-guilt, and who endeavors to hide his own baseness by falsifying the official records of his State?

Slaton did, with a spurt of his pen, that which Burns, Rabbi Marx, Frank’s wife, and Samuel Boornstein were unable to do by persuasion or by threat—he got rid of the evidence which convicts Leo Frank of the murder of Mary Phagan. The most persistent, unprecedented, and illegal methods were used by the Burns Detective Agency, and by Rabbi Marx to induce this honest young woman, Monteen Stover, to perjure herself; but these outrageous efforts were foiled by the old-fashioned honesty of this poor daughter of the working class.

It was the snob Governor, of high society, gilded club-life, and palatial environment, that proved to be the rotten pippin in our barrel. Rich Jews could not buy the work-people whose daily bread is earned by the toil of their hands. Rich Jews were never able to move a single member of the jury which listened for weeks to this damning testimony. Neither could Judge Roan, or our Supreme Court be moved. With splendid integrity, our whole system withstood the attacks of Big Money, until, at length, nothing was left but the perfidy of a Governor who, in the interest of his client, betrayed a high office, and a great people.

R.P. Barrett was the next witness for the State.

He testified that he was the machinist at the pencil factory, and that on Monday morning, April 28^th, he “found an unusual spot that I had never seen before, at the west end of the dressing room, on the second floor. That spot was not there Friday. It was blood. The spot was four or five inches in diameter, and little spots behind these from the rear—six or eight in number. I discovered these between 6:30 and 7 o’clock. White stuff (potash or haskoline) was smeared over the spots.

“I found some hair on the handle of a bench lathe. The handle was in the shape of an L. The hair was hanging on the handle, swinging down. The hair was not there Friday. It was my machine. I know the hair was not there Friday, because I had used that machine up to quitting time, Friday, 5:30.

“I could tell it was blood by looking at it. I found the hair some few minutes afterward—about six or eight strands, pretty long. When I left my machine Friday, I left a piece of work in it. When I got back, the piece of work was still there. It had not been disturbed.”

(Bear in mind, that all of this was early Monday morning, when no Gentile had accused Leo Frank, for whom rich Jews had already, in secret, employed the best lawyers. When the rascally Burns got into the case, an effort was made to bribe this machinist, but he refused to sell out.)

The State’s next witness, Mell Stanford, had been working for Frank two years. He testified that he swept up the whole floor in the metal room Friday, April 25^th. “I moved everything, and swept everything. I swept under Mary’s and Barrett’s machines. On Monday thereafter, I found a spot that had some white haskoline over it, on second floor, near dressing room, that wasn’t there Friday when I swept. The spot looked to me like it was blood, with dark spots scattered around.”

The extreme importance of the evidence of Barrett and Stanford is, that the hair and the spots were not there on Friday. As Barrett’s hands had been turning his machine handle, at 5:30 Friday evening, the tress of woman’s hair could not have been on it then. How came it there after the men and girls quit work Friday? And whose was it, if not Mary Phagan’s?

As Stanford swept the floor Friday, the blood spots could not have been there then, for his small broom would certainly have swept the white powder. Whether paint or blood, how came the spots, and the white powder on the floor, after Stanford swept up, Friday?

Mrs. George W. Jefferson testified that she worked at the pencil factory, and that on Monday, “we saw blood on the second floor, in front of the girls’ dressing room. It was about as big as a fan, and something white was over it. I didn’t see it there Friday. I have been working there five years. The spot I saw was not one of the paints. The white stuff did not hide the red. You could see it plainly.”

R.B. Haslett testified that on Monday morning he and Mr. Black went out to Frank’s house, to request him to appear at the station-house about 8:30 or 9 o’clock. Mr. Frank was at the station-house two or three hours.”

E.F. Holloway, sworn for the State: Was day watchman at factory. Forgot to lock the elevator on Saturday, when he left the factory at 11:45. Witness admitted that he had been previously sworn twice that he left the elevator locked; once, in the affidavit he gave to Solicitor Dorsey and, again, at the coroner’s inquest.

(In other words, Holloway entrapped the State, which had his sworn testimony, twice given, that he had left the elevator locked at 11:45 Saturday morning. He had not noticed them of his change, otherwise the State would not have put him up.)

On cross-examination, Holloway stated that Frank got back from Montag’s at about 11 o’clock. That Frank was working on his books in the office. That Corinthia Hall, and Emma Clark were coming toward the factory (at 11:45), when he, Holloway, was leaving.

(Remember this: its importance was not apparent to the witness when he swore it, and he was doing what he could to help his employer.)

He had often seen blood spots on the floor, but didn’t remember having seen those Barrett found.

Witness had never seen Frank speak to Mary Phagan. Cords like that found on Mary’s neck are all over the place. They come on the bundles of slats that are tied around the pencils. Barrett found the blood, hair, and pay-envelope.

Witness’ explanation of the difference between his former testimony about the elevator, and that which he was giving at the trial, is quite simple and satisfactory: he says that he sawed a plank for the two carpenters on the fourth floor, and forgot about it; and, as soon as he remembered that he had sawed the plank, he recollected that he had forgotten to lock the elevator. Thus doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour; and, by association of ideas, remember that forgetfulness as to sawing one plank, revives the memory to the extent that one can recall what it was he forgot.

N.V. Darley was Manager of a branch of the pencil factory. He testified:

“Mr. Sig Montag is my superior. Mr. Frank and I are of equal dignity in the factory.

“I was there Sunday morning (April 27), about 8:20. I saw Mr. Frank that morning. When I first saw him, I observed nothing unusual. When we started to the basement, I noticed that his hands were trembling. I observed that he seemed still nervous when he went to nail up the back door. Frank explained why he was nervous by saying he hadn’t had breakfast, and that the sight at the morgue had unnerved him.

“The elevator was unlocked.

“Mr. Frank told me in the basement that he believed the murder had been committed in the basement.

“When we started down the elevator, he was shaking all over. He looked pale. When riding down to the police station, Mr. Frank was on my knee: he was trembling. When my attention was called to it, I noticed something that looked like blood, with something white over it, at the ladies’ dressing room, Monday morning.

“Barrett showed me some hair on the lever of a lathe: six or eight strands, at the outside.

“Pay-envelopes are found scattered all around.

“The factory is supposed to be locked and unoccupied by any person on Sundays.

“Frank usually started on his balance sheet in the afternoon.

“Frank is a small, thin man, about 125, or 130 pounds. Is easily upset, and nervous. Rubs his hands. Sig Montag had a fuss with Frank on fourth floor, and Montag hollered at him considerably, and he was very nervous the balance of the evening; he shook and trembled. He says, ‘Mr. Darley, I just can’t work,’ and some of the boys told me he took spirits of ammonia for his nerves.

“Scratch pads are scattered all over the building.

“Mr. Frank told me that the slip he took out of the clock Sunday morning had been punched regularly. I made the same mistake.”

(Darley, like Frank, wanted to give an innocent negro an hour of the night, so that he might have time to go home and back.)

W.F. Anderson, sworn for the State, said that when the call came from the night-watchman at the factory, Lee phoned that a woman was dead at the factory.

“I asked him if it was a white woman or a negro woman. He said it was a white woman.”

Anderson went to the factory, used the ladder to reach the basement, and at about 3:30 he began to use the telephone trying to get Leo Frank. “I heard the telephone rattling and buzzing; I continued to call for five minutes; got no answer.

“I called Mr. Haas, and Mr. Montag, too; I got a response from both. I tried to get Frank again at 4 o’clock. Central said she rang, and couldn’t get him.

“There are plenty of pencils and trash in the basement. The trash was all up next to the boiler.”

H.L. Parry, and G.C. Febuary, stenographers, swore to their reports of Frank’s statements to Chief Lanford, and to the coroner’s jury.

Albert McKnight, a negro, testified that his wife, Minola, cooks for Mrs. Selig, with whom Frank and wife lived; on Saturday, April 26^th, he was at the home of Frank to see Minola. He saw Frank when came home, “close to 1:30. He did not eat any dinner. He came in, went to the sideboard of the dining room, stayed there a few minutes, and then he goes out, and catches a car. Stayed there about five or ten minutes.

“I certainly saw Mr. Frank that day, from the kitchen, where I was sitting.”

Cross-examination failed to shake the negro, and he was corroborated later by white men who said he had made the same statements to them, soon after the murder.

Miss Helen Ferguson testified that she worked at the pencil factory.

“I saw Mr. Frank on Friday, April 25, about 7 o’clock in the evening, and asked for Mary Phagan’s money. Mr. Frank said, ‘I can’t let you have it.’”

Witness had got Mary’s money before, but not from Frank.

R.L. Waggoner swore to seeing Frank on Tuesday morning, walk to the window of the pencil factory, a dozen times in half an hour, look down on the sidewalk, and twist his hands. In the automobile, after his arrest, Frank’s leg was shaking.

J.L. Beavers, Chief of Police, swore: “Saw what I took to be a splotch of blood on the floor, near the dressing room door. It looked like blood.”

R.M. Lassiter swore that he found a parasol in the bottom of the elevator shaft, Sunday morning; also a ball of small wrapping twine; also a person’s stool.

“I noticed evidence of dragging from the elevator in the basement. The umbrella was not crushed. There is a whole lot of trash at the bottom” of the elevator shaft.

W.H. Gheesling, funeral director and embalmer, testified:

“I moved the body of Mary Phagan (from the factory) at 10 minutes to 4 o’clock, in the morning, April 27^th. This cord was around her neck. There was an impress of an eighth of an inch on her neck. The rag was around her head, and over her face. The tongue was an inch and a quarter out of her mouth, sticking out. The body was rigid…in my opinion, she had been dead ten or fifteen hours, probably longer. The blood was very much congested. The blood had settled in her face, because she was lying on her face.

“I found some dirt and dust under the nails. Some urine and dry blood splotches on the underclothes. The right leg of the drawers was split with a knife, or ripped right up the seam.

“Her right eye was very dark, and very much swollen, like it was hit before death. If it had been after death, there wouldn’t have been any swelling.
“I found a wound 2 ¼ inches on the back of the head. It was made before death, because it bled a great deal. The hair was matted with blood, and very dry. There is no circulation after death. I didn’t notice any scratches on her nose. I don’t think the little girl lost much blood.”

Dr. Claude Smith testified that on one of the chips brought him, he found three, four, or five corpuscles of blood. Couldn’t say it was human blood. A drop, or half a drop, or even less, would have caused it. Examined the bloody shirt found at Newt Lee’s. It was smeared inside and out. “I got no odor from the armpits that it had been worn. The blood was high up about the waistline.”

Dr. J.W. Hurt, County Physician, testified to the wounds, one back of the head, and the other on the eye. “Black, contused eye. A number of small minor scratches on the face. Tongue protruding. Cord around the neck. She died of strangulation. There was swelling on the neck. The wound on back of head, made by blunt instrument, and the blow from down upward. It was calculated to produce unconsciousness. Scratches on face made after death. Hymen not intact. Blood on the parts. Vagina a little large for her age; enlargement could have been made by penetration before death. Normal virgin uterus. She was not pregnant.

“The body looked as if it had been dragged through the dirt and cinders. It was my impression that she was dragged face forward.”

Dr. H.F. Harris, a practicing physician, testified:

“I made an examination of the body of Mary Phagan on May 5^th. On removing the skull, found a little hemorrhage under the skull, corresponding with point where blow was received. Blow hard enough to render person unconscious. Injury to eye and scalp made before death. Strangulation by cord, the cause of death. Examined vagina. No spermatozoa. On walls of vagina, evidence of violence of some kind. Epithelium pulled loose, completely detached in some places, blood vessels dilated immediately beneath surface, and a great deal of hemorrhage in surrounding tissues.

“Indications were that violence had been done to vagina some little time before death. Perhaps ten or fifteen minutes.

“There was evidence of violence in the neighborhood of the hymen. This violence to the hymen had evidently been done just before death.

“Menses could not have caused any dilation of blood vessels, and discoloration of walls.

“Contents of stomach showed that very little alteration, if any, had taken place in the cabbage and biscuit eaten for dinner. She died in half-an-hour, or three-quarters afterwards.

“The violence to the private parts might have been produced by the finger or other means, but I found evidence of violence.”

C.B. Dalton, sworn for the State, said that he knew Leo Frank, Daisy Hopkins, and Jim Conley. He had been to the pencil factory several times. Had been in the basement.

“Daisy Hopkins introduced me to Frank. When I went down the ladder (into the basement) Daisy Hopkins went with me. We went back to a trash pile in the basement. I saw an old cot, and a stretcher.

“Frank had Coca-Cola, lemon and lime, and beer, in his office. I never saw the women in his office doing any writing. The first time I went to Frank’s office, it was Saturday evening. I went in there with Daisy Hopkins. There were women in the office. I have been in there several times. Conley was sitting at the front door.”

S.L. Rosser: “I am city policeman. On May 6^th or 7^th, I knew that Mrs. White claimed she saw a negro at the factory on Saturday morning, April 26^th.

“Mrs. White volunteered the information about seeing the negro.”

Harry Scott, recalled:

“I knew on Monday (April 28), that Mrs. White claimed she saw a darkey at the pencil factory. I gave the information to the police department.

“Mr. Frank gave me the information when I first talked to him.”

(Pray observe that Frank not only told the detective whom he employed, that he knew Mary Phagan, and that he knew J.M. Gantt was paying considerable attention to her, but that he knew Jim Conley was in the factory on the day of the crime.

Yet he was directing the police to a negro who was not there until night-fall, and to a white man who merely went in to get some old shoes!)

“I got information as to Conley writing, through my operations while I was out of town. Personally, I did not get the information from the pencil factory, I got it from outside sources, wholly disconnected with the pencil company.”

Misses Myrtice Cato and Maggie Griffin, both swore that they had seen Frank and Rebecca Carson repeatedly go into the ladies’ private room, on the fourth floor, and remain fifteen or twenty minutes. This was during work hours. Rebecca Carson carried the key to this room.

Let us now give the gist of the evidence of Jim Conley, the accomplice, whose confession blocked Leo Frank’s deliberate scheme to hang the innocent negro, Newt Lee.

Jim told how Frank would have private meetings with women in the factory, while he, Jim, kept a watch-out. He told of how another young man (Dalton) visited the factory, and how there would be “a lady for him, and one for Mr. Frank.”

He told of how Frank would signal to him, by “stomping” on the floor, when a woman was alone with Frank, and how he, Jim, was then to lock the door. When Frank got through with his woman, he would whistle, and Jim would unlock the door.

Conley told of meeting Frank near Montag’s, that Saturday morning, and of their talk; on this point of the meeting, and an apparently confidential talk, the negro was corroborated by Mrs. Hattie Waites.

The negro told of how the Jew instructed him where to sit, and what to do, when they reached the factory after Frank got back from Montag’s. Mary Phagan was expected; and Frank was planning to prevent interruption, while he was alone with her.

The negro then told of how he sat where Frank told him to, and he named the several visitors that came to the factory during the morning.

At length, he reaches the doomed girl, and he said—

“The next person I saw, was the lady that is dead.

“After she went upstairs, I heard her footsteps going towards the office; and after she went in the office, I heard two people walking out of the office, and going like they were coming down the steps; but they didn’t come down the steps; they went back toward the metal department.”

(“Has the metal come? Will there be work for me, next week?”

No more work for you, Mary Phagan!

You can die in defense of your virtue, but never more will you turn the dull wheel of Labor!)

“After they went back there, I heard the lady scream, but I didn’t hear no more; and the next person that came was Miss Monteen Stover. She stayed there a pretty good while—it wasn’t so very long, either—she came back down the steps, and left.

“After she came back down the steps, and left, I heard somebody from the metal department come running back there upstairs, on their tip-toes; then I heard somebody tip-toeing back to the metal department.”

Next, he heard the “stomp,” and the whistle, and went upstairs.

“Mr. Frank was standing there at the top of the stairs, shivering and trembling, and rubbing his hands, like this”—illustrating.

“He had a little rope in his hands—a long, wide piece of cord.

“His eyes looked funny. His face was red.

“After I got to the top of the stairs, he asked me:

“’Did you see that little girl that passed here just a while ago?’

“I told him I saw one come along there, and she come back again, and then I saw another one come along there, and she hasn’t come back down.

“And he says, ‘Well, the one you say didn’t come back down, she came into my office, and I went back there to see if her work had come, and I wanted to be with the little girl, and she refused me, and I struck her, and I guess I struck her too hard, and she fell and hit her head against something, and I don’t know how bad she got hurt.”

At the time Jim made this statement first to the officers, he did not know that there was a wound in the back of the girl’s head; and, of course, he did not know it ranged “from down upward.”

He did not know that her eye was black and swollen, and that scientific testimony would prove the two wounds to have been given at practically the same time.

Without Jim’s story of the blow in her face, and her fall against something, it would be impossible to take the official record and explain those two wounds—front and rear.

One man could not have made the two wounds, simultaneously; the fall against the handle of the machine made the rear wound, and explains its peculiar range.

Had Jim been making up a story, he would have said that she fell against the crank, against some sharp corner, naming it.

In the excitement of the moment, Frank himself did not know what it was that the girl had struck in falling, else he would have removed her tress of hair from the crank.

Is it not an evidence of the veracity of the negro’s story, that he represents Frank as saying he had hit the girl too hard, and in falling she had hit something, and he did not know how bad she was hurt?

The fact is, Frank expected to overcome the girl’s resistance without any more violence than rakes usually exert on modest girls who stoutly resist, and even cry out, at first.

Her determined fight enraged him; and knowing that he had but a few minutes in which to accomplish his purpose, he struck her, believing she would then yield, through fear.

When she fell on the floor, he may have thought she was shamming unconsciousness; and he therefore ripped her drawer-leg, clear up, and did the violence to the vagina. HOW? Not in the natural way.

Then, his passion cooled, he saw that the girl was badly hurt; and that if he allowed her to leave, in her pitiable condition, she would go out into the streets, and make the city ring with what she could tell, and what she could show.

Having gone that far—it was death anyway—he ran for the cord, tied it around her neck, as tight as he could tie it; and left her, to call for help from Jim, his confidential man, in such matters.

The strip from her underskirt was probably torn off, and wadded under the girl’s head, when he pushed up her clothes, and ripped the leg of her drawers.

Conley continued his testimony, as to what Frank said to him:

“’Of course you know I ain’t built like other men.’”

Note, farther on, that Miss Nellie Woods swore that Frank used these identical words to her, when he had her in his office, and was trying to get his hands under her clothes.

Of course, Jim Conley did not know that Frank had ever used those words to a white girl, and the corroboration is powerful.

The negro continued:

“The reason he said that was, I had seen him in a position I haven’t seen any other man,” etc.

The language is set forth in the opinion of the two Justices of the Georgia Supreme Court, who dissented from the majority. They considered the evidence improper, and their dissent was based upon this, and upon other evidence of Frank’s vices.

What Jim described, was the crime of Sodom.

“He asked me if I wouldn’t go back there, and bring her up, so that he could put her somewhere; and he said to hurry! that there would be money in it for me.

“When I came back there, I found the lady lying flat of her back, with a rope around her neck. The cloth was also tied around her neck, and part of it was under her head, like to catch blood. She was dead when I went back there, and I came back and told Mr. Frank the girl was dead, and he said, ‘Sh, sh.’ He told me to go back there by the cotton box, get a piece of cloth, put it around her, and bring her up. I didn’t hear what Mr. Frank said , and I came on up there to hear what he said. He was standing on the top of the steps, like he was going down the steps, and while I was back in the metal department. I didn’t understand what he said, and I came on back there to understand what he did say, and he said to go and get a piece of cloth to put around her, and I went and looked around the cotton box, and got a piece of cloth and went back there.

“The girl was lying flat on her back, and her hands were out this way. I put both of her hands down easily, and rolled her up in the cloth, and taken the cloth and tied her up, and started to pick her up, and I looked back a little distance and saw her hat and piece of ribbon laying down, and her slippers, and I taken them and put them all in the cloth, and I ran my right arm through the cloth and tried to bring it up on my shoulder. The cloth was tied just like a person that was going to give out clothes on Monday; they get the clothes and put them on the inside of a sheet and take each corner and tie the four corners, and I run my right arm through the cloth after I tied it that way and went to put it on my shoulder and I found I couldn’t get it on my shoulder; it was heavy, and I carried it on my arm the best I could and when I got away from the little dressing room that was in the metal department, I let her fall, and I was scared and kind of jumped, and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, you will have to help me with this girl, she is heavy,’ and he come and caught her by the feet, and I laid hold of her by the shoulders, and when we got her that way I was backing and Mr. Frank had her by the feet, and Mr. Frank kind of put her on me; he was nervous and trembling, and after we got up a piece from where we got her at, he let her feet drop, and then he picked her up, and we went on to the elevator, and he pulled down on one of the cords and the elevator wouldn’t go, and he said, ‘Wait, let me go in the office, and get the key; and he went in the office and got the key and come back and unlocked the switchboard, and the elevator went down to the basement, and we carried her out, and I opened the cloth and rolled her out there on the floor, and Mr. Frank turned around and went on up the ladder, and I noticed her hat and slipper and piece of ribbon, and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, what am I going to do with these things?’ and he said, ‘Just leave them right there,’ and I taken the things and pitched them over in front of the boiler, and after Mr. Frank had left, I goes over to the elevator, and he said, ‘Come on up and I will catch you on the first floor,’ and I got on the elevator and started it to the first floor, and Mr. Frank was running up there. He didn’t give me time to stop the elevator, he was so nervous and trembly, and before the elevator got to the top of the first floor, Mr. Frank made the first step onto the elevator, and by the elevator being a little down, like that, he stepped down on it and hit me quite a blow right over my chest, and that jammed me up against the elevator, and when we got near the second floor he tried to step off it before it got to the floor, and his foot caught on the second floor as he was stepping off, and that made him stumble and he fell back sort of against me, and he goes on and takes the key back to his office and leaves the box unlocked.

“I was willing to do anything to help Mr. Frank because he was a white man and my superintendent, and he sat down and I sat down at the table, and Mr. Frank dictated the notes to me. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to suit him, and he told me to turn over and write again, and I turned the paper and wrote again, and when I done that he told me turn over again, and I turned over again and I wrote out the next page there, and he looked at that and kind of liked it, and he said that was all right. Then he reached over and got another piece of paper, a green piece, and told me what to write. He took it and laid it on his desk, and looked at me smiling and rubbing his hands, and then he pulled out a nice little roll of greenbacks, and he said, ‘Here is $200,’ and I taken the money and looked at it a little bit, and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, don’t you pay another dollar for that watchman, because I will pay him myself,’ and he said, ‘All right, I don’t see what you want to buy a watch for, either; that big, fat wife of mine wanted me to buy an automobile, and I wouldn’t do it.’ And after awhile Mr. Frank looked at me and said, ‘You go down there in the basement and you take a lot of trash and burn that package that’s in front of the furnace,’ and I told him all right. But I was afraid to go down there by myself, and Mr. Frank wouldn’t go down there with me. He said, ‘There’s no need of my going down there,’ and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, you are a white man, and you done it, and I am not going down there and burn that myself,’ He looked at me then kind of frightened, and he said, ‘Let me see that money,’ and he took the money back and put it back in his pocket, and I said, ‘Is this the way you do things?’ And he said, ‘You keep your mouth shut, that is all right.’ And Mr. Frank turned round in his chair and looked at the money, and he looked back at me and folded his hands and looked up and said, ‘Why should I hang? I have wealthy people in Brooklyn,’ and he looked down when he said that, and I looked up at him, and he was looking up at the ceiling, and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, what about me?’ And he said, ‘That’s all right, don’t you worry about this thing; you just come back to work Monday, like you don’t know anything, and keep your mouth shut; if you get caught, I will get you out on bond and send you away,’ and he said, ‘Can you come back this evening and do it?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ that I was coming to get my money. He said, ‘Well, I am going home to get dinner, and you come back here in about forty minutes and I will fix the money, and I said, ‘How will I get in?’ And he said, ‘There will be a place for you to get in all right, but if you are not coming back, let me know, and I will take those things and put them down with the body,’ and I said, ‘All right, I will be back in about forty minutes,’ Then I went down over to the beer saloon across the street, and I took the cigarettes out of the box and there was some money in there and I took that out, and there was two paper dollars in there and two silver quarters, and I took a drink, and then I bought me a double-header and drank it, and I looked around at another colored fellow standing there, and I asked him did he want a glass of beer, and he said no, and I looked at the clock and it said twenty minutes to two, and the man in there asked me was I going home, and I said, ‘Yes,’ and I walked south on Forsyth Street to Mitchell and Mitchell to Davis, and I said to the fellow that was with me, ‘I am going back to Peters Street,’ and a Jew across the street that I owed a dime to called me and asked me about it and I paid him that dime. Then I went on over to Peters Street and staid there a while. Then I went home and I taken fifteen cents out of my pocket and gave it to a little girl to go and get some sausage, and then I gave her a dime to go and get some wood, and she staid so long that when she came back I said, ‘I will cook this sausage and eat it and go back to Mr. Frank,’ and I laid down across the bed and went to sleep, and I didn’t get up any more until half past six o’clock that night.

“That’s the last I saw of Mr. Frank that Saturday, I saw him next time on Tuesday, on the 4^th floor, when I was sweeping. He walked up and he said, ‘Now, remember, keep your mouth shut,’ and I said, ‘All right,’ and he said, ‘If you’d come back on Saturday and done what I told you to do with it down there, there would have been no trouble.’ This conversation took place between ten and eleven o’clock Tuesday. Mr. Frank knew I could write a little bit, because he always gave me tablets up there at the office so I could write down what kind of boxes we had, and I would give that to Mr. Frank down at his office, and that’s the way he knew I could write.”

On cross-examination—it lasted 8 hours—the negro stated that he was 27 years old; that before he went to the pencil factory, he worked a year and a half for Dr. Palmer; that he had worked for the Orr Stationery Company, and for S.S. Gordon. Before that, for Adams Woodword and Dr. Howell. Got his first job with S.M. Truitt. Next with W.S. Coates. Went to school one year. Can write a little. Worked for Truitt two years. For Coates, five years.

He admitted he had stooled in the elevator shaft, Friday evening.

“I have never seen the night watch-man, Newt Lee.”

(Notice that Lee had only been there three weeks, and that Conley had never seen him; and therefore it was Frank, not Conley, who knew that the night-watch was a “tall, slim, black negro.”

Therefore, it was Frank, not Conley, who was able to accurately describe Lee, in the notes where he is twice described!

This immensely important detail has heretofore been overlooked.)

“I heard them say there was a negro watchman, but I did not know he was a negro.

“The lady that I saw with Mr. Frank was Miss Daisy Hopkins. It would always be between 3 and 3:30 (o’clock p.m.). I was sweeping the second floor; (Frank’s office floor). Mr. Frank called me into his office. Miss Daisy was with him.”

Then Jim told of how Dalton and another woman came; how Dalton and his went down into the basement, and how Frank and his remained together; and how, after the two men got through, each paid him 25 cents for watching while they were with the women.

Then Jim told of the woman who came down from the fourth floor, to be with Frank in his office, while the negro watched.

(The manner of Frank with these women is set forth in Volume 141 of Georgia Reports, page 287. Anyone can obtain a copy by writing to the State Librarian, Atlanta.)

“I never was drunk at the factory. Yes, I sometimes drank beer in the basement with Snowball”—another negro employee.

Jim admitted that he had told lies about the case, until he decided to confess.

“Mr. Quinn came in, and then went away before Mary Phagan came. Mr. Quinn had already gone out of the factory when Mary Phagan came in. I didn’t see Mr. Barrett, nor Miss Corinthia Hall, or Hattie Hall, or Alonzo Mann, or Emma Clark.

“I never was in jail until April, 1913. I have been down at police barracks several times. I was arrested for fighting black boys. I have never fought a white man, or woman.

“While I was writing the notes, Mr. Frank took the pencil out of my hand, and told me to rub out that ‘a’ in ‘negro.’

“I saw Mary Phagan’s mesh-bag, or pocketbook, in Mr. Frank’s office, after he got back from the basement. It was lying on his desk. He taken it and put it in the safe.”

“Mr. Frank told me he would send me away from here if they caught me. He would get me out on bond, and send me away.

“I had orders from Mr. Frank to write down how many boxes we needed.

“Mr. Frank knew for a whole year that I could write. I used to write for him, the name of the pencils we made, ‘Luxury,’ ‘George Washington,’ ‘Thomas Jefferson,’ ‘Magnolia,’ and ‘Uncle Remus.’

“Yes, I wrote him orders to take money out of my wages.”

(See the importance of this—unknown to the negro; Frank, familiar with his writing, sees two specimens of it in the basement. Sunday morning, soon after the corpse is found, and yet never says a word about the “hand-write” being Conley’s, nor about his, Frank’s, knowing that Conley could write.)

“The pocket-book was a white-looking pocket-book, with a chain to it. You could take it and fold it up and hold it in one hand.”

(Mary’s mother referred to it as a silver mesh-bag.)

Ivie Jones testified that he met Jim Conley on the street, between 1 and 2 o’clock, Saturday afternoon, of April 26^th; and that they walked on together toward Conley’s home.

The State here “rested” its case. It had traced Mary into Frank’s possession, and had thrown upon him the burden of explaining what became of her, for she was found dead, in his possession (in law), and the condition of her stomach and limbs proved that she was murdered at about the time he got possession of her.

In the effort to save his life, he pretended that she had gone into Newt Lee’s possession, after nightfall; but he was foiled in his purpose to hang the innocent negro, by unforeseen circumstances:

1) The inability of his friends to prove that anybody Mary alive, after she had been traced almost to the factory door;

2) The providential visit of Monteen Stover to Frank’s office, at the time when he told Harry Scott—and swore at the inquest—that Mary was in his office, and that he himself never left it;

3) The call of nature, 3 o’clock after midnight, that same night, which providentially caused the endangered Newt Lee to discover the corpse—which Frank had intended to either drag out into the alley behind, or bury in the dirt floor, or burn in the furnace, when the fires were started again, Monday.

4) The break-down and confession of Jim Conley.

Thus the circumstances forged a perfect chain around Frank.

Like a shuttle in a weaver’s loom, the girl was on the stairs, between Conley and Frank; both knew she was there; each man knew the other was there; and each man knew that if he did not kill the child, the other did!

If she had left the hands of Frank, she was flung towards the hands of Conley, at the foot of the stairs; and, as Frank knew Conley was there, he knew the negro assaulted and murdered the girl, if he himself did not do so.

There isn’t a lawyer living who can get over this point, and explain Frank’s screening of Conley, save upon the idea of their joint guilt.

The Jew never hinted a suspicion of the negro, until after the negro exonerated Newt Lee, and put the awful crime where it belonged.

And, without the negro’s evidence, no man can possibly explain that hair and blood on Frank’s floor; the absence of blood or signs of struggle, elsewhere; the loose cloth around the head, which soaked up the blood; the hands folded across the breast, and so frozen into position that, when the fiendish Jew dragged her by the heels, over a cinder-strewn and gritty dirt floor, those little fingers remained in position across the bosom, which was never to pillow a husband’s head, or nourish an honest man’s babe.

“I put both of her hands down, easy;” and, as the negro had seen people cross the hands of the dead, he crossed hers upon her breast; and so they found them, next morning.

Everlasting honor to the race which produces girls of this heroic mold—girls who will not live, unless they can live purely!

Everlasting honor to the work people, and the common people, who have fought so grandly, for two long years, to avenge that innocent blood!

And honor forever to the brave men of Cobb County who carried out the legal sentence of the courts, after one of Frank’s own lawyers had contemptuously upset the legal machinery which had judicially ascertained Leo Frank’s terrible guilt.

THE CASE OF THE DEFENSE.

The first two witnesses, Matthews and Hollis, merely swore to street-car schedules, and the time Mary Phagan rode into the city.

Herbert Schiff, Assistant Superintendent of the factory, testified to the system of business, manner of paying off, how pencils are made, etc.

He saw the blood spots, and the hair. His most important statement was made on cross-examination:

“I knew on Monday that Mrs. White claimed she saw a negro there.”

Then, Mr. Schiff, why didn’t you go after that negro, instead of Newt Lee, who was at home, asleep?

Answer the question, NOW, Mr. Herbert Schiff!

You knew, on Monday, that the negro whom Mrs. White saw, must have been Jim Conley; and you swore that you saw Conley in the shipping room of the factory on Monday, and on Tuesday, following: you did not ask Conley a single question about the crime; and yet you knew he must be the guilty man, if Frank wasn’t.

How do you explain your failure to catechize Jim Conley?

Explain it NOW, Mr. Schiff!

A detail of Mr. Schiff’s evidence was, that “empty sacks are usually moved a few hours after they are taken off the cotton.”

Frank’s gubernatorial attorney argued that there was no use for cloth, or sacks, at a pencil factory.

Miss Hattie Hall, stenographer, swore she finished her work, carried it to Frank, and left at 12:02, Saturday, punching the clock as she went away.

She said Frank did not make up his financial sheet that morning, but admitted she had testified differently at the inquest.

Miss Corinthia Hall, sworn for the defense, stated she was forelady at the factory. Got there Saturday about 25 minutes to 12 o’clock. Mrs. Emma Clark Freeman was with her. They left at about 15 minutes to 12. Frank was in his office.

On cross-examination, witness stated that she and Mrs. Freeman met Lemmie Quinn a few minutes later at the Greek Café, and Quinn told them he had just been up to see Mr. Frank.

Mrs. Freeman’s evidence was to the same effect.

Miss Eula May Flowers merely testified that she gave Schiff the data for financial reports.

Miss Magnolia Kennedy swore that Helen Ferguson did not ask for Mary Phagan’s pay envelope.

On cross-examination, she said:

“Barrett called my attention to the hair. It looked like Mary’s. My machine was right next to Mary’s.”

She had never before seen the spots on the floor, but on Monday could see them ten or twelve feet away.

Wade Campbell, another employee:

His sister, Mrs. White, told him, Monday, that she had seen the negro Saturday. “I saw the spots they claim was blood. Have never seen Frank talk to Mary Phagan. I knew that Conley could write.”

(Then, Mr. Campbell, why didn’t you suspect Conley, whom you knew to be the negro your sister saw there, and whom you knew could write?)

Lemmie Quinn came next:

He is foreman of the metal department. About 100 women work at factory. Couldn’t tell color of hair Barrett found. Noticed the blood spots. “I was in the office, and saw Frank between 12:20 and 12:25.”

He “reckoned” the time, and did not go by any clock or watch. He admitted that he met Miss Hall, and Mrs. Freeman after he had been to see Frank.

(This was the only attempt at alibi; and two of Frank’s own witnesses smashed it, by Frank’s own clock.

Note how they were corroborated by Mrs. White and Holloway, both of whom swore that the ladies, Miss Hall and Mrs. Freeman, were at the factory some 10 to 20 minutes before noon.

The attempt to place Quinn in Frank’s office at 12:20, shows how they needed help, there and then; its break-down, left them without a leg to stand on.)

Harry Denham, one of the carpenters at work on the fourth floor, testified to the hammering, forty feet from the elevator. Was pretty sure elevator did not run that day. He could have seen wheels moving, and heard the noise. Finished and left about 3 p.m. Frank was there.

Minola McKnight:

Testified to Frank’s natural and regular conduct on Saturday and Sunday. Swore her husband bulldozed her into making that affidavit about Frank getting drunk Saturday night, confessing to murder, and wanting to kill himself.

“My husband tried to get me to tell lies,” she said. “All that affidavit is a lie.”

Emil Selig, father-in-law to Frank, testified to his natural conduct, and conversation on Saturday. Flatly contradicted Albert McKnight.

Miss Helen Kerns swore she saw Frank on the street, that Saturday, 10 minutes after 1 p.m., on Alabama Street.

Mrs. A.P. Levy: Saw Frank get off car near his home, between 1 and 2 p.m., that Saturday. Was looking at the clock, and knows it was 1:20.

Mrs. M.G. Michael, of Athens, testified that Mrs. Frank is her niece. She saw Frank at about 2 o’clock Saturday. He greeted her. She saw nothing unusual about him.

Jerome Michael, of Athens, swore that he had his watch in his hand Saturday, and saw Frank that day between 1 and 2 o’clock. Saw nothing unusual about him.

“I practice law. I had my watch in my hand when I saw Frank.”

Mrs. Hennie Wolfsheimer swore to about the same thing. She was Frank’s aunt. She was corroborated by Julien Loeb, and H.J. Hinchey.

Miss Rebecca Carson testified that she was forelady at the pencil factory; that the elevator is noisy when running, and that Jim Conley told her, on Monday, he was so drunk the previous Saturday he did not know where he was or what he did. She also heard Jim say that Frank was as innocent as an angel.

Mrs. E.M. Carson testified that Conley said that Frank was innocent. She has seen blood spots on floor. Girls would hurt their fingers.

On cross-examination, she admitted she had seen Frank and Conley, on fourth floor, at the same time, the Tuesday after the murder.

(This was an important corroboration of Conley’s evidence.)

Miss Mary Pirk, another forelady at the factory, swore that on Monday she accused Jim of the murder, and that “he took his broom and walked right out of the office.” Miss Mary swore she wouldn’t believe Jim on oath. She did not report to Frank that she suspected Jim. “I accused Jim before I saw the blood at the ladies’ dressing room.”

Miss Dora Small testified that she worked at the factory: saw Jim Conley on fourth floor Tuesday. Didn’t see Frank talk to Jim. “I have never seen him talk to that nigger in my life.” Miss Dora said that Jim worried her for money to buy newspapers, and that she wouldn’t believe him on oath. Every time he heard a newsboy yell “Extra!” Jim would go to Miss Dora and beg to see it, before she had finished with it.

Miss Julia Fuss, who also worked there, testified that Jim said, on Wednesday, after the murder, that Frank was as innocent as the angels in heaven; she added that Jim “was never known to tell the truth.”

She testified that Frank came up stairs where Conley was, that Tuesday morning, but she did not see them in conversation.

Annie Hixon, a lady of color, testified that Frank called up the Ursenbach home, about half-past one, April 26^th, and told them he would not be able to keep his engagement to go to the ball game.

Alonzo Mann, office boy at the factory, swore he left at about 11:30 on Saturday. Had never seen Frank have any women there. Had never seen Dalton there.

Mr. M.O. Nix identified the financial sheets as being in Frank’s handwriting.

Harry Gottheimer travels for the pencil factory. Saw Frank at Montag’s that Saturday morning. Said Frank invited him to call at the factory that afternoon.

Mrs. Rae Frank, mother of defendant, identified some writing, especially a letter written by him to his uncle, Moses Frank, who is “supposed to be very wealthy.”

Oscar Pappenheimer, stockholder in the pencil factory, swore to receiving report Monday, April 28^th.

C.F. Ursenbach, brother-in-law of Frank, said he had an engagement for the ball game with Frank, for Saturday afternoon, and Frank called it off; saw Frank, Sunday; seemed all right.

I. Straus swore he was at Frank’s home, Saturday night, and while others played cards, Frank sat in the hall, reading.

Mrs. Emil Selig testified that the contents of the Minola McKnight affidavit were false.

Sig. Montag, Treasurer of the factory, testified to Frank’s coming to his house, Sunday morning, after the crime; looked all right; witness went to the factory that morning; sent for Haas and Rosser, Monday; made no trade about fees. Don’t know who is paying Frank’s lawyers.

Many witnesses for the defense either confined themselves to the good character of Frank, or to the bad character of Conley, and to contradictory statements made by him; and not one of these witnesses swore to any fact of real importance.

The defendant’s lawyers carried the character business too far, by putting up Miss Irene Jackson, who, after saying that Frank’s “character was very well,” swore that he had a habit of leering at the girls in their private room, while they were partially undressed.

Miss Bessie Fleming testified that Frank made out his financial sheets on Saturday mornings.

Then came defendant’s statement:

It covers forty-five pages of printed matter, and less than five of these touch the merits of the case.

He stated that after Hattie Hall left (12:02), Mary Phagan (he did not know her name, he said) came into his office, ten or fifteen minutes later, and that he did not know where she went after he gave her the pay envelope.

He stated that Quinn came in, afterwards, and that if he (Frank) left his office, after 12 o’clock, before he went upstairs at 12:45, he must have “unconsciously” gone back to the toilet!

(This toilet is back of the metal room, and he had to go to the metal room, and, if he went to it, then, he had to go to the metal room where Mary Phagan’s hair was, and over the very spot where her blood stained the floor!)

Almost the entire statement of the defendant, as shown in the record, was taken up with a tedious and prolonged explanation of his manner of doing his work at the factory.

One thing Frank did try to do: he attempted to explain why his wife would not come to see him at the jail. He said he did not want her in that crowd of reporters, detectives, and snap-shotters!

Three of Frank’s male relatives had virtually dragged her to the police headquarters; but she would go no further; and when she went away, she stayed away three weeks.

In the Atlanta papers, Rabbi Marx explained this by saying, she was expecting every day that Frank would be released, although the fact was universally known that he had been bound over for trial, and could not be bailed out.

In rebuttal, the State proved that Frank’s character for lasciviousness was bad. The witnesses who swore it, were Myrtie Cato, Maggie Griffin, Mrs. C.D. Donegan, Mrs. H.R. Johnson, Marie Karst, Nellie Pettis, Mary Davis, Mrs. Mary E. Wallace, Estelle Winkle, and Carrie Smith. These white ladies had worked for Frank, and not one of them was impeached, or cross-examined, by his lawyers.

By Ruth Robinson, Dewey Hewell, and W.E. Turner (white), it was proved that Frank not only knew Mary Phagan, but talked to her by name, had his hand on her shoulder, tried to push his attentions on her; and that she was holding him off, repulsing his advances.

George Eppes made affidavit that Mary told him, the Saturday morning he saw her last, alive, that Frank had been trying to flirt with her.

One of the notes found near the corpse read:

“He said he would love me, laid down play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy hisself.”

The other read:

“Mam that negro fire down here did this i went to make water and he push me down a hole a long tall negro black that had it wase long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me.”

Note, that unnatural sexual intercourse seems to be suggested; and that Newt Lee is designated by occupation once, and by personal description, twice; and that the place of the crime is placed on the floor above—not in the basement itself.

Excepting a mass of immaterial evidence, as to how long cabbage lies in the stomach undigested, and as to whether the girl’s privates had been violated, the defendant had nothing except what I have stated.

How could he have?

The case hinged on the few minutes after Hattie Hall left at 12:02, and before Mrs. White’s return at 12:30; and the disappearance of Frank and his victim, during the time that Monteen Stover waited for him in his office, could never be explained.

His conviction rested upon undeniable physical facts, and his own statements, made before he learned how Monteen could disprove them.

The lawyers for the defense took three lines, and three only—each of them leading into what the French call a cul de sac; we Americans call it, a blind alley.

A number of witnesses, following one of these paths that didn’t go anywhere, testified to a time or times when they had seen varnish and paint spilled, or when they had seen somebody hurt at a machine, and bleeding on the floor. None of these witnesses made the slightest effort to explain away the spots of red, with white powder over them, which were not on the floor when it was swept Friday, but was seen there the first thing Monday morning.

Consequently, this line of evidence stopped in a cul de sac.

Another lot of witnesses were put up, to prove that Frank had never been seen by them to have had a woman, or women, in the factory on Saturday afternoons.

Even a layman will perceive, that no matter how strong this point was made, it did nothing more than contradict Conley, as to one detail of his testimony. The evidence of these witnesses was consistent with the idea, that Frank was too sly in his secret vices to be caught up with by the ordinary employees of the place. Jim was his confidential man, and Jim was just the sort of negro to keep the secret, and to care nothing about the sexual practices of his white boss.

So you see that this path of the defense also led to nothing; it did not tend to clear up the mystery of Mary Phagan’s death, in Frank’s house, shortly after she went into his possession.

The third line of defense consisted of scientific testimony as to the cabbage in the girl’s stomach, and the blood on her person.

An incredible amount of time was devoted to this point; and the lawyers of Frank really appeared to attach tremendous importance to it.

Doctor after doctor gave the most learned and exhaustive dissertations on the digestibility of cabbage; and doctor after doctor uttered wisdom, on the possibility of ascertaining, from the examination of a woman’s corpse, whether she had suffered sexual violence before she died.

Can you not see at a glance how futile all this sort of thing was? There was no dispute about the girl’s going into Frank’s possession, soon after she ate dinner; there was no dispute that somebody murdered her, in Frank’s own house, almost immediately after she entered it; and nobody was being prosecuted for any other crime than murder!

Frank was not being tried for rape, nor sodomy, nor adultery. He was being tried for THE MURDER OF MARY PHAGAN, who was found dead, by violence, IN HIS HOUSE, shortly following her coming into his possession.

He admitted the possession; fixed the time by his own clock; and made false statements as to his then whereabouts; consequently the scientific testimony concerning the contents of the girl’s stomach, and the condition of her vagina, was almost ludicrously unimportant.

That laborious path led nowhere, for the simple reason that it threw no light on the question in the case—that question being, “Who fastened the cruel cord around the child’s neck, and choked her to death?”

The astounding fact to be learned from this official Brief of Evidence is, it fails to show that defendant’s lawyers had any consistent theory as to who committed the crime, AND WHERE. I never saw such an instance of water-muddying, and beating about the bush. At no pivotal point did Frank’s attorneys grapple with the facts. You search in vain to find how they expected to show the jury that Mary Phagan came out of Frank’s possession safely, after she came in, next to Hattie Hall, and was followed so closely by Monteen Stover. The jury could see—as you do—that, had she gone on down stairs, as Frank said she did, “at 12:05, or 12:10, or maybe 12:07,” she would have met Monteen; and that the negro, at the foot of the stairs, could not have done what was done to her, without being taken in the act, by the other white girl.

When Frank told the jury he must have been at the toilet during the five minutes that Monteen waited, the jury must have felt the cold chills run up their spines, for the jury knew that Mary had not “unconsciously” gone to the toilet, at the same time Frank did!

What the doomed man, and his bewildered lawyers failed to see was this:

It was just as necessary for him to explain WHERE MARY WAS, while Monteen waited, as to explain HIS OWN DISAPPEARNCE, at that fatal time.

Frank’s repeated statements entrapped him beyond escape. He said, again and again, that Mary came next to Hattie Hall, and he did not mention Monteen’s coming at all. This proved to the jury that he did not know of Monteen’s coming. And he would have known it had he been in his office, when he said he was. Now, as he had (in ignorance of Monteen’s visit) placed both Mary and himself in his office—while Monteen waited—he had deliberately and repeatedly lied as to Mary’s whereabouts, as well as his own. He might have “unconsciously” gone to the toilet. Very well; but where did Mary go?

Her hair, and her blood, and the only possible explanation of the wounds—the swollen eye in front, and the scalp cut on the back of the head, ranging from down upward—were all back there at the metal department, where the toilet was.

Infatuated young degenerate! To escape Monteen’s evidence, and to explain his absence from his office, he supposed himself to have gone, “unconsciously,” to the only place in his house where there were damning evidences of the crime.

Ask the finest criminal lawyer of your acquaintance, if he ever knew of a great case of circumstantial evidence, where the defendant was not convicted by something which HE said, or did. It happens so, almost invariably. Guilt cannot talk, or be mute; move, or stand still, without revealing the difference between the slush and the snow; the crystal fount, and the turbid stream. God so made the world that truths fit; lies never do.

No innocent man ever pretended not to know a murdered person with whom he had been in daily contact, for a year; with whom he had familiarly conversed, and upon whom he had put his hands; and no guilty man ever took hold of the upraised arms of his victim, crossed them decently over her bosom, and then bore her way from the scene of the crime.

When the defendant made his extraordinary motion for a new trial (the Supreme Court having unanimously refused to grant a re-hearing on his regular motion for a new trial) there was developed the most amazing series of operations, conducted by the W.J. Burns Agency, and by C.W. Burke, private detective of Governor Slaton’s law-firm.

Practically all of the employees of the pencil factory, whose testimony had made out the State’s case, were either threatened, or offered money, to change their evidence.

Much of this foul work was done in the private office of Governor Slaton. His detective, Burke, using the assumed name of Kelly, tampered with George Eppes, and took him to Birmingham. Albert McKnight was tempted with money, and with offers of employment at high wages. Burns tried to get him to swear, that some injuries he had received in a railroad accident were caused by a beating given Albert by the Atlanta detectives.

The work-girls were offered money to make affidavits contradicting the evidence given at the trial.

Carrie Smith was threatened by Burke with the exposure of alleged misconduct, if she did not come across, and make the statement Burke desired. The girl, being innocent, defied Governor Slaton’s detective!

Burns kept an Atlanta negro, Aaron Allen, several days in Chicago, talking to him daily, and having Burns’ underlings talk to him; and they were assisted by Jacob Jacobs. They wanted the negro to swear that Conley had confessed that he alone committed the murder. One day, in Chicago, Allen was ushered into a room of the Burns suite of offices; where somebody had left on the table a large pile of money, gold, silver, and greenbacks. The negro was too wary to touch it.

Marie Karst testified that Burke and Lemmie Quinn came out to her home, and “Lemmie set up to drinks,” and Burke talked to her. Wanted her to come to the office of Rosser, Brandon, Slaton & Philips. “I didn’t go.” Then Burke met her on the street, and offered to employ her to work for him. Gave her $2 a day for working in the afternoons. “Burke wanted me to go around and see the girls who had sworn for the State in the Frank trial…and see if they would not change their evidence.

“He told me that what I swore to did not bind me, because I was not cross-examined, and said it was not recorded.

“I saw several of the girls, and they told me they would not change their evidence, because what they swore to was true.

“Burke wanted me to see Monteen Stover, and talk with her, and see if I couldn’t get her to change her evidence.

“He wanted me to go down and live with Monteen, and ‘pick’ her. My mother refused to let me do it, and would not let me work for Burke any more.

“I met Burke, and talked with him, in THE PRIVATE OFFICE OF GOVERNOR JOHN M. SLATON.”

Mrs. Cora Falta testified that she had been working at the factory five years.

“On Monday, April 26, 1913, we were all at work, and Magnolia Kennedy came running into the room, and said: ‘We have found some of Mary’s hair on the lathe machine!’ We all quit work, and went there and looked at it.”

(Remember, that no one, at this time, suspected Leo Frank.)

R.L. Craven swore that he heard J.N. Starnes urge Minola McKnight to tell something favorable to Frank, if she could, because they would rather learn something in his favor than something against him; and, in the presence of Minola’s husband, and her lawyer, Starnes told the woman not to swear to her statement unless it was true.

This statement of Minola was in reference to Frank’s being drunk during the night after the crime; his wife sleeping on the rug on the floor; and his calling for his pistol to kill himself. After these exhortations, the woman swore to the statement, and signed it.

Mrs. Carrie Smith swore that she was offered $20 to sign an affidavit favorable to Frank. She had worked three years at the factory, and knew Frank’s character was bad. The man, Maddox, who wanted her to change her evidence, was in Governor Slaton’s private office, in the Grant building, when she went there to see Marie Karst.

Mrs. Maggie Nash (formerly Griffin) swore to the efforts of Burns to get her to change her evidence as to Frank’s bad character, and Frank’s going into the private room, on the fourth floor, with a forelady. She told Burns he might try one hundred years to change her evidence, but she would never do it, because it was the truth.

Ruth Robinson swore that she had known Mary Phagan as a little girl, in Cobb County; and that she had seen Frank at Mary’s machine, several times a day, talking to her, and calling her “Mary,” when it was not necessary from any business reason.

“Mary had worked there a good, long time, and understood her business.”

“Sometimes Frank would remain at Mary’s machine fifteen or twenty minutes. I never saw him show that much attention to the work of the other girls on that floor. I have seen Frank, in showing Mary about her work, take hold of her hands, and hold them. Frank’s visit to Mary, and talks with her, and assistance given her, became more and more frequent.

“The very last day I worked there, I saw Frank talking to Mary. I heard him call her ‘Mary.’

“The said Leo Frank undertook to give me seven dollars, when he knew I was not entitled to the money, and he endeavored to have an assignation with me, some time the next week. This occurred in his office.”

Miss Nellie Pettis made affidavit to the efforts of Frank’s detectives, and lawyers, to change her evidence; but she reiterated with emphasis that Frank had insulted her in his office, by making an indecent proposition which she indignantly rejected—following which she left his office and employment.

Mrs. Mamie Edmunds (formerly Kitchens) swore that when Frank, without knocking, would open the door of the ladies’ private dressing room, and see girls in there partly dressed, she thought it would have been as little he could have done to say, “Excuse me, ladies,” and go away. But instead of doing so, “he would stand in the door, and laughed or grinned. I don’t know when a Jew is laughing, or when he is grinning; but he stood there, and made no effort to move.”

“Miss Jackson exclaimed, ‘We are dressing, blame it!’ and then he shut the door and disappeared.”

C.W. Burke tried to persuade witnesses that Frank’s conduct was all right, and urged her to sign a paper to that effect.

“I took Burke’s word for what the papers contained. I did not tell Burke anything different from what I have sworn before.”

C.B. Dalton swore that Burke offered him $100 to sign a paper, “to be used before the Pardon Board, to keep Frank from hanging.” He said he went to Dublin, Ga., to do some work for a bank, and two Jews came to him and offered him $400 to leave the State. They came to him several times, and renewed the offer, stating that they meant to get Frank a new trial.

“I have, on several visits to Frank’s office, seen girls there. Have seen him play with them, hug them, kiss them, and pinch them. I saw him, on several occasions, take a girl and go back of the room where the dressing room is. On one occasion, Frank had six bottles of beer, and I carried three more to his office. Frank told Dalton he needn’t rent a room; to take Daisy Hopkins to the basement, where there was a cot. “I used this cot with Daisy Hopkins half a dozen times.”

Helen Ferguson swore that Jimmie Wrenn, who worked for C.W. Burke, offered her $100, if she would leave Atlanta. Frank was going to get a new trial, and her board and all expenses would be paid while she was out of the State. She said that Wrenn made violent love to her, and tried to persuade her to marry him! He took her up to the Grant building, and introduced her to his “father.”

“Jimmie made love to me, and said he wanted to marry me, but wanted me to sign an affidavit first.”

They were working on the girl to get her to repudiate her statement, that Frank had refused to give her Mary’s pay envelope.

It was this refusal, on Friday evening, to give Helen the $1.20 due to Mary, that compelled the girl to go to Frank herself for it, next day.

Burns, Burke, and Wrenn were working desperately, using John M. Slaton’s private office, to get out of their way the evidence which tended to show that Frank deliberately laid a trap for Mary Phagan.

It was not until several weeks after Jimmy Wrenn introduced Helen Ferguson to his “father,” in Governor Slaton’s private office, that she discovered that Jimmy’s “father” was the unscrupulous scoundrel, C.W. Burke, who was working for the firm of Rosser, Brandon, Slaton & Philips, and trying, in the interest of this law-firm, to criminally defeat Law and Justice.

Miss Nellie Wood gave testimony which corroborated Conley in a most remarkable manner. She said:

“I told the Solicitor before he put me on the stand, that I was in the office of Leo Frank on one occasion, when the said Frank made an indecent proposal to me. My experience as a trained nurse enabled me to fully understand and know what Frank intended.

“He said, ‘You know, I am not like other people,’ and, drawing his chair closer up to me, says, ‘I don’t think you understand me,’ and put his hands on me; I resisted, and got up and opened the door,” etc.

Frank’s detectives endeavored to secure from this witness a statement that would negative her former evidence; but, as in every other instance, they fell short of success.

Two white men—Graham and Tillander—made affidavit that they went to the pencil factory, Saturday, April 26^th, between 11 and 12 o’clock; and that they saw a negro seated near the foot of the stairs. Being unacquainted with the interior of the building, each of these men asked the negro where the office was located and he directed them to it. If the negro was drunk, these men didn’t notice it.

Mrs. Hattie Waites made an affidavit to the fact that, on Saturday morning, April 26^th, between 10 and 11 o’clock, she saw a white man and a negro talking together on the street, near Montag’s place of business. She afterwards recognized Frank as the white man, and Conley as the negro.

The most abominable attempt to manufacture evidence was made while Conley was in jail, awaiting trial. A white convict, George Wrenn—who had stolen $30,000 worth of diamonds, but who was nevertheless a “trusty” in the prison—was the instrument used by the Frank detectives.

He, in turn, employed a negro woman, Annie Maud Carter, a notoriously low character. Wrenn coached this black strumpet, and put her into Conley’s cell, to entice him into committing the unnatural act with her.

They wanted to show that it was Conley who was the sodomist.

“Mr. Gillem (a prison official) told me he would give me $2.00 if I would go in there and see Jim Conley. George Wrenn wrote a letter, and gave it to me, and he said, ‘You give it to Jim Conley, and tell him it just came in through the mail.’

“Gillem said to me, that Conley was a ——– (a most nasty term for sodomite) and said, ‘I just want to see if he will fool with you with his—(the rest is too obscene to print). I have asked Conley, and he said he would never do a thing like that; said he had never done ——– except in the natural way.

“The first Sunday in December, a Jew came up—Mr. Pappenheim was there, too”—and the woman went on to tell how the Jew told her she could make a pot of money, and get rich quick, if she would put something in Jim Conley’s victuals!

The Jew said to the negress—

“I want you to take this little vial, and put a drop in his food, and give it to him.”

When the negress recoiled from the Jew’s offer, he said to her, “You’re a d—d fool,” and walked off.

“I don’t know his name, but he comes up here” (where Frank and Conley were imprisoned) “with the Klein boys. He has black hair, and his hair stands up, and his hat is pulled to one side.”

The detectives not only tried to get the Carter woman to inveigle Conley into the unnatural vice of which Frank was accused, but endeavored to get up a marriage between the two!

Conley and the woman both swore that their letters had been changed, and that the unprintable filth put in them, had been forged.

Forged time-slips against Newt Lee! Forged bloody shirt against Lee! Forged affidavits against the girls! Forged letter of the dead Judge Roan! Forged letters of a couple of negroes!

The whole case of the defense reeked with fraud, bribery, perjury, and forgery.

Never in the world was there a more infamous episode than which followed the organization of the Haas Finance Committee, after the legitimate litigation in this case had ended.

Having lost at every point in the legal contest, the Haas Finance Committee was appointed for no other purpose than to defeat Law and Justice, by unparalleled and illegitimate means.

It is almost miraculous that the indomitable Solicitor, Hugh Dorsey, was able to defeat the Haas Committee, defeat the detectives of Governor Slaton’s firm, and defeat the criminals of the Burns “Detective” Agency—a villainous gang whose work consists of just such attempts to bribe witnesses, as was seen in their manipulations of the Frank case.

With the following, clipped from current news reports in Atlanta, I close the review of the corrupt practices used in the extraordinary motion for new trial:

Atlanta, Ga., Jan. 28.—The Rev. C.B. Ragsdale, formerly pastor of a local church, today testified he was paid $200 for signing a false affidavit in connection with the Leo M. Frank case. Mr. Ragsdale was the first witness in the trial of Dan S. Lehon, southern manager of the William J. Burns National Detective Agency; Arthur Thurman, a lawyer, and C.C. Tedder, a former policeman, who are charged with subordination of perjury. It is alleged they procured false affidavits from Ragsdale and R.L. Barber shortly after Frank’s extraordinary motion for a new trial was filed.

In the affidavits Ragsdale and Barber declared they overheard James Conley, a negro, tell another negro that he had killed a girl in the factory where Mary Phagan was murdered.

The former pastor still was on the witness stand when court adjourned for the day. He testified to alleged meetings with the defendants when he said the affidavit was discussed, describing the signing of the document in the office of Luther Z. Rosser, who was one of Frank’s principal counsel, and told of the alleged payment of the money later. He added that the night he received the money “a man rode up to my house on a motorcycle and told my sons to tell their father not to say anything to anybody unless it was a Burns man.”

By the skin of his teeth, Lehon escaped conviction, because the State was not able to trace the payment of the $200 directly to him, beyond a reasonable doubt. At least, that is the most charitable view to take of the verdict. Some man, or men, on the panel may have suspected that the $200 fell out of the moon, and just accidentally dropped into Ragsdale’s pocket.

But you will have no doubts as to who hired, and paid, Ragsdale to swear that he had overheard Conley confess, because you have already seen how Burns had vainly tried to bribe Aaron Allen, in Chicago; and how they had tried to bribe the white girls, and how they tried to bribe R.P. Barrett, and Albert McKnight; and how they tried to use Annie Maud Carter.

Decidedly, it is the blackest record of systematic effort to save the guilty, destroy the innocent, debauch witnesses, manufacture evidence, and create a public sentiment in favor of a fictitious case, AGAINST THE REAL ONE, that ever has been known in the New World.

The Appellate Court of New York—the highest tribunal in that State—said, in the Becker case:

Extensive as is the power of review vested in this court on a judgment of death, the law does not intend to substitute the conclusions of fact, which may be drawn by seven judges, for the conclusions of the fact which have been drawn from the evidence by twelve jurors, unless we are clear that the view of the facts taken by the jury is wrong. It is our duty to affirm, if the trial was fair and without legal error, and the verdict was not against the weight of evidence. We are to see to it that the trial was fair and that there was sufficient evidence with recognized rules of law to support the verdict. This done, the responsibility for the result rests with the jurors.

That is good law—good wherever the system of jury-trial prevails.

Our Supreme Court reviewed the evidence in the Frank case, and found it “sufficient to support the verdict.” (See page 284, 141 Georgia Reports.)

The Court held unanimously that the new evidence, pretended to have been discovered after the verdict had been affirmed, was not of such a character as to warrant another trial.

The United States Supreme Court decided that Frank’s lawyers had not been able to show that he had been denied a fair trial, or deprived of any legal right.

Surely, a case should come to an end, some time. Surely, Frank’s case ought to have eluded when the highest court on earth said the verdict must stand. Surely, his own lawyer, Governor John M. Slaton, had no legal right to annul the solemn adjudications of the supreme heads of our judicial system. Surely, the Law never meant that a defendant’s own attorney should become his jury, his trial judge, and his reviewing court.

When Slaton commuted the sentence of his client, his act was null and void. Time could not validate it.

Frank was legally under sentence of death when the Vigilance Committee took him out, and hanged him by the neck until he was dead.

All power is in the people. Courts, juries, sheriffs, governors draw their authority from this original source; when the constituted authorities are unable, or unwilling to protect life, liberty, and property, the People must assert their inherent right to do so.

Womanhood must not be left at the mercy of the libertine; the Rich must not trample upon the children of the Poor; the Jew must learn to distinguish between the Midianite and the American.

Prison Commissions and Governors must learn that it is dangerous to usurp power, and to undo the official work, done legally by the Judicial Department.

In Frank’s case, all legal tribunals were appealed to, by the best of lawyers; and every decision was against him. They had to be; there was no escape from it.

His own lawyer then commuted his sentence, and fled the State.

The Vigilance Committee took the condemned man out of the State Farm, carried him almost to the grave of his little victim, and hanged him, in accordance with the sentence which had three times been pronounced from the bench.

It was a long, hard fight, and the Law won, over Big Money.

There are some legal trials that are more than mere law cases.

There are some that involve a dynasty, test a system, and throw light upon national conditions.

There are some that change the course of events, and leave their effect, for weal or woe, upon the era in which they are tried.

A court-house case, in France, dragging into it a king’s wife, a pope’s cardinal, and a corrupt judicial system, led the way to the overthrow of an ancient monarchy.

A court-house case, in Virginia, followed by another, in Massachusetts, set in motion the ball which never ceased to roll until Thirteen Colonies had become Thirteen Independent States—the eloquence of Patrick Henry, and of James Otis, rather than the musket in the Ohio wilderness, being the shot that was heard around the world.

A law-case in England, rocked the throne, and tested, with a supreme severity, the strength of England’s judicial fabric.

The fabric stood the test; and the vindicated system, which would not bend, even though the king sought to bend it, filled Englishmen with honest pride.

It was the great case where George IV brought to bear all the powers of a monarch and a bad man, to crush one friendless woman—AND FAILED!

Not all the patronage of the crown, not all the money of the Secret Service, not all the clamor of placeholders, place-seekers, time-servers, court sycophants, and unscrupulous politicians, could bend the Law of Great Britain.

Personally weak and without friends, the foreign princess who had married the king, saw a host of determined supporters come to her relief, when English ministers sought to use the Law, as the instrument of a bad man.

When the long legal combat drew toward its close, and Lord Brougham had brought to shame and defeat the crowned libertine, we are told that a scene of indescribable excitement took place in the House of Lords—the high court which had tried the case.

The Prime Minister rose to “withdraw the bill,” equivalent to quashing the indictment against the persecuted woman.

“Cheers loud and long rose from the opposition benches”—where sat the champions of the Law.

“But the House hushed to silence, when the venerable Erskine arose, with eyes aflame”—Erskine, the indomitable lawyer who had fought so hard, so long, and so triumphantly, to vindicate the jury system.

“My lords,” he said, and his voice rang out with the clear tone that had entranced the tribunals of thirty years before—

“My lords, I am an old man, and my life, for good or evil, has been passed under the sacred rule of the law.

“In this moment, I feel my strength renovated and repaired by that rule being restored—the accursed change wherewithal we have been menaced, has passed over our heads—there is an end of that horrid and portentous excrescence of a new law, retrospective, and iniquitous—and the constitution and scheme of our policy is once more safe.

“My heart is too full of the escape we have just had, to let me do more than praise the blessings of the system we have regained,” a system of which Hooker, in his great work on Ecclesiastical Polity, said—

“Of Law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God; her voice is the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and on earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power.

“Both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever…admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.”

“There was silence as the silvery voice ceased. It was as if men wished to hear the last echo of those wondrous accents. Then broke out a cheer, such as was never before heard in that august assembly.”

The Law had won! against the licentious king; against the truckling minsters; against the servile aristocrats; against the detectives of the secret service, and the hirelings of the reptile press:

Yea, by the living God! the Law had won! and all men in England, all women in England, all children in England, WERE SAFER FROM THAT HOUR, when the grand old lawyer rose, with full heart and flashing eyes, to quote the words of the grand old preacher, whose tribute to Law, is a tribute to the God that inspired the Law.

Have the children of Moses the right to break the Sinai tables?

Do they deserve death when they slay Hebrews, only?

Is there some unwritten law, which absolves them, when their victim is a Gentile?

They are taught in their Talmud that, “As man is superior to other animals, so are the Jews superior to all other men.”

Do the Hebrews of today hold to that, in their heart of hearts?

They are taught by their great teacher, Rabbana Ashi, that “Those who are not Jews, are dogs and asses.”

Are the Hebrews true to Talmud, and to their learned Rabbana?

Was Mary Phagan—the Irish girl—legitimate spoil for the descendant of those who divided among themselves the daughters of the Midianite?

Is there a secret tenet of their religion, which compels the entire race to combine to save the neck of such a loathsome degenerate as Leo Frank?

They did not waste a dollar, nor a day, on the Jews who were electrocuted for shooting Rosenthal; was it because Rosenthal was a Jew?

If the victim in that case had been an Irishman, would there have been a Haas Finance Committee? a nation-wide distribution of lying circulars? a flying column of mendacious detectives? a constantly increasing supply of political lawyers? the muzzling of daily papers? an attempt to enlist the Northern school-children, Peace Societies, and Anti-Capital-Punishment leagues?

Money talks; and in this Frank case, money talked as loudly, and as resourcefully, as though Baron Hirsch’s $45,000,000 Hebrew Fund had been copiously poured into the campaign.

Like Thomas Erskine, I am nothing but an old lawyer, no longer inclined to the hot combat of the arena where I once loved to fight; but I’m not too old to make a stand for the Law; for the integrity of the system which our fathers handed down to us; and for the inflexible Justice, in whose scales the murder of one little factory girl weighs as heavily, as though she had been the daughter of Rothschild.

Let the Jews of Georgia, and elsewhere, look to it.

They are putting themselves on trial; and, if they continue the malignant crusade which they have been waging, by libels and cartoons, against a State which has never done injustice to a single Jew, they will reap the whirlwind.

If Mary Phagan had been a rich man’s daughter, and Frank, a poor man’s son, his neck would have been cracked, a year ago!

This case is more than a law case. This case involves the honor of a State! This case drags the judicial ermine into the ditch. This case is in indictment against jury trial. This case is an attack upon the fortress of the Law. This case pollutes the holy temple of Justice.

There never were such foul methods used to besmirch honest men, mock the truthful evidence, gull a generous public, and defeat the very purposes of the criminal code.

There never were such prodigious energies put forth to conceal the Truth, and to put Falsehood in its place.

In the whole scope of American history, no such campaign of abuse, of misrepresentation, of deliberate fabrications, and systematic efforts to humbug outsiders, to close the mouths of editors, to corrupt or intimidate officials; and to “get away with it,” in defiance of the record, the verdict, and the decisions of the courts.

They have never dared TO PUBLISH THE EVIDENCE!

It is a peculiar and portentous thing, that one race of men—and one, only—should be able to convulse the world, by a system of newspaper agitation and suppression, when a member of that race is convicted of a capital crime against another race.

Does anybody in this country know what was the truth about Dreyfus, the French officer who was convicted of treason, and, at first, sentenced to death?

Nobody does. All we know is, what the newspapers told us; and it leaked out afterwards, that the wife of Dreyfus abandoned him, as soon as he was turned loose.

Presumably, she was a Jewess; but, like the other Hebrew champions of Dreyfus, she dropped him, as soon as she had accomplished her purpose.

One of the Rothschild banking houses exerts a powerful influence over French finances; another in Frankfort, another in Vienna, and another in London, have often stood together to control the policies of European governments; if they insisted upon the liberation of Dreyfus, the French Republic—beset by royalists, socialists, and clericals—was in no condition to resist the demand.

The peculiar thing, and the sinister thing, is, that some secret organization existed which could permeate the whole European world, and the United States, also, with the literature which clamored for Dreyfus.

The father of Dreyfus was an Alsatian banker—a Jew, of course—and a subject of the Kaiser. He was a cog in the wheel of the German spy-system; and he used his son, the French officer, to secure for the Berlin Government, the military secrets of the French War Office.

France had not then formed her defensive alliance with Great Britain, and was not strong enough to fully expose Dreyfus, and the Kaiser—thus precipitating a war. The French officer, Ricard, who was the stanch champion of Dreyfus in every one of the investigations, turned against the Jew, after he himself was given a position in the War Office and learned the truth, from indubitable documentary evidence.

The Beiliss case, in Russia, was equally remarkable, in its progress and its end.

A Gentile boy was found dead, with more than forty small incisions in his veins and arteries, from which practically every drop of his blood had been drawn—and the blood had left no marks, anywhere.

That much trickled through the newspapers to the American people, and they realized, of course, that here was a novelty in deliberate and atrocious crime.

Beiliss, a Russian Jew, was accused of kidnapping the little boy, and emptying his blood-vessels of their contents, in order that it might be used in “a religious sacrifice.”

The Russian court found Beiliss guilty; but, apparently, the same mighty engine of agitation, and suppression, that had worked for Dreyfus, was put in motion for Beiliss.

Mankind was told, that there was no such thing as “blood sacrifice” among Russian Jews; and that Beiliss was the victim of jungle fury, race hatred, lynch law, &c., &c.

In the meanwhile, the hysterical public lost sight of the pallid corpse of the Gentile boy, whose veins presented the pale lips of forty-five cuts, made by a sharp instrument.

Somebody had killed the lad—most deliberately, most cruelly—and the Russian courts, in full possession of the facts, declared that Beiliss had done it.

But the American people—not knowing the facts, and totally in the dark as to who did get the blood out of the boy’s veins—were excitedly certain that Beiliss didn’t.

Consequently, a pressure of the same peculiar and irresistible sort that had saved Dreyfus, caused Russia to stay her uplifted hand, and spare Beiliss.

To this day, the Americans who blindly, hysterically helped to put the pressure on the Czar’s Government, have no idea who made the forty-five slits in the blood-vessesl of the little boy; and, what’s more, they don’t care.

They accomplished their emotional purpose, blew off their psychological steam, and then forgot all about Beiliss, and the boy.

Is there such a thing as “blood sacrifice” in Russia? We don’t know. Nobody can dogmatize on such a subject.

Even in our own country, there is a blood sacrifice, practiced in the remoter wilds of Arizona. The Indians who practiced it, welded Christianity to some ancient tribal rite, and adopted the custom of crucifying an Indian, as Christ was crucified.

When I see Abraham with his knife uplifted over the breast of his boy; and when I see Agamemnon covering his face to shut out the sight of the priest and his knife—about to slay the Greek king’s daughter; and when I see the sacrifice of the idolized girl who ran out, radiant with joy, to greet Jeptha on his return from battle—I feel myself lost in doubt as to what a Russian fanatic might do.

Let all this be as it may, the other races of men must “sit up and take notice,” if the repeated campaigns of this Invisible Power seem to mean, that Jews are to be exempt from punishment for capital crimes, when the victim is a Gentile.

If the work of this Invisible Power has been substantially the same in a third case, as in the other two; and this third case is that of Leo Frank, then the Frank case assumes a new aspect, of new importance, and of formidable portent.

America is big enough to be “the melting pot” of the Old World, provided the metals melt—otherwise, it isn’t.

If the Jew is not to amalgamate and be assimilated; if all the very numerous foreign nationalities that are being moved over into this country are to retain their several languages, customs, flags, holidays, ideas of law, education, government, etc., then the melting pot will fail to fuse into one another, these conflicting elements.

In such a case, the melting pot becomes a huge bomb, loaded with deadly explosives.

Has the menace of secret organization, of an Invisible Power, and of cynical defiance of law, revealed itself, in the Frank case?

Reflect upon it!

Reflect upon it, with especial reference to recent announcements, in metropolitan dailies, that the Jews mean to use the Baron Hirsch Fund of $45,000,000 to carve out a new Zion in this country. From all over the world, the Children of Israel are flocking to this country, and plans are on foot to move them from Europe en masse. Poland, Hungary, Russia, and Germany are to empty upon our shores the very scum and dregs of the Parasite Race.

The papers state that the heads of the vast Hebrew societies of this Union will soon “submit a proposition to the United States Government.”

What? The subject treat with the Sovereign?

This is what comes of unrestricted Immigration, just as 90 per cent of our crimes come from it.

What a fine illustration of Jewish arrogance it will be, if such American citizens as Rabbi Wise, Nathan Straus, Adolph Ochs, Joseph Pulitzer, et al., make a proposition to our Government, for an American Zion, the Jew millionaires negotiating with the Government as its equals!

In 1913, the rich Jews compelled Congress to abrogate the Russian treaty, as a rebuke to Russia, for her treatment of her own subjects.

They naturalized a German Jew, Paul Warburg, and placed him at the head of our new Jew-made financial system.

Meditate upon these points:

(1.) Never before was a Jewish or Gentile Finance Committee organized, and funds raised, to fight a case which had already been thrice adjudged by a State Supreme Court;

(2.) Never before, was unlimited money spent in publishing lies about an official record which was accessible to everybody, and which itself could have been laid before the public for less money than the lies cost;

(3.) Never before, did a murder case, tried in Georgia, secure an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States;

(4.) Never before, did any defendant employ so many lawyers, in so many different cities, as were employed for this degenerate Jew;

(5.) Never before, were the Atlanta papers, the Hearst papers, and the Jew papers so doggedly determined that the public should not have a chance to learn what was the evidence, upon which the Jew had been legally convicted.

(6.) Never before did a criminal’s own lawyer, holding the office of Governor, defy and reverse all the courts, and virtually pardon his own client.

(7.) Never before did the Jew papers, and the Hearst papers, so provoke a State, as to insolently demand, from day to day, that the legal sentence on Frank be annulled, and that he be set at liberty;

(8.) Never before did a Vigilance Committee execute a criminal whom a jury had convicted, whom the Supreme Court of Georgia had declared was properly found guilty, whom the Supreme Court of the Union said must die, and whom the Superior Court judges had, three times, sentenced to be hanged.

When the Jews, and Hearst papers, are especially and peculiarly wrought up over this kind of a “lynching,” you may feel quite sure that their unwritten law exempts a Jew, when his victim is a Gentile.

THE END.

Transcribed by Penelope Lee. Originally published by the American Mercury.

Introduction

Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case

Tom Watson: A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case

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

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

Tom Watson: The Rich Jews Indict a State!

See our photos taken at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, NYC on August 17, 2015 at the Jewish ADL’s Centennial commemoration of Leo Frank’s lynching: http://postimg.org/gallery/360yqen38/. The event was given official gravitas by involving the city council (see: event advertisement, programme and proclamation photos).

On our fifth anniversary (2010-2015), we ask each and every one of our dear readers this salient question:

Is the official Leo Frank trial testimony, evidence, and exhibits “murky” as some “Frankites” like Steve Oney and Bill Kinney have been suggesting through various media outreach efforts during August of 2015?  Before you answer this question, please read our analysis of something Leo Frank had said to his trial jury, while he was seated on the witness stand, delivering his four-hour statement during open court on Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913. 

What does Frank’s statement suggest given its context?

Now, gentlemen, to the best of my recollection from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock until after a quarter to one when I went up stairs and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of my office; but it is possible that in order to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and can not tell how many times nor when he does it…

Did Leo Frank confess?
http://www.leofrank.org/solution/confession/

Our Five-Year Celebration

The domain name www.LeoFrank.org was purchased for $9 in January 2010 and remained dormant for six months. Half a decade ago — as of this writing — in June of 2010, the Leo Frank Case and Trial Research Library had begun its nascent evolution in the form of a newly installed WordPress script called “Thesis.” After two months of feverishly slapping together some rough draft introductory articles and putting together a basic image gallery, we decided to go public. Our official launch date was August 18, 2010. We considered this grand opening date significant because it was the same day Leo Frank gave orally his hand written trial statement to the jury almost one hundred years prior (97 years to be exact).

At the time of our early beginnings, we never foresaw that our future affiliated website and article network would eventually receive hundreds of thousands of unique visitors, but five years later, we achieved one of many progressive traffic milestones, finally breaking seven figures, or to be more precise: 1,053,547 page views. Astounding!

Our efforts ironically succeeded thanks in part to Jewish censorship efforts against our website, which forced us to rapidly adapt by thinking in new ways we never would have considered otherwise (Neo-Nazis Use Leo Frank Case for Anti-Semitic Propaganda Push by Paul Berger, August 20, 2013, Jewish Daily Forward; 100 Years Later, Anti-Semitism Around Leo Frank Case Abounds by ADL leader Abraham Foxman, August 23, 2013, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith; and NEO-NAZIS BEHIND LEO FRANK PROPAGANDA SITES by Mark Potok and heidi beirich, November 20, 2013, Southern Poverty Law Center).

Articles attempting to conflate opposing conclusions from the central Judeo-revisionist narrative with neo-nazism and anti-Semitism by hyperethnocentric Antigentile Jewish activist organizations is generally perceived by the intelligent part of the public as desperately absurd. In an attempt to stifle freedom of speech, academic debate and unbiased inquiry into the Leo Frank case, Jewish supremacist groups like the ADL, SPLC and Jewish Daily Forward have been at the forefront of asserting disingenuous and contradictory statements about the evolutionary development of Leo Frank case historical research aggregates that have arisen on the Internet post 2010.

The Jews are beginning to lose domination over the narrative of the Leo Frank case, because their Antigentile canards, racial epithets, agitprop bias and tropes are beginning to have an opposite effect than their intended usage and purpose.

Jewish Censorship Efforts Resulted in the Proliferation of Formerly Suppressed Evidence

We owe our greatest gratitude largely to dozens of scholars who wrote articles about the Frank-Phagan affair based on the primary sources we uncovered and published online. The citing of our website (back-links) within their numerous articles and bibliographies boosted our search engine rank in Google, Yahoo, and Bing to the first page results for many relevant keywords associated with the case. Once our website began hovering on the first and second page of Google for keyword variations of “Leo Frank,” we started receiving hundreds of unique visitors a day on average. On major dates like the anniversaries and especially the pivotal centennials we received thousands of unique visitors per day. Our affiliated websites have received hundreds of thousands of page views on the Frank case articles they produced and published.

Now that Jewish censorship efforts have taught us many Internet marketing secrets, we must ask ourselves: Do we coast on our success or climb to ever higher Gideon plateaus?

Anti-Gentilism and Jewish Censorship: How It Unfolded

After anti-Gentile Jewish activists tried and failed to pressure our domain registration company and ISP to shut us down, we realized we had no choice but to diverge in our media reach and publish our research on high-traffic websites from 2012 to 2015. Had the ADL and SPLC not tried to get our domain registration company and ISP to close down our website, it would have never occurred to us that we should recruit dozens of people to completely rewrite our research analysis by polishing the treatments for distribution on a broad range of high traffic websites. The irony of treacherous Jewish efforts to suppress and censor ‘The Leo Frank Research Library’ is that our response of republishing our scholarly analysis on half a dozen other sites, resulted in those articles having received more than 100,000 views and the negative comments on them were clearly from irritated and frustrated Zionists who were upset that a full century of Jewish lies were slowing falling apart like a teetering house of cards. Nothing seems to cause Jewish people more exasperation and begrudging self-deception than facing the reality that their entire self-written history is built on pathological lies.

Special Thanks to Abe Foxman, Mark Potok, Heidi Bierich and Morris Dees for their censorship efforts to suppress research that fact checks the false narrative of organized Jewry

Thank you ADL, SPLC, and other racist Jewish supremacist activists for your un-American and anti-Gentile machinations inadvertently causing us to discover the best marketing secret in the universe: professionally rewrite content and publish it on some of the highest traffic Internet websites for maximum reach! We never would have known this if it weren’t for both your overt mendacious behavior, and underhanded scheming.

We are grateful to your Antigentile Jewish organizations for teaching us that when we upload politically incorrect videos to YouTube, followed by Jewish activist individuals and groups responding by successfully pressuring Google to have the items deleted, that we should upload those same censored videos to the top one hundred video-sharing websites. You see before, it was on one video-sharing website (YouTube), and Zionists then had it deleted through pressure, and from there thinking they (Jews) had won the day. Then, out of the blue (surprise!), the censored videos blossomed on one hundred more sites. The result? The video received more traffic than it ever could have hoped for on YouTube alone. From here on out we will use web sites like www.clipconverter.com to download videos and share them as a bulwark against the Jewish war against the U.S. constitution and first amendment.

Thank you Jewish supremacists for teaching us the greatest secrets of guerilla marketing. You’d better hope that other politically incorrect fellow travelers who have experienced this kind of Jewish pressure don’t figure out the amazing solutions described above.

The Next Five Years

If we are going to continue this momentum, then we must proactively recruit more writers and editorial teams who can produce high-quality treatments of every type (books, booklets, audiobooks, radio programs, magazines, journals, periodicals, pamphlets, business cards and newspaper articles) and then make these new, developing, and professional works available on the top one hundred most visited self-publishing media, blog, vlog and article sharing websites.

More than ten thousand articles have been written in the past century about the Leo Frank case propounding the Frankite partisans’ fraud based positions of grotesquely exaggerated Jewish persecution allegations, anti-Gentilism, lying by omission, anti-Gentile blood-libels, misrepresentation, and fabrication. We seek to provide a counterbalance to this anti-Gentile Jewish supremacist culture war by acquainting people of all races, religions, and creeds with the uncensored truth of this amazing and tragic story.

Narrative Warfare

If we are going to change the artificially manufactured historical consensus based upon Jewish pathological lies that have been forced relentlessly into academia and popular culture for many generations, we must recruit no less than one hundred professors, scholars, authors, journalists, film producers, and concerned citizens to push back hard by producing new professionally written articles, books, audio programs, and videos for the mainstream popular culture consumption and academic peer-reviewed journals. These works should both debunk the enduring falsifications and propound all the facts in their context that have been suppressed for more than a century.

We Need Your Help!

We ask you, dear reader, to assist our efforts. Purchase each and every book about the murder of little Mary Phagan and the Leo Frank case to fact-check the narratives contained within them: from each sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter all the way to the bibliography. Gather all of the sources, citations, references, and so forth mentioned in these works, and study those items to see if they can be fully verified for reliability– we intend to publish the results and hope a great body of research will survive for future generations to continue this struggle to take back our history with truth from the Jewish Supremacists.

We implore you to help us conduct a 100+ year deep audit and analysis of everything ever written about this affair since 1913. We request that you take the time to explore our website thoroughly and acquire the extant books we discuss from eBay.com or amazon.com for these long-term research endeavors. All the verifiable errors must be meticulously uncovered in these books and released for public awareness, and as already stated, new materials must be written, providing all the formerly censored facts and evidence in a cogent manner. We must take back the narrative. Please help us to create study lessons to help people discover and uncover the false hoods in the Frankite version of the case.

International Reach

In the next five years, we would like our materials to be downloaded, translated, and published everywhere in non-English speaking countries to inform millions of people around the world using rich media in the form of discussion threads, scholarly articles, college level books, e-radio programs, and interactive videos about this famous case that is in fact relatively unknown outside of the United States of America, except in Israel. The Leo Frank musical parade has been featured all over the world, so more people than ever before are more aware of this case and if curious will likely do research on the Internet about it. We must provide them with educational resources in their respective languages.

Impermanence

And no matter what ultimately befalls this library — because nothing lasts forever — we aspire to at least create an impact that will send enduring ripples across the oceans of time and space for future generations. We have no misconceptions that our library will survive forever given the relentless attacks by anti-Gentile Jews and the climate of anti-Gentilism they have created against alternative viewpoints, politically incorrect worldviews, jewish wise opinions and awakened paradigms, but we can, in our limited lifetime, be the foundation for others to produce annotated books that will survive the test of time. We hope that the definitive book on the Leo Frank case will arise from this website before it is gone forever in the years to come. We hope that someday on Amazon and Ebay, there will be books and magazines with alternative viewpoints than the anti-Gentile monolithic Jewish narrative.

Rich Media Presentations

If we are going to achieve the power to reach the minds of generations to come, then professional audio-visual productions should be published in the mainstream media. Only then can we expose the echoing pathological lies of the affair and the Jews’ use of this fictionalization to create consensus in the war for narrative dominance by quoting and citing each other’s academic dishonesty. So think of this website as a means for planting seeds of truth across the Earth. Let this website destroy itself in the same way an acorn annihilates itself to become a mighty oak. Let that mature tree produce 10,000 seeds. We plan to incubate those acorns of truth in every city, state, province, and nation in the world. Please help in our efforts and also promote us on social media.

Social Media and World Languages

We are battling the overwhelming Jewish narrative warfare on a shoestring budget, and this is but one line of defense against their offensive onslaught, which is multifront. You can aid us by educating people regarding the facts that have been suppressed, fabricated, or manipulated by Leo Frank’s defenders since 1913 through social media, especially: Facebook and Twitter (look for other popular social media as well). We intend to encourage people to write articles about this case in other languages and translate existing ones from English to all the languages spoken around the globe, so other peoples from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds can learn about the ethnocentric Jewish occupation of Gentile history in Western Civilization. This will also give people the opportunity to learn how the Jewish strategy works of getting paradigms into the mainstream as social-political orthodoxy.

Text Search Engine Dominance

If you searched on the Internet five years ago (2010) or prior for information about Mary Phagan and Leo Frank, 99% of the results, no matter how many pages deep you perused, would be sympathetic Jewish sources presenting the case with exaggerated claims about the unfairness of Frank’s trial, his supposed wrongful conviction and his “innocence”. Times have changed, beginning in 2013 and especially now in 2015, we are increasingly seeing competing ideas. For relevant keywords about the case (“leo frank,” “mary phagan,” and other variants about principals of the case), our website and others born from our research, regularly hover on the first or second page of search engine results pages (SERPS) on the three dominant search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which together as an oligopoly or cartel, account for 99% of market share for all text-based searches in the Western world. Ordinary people are coming to their own definite conclusions about Leo Frank’s guilt or innocence after reading the Jewish approach of obfuscation and creating doubt which is based on Antigentilism verses the Gentile position which is based on reasoned analysis of the facts, evidence and testimony.

Image Search Engine Dominance

If you enter any high-relevance keywords about Mary Phagan or Leo Frank in these search engines and click on the images tab, a large percentage of the results link back to our library or affiliated sites. Many of the dozens of new articles written about the Leo Frank case are exposing anti-Gentile frauds by anonymous academics and journalists who have been emboldened to debunk the century of Jewish lies, by utilizing the vast research of this website. We may have only scratched the surface of awakening the masses at least from the perspective of our hereditary enemies, but we are still turning the tide.

The Future of the Internet is Video

We must dominate the video sphere if we want to win the narrative war and take back our history. That will take a Herculean effort. Transforming this great body of knowledge into a video series will take a lot of hard work and time to get it done right. It will take many years and thousands of man hours, but we must do it as more people turn to audiobooks and video for their education. Many people have less patience for reading than in generations past, so we must harness new forms of rich media.

Library Growth

A very special thank you to everyone who promoted this website on social media and to the curious students of history and law who took the time to learn about this fascinating true-crime murder case. On our fifth anniversary (August 18, 2015), we are proud to announce that we have made more than 10,000 pages available of primary source materials about the case from the two year period between 1913 and 1915, including recently discovered documents, photos, facts, evidence, exhibits, affidavits, and testimony never before uncovered by scholars and journalists.

The 1,800-page Leo Frank Georgia Supreme court records we released on the Internet are uncharted territory for students of the Mary Phagan murder mystery, and we are pleased to be the first to bring these elusive documents to the Interweb for your research efforts. We are looking forward to transforming it from high resolution photos into text and then audiobook format in the next five years.

Mary Phagan Scholarship Funds

Our mission has always been to build the world’s foremost educational library about this famous criminal case for students of history and law, this has been successfully achieved during the double centennials of Mary Phagan’s murder and Leo Frank’s hanging (2013 and 2015, respectively), but our work is still far from complete. We intend to continue our development of this superb place of higher learning and establish scholarship funds for college students, university professors, historians, journalists, and educators to conduct research, write scholarly papers, and publish them in academic peer-reviewed journals. These scholarship funds will be focused for research and publication exposing all the exaggerations, falsehoods, plagiarism, and academic misconduct perpetuated for more than one hundred years about this case by Frank’s defenders.

Anti-Gentile and Anti-Gentilism Established by Repetition: 

We are up for the task: It might take one hundred years and thousands of researchers to fact-check everything that has ever been produced about the case by Jews and their sychophantic Gentile allies. We believe that if these findings are publicized, exposing pseudo-scholars who actively fabricate history and plagiarize each other’s *perjurous* retelling of legal history, it will provide a great service to humanity.

How Jews Control History

The Jewish theme of creating census is now more obvious than ever in the 21st century thanks to OCR scanning and computer analysis. Jews cite each other in favor of exalting Jews as noble persecuted victims and defame Gentiles as part of vast anti-Semitic conspiracy. This history of anti-Gentilism is going to be fought against ferociously by new coalitions of awakened Gentiles.

Help us to bring the words Antigentile and Antigentilism into the mainstream, use them whenever they accurately apply to Jewish individual or group machinations that are deleterious to Western Civilization.

Kevin MacDonald was Right

For one hundred years, the strategy of the Jewish community has been to utilize all manner of fallacious manipulation, no matter how obviously unfounded, in their efforts to perpetuate the myth that Leo Frank was “Falsely Accused, Wrongfully Convicted and Wantonly Murdered” (according to Rabbi Steven Lebow of Marietta, Ga). Jewish activists over the decades continue to use the web-of-lies strategy by quoting, citing, and then regurgitating each other’s academic dishonesty to create historical consensus within academia, popular culture and for mainstream media consumption. We are seeking students of the Leo Frank case to uncover this entire web of lies from 1913 to 2015 and begin publishing the detailed analysis of this Jewish criminal conspiracy everywhere on the Internet and for new generations to continue to do so for the centuries to come. We want to give people the tools to uncover this kind of behavior.

He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past. He Who Controls the Past Controls the Future.

We must take back our Gentile history, so we are calling for a one-hundred-year audit of everything released about this famous murder affair, and in a wider sense, everything written by Jews in the 20th century about anti-Semitism. It must be meticulously fact-checked to ascertain and discredit all the embellishments, biases, slanting, misrepresentations, fabrications, lying by omission, academic dishonesty, falsifications, plagiarism, rumor creating, defamation, slander, bigotry, prejudice, and academic misconduct. We will chart a new course in history by debunking all their collective pseudo-scholarship about Jewish-Gentile history.

Brainstorming for the Next Five Years

1. Release more of the legal records of the case and transcribe them so they can be easily searched with text based engine software, including the 1,800-page Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court legal records, which are currently only available as high resolution image slides as of 2015. We also plan make these once elusive documents into an audiobook. This will take enormous efforts to achieve.

2. Publish more primary sources of the case from the years 1913 to 1915, including national newspapers, journals, magazines, and periodicals that are no longer in copyright, as the years go onward. We would like to acquire more of the original primary sources from libraries around the country. So far, we have acquired a museum-quality collection of original newspapers, magazines, and books. We will make this collection available at some point in the future to anyone who wishes to do a traveling exhibit about the case.

3. Create scholarship funds for students and professors to fact-check every book and article about the Leo Frank case ever produced from 1913 to 2015 and then publish the results widely of the fraudulent claims they discover. We are looking to recruit one hundred researchers for this fact-checking effort.

4. Transcribe the Georgia newspaper articles from April to August of 1913 published about the case contained in the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Georgian, so they can be easily keyword searched. After transcribing these Atlanta newspaper articles from the spring and summer of 1913, they will be turned into an audiobook.

5. Transcribe the Leo Frank trial brief of evidence so it can be easily keyword searched and transform it into an audiobook.

6. Convert the Case of Pinkerton Detective Agency versus National Pencil Company brief of evidence (1916) into text and an audiobook, currently we only have photographs of the pages and rough OCR scanned text that needs editing.

7. Produce professional high production value documentaries, films, and videos about the Leo Frank case, unmasking the one hundred years of Jewish lies and all the facts of the case they suppressed. For every professional video, film, documentary, miniseries, and Broadway musical, we need to produce at least one of these same items to uncover and expose Frankite lies. We want to create a South Park parody of the case and a Monty Python-style comedy, complete with British actors with varying regional English accents to poke fun at the Jews.

8. Start a national campaign to contact all the African-American professors in the United States and recruit them to research, write, and publish articles about the case, especially on the optics of Jewish racism, bigotry, and prejudice that is rarely acknowledged by them. For instance, a great deal of proof is available regarding the fact that Jews falsely accuse James “Jim” Conley of the crime with fallacious evidence, and the rarely discussed subject that Leo Frank tried to frame two of his black employees for the murder he was convicted of (one of them being the African-American Newt Lee). There is a lot of Jewish racism to be found in the Leo Frank case, and we would like to see hundreds of articles written about the anti-Gentilism of this affair by Black scholars. We intend to take back control of our Gentile destiny from the Jewish occupiers and expose them as an inborn race of paranoiac egomaniac pathological liars.

9. Help to elect people to the Georgia Legislature who can make official statements overturning the illegal Leo Frank posthumous pardon and stop new efforts to exonerate him. The 1986 posthumous pardon of Leo Frank must be fully revoked, nullified, and permanently overturned. The Governor chooses the members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, we want members elected who will overturn Leo Frank pardon which is a travesty of injustice given that he was a convicted sex killer. And we want an official apology from leaders in the Jewish-American community for the century of racist lies being propounded by Jewish activist professors, academics, and journalists spreading their bigoted anti-Gentilism blood libel about the case.

10. Create a Mary Phagan park somewhere in the greater Metro Atlanta region, with a placard saying something along the lines of

“Mary Phagan (1899-1913) was a child laborer in Georgia, who was bludgeoned, raped, strangled, and mutilated by her sadistic killer the 1913 Atlanta B’nai B’rith president Leo Max Frank the Toilet Strangler, a Jewish serial rapist-pedophile who had sexually abused many of the pre-teen and teenage girls who worked for him at his industrial sweatshop. When Leo Frank was arrested, he attempted a racist anti-Black plot to frame his African-American employee, the nightwatchman Newt Lee, but when that failed, his attorneys turned on Frank’s accomplice-after-the-fact James “Jim” Conley who partially helped the police solve the murder. For more than one hundred years, racist activist Jews and their organizations have been perpetuating anti-Gentile pathological lies and promulgating anti-Gentilism as a smoke screen for the epidemic of pedophilia in the Jewish community and the occupation of our government, legal system, media and educational system by Jews.”

11. Find a legal way to repudiate the racist claims on the monument at the Mount Carmel Cemetery that the ADL put there that falsely accuses Gentiles of anti-Semitism. Each anti-Gentile sentence on that monument needs to be fully repudiated. Find a legal remedy to have the sign near Leo Frank’s lynching repudiated for its falsely accusing Leo Frank’s trial and hanging as being fueled by anti-Semitism. We want the historical monument at the grave of Mary Phagan to mention that Leo Frank was not officially absolved of the murder and mention the Jewish supremacists behind these efforts.

12. The historical markers for the principals of the Leo Frank case, located in Georgia, all revised that falsely accuse anti-Semitism as the reason for Frank’s conviction.

The Leo Frank Case in a Wider Context: Jewish Evolutionary Strategy.

The Flower of Womanhood

In the years surrounding the turn of the 21st century, leading up to the double centennial of this sensational double murder (2013, 2015), an inflammatory rebirth of the Leo Frank case has inspired Jews to use it for dividing, guilting and shaming Gentiles even further over their past of seeking to protect the woman of their race and preserve the continued survival of their heritage, traditions, genealogy, and recessive gene pool. Jewish activists should be seen for what they are: JewisHIV+ Viral extremists who are waging a DNA war, on a genetic algorithm level, by attacking natural instincts of White and European-American solidarity as evil and irrational. For one hundred years Jews have been associating White ethnoconsciousness with the Frank case for their deracinating propaganda efforts to misrepresent the case’s legal records and distort history of the American past with new “social justice warrior” SJW paradigms. Jews must be seen as being genetically coded to behave like HIV the virus that destroys the immune system. Jews are using the Leo Frank case to destroy our White immune system so we can not fight back with an immunal response. We are doing just that with this website, fighting JewisHIV+.

1913: The Birth of the Jewish Culture War against European-Americans

The year 1913 marked the start of quiet, slow terminal decline for the United States of America, resulting from the birth of the Federal Reserve, Income Tax, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. In 2013, we have reached the point of no return, where we can do nothing to avert the death of the West. Unless of course we organize, fight back and take back control our history, government, media, education system and country from our parasitic occupiers.

Since 1913, Jewish lobbies and activist groups have steadily expanded in number and power. In 2013, the Federal Reserve quietly bankrupts the United States with fiat currency that lost 99% of its original value from one hundred years ago. The Jews have so much power in congress they can get enough U.S. Senators to block an audit of the Federal Reserve. With convoluted income tax laws having escalated to infinitely higher levels of complexity than they were one hundred years ago, and endless wars for Israel in the Middle East squandering the U.S. treasury, as well as American blood – we need a great awakening amongst the people. The power of Jewish lobbies has grown to transnational superpower proportions, enabling them to control U.S. Congress and manipulate both domestic and foreign policy, which means they ultimately influence at some significant level many if not all international politics in the United Nations.

Step Back in Time

Concerning 20th century U.S. legal history, the Leo Frank trial, beginning on July 28, 1913, is considered one of the essential criminal proceedings defining Southern history, it sparked a Jewish-Gentile social, political, and cultural hostility that evolved into something immeasurable a century after the execution of Leo Frank on August 17, 1915. August 17, 2015 the mainstream media has been deluged with articles perpetuating Antigentile narratives that go unchallenged, but that is all about to change. For every book written that is pro-Frank, we intend to counter it with a book exposing the Jewish lies and letting people know what really happened – the same applies for every video and newspaper article the Jewish supremacists create. We must ensure that all alternative media sources provide a counter balance of truth to Jewish perpetuated fallacies.

The Leo Frank case became an aggressive political and social front, allowing a dissenting minority of Jews to subvert the majority population of Gentiles. Their concerted and insidious virulent war of entropy against Western Civilization that saw a historical peak in 1913, has achieved its ultimate success in 2013: European-Americans are now at the point of no return, where they can no longer vote themselves out of a multicultural society that will reduce them to minority status in 25 years and genetically displace them in less than one hundred years. And because the U.S. government is too powerful and pervasive, with some of the most advanced military technology in the world, no armed conflict by revolutionary insurgents could ever hope to overthrow the U.S. Jewish occupied government known as ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government). That leaves only the political process left, and because only a tiny fraction of Whites feel a sense of tribal racial conscientiousness, organizing them is a promethean task. Building a broader coalition of Universal nationalism seems to be working, and therefore working with other peoples united against Jewish supremacy we can win the day.

In Mary Phagan’s Honor we Call for a White Baby Boom Every Generation

A White baby boom to reach 10 billion is going to take not less than 100 years and potentially up to 200 years. This option must be incorporated as a long term plan because is too slow in the short term, so the only option left is to awaken the whole world, to unite the whole world against the Jews and this option is viable because tribalism is hard wired in all people. Let White Nationalism Die the death that it needs, and for Universal Nationalism to be born, and lets create a world where Jewish Internationalism is impossible and is vanquished from the face of the Earth forever.

If Western Civilization is going to survive into the 22nd century, it must become genetically conscious and seize the reigns of its own evolutionary destiny, or a slow burning revolution culminating in World War III, the death of the West in its final conflict with multiculturalism, and a second Holocaust of Jews in the eight digits will arrive well before the 21st century ends. We have a duty to avert this disaster and taking back our history must become an imperative.

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References:

Photos at the Anti-Defamation League’s Leo Frank lynching centennial at Mount Carmel Cemetery on August 17, 2015: http://postimg.org/gallery/360yqen38/

Steve Oney, Holding an Atlanta Constitution Newspaper, August 18, 1915 Issue 

And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (742 pages) by Steve Oney, published in 2003, through Pantheon Books in New York. The book is available from ebay.com, and www.Amazon.com (including many other popular online stores).

Background Information on Steve Oney

Steve Oney is a journalist-author who was born in metro Atlanta, Georgia, in 1954, and currently resides in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, California. Oney was raised and educated in Georgia during his most formative years. He graduated from Peachtree High School (Varsity football, basketball, and baseball) in Dunwoody, GA (1972). According to Dr. Sherrie Whaley (2004), “Oney was educated at the University of Georgia, Grady College [and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, with a minor in English], 1979, and a Harvard Nieman Fellow, 1982. After brief tours as a reporter for The Greenville (S.C.) News and The Anderson (S.C.) Independent, he worked for many years as a staff writer for Atlanta Weekly, the Sunday magazine of The Atlanta Journal & Atlanta Constitution.” Not exclusive to the East Coast, his wide range of journalistic experience on the ground stretches to California where he moved in the 1980s, “Steve Oney was a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine (Forward, May Issue, 2009). Oney has contributed to “Playboy, GQ, Premiere, Esquire, New York Times” (Welcome Steve Oney, Journalism Department Professional in Residence, Nov. 1 through 5, October, 2004).

Steve Oney is happily married to a Jewish woman (Jewish Journal, February 5, 2004) named Madeline Stuart, an interior decorator and fashion designer. Together the creative couple raise their beloved dog named Beatrice, a professional Jack Russell terrier.

For the Masses of Readers Interested in the Leo Frank Case (1913 to 1986)

Steve Oney couldn’t have put it better when he described the Leo Frank case as one of the most incendiary and complex episodes of Georgia’s past (Georgia Magazine, Features, Vol. 83, No. 4, March 2004). Indeed, no one at the time had anticipated that after Leo Frank’s trial, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith would form on his behalf one month later or that his two years of appeals to State and Federal courts were destined to evolve into a national cause celebre that would enrage the people of Georgia and the South to lynch him.

When Leo Frank had exhausted all of his appeals in the State and Federal Court System during the affair, he was left with one last chance to prevent his scheduled execution on June 22, 1915. A gubernatorial commutation of his death sentence to life in prison was seen as his last hope to continue fighting for vindication. A stay of execution would have given Leo Frank the opportunity for renewed pursuit of exoneration and freedom. Leo Frank first petitioned the Prison Commission of Georgia for a recommendation of clemency as formality, because it was prerequisite to petitioning the governor for executive clemency. The Prison Commission denied the petition of Leo Frank by a vote of 2 to 1.

On June 21, 1915, one day before Leo Frank was scheduled to hang, the outgoing Governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, used his constitutional powers to reduce Leo Frank’s death sentence to life in prison.

The people of Georgia were enraged to a fever pitch because of what they perceived as a cowardly appeasement to powerful interests, grotesque betrayal to the oath of office, and conflict of interest.

Governor John Slaton was a part owner and senior partner in the law firm Rosser, Brandon, Slaton, and Phillips (the “Slaton” was Governor John M. Slaton) that had represented Leo Frank during his trial and appeals. The commutation paved the way to Leo Frank’s unusual demise two months later, but the Jewish community would claim the hanging of Frank was because of anti-Semitism.

The Leo Frank case has refused to gather dust over the last one hundred years and has reached a fever pitch in terms of public interest with the double murder centennials (2013 and 2015). One only needs to look at the number of new books or revised editions on the Frank case published in the 21st century for evidence of this trend. The movement to rehabilitate Leo Frank’s image and transform him into a martyr of anti-Semitic injustice is more prominent, widespread, and vocal in the 21st century media than at any other time since the epic saga began in 1913.

All the incidents and details behind the Leo Frank affair offer a glimpse of why it could easily be described as one of the most intriguing criminal cases in the annals of United States legal history.

Sift the Official Records

Most people are unacquainted with the official record of the Georgia Supreme Court files containing the Frank Trial Brief of Evidence (1913) and Leo’s State level appeals (1913, 1914); these documents fortunately survived into the 21st century and are now available online as of October 2010. Even if a great many people were to study these official records, most are not trained on how to properly sift these voluminous legal documents to arrive at the truth. This is why inquiring minds generally depend on dispassionate intellectuals with lucid penetrating eyes to study official legal records of the Leo Frank case, cross reference them, interpret the material facts, and distill them for public consumption.

The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

For the average person reading Steve Oney’s breezy and long-winded tome on the Frank case, it’s easy to get the false impression that, for the most part, he attempts to report the relevant and material facts, evidence, and testimony concerning the Leo Frank trial and appeals with a high degree of neutrality and accuracy. However, when one reads all of the published newspaper and magazine articles about or by Steve Oney concerning his position on the Frank case, an entirely different picture is painted about his impartiality. The question one should consider is whether or not Steve Oney’s weltanschauung on the conviction of Leo Frank has interfered with his presentation of the events. Before we can compare And the Dead Shall Rise against the official legal records to determine the reliability of Steve Oney, we should first consider his position on the innocence and guilt of Leo Frank and whether this position or the facts came first.

Steve Oney’s Position on the Leo Frank Case Is Self-Described as Pro Leo Frank (Partisan) and Revisionist

From Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered by Donald Eugene Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law:

Oney’s book (as literary critic Theodore Rosengarten reminds us) does not “come flat out and say who killed Mary [Phagan].” Although the book does assert that the weight of the evidence “strongly suggests Frank’s innocence,” it also claims that “the argument [over whether Frank or Conley is the guilty party]” will “never move beyond that of Conley’s word versus Frank’s.” On the other hand, in a recent press interview Oney stated that “I’m pretty certain that Frank was innocent,” and “I’m 95 percent certain Conley did it.” And in a short magazine article published in March 2004 Oney “declared [his] belief in Frank’s innocence.” (Flag Pole Magazine, Athens, GA, May 5, 2004).

Leo Frank Scholarship Analysis of Steve Oney

The quote above, rewritten half a dozen times, is virtually echoed in nearly every article about or by Steve Oney concerning his position on the Frank case, thus bringing us to a number of conclusions that Steve Oney believes Leo Frank was innocent and wrongfully convicted, framed by Jim Conley (“the real killer”), and unjustly hanged for the strangulation of Mary Phagan.

When one takes a much closer look at the “facts” in Oney’s book used to maintain the integrity of his pro-Frank positions on the case and juxtaposes them against his admitted partisan-revisionist position on the Leo Frank case, he contradicts the grain of official records and decisions rendered by every level of the United States System of Justice. But believing in Leo Frank’s innocence by itself is not what ultimately makes Steve Oney unreliable; its his pretentious act of pretending to be neutral in his book and then misrepresenting, fabricating, and omitting evidence incriminating to Leo Frank. However, the book isn’t completely hopeless. At least Oney was thoughtful enough to wrap his sloppy research in well-written colorful language.

The Unabridged Tabloid-Journalist Thesaurus

Oney’s Leo Frank partisan book is a conglomeration of intensely cherry picked details, which is at times a bit droll and unnecessarily excessive in the amount of immaterial picayune tangents, but on the flipside, he made a huge effort to use a plethora of rich and colorful language from the unabridged tabloid-journalist thesaurus to keep the attention of the reader creatively engaged for the most part.

You can tell Oney makes a real committed effort not to use the same words over and over again as best he could, giving the book an interesting flavor in these regards. In other words, imagine if Shakespeare were genetically hybridized with a seasoned writer from the National Inquirer, and this chimera wrote a long-winded book about a famous criminal case based on sloppy research, fabrications, omissions, and misrepresentations. It would still be interesting to read, even if it did not measure up to college-level academic research standards.

Although Steve Oney is no Shakespeare, he definitely lives up to what you would expect from a seasoned tabloid journalist-author with his well-developed kaleidoscopic lexicon. Despite the unfortunate reality that Oney uses his book as a trash compactor for every erroneous, misrepresented, and fabricated “fact” on behalf of fraudulently exonerating Leo Frank, there are some enjoyable parts throughout his book — an example, Oney’s gay and giggly description of Momma and em clogging in the aisles was vivid and picturesque.

Fact Checking

Carefully reviewing the bibliography, then obtaining and directly examining the sources and references of Steve Oney’s book, reveals that first comes his Leo Frank partisan revisionist conclusions, and then the “facts” are gently massaged, refolded, manipulated, and contoured to support it. The omissions of the most important facts in Leo Frank case from Oney’s book are incorrigible and unforgivable, especially when he spent seventeen years researching his book and had direct access to the 2,500+ pages of surviving and official trial and appeals documents.

Genuine Academic Scholarly Research

Genuine dispassionate researchers cannot stress this point more clearly. Correct scholarly research and historiography requires that first comes the facts and evidence, then the conclusions — not the other way around. Steve Oney’s book does not stand up to minimal scrutiny when examined by dispassionate researchers and will not stand the test of time once more rigorously researched books are eventually published. Ironically, the most accurate book (despite its errors) written on the Leo Frank case was published in 1989, by Mary Phagan Kean, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan.

Fabrication, Misrepresentations, Omissions, and Half-Truths

Despite the book being mostly well-written, Steve Oney is indisputably guilty of making misrepresentations, unsupported claims, and using fabricated evidence that does not stand up to even the most minimal scrutiny in regards to supporting his Leo Frank partisan revisionist position. Even more flabbergasting are the incomprehensible omissions within his book, he geekishly goes into painstaking nanoscopic details on some people, places, and things, but intentionally leaves out volumes of the most important evidence from the official trial and appeal legal records ineluctably damaging or incriminating of Leo Frank. Oney left out the majority of the evidence against Leo Frank that ensured every level of the United States Legal System sustained the verdict of guilt for Frank.

On the flip side, some Leo Frank partisan revisionists could easily argue Steve Oney irredeemably allows too much information into his book that seems to incriminate Leo Frank, but there’s a catch. Even if Steve Oney’s revisionist positions on the Leo Frank case are mostly couched with faux neutrality throughout most of his book, his real position becomes most evident toward the final half, rather than in the beginning of his work. In the last sections of his book, he goes to inordinate lengths to exonerate and thus rehabilitate the image of Leo Frank, even if it means doing so in a manner you would have never expected to be so deviously cunning from a journalist with a reasonably good reputation. Steve Oney’s claim of looking back on the early 20th century case with new eyes is myopic at best.

A Matter of Time

Thanks to the Internet age, no unsubstantiated, misrepresented, or fabricated facts in Oney’s book will be left unexamined, and in due time, every sentence, source, and reference in his book will be checked for its veracity and exposed to the world if erroneous or fraudulent. The final verdict on Steve Oney’s book and his reputation for intellectual honesty will eventually be rendered: no honor, no integrity, no honesty.

Under the Veneer, Steve Oney Is a Pseudo Historian Practicing Pseudo Scholarship

It can’t be stressed enough, this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing book is written in a style that gives it an air of balanced scholarly neutrality, but when one takes a much closer look at the statements and claims within it, and then compares them against the 2,500+ pages of surviving Leo M. Frank official court case legal documents, one discovers this book by Oney is nothing more than another Jewish con job, just like every other book written by Jews about the case.

The Collective Jewish Pathology of Self-Deception and Paranoid Neurosis Is a Genetic Disease

The Frank case is a high drama that became a permanent part of U.S. legal and social history, in part, because the case of Leo Frank had some of the spiciest ingredients of race conflict, class division, and religious friction all amplified and distorted by the myopic spectacles of Jewish tribal neurosis.

While the case was playing out in State and Federal court system, it transformed into an international Jewish cause celebre that reached as far away as Europe, when its fevered pitch in the U.S. national media spilled outside domestic borders. Even after the lynching of Leo Frank on August 17, 1915, the case never fully died, but slowly evolved into a Jewish mythology that Jews and many leftists believe to be true with religious fanaticism.

The Prosecution of Leo Frank Is the Persecution of Jews

What was nothing more than a heinous crime of passion committed by a frustrated twenty-nine-year-old serial pedophile, who happened to be a high-profile and rising star within Southern Jewish society, was transformed by collective Jewish tribal hysteria, overexaggerating the subtle political, regional, and social overlays, into another permanent schism between Jews and Gentiles.

Leo Frank the Poster Boy of Jewish Neurosis

The dramatized Leo Frank soap opera conjured in the paranoid schizophrenic collective mind of Jews seems to be one of the favorite choices embodying the need to nurture the neurotic and pathological longing to perpetuate Jewish status as noble victims. The victim-persecution pathology is a strong theme that runs high and deep through most of the books written on the Leo Frank case by Jews.

So many books on the Leo Frank case have been written by Jews neurotically obsessed with the case being an anti-Semitic UFO-like galactic conspiracy that, as a byproduct, most non-Jews studying the case think that because so many books take this persecution position, it must be true. However, ultimately, the Leo Frank case is not about a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy by Gentiles, but about a spurned and frustrated pedophile who pounded in the face of a little girl who rejected him. Then he lifted up her dress while she lay on the floor unconscious, ripped open her bloomers, and savagely raped her, and naturally because of the disastrous implications of what he had done, he had no choice but to permanently silence her.

Had Mary Phagan survived the ordeal and reported in explicit details what Leo Frank had done to her in the metal room, every prisoner in the State of Georgia would be fist fighting against each other to determine the pecking order of who got first dibs on eating him alive. Instead of telling the truth, a collective Jewish treasury finances a Leo Frank industry of mind-boggling proportions that has manufactured more than one hundred years of doubt about his guilt, but now with the Internet age and Pax Jewry reaching the end of its peak power, the truth about Leo Frank’s guilt will become inescapable.

Take the Leo Frank challenge, and read the entire 1,800-page official Georgia Supreme Court Case File on Leo Frank and decide for yourself if every level of the United States Appellate Court System was right or wrong in sustaining the Georgia Supreme Courts affirmation of Leo Frank’s guilt.

The Leo Frank Industry

The popularity of Leo Frank has seen a major revival in the years surrounding and after the turn of the 21st century, with new treatments in every kind of creative media format imaginable, including a musical, Parade (1998), with jinglesque catchy songs, a fictionalized docudrama, People vs. Leo Frank (2009), and a plethora of books, all taking “creative artistic license” to the extreme and pushing the envelope of absurdity for the Jewish partisan and revisionist position on the case. After studying all the official legal documents of the Georgia Supreme Court Case File on Leo Frank and then seeing how Jews twist and manipulate the case, you can’t help but understand that the “creative artistic license” taken by Jews on the Leo Frank case is nothing more than insolence to the extreme, blood libel against Gentiles, anti-white and anti-black racism, smears and defamation directed against non-Jews.

Leo Frank, More than a Man, Less than a God

Alas, these Jewish-friendly fictionalized interpretations of the Leo Frank case embody the subversive Jewish Hollywood mockery perpetually at war with Gentile Western civilization. Thus ensuring the mythology of Leo Frank continues his genetic mutation toward the Jewish Übermensch, as he ascends to saintly godhood with the centennial of his martyrdom. Moreover, as a result of the Jewish money-making media circus and blood-money industry surrounding the Jewish beautification of Saint Leo Frank and the defamation campaign against Gentile Western civilization, the Leo Frank case has become another ugly war front in the ongoing multifront Jewish-Gentile culture war, smoldering and raging at the surface for more than a century.

Dishonoring the Life of Mary Phagan

In the wake of the Leo Frank partisan revisionism movement growing since 1913 is a violently beaten, raped, and strangled little thirteen-year-old poverty-stricken white girl, six feet under, who had to drop out of school at the age of ten in 1910, laboring in filthy factories and mills to help her family make ends meet.

Jewish Inbreeding

The selective breeding program of Jewry that reaches back thousands of years made it possible for the Jewish IQ to rise seventeen points above the average. It is this concentration of primitive tribal genes in the Jewish genome that cursed so many Jews with the pathology of extreme racist myopia and self-deception to the degree they would transform a violent and murderous pedophile into a holy icon regarded as a stoic Jewish martyr-hero, who was swept into a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy by Gentiles.

Pretentious Book

A cursory look at the book reveals Steve Oney is no Bernard Lazare (Anti-Semitism: Its History and Causes), capable of emotionally removing himself from the Jewish tribal neurosis artificially created by such a complex and convoluted subject involving one of his racial kinsmen. Steve Oney makes a good effort here and there to present the case through an impartial lens, but ultimately, his crass, pompous, and pretentious ego oozes from too many sentences and chapters in his book, like the low-nutrient transfatty slime that drips down the outer wall from the exhaust fan at the back of urban burger joints.

Seventeen Years in the Making to Write a Book That Fails

Steve Oney claims he spent more than seventeen years dedicated to writing this “magnum opus” on the Leo Frank case. Many people have called his treatment of the most infamous, controversial, and contentious criminal case from the annals of early 20th century Southern legal history the definitive account of the Leo Frank saga. It’s easy to see how the masses of avid readers might assume that because someone wrote and published a long-winded, neural-feigning, and reasonably well-written book on the Leo Frank case, it must be the best source on the topic. For Leo Frank scholars and amateur students of the case, Oney at best gets a C- overall and fails with a solid F when it comes to maintaining fact-checking integrity concerning the evidence he uses to exonerate and rehabilitate Leo Frank.

For students of the Leo Frank case, who have studied more than 2,500+ pages of official Leo M. Frank State and Federal legal case files (1913 to 1915) — dry leaves that have luckily managed to survive beyond 2013 — the reality about Steve Oney’s book is it reads like nothing more than an “…elephantine magazine article…” written in “…slangy journalese…” as Charles Weinstein suggested. The name dropping, boring chapters, and Oney’s ego slime that oozes from the pores of the book probably means half the people who pick up this book will never finish it, and those who complete the book will never do any fact-checking to see if what Oney is saying to exonerate Leo Frank is true.

The Depth of Steve Oney in a Nutshell

The book also reveals that the depth of Steve Oney’s mental capacity for truly insightful analysis is slightly above average at best and partly constipated in the shallow realm of tabloid journalistic reportage. Many people familiar with the voluminous official legal documents of the case feel unsatisfied with the book. Everyone wants to know when the ultimate unpretentious and definitive book on the case will be written by a dispassionate researcher.

From the perspective of a Leo Frank scholar, at times, the two-dimensional analysis Steve Oney provides feels dumbed down and flabby, giving you the impression he lacks the fearless spirit to plumb the depths of the case and soar to greatest heights of a time-traveling eagle looking downward on the case like a dispassionate historian whose mind is free and clear of the shallow, subjective, and egotistical self-deceptions. Steve Oney’s book drives 742 miles with the emergency brake on and does not look at the case one hundred years later with new and lucid eyes, but instead with myopic rose-colored, hexagram-shaped glasses and that’s the bottom line.

The book ultimately provides little historical context of the bigger picture of time and space. As Charles Weinstein (2003) put it, “historian’s skills are needed to contextualize this century-old crime, explore its sectarian and sociological mysteries, and draw out its lasting implications. Unfortunately, author Steve Oney is merely a journalist: his talents begin and end with investigative research and reportage. He explains in exhaustive and often unnecessary detail exactly what happened; he fails to plumb the why.” (Amazon.com Review, November 7, 2003)

The Best Leo Frank Revisionist Book

It seems like the ultimate purpose of Oney’s book is to create the best toned-down rendition of the Jewish revisionist position to exonerate Leo Frank as an innocent scapegoat, framed in a crime committed by his semiliterate Negro pet, James Conley. Way to go, Steve, making lots of money off this dead little girl by feeding the insatiable pathologies endemic of the Jewish community.

Food for Rabid Dogs

At times, Oney’s book is frothing with contempt. One can’t help but envision the hate-filled Jewish community, rubbing its hands, vampire fangs bared and foaming at the mouth from a terminal-stage rabies infection over the book smearing glatt kosher shit everywhere, even on the deceased.

No matter how much time passes from the original event, the Leo Frank case never ceases to capture the imagination of the public, Jew and Gentile.

Time to Check the Facts

Let’s examine a number of unsubstantiated, erroneous, maliciously fabricated, weak, and questionable claims made in Steve Oney’s book, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.

Steve Oney Misquotes Official Legal Records and Documents Concerning Selig Cook, Minola McKnight

Steve Oney misquoted the Selig cook, Minola Mcknight, concerning her reporting Leo Frank came home for lunch on April 26, 1913, at 1:20 p.m. in her June 3, 1913, statement to police, but Minola actually said Leo Frank came home at 1:30 p.m. as documented by the stenographed deposition (BOE, State’s Exhibit J, June 3, 1913).

A simple misquote of ten minutes might seem like a trifling mistake, but throughout the entire month-long trial, differences in mere minutes in the murder timeline became the central focus of gladiatorial battles ferociously fought over between defense and prosecution lawyers. The “mistake” by Steve Oney is in Leo Frank’s favor (of course), shrinking the amount of available Mary Phagan disposal time by ten minutes, and thus making Jim Conley’s description of what happened that afternoon less plausible given the time constriction. In a murder trial where every second of time is precious and crucial to the timeline of the defense and prosecution theories, minutes become immeasurably valuable and can determine the outcome of a case. Every misquote of the official record by Steve Oney in his book is in Leo Frank’s favor, making it seem impossible that they were accidental.

Minola’s June 3, 1913, statement tended to assert Leo Frank left the National Pencil Company at about or just before 1:20 p.m., as it took usually around eight to ten minutes for Leo Frank to get home at 68 East Georgia Avenue, from the NPCo located on 37 to 41 S. Forsyth Street, Atlanta, Georgia. Minola said Leo Frank arrived at 1:30 p.m., ate no lunch, and left the Selig home five minutes later at 1:35 p.m. on April 26, 1913.

Minola’s affidavit raised suspicions about Leo Frank because it left most people wondering why he had no stomach for lunch, especially in light of the fact it also meant that he would have rejected the lunch Minola had specifically prepared for him. Leo Frank alleged he made a phone call to Minola prior to coming home that Saturday. Why would Frank request lunch and then not eat it when he arrived? That’s unusual behavior that raised red flags, then and now. What caused Leo Frank to completely lose his appetite between the time he called Minola to the time he arrived at home?

Pregnancy Hoax: Lucille Selig Frank Pregnant with Leo Max Frank II

Steve Oney quotes a woman who suggested Lucille Selig Frank was pregnant and miscarried in 1913, but none of the voluminous surviving letters written between Lucille and Leo, friends and family, hint at any pregnancy or miscarriage, nor are there any condolences or subtle mentioning of it, not even couched (Koenigsberg, 2010).

The Leo Frank Girl-man Hoax

Author Steve Oney (2003) makes the unsubstantiated claim that Leo Frank was 5’6″ (sixty-six inches) tall, but Frank’s 1908 passport application says he was 5’8″. So which one is more likely right? Steve Oney fabricates Leo Frank’s height to try to make him seem smaller than he really was in reality, thus making it seem less likely he could have assaulted the 4’11” Mary Phagan. This kind sneaky pseudo scholarship is a pervasive theme throughout Oney’s book.

Proof that Leo Frank’s passport application says he was 5’8″: http://leofrank.org/images/passport-leo-frank/leo-max-frank-passport-application.jpg. And based on his lean muscular build (muscle weighs more than fat), he more likely weighed around 155 lbs. or more. Research at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, clearly indicates Leo Frank played on the college basketball team and also regularly played tennis on the college squad. Oney attempts to turn Leo Frank from a formerly fit basketball and tennis athlete into a petite Auschwitz muscle wasting skeleton in the last stages of terminal AIDS. With Steve Oney, first comes the conclusions and then the facts massaged to fit them.

How Could Sweet Little Leo Frank Attack Mary Anne Phagan?

It’s not just Steve Oney who plays these games with rewriting history. Other pseudo historians try to downplay Leo Frank as the physical product of a college athlete who continued to play tennis regularly after college. The attempts to make Frank seem much smaller and thinner than he really was became part of the historically manufactured evidence on his behalf, finally upgraded into mutual consensus and finally transformed into “fact” by Leo Frank partisans. The goal was to make Frank seem less threatening in size and strength, and thus less likely to have attacked Mary Phagan if he was too weak.

Leo Frank Auschwitz Victim

So Steve Oney is not the only one who manufactured the image of Leo Frank as a short, rail-thin, petite, and frail girly man. It’s every Leo Frank partisan and revisionist. Part of the false image created by Leo Frank partisans is to make it seem less likely Leo Frank could have committed the crime with the image conjured up of Frank as a little nebbish Jewish pencil neck geek, instead of the fit, lean muscle mass college athlete (1902 to 1906) and the active tennis player within Southern Jewish Society (1908 to 1913). Could a short Auschwitz skeleton overpower Mary Phagan? No way, but a fit college athlete at 5’8″ could easily subdue a 4’11” chunky little thirteen-year-old.

Leo Frank Partisans Quote Each Other

Most prominent Leo Frank partisan authors requote each other ad nauseum until the case becomes a cacophony of half-truths. Moreover, most authors who write on the Leo Frank case make gratuitous claims about him without ever bothering to do original research and check the veracity of the original references and sources, which tend to provide more accurate information.

Steve Oney Tones Down Some of the Garbage In and Garbage Out

The sloppy research published and requoted by Leo Frank authors like Steve Oney is the most common theme of their books, magazine and newspaper articles, and films, second to their claims that Leo Frank was the fall guy over the heinous Mary Phagan murder, because a guilty Negro was not worthy enough in terms of his blood value for paying the ultimate price over a dead white girl. In other words, one of the reasons Jew Leo Frank was convicted and hanged was because a Negro was not as worthy as a Jew to pay the ultimate price for the murder of Mary Phagan. Though this is a common theme amongst Leo Frank revisionists, Oney tones his book down for the mainstream, not just Jews, and steers away from this claim, unlike Alphin.

Third, all Leo Frank partisans contend the crime against Mary Phagan was actually committed by the diabolical semiliterate Negro sweeper, Jim Conley, who duped the White man and every level of the U.S. judicial system.

Finally, the ugly Jewish blood libel, Leo Frank partisan writers posit, is the Frank case was a 1913 to 1915 intergalactic conspiracy enforced and made possible as a result of the widespread white Gentile anti-Semitic culture and media frenzies at the beginning of the investigation.

Not One Jewish Source from 1913 to 2010 Mentions Leo Frank’s Passport Application

Why the refusal to go back to 1907/1908 government registered documents, when Leo Frank was pre-enabling one of the most important chapters in his life, a European sojourn to royalty-aristocratic controlled Magna Europa, to visit his father Rudolph’s “Ancestral Homeland,” the German Empire, where some of the world’s best engineers are born, created, educated, and reengineered. The training at Eberhard Faber in Germany may have been a part of ensuring it was not luck that the National Pencil Company grew up and became successful under the tutelage of innately intelligent Leo Frank.

It will be interesting to see how the Leo Frank girl-man hoax will be perpetuated or revised, now that it has been exposed here and now, 2010, on the Leo Frank Research Library.

Relativity Is the Most important Factor, Not Leo Frank’s Height

Leo Frank was significantly larger and more powerful when compared against Mary Anne Phagan, who was described by one of her former co-workers at the Leo Frank trial, as a “Low chunky girl” (BOE, 1913). The “blubbery” Mary Phagan (1899 to 1913) was only 4’11” (Phagan, 1987), weighing 115 to 120 lbs. At 5’8″ and the fit tennis athlete Leo Frank based on his build was likely around 155 lbs.

Within the official record, Mary Phagan is described as well developed, heavy (Mrs. Coleman, BOE, July, 1913), (“Fat”), and Leo Frank is muscle fit with records of his athletics to back it up (Cornell, 1902 to 1906) and pictures showing him years later still looking fit.

Leo Frank and Mary Phagan Height Difference: Seven to Nine Inches

Giving credence to the erroneous claims, Leo Frank “on the low end” of his height scale was at 5’6″ (sixty-six inches), which was seven inches taller than Mary Phagan at 4’11”, and Leo Frank “on the high end” of his height scale at 5’8″ (sixty-eight inches) was nine inches taller than she was. Perhaps Leo Frank wore one-inch man-heals, which would have given him the appearance of being 5’9″ (sixty-nine inches).

Leo Frank’s size difference in terms of how much bigger and stronger he was than Mary Phagan is where the truth of his capacity in being able to overpower her without a scratch on him becomes apparent.

Mary’s Hourly Wages

Steve Oney incorrectly says Mary Phagan made ten cents an hour; actually, she made 7 4/11 cents an hour, or $4.05 a week for a fifty-five hour workweek (Coroner’s Inquest, Former Paymaster J. M. Gantt, May, 1913).

Why Nitpick over Such Trivial Pennies?

It’s hard to imagine that pennies were so valuable back in the early 20th century. That was, of course, before the independent Federal Reserve, born in 1913, could slowly erase the value of U.S. currency over the years and decades by 99% of its value, up to, through, and beyond 2013, until the dollar will eventually collapse from overprinting in the near future. Pennies were actually not so trivial back in 1913. In terms of their ability to sustain a family, for instance, they were “equivalent” roughly to U.S. dollars — “green backs” — after adjusting for inflation by 2013 standards.

Back in 1913, pennies were quite a big deal. You could buy a fresh loaf of warm bread right out of the oven for one to two cents. At a typical dive bar, a pint of beer or a shot of whiskey was three to five cents. Five to ten cents would get you a nice lunch. Today a loaf of bread is $2 or more at a typical “run of the mill” grocery store, and at a dive bar in Atlanta, a beer is typically $3 to $5, and a shot of whiskey on the rocks $3 to $5. You can get a decent lunch in Atlanta for $5 to $10 too. These prices are more or less about right anywhere you go in the United States in 2013, barring lunch and drink specials. The price of a loaf of bread over the last one hundred years is a good indicator of monetary value in the USA.

The importance of getting Mary Phagan’s 7 4/11 cents an hour wage correct is because of the cozy relationship Leo Frank had with James “Jim” Conley. Jim was being paid eleven cents an hour or $6.05 a week (nearly 50% more than the individual 170+ laborers making up nearly the entire workforce).

Neutral observers are asking, why was a Negro janitor, Jim Conley, in the white racial separatist South of Jim Crow Laws in the Progressive Era, whose job was to sweep the floors, making a lot more money, relatively speaking, than the average laborers whose jobs were so critically important to the company’s production and bottom line? It suggests that perhaps Jim Conley was more than meets the eye in terms of his value at the factory under the General Superintendent Leo M. Frank, and perhaps the Negro roustabout served other more important functions for Frank.

The shockingly high eleven cents an hour Conley made for sweeping the factory floors tends to suggest that maybe Jim Conley was Leo Frank’s special watchdog after all, because it is hard to imagine a legitimate reason why a job warranting only five cents an hour at the time was compensated for at more than double its fair market value. Not to mention, Jim Conley was allegedly also getting some nice tips for watching on the side (Jim Conley, August 4, BOE, 1913).

At the trial, one of the young female employees testified that there were complaints of Jim Conley “sprinkling” (urinating) on the pencils. If the substance of the statement were true, most neutral observers would ask why a Negro janitor who was relieving himself on the pencils be allowed to stay at the factory, when Negro replacements were a dime a dozen. It could have been just a rumor to mock the generally disliked beer-scum-stinking janitor, and that little tidbit of information is really only important in light of the fact that Jim Conley was also given allowances in not always having to punch his time card in the clock. Not having to always punch the time clock was a privileged likely not extended to many employees. Why was Leo Frank managing Jim Conley’s numerous watch contracts? Conley was running a watch concession at the factory. The cozy relationship between Leo Frank and Jim Conley, the circumstances of certain punch clock liberties, and pay rate issues concerning Jim Conley tends to sustain Jim was more important to Frank than meets the eye and corroborates Conley’s statements that he served Frank as more than just a sweeper.

The Origin of the Leo M. Frank Teeth X-Ray and Mary Phagan Bite Mark Hoax

To Number Our Days, Published in 1964 by Dutch Jew and self-proclaimed Zionist Pierre van Paassen. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-13633. 404 pages.

To Number Our Days, “Short Stand in Dixieland,” pages 237-238

The Jewish community of Atlanta at that time seemed to live under a cloud. Several years previously one of its members, Leo Frank, had been lynched as he was being transferred from the Fulton Tower Prison in Atlanta to Milledgeville for trial on a charge of having raped and murdered a little girl in his warehouse which stood right opposite the Constitution building. Many Jewish citizens who recalled the lynching were unanimous in assuring me that Frank was innocent of the crime.

I took reading all the evidence pro and con in the record department at the courthouse. Before long I came upon an envelope containing a sheaf of papers and a number of X-ray photographs showing teeth indentures. The murdered girl had been bitten on the left shoulder and neck before being strangled. But the X-ray photos of the teeth marks on her body did not correspond with Leo Frank’s set of teeth of which several photos were included. If those photos had been published at the time of the murder, as they should have been, the lynching would probably not have taken place.

Though, as I said, the man died several years before, it was too late, I thought, to rehabilitate his memory and perhaps restore the good name of his family. I showed Clark Howell the evidence establishing Frank’s innocence and asked permission to run a series of articles dealing with the case and especially with the evidence just uncovered. Mr. Howell immediately concurred, but the most prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, Mr. Harry Alexander, whom I consulted with a view to have him present the evidence to the grand jury, demurred. He said Frank had not even been tried. Hence no new trial could be requested. Moreover, the Jewish community in its entirety still felt nervous about the incident. If I wrote the articles old resentments might be stirred up and, who knows some of the unknown lynchers might recognize themselves as participants in my description of the lynching. It was better, Mr. Alexander thought, to leave sleeping lions alone. Some local rabbis were drawn into the discussion and they actually pleaded with Clark Howell to stop me from reviving interest in the Frank case as this was bound to have evil repercussions on the Jewish community.

That someone had blabbed out of school became quite evident when I received a printed warning saying: “Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy.” The unsigned warning was reinforced one night, or rather, early one morning when I was driving home. A large automobile drove up alongside of me and forced me into the track of a fast-moving streetcar coming from the opposite direction. My car was demolished, but I escaped without a scratch….

Reference:

To Number Our Days, Published in 1964 by Pierre van Paassen. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-13633. 404 pages.

Were Dental X-rays of Leo Frank’s Teeth Ever Taken because of Bite Marks Found on Mary Phagan during Her Numerous Autopsies?

In Steve Oney’s book, And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, he claims there were x-rays of Leo Frank’s teeth taken for the purpose of comparing them to bite marks found on the body of Mary Phagan. The supposition is to determine if Leo Frank was innocent of the murder or not, with the idea that whoever bit up Mary Phagan’s body was likely the murderer. It certainly would be enough to convict someone.

In the 2,500+ pages of surviving legal documents on the Leo Frank case (1913 to 1915) contained in several government archives, including the Georgia State Archive, United States District Court Archives, and United States Supreme Court archives, there is ABSOLUTELY nothing mentioned ANYWHERE about any kind of X-rays performed on anyone, not performed on Leo Frank or Mary Phagan, and there is absolutely nothing mentioned about bite marks on Mary Phagan in any affidavits, trial testimony, autopsy reports (defense and prosecution), or evidence submitted at Frank’s trial July 28 to August 26, 1913, appeals (1913 to 1915), commutation (June 21, 1915), or pardon without exoneration (March 1986). From a scientific point of view, X-ray technology was in its infancy by the time 1913 rolled around and was not in any measure of widespread use.

Is the Leo Frank X-Ray and Mary Phagan Bite Mark Claims Another Hoax?

Within the thousands of pages of surviving records on the Frank case, there is nothing specifically in the 1,800-page Leo M. Frank Georgia Supreme Court Case file about Leo Frank having his teeth X-rayed or Mary Phagan having visible bite marks on her, or even Mary Phagan being X-rayed because of alleged bite marks. The Leo M. Frank Georgia Supreme Court case files dealt directly with the trial testimony, facts, autopsy reports, and evidence, making it the likely place such erroneous claims might be documented. However, an exhaustive review reveals there is absolutely nothing, not even a sentence or word about Leo Frank’s teeth being X-rayed in any Georgia Superior Court or Georgia Supreme Court case documents from 1913 to 1915. An exhaustive check of historical newspapers from 1913 to 1915, reveals nothing about Leo Frank’s teeth getting X-rayed, or bite marks found on Mary Phagan or an X-ray performed on Mary Phagan in any of the three major Georgian newspapers at the time: Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Constitution, and Atlanta Georgian (1913 to 1915). Even a search of prominent newspapers outside of Georgia, including The New York Times (1913 to 1915), which admittedly took the side of Leo M. Frank, does not mention dental or autopsy X-rays.

The point is absolutely nothing supports Leo Frank’s teeth being X-rayed as part of the Phagan murder investigation, trial, appeals, or commutation. No evidence supports that Mary Phagan was X-rayed for bite marks, and nothing suggests Mary Phagan had any VISIBLE bite marks all over her body from either prosecution or defense physicians who performed their numerous autopsies.

There was, however, a report in the Leo M. Frank Georgia Supreme Court case file (see folder 2) about a little teenage girl that formerly worked at the factory claiming Leo Frank turned her out and possibly inseminated her. She claimed Leo Frank was into sadist biting, and during sex, he bit her and left a serious bruise on her inner thigh. Perhaps Steve Oney twisted this affidavit and negative tidbit of information for the benefit of Leo Frank, and maybe he thought the 2,500+ page official surviving record of the Leo M. Frank case file would NEVER make it onto the Internet for the whole world to see.

The report about Leo Frank turning out another little girl (not Mary Phagan), seducing her, possibly impregnating her, and afterward biting her inner thigh was more about showing the kinky, sadistic propensities Frank had as part of his sexual appetite, and nineteen girls, former employees, at the trial, provided short and to the point testimony that revealed he had a bad character for lasciviousness. The defense didn’t dare cross question these girls out of fear of the intimate details. Either way, Leo Frank was essentially painted as an aggressive sexual predator and pedophile toward some of the girls at the factory, to translate a “bad character for lasciviousness.” The point of all that evidence was Dorsey’s way of trying to build a bridge, showing a clear pattern of behavior about Leo Frank supporting the notion he was more likely to have had a hand in the murder of Mary Phagan because of what her discovery revealed happened to her and the implications of it at the time.

Regarding X-rays, while the concept was first invented “by the German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen (1845-1923) in 1895,” they weren’t used for medical purposes until 1913:

“In 1913 the first X-ray tube designed specifically for medical purposes was developed by American chemist William Coolidge (1873-1975).”

The thought of a process that was just created being used in this trial is a bit farfetched, to say the least. Read more: X-ray Machine — used, first, body, produced, device, Medical Use of X-rays, What Are X-rays? Modern X-Ray Machines http://www.discoveriesinmedicine.com/To-Z/X-ray-Machine.html

I doubt if the court would’ve even allowed such evidence given the technology was in its infancy, not that it would’ve proved the case any better than a physical mold. A simple caste of the teeth in comparison to “bite-marks,” if they existed, could have been made, if the defense sought to prove his innocence on such evidence. However, there were no bite marks on Mary Phagan, according to every surviving legal document or newspaper, including defense witness medical doctors who provided trial testimony. Why would Steve Oney, who claims to have studied the Leo Frank case for seventeen years, perpetuate such lies that amount to fabricated evidence? Now, because the Leo Frank X-Ray hoax is mentioned in nearly every Jewish rendition of the Leo Frank case, it can accurately be called a Jewish hoax! To determine whether Steve Oney (2003) is lying and perpetuating a Jewish hoax, simply review the 2,500 surviving pages of the Leo M. Frank legal documents and the hundreds of pages of newspapers articles from 1913 to 1915. The result? ABSOLUTE ZERO, nothing, is mentioned about X-rays or bite marks on Mary Phagan.

When you review the official 318-page Leo M. Frank brief of evidence:

Do you see anything about X-rays of Leo Frank’s teeth? No.

Do you see anything about bite marks on Mary Phagan? No.

Do you see anything about X-rays done to Mary Phagan? No.

Is there anything in the Defense Physician Autopsy Reports about bite marks on Mary Phagan? No.

Is there anything in the Prosecution Physician Autopsy Reports about bite marks on Mary Phagan? No.

Guess Who Started the Jewish X-Ray Leo M. Frank Hoax?

A self-described Zionist Jew in 1922 named Pierre van Paassen and the Frankites have been parroting him ever since.

Look what happens when tabloid pseudo scholars and liars like Steve Oney publish outright lies and baloney on the Frank case. It causes people to think Leo Frank was framed. So in one sense, Steve Oney achieved his goal, of helping to perpetuate a hoax and fraud to the benefit of Leo Frank.

John Marshal Slaton Commutation Order

The John Marshal Slaton twenty-nine-page commutation order published June 21, 1915, reviews and mangles the facts, evidence, and testimony in the Leo M. Frank case, pretending to bring forward new facts that emerged from 1913 to 1915. After reviewing the twenty-nine-page clemency order, do you see anything about Leo Frank’s teeth X-rayed in there or Mary Phagan being X-rayed because of bite marks found on her body? No.

Leo Frank’s Four-Hour Statement at His Trial

Does Leo Frank mention anything about his teeth being X-rayed or bite marks on Mary Phagan during his four-hour statement to the judge and jury? Or during his two years of appeal? No.

The tabloid journalist Steve Oney is full of baloney concerning his Leo M. Frank X-ray hoax. Oney fabricated or perpetuated a lot of other evidence as well in his book. We found dozens of errors, but we will just focus on the main stuff.

Steve Oney Says: MOSES FRANK — Confederate Veteran Moses Frank

Allen Koenigsberg (2011) writes:

Almost without exception, every book on the case (Golden, Connolly, Frey, Melnick, Oney) has referred to the “thin gray line” and stated that Leo’s “interested” uncle was himself once a Confederate soldier. However, extensive research reveals that Moses Frank never served in the US military, North or South, nor do any of his obituaries or eulogies (1841-1927) mention such a record despite a much later family belief. Moses Frank, an 1856 immigrant from Dudelsheim in Hesse-Darmstadt, had lived in Atlanta, on and off, since 1866 (when he married his first wife Jane Wilson Kelly), and had even been in that city the very week of April 21st (with his second wife Sara) – why was he being kept up to date so carefully about this regular annual event (“Today was Yondeff”)? Moses was about 72 at the time and would hardly need to be reminded of his own mortality (“smaller each year”)? In a Mar. 1914 jail-house interview, Leo Frank would not say that his wealthy uncle was a Confederate veteran, nor was this possibility ever broached at the Trial (it was suddenly offered – without proof – only in Oct. 1913, by Reuben Arnold). The location of that handwritten original, though shown in Court, is unknown and no photographic image of it survives. Solicitor Dorsey implied to the jury that this “exculpatory” letter was not sent at its apparent date or time, an issue entirely ignored in the extensive Leo Frank literature. Curiously, no one at the Trial (or later) ever referred to the fact, or the reason, that his uncle had been blind since 1907. And despite the mistaken claim of his presence in the Frey book (‘The Silent and the Damned’), Moses Frank was continuously absent from Atlanta for over 3 years (Apr 21, 1913 – Oct 1, 1916). However, his exact whereabouts between Apr. 28 and mid-Sept of 1913, is still unresolved; he and his wife Sara were ‘unavailable’ for the Trial and Rae Frank alone (in Aug.) said he was already ‘in Europe’ from where she had been sent Leo’s ‘Apr. 26’ letter (the outer envelope from ‘overseas’ was not produced). Moses did not register in Frankfurt until Sept. 15, 1913 and he may have been in Hamburg (with his wife) since May 9th. (http://www.leofrankcase.com, Leo Frank Case – Open or Closed? 2011)

Jim Conley’s Education

Oney makes errors on Jim Conley’s education, giving him more credit than he deserves.

Perhaps the reason Oney (2003) fabricates evidence and twists the case to benefit Leo Frank is revealed in the fact he pretends the star witness Monteen Stover was not important.

From Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered by Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law

Oney’s book (as literary critic Theodore Rosengarten reminds us) does not “come flat out and say who killed Mary [Phagan].” Although the book does assert that the weight of the evidence “strongly suggests Frank’s innocence,” it also claims that “the argument [over whether Frank or Conley is the guilty party]” will “never move beyond that of Conley’s word versus Frank’s.” On the other hand, in a recent press interview Oney stated that “I’m pretty certain that Frank was innocent,” and “I’m 95 percent certain Conley did it.” And in a short magazine article published in March 2004 Oney “declared [his] belief in Frank’s innocence.” (Wilkes)

Although Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered, by Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law, makes a convincing case on behalf of Leo M. Frank, it is yet another document written by a Jew and diehard Frankite filled with countless errors.

It seems that every thing ever produced claiming Leo Frank was innocent is filled with nothing but lies and fabrications.

Another perspective from Steve Oney…

Questions and Answers: With Steve Oney

February 5, 2004

By David Finnigan

http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/q_and_a_with_steve_oney_20040206/

Los Angeles writer Steve Oney’s book, “And the Dead Shall Rise” (Pantheon Books, 2003), details two infamous, unsolved crimes: the 1913 murder of non-Jewish preteen Mary Phagan in an Atlanta factory and the arrest, trial, conviction, death sentence commutation and 1915 abduction and lynching by a 25-man mob of Leo Frank, the factory’s Jewish, 29-year-old Northern-born supervisor. In 1995, on the 80th yahrtzeit of Frank’s death, Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta, Ga., helped place a plaque on the building built on the spot where the tree used to lynch him grew. Oney, a 49-year-old former Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, whose wife is Jewish, spent 17 years researching the 742-page book.

Jewish Journal: This book genuinely seems to have taken a chunk out of you as a writer and as a person.

Steve Oney: If somebody had told me I was going to spend 17 years on this book when I got started, I would have quit — immediately. The deeper I got into it, the more entranced I was by the subject; this double-murder mystery, two unsolved killings, the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank. So, yeah, it was a chunk of my life. But I don’t know how I could have spent it better.

JJ: Were you trying to give this case, journalistically speaking, a proper, dignified burial?

SO: I took it as a point of pride to get the truth of who lynched Leo Frank. He was the most celebrated convict in America; he was in the state prison, and he was abducted from the state prison without a shot being fired. And then after abducting Frank, these 25 [lynch-mob members] drove by circuitous routes over 150 miles on unpaved roads in Model Ts and lynched Frank the next day at dawn. Not a one of them was arrested or even inconvenienced.

JJ: There’s a body of Leo Frank literature and writing that most people don’t know about; why is there so much of it?

SO: Well, the material is so inherently dramatic. A little girl, Mary Phagan, beautiful, busty, murdered on Confederate Memorial Day, 1913, in a society that is in transition from the old South to the new South. Her boss, a Northern Jew named Leo Frank, convicted of her murder and then lynched — and out of that lynching rose … the modern Ku Klux Klan, and it galvanizes the Anti-Defamation League.

JJ: Do you think it was romanticized?

SO: In many of the previous accounts of this case, there’s the inevitable section where the writer will say, “Outside the courthouse where Leo Frank was tried, people yelled, ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!'” In my book I say it didn’t happen. It was something that someone wrote a couple years after the crime, and then it got stuck into subsequent recountings of the story.

JJ: I was specifically fascinated by your use of the term, “Negro.” You use it not in quotes and not in italics, but as a common term in parts of the book. What made you choose that term?

SO: I agonized over that choice. Frank was convicted largely on the testimony of a black, self-confessed accomplice named Jim Conley. For one of the first times ever in a capital murder case in America, especially in the South, an all-white jury accepted a black man’s word over a white man’s word. I thought I could never express how stunning a fact that was if I used polite terminology of today. I had to situate you back in the South of 1913 to make you feel what the racial tension was like and to make you see through the use of the word, Negro, how all white people would view a black man at that moment. Even with that rationale, I agonized over it. I can’t impose the polite parlance of contemporary usage on the time. So that’s why I decided to use the word, Negro.

JJ: Many of the Atlanta Jews, in the fallout of the entire tragedy, leave Atlanta, but they stay in the South, as opposed to some of the [non-Jewish] characters who move north. Didn’t that strike you as odd?

SO: Southern Jews are Southerners and Jews second, or they’re both simultaneously. But they are as wed to the land and to the Southern way of life as any Southern [non-Jew]. The Jews of Atlanta in particular, the German Jews into which Leo Frank married, they fought for the Confederacy or their forebearers did. They were very much Southern patriots and that was, on the one hand, why they stayed, on the other hand, why Frank’s lynching was such a shock to them. They stayed, but they nursed very quietly this grievous wound.

By Steve Oney, Tuesday, November 3, 2009

On Aug. 17, 1915, Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish industrialist, was lynched just outside Atlanta. The atrocity marked the culmination of an ugly conflict that began with the 1913 murder of a child laborer named Mary Phagan, who toiled for pennies an hour in Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory.

Frank, the plant superintendent, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, although he always maintained his innocence.

He appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing each time, whereupon Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

The decision so angered the general populace that a mob organized by a Superior Court judge, the son of a U.S. senator and a former governor abducted Frank from a well-guarded state prison and hanged him from an oak tree.

The lynching of Frank seems like an incident out of another America, one of gray-bearded Civil War veterans and Jim Crow, Model Ts and ragtime.

Woodrow Wilson was president. “The Birth of a Nation” was playing in movie theaters.

The story, however, remains very much alive. “Parade,” the Alfred Uhry musical inspired by the affair, has been drawing crowds to Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. In November, PBS stations will broadcast “The People v. Leo Frank,” the first full-length documentary to explore the topic.

There are many reasons why the Frank case continues to command attention.

For one, both the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank are crimes as puzzling as any Arthur Conan Doyle ever invented. Strange notes, racial paradoxes (an all-white jury convicted the factory boss on the testimony of a black witness) and an intricate conspiracy played a part

But finally the story is still relevant and intriguing because the conflict at its core foreshadows today’s red-state/blue-state hostilities.

The raw material for class warfare was, of course, there from the start — a lovely Southern girl found murdered at a business run by a Northern Jew.

But it wasn’t until after Frank’s conviction that matters exploded. At the urging of the rabbi of Atlanta’s Reform synagogue, a nationwide campaign to exonerate the condemned man was inaugurated by Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, and A.D. Lasker, the advertising genius behind Sunkist orange juice and Lucky Strike cigarettes. They believed that Frank had not been so much prosecuted as persecuted.

To attract attention to what he viewed as an injustice, Ochs launched the Times’ first — and to this day only — journalistic crusade.

Over an 18-month period, the paper published not just dozens of editorials demanding a new trial for Frank but scores of news articles slanted in his favor.

For his part, Lasker orchestrated public relations stunts and hired William Burns, the private detective who solved the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, to turn up new evidence.

Although Ochs and Lasker were convinced that anti-Semitism had poisoned Frank’s trial, they and their supporters in New York and other urban areas did not take into account how their efforts would come across in the South or in working-class heartland neighborhoods.

Articulating the populist response was future U.S. Sen. Tom Watson, a Georgia lawyer and polemicist of such superior rhetorical gifts and inexhaustible vitriol that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck pale in comparison.

Week after week in his widely circulated paper, the Jeffersonian, Watson rebutted Ochs and Lasker, arguing to his vast readership that self-appointed elites representing money and privilege had decreed that a child laborer’s life was not equal in value to that of a Jewish industrialist.

“The agrarian rebel,” as historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed Watson, gave voice to a constituency that felt excluded from the halls of power in Washington and on Wall Street. When Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence, Watson called for the lynching.

No one involved in Frank’s death was ever convicted or even indicted. (The chief prosecutor of Cobb County, where the incident occurred, helped to plan it.) The polarizing impact of the affair made itself felt almost immediately.

On Thanksgiving eve 1915, a few months after Frank was hanged, the Ku Klux Klan held its first modern-era cross-burning atop Stone Mountain, several miles east of Atlanta. (Three members of the lynching party were present.)

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, which had been founded in 1913, took up the fight against religious intolerance in earnest.

The Frank case, however, was about more than racism and anti-Semitism.

It was also about the conflicting perceptions of the nation’s haves and have-nots, the chasm between the people who appear to run things and those who feel they lack a say.

While it’s doubtful that a mob could break into a state prison in 2009 and lynch an inmate, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which something almost as bad transpired.

In an era of escalating home foreclosures and rocketing unemployment, endless bank bailouts and hefty bonuses to Goldman Sachs traders, the Frank saga says as much about current events as it does about history.

Steve Oney, author of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” is chief consultant to “The People v. Leo Frank.”

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/leo-frank-saga-still-185064.html

Next: Steve Oney: Off the Shelf: Letting go of a life’s work (January 10, 2010)

Writer Steve Oney spent decades researching the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, but his voluminous files now belong to history.

By Steve Oney

January 10, 2010

With emotions wavering between relief and regret, I remove a battered spiral notebook from a metal file cabinet and place it in an acid-free cardboard box open on my office floor. The notebook contains an interview I conducted in December 1984 at a VA hospital in Johnson City, Tenn., with 85-year-old Alonzo Mann. Some seven decades earlier, he told me, he’d seen a murderer carrying a girl’s body through the lobby of an Atlanta factory, but he was only 14 and too scared to call the police. As a result, an innocent industrialist was convicted of the crime and later lynched.

Mann’s assertion goes to the heart of an enduring debate about a great historical mystery. To me, however, the notebook possesses more than just documentary value. It contains the first research I conducted on a project that consumed nearly half my life.

Six years after the publication of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” my book about the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, I am packing my papers for donation to the Georgia Historical Society. The contents of a dozen bulging plastic bins and six overflowing file drawers must be indexed, then placed in the cartons that will carry them from Los Angeles to their new home: Hodgson Hall, an 1875 athenaeum just off Savannah’s live-oak-canopied Forsyth Park.

This is a tedious task, but what makes it more than simply time consuming is that every item conjures intense memories. There go a half-dozen file folders containing notes from tearful conversations with the children of the men who lynched Frank. A bundle of original letters and legal documents recalls its generous source: the now-dead son of a lawyer involved in the case. Dog-eared pages from an Atlanta phone book might not seem significant, but they’re links to the next of kin of a key witness, as well as reminders of the many calls I made trying to track him down. As for the stacks of Xeroxed newspaper stories, they bring back the countless hours I sat staring at microfilm machines in libraries across the country, hoping that by sheer dint of concentration I could summon the past.

Taken together, these materials might well serve as the basis for an exhibit on a kind of research no one in their right mind will ever again conduct. Working without scanners or flash drives, I relied on anachronistic devices and a willingness to camp out in archives for weeks. I ran off most of my newspaper copies on wet process printers, some set for negative film (black print on white background) and others for positive (white print on black background). At university special-collections departments, I took notes with stubby pencils while wearing white gloves.

The piece de resistance is my card filing system. Using 3-by-5 color-keyed cards organized by hand-labeled tabs — “Debate RE rape,” reads one, “Writ of Habeas Corpus,” another — I ultimately filled four shoe-box-sized, marble-paper-covered boxes of the sort favored by graduate students of another era. In my best moments, I think this is the stuff of a magnificent obsession. In my worst, I merely shake my head.

My putative rationale for holding onto everything has been that I’ve been serving as the consultant for “The People v. Leo Frank,” a 2009 PBS documentary inspired by “And the Dead Shall Rise.” The filmmaker and I have needed the papers for fact-checking purposes. But if this is true as far as it goes — director Ben Loeterman and I have spent a lot of time rifling my files — the real reason has less to do with the material’s continuing utility than with my fear of letting it go. During the nearly 20 years I spent amassing my files, I’ve grown fond of them, much as numismatists grow fond of their coins. I’ve also taken strength from them. Here is proof that I’ve done the work that allowed me to identify the men who’d perpetrated Frank’s lynching, arguably America’s worst anti-Semitic incident. And yet, for all of this, the papers have also tied me to a project I was finished with, which is a bad thing.

As I place the last of the files in the acid-free boxes, I realize I am rolling away a stone that for too long has impeded my future. Getting the material out of the office will allow me to move forward. Furthermore, not only do the papers belong in Georgia, where most of the events they describe transpired, but now they will be accessible to generations of scholars, which is reassuring, as the Frank case remains a topic of genuine fascination.

The story is rife with conundrums and rich with meaning. An all-white jury convicted Frank largely on the testimony of a black man — unheard of in the Jim Crow South. Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, compromised his newspaper’s objectivity in an attempt to exonerate Frank. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the modern Ku Klux Klan grew out of the affair.

Ticking off these facts, I feel a pang. How am I going to get along without my files? This is the material of a lifetime. But then again, as Todd Groce, president of the Georgia Historical Society, has told me: “Remember, you can come visit all of it any time you want.”

Oney is the author of “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.”

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Source: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-caw-off-the-shelf10-2010jan10,0,4242686.story

References

Van Paassen, Pierre. To Number Our Days. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.

Oney, Steve. The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Available in Adobe PDF format or order the book at Amazon.com.

See: Leo M. Frank Georgia Supreme Court Case File (1,800 Images Volumes 1 and 2).

Testimony of Jim Conley: http://www.leofrank.org/jim-conley-august-4-5-6/.

Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Steve Oney, and many other revisionist authors incorrectly describe Leo Frank as 5’6″. The purpose is to make Leo Frank seem smaller and weaker than he really was to make it seem less likely he could have been capable of beating, raping, and strangling Mary Phagan. Rarely do these revisionist writers point out the fact Mary Anne Phagan was about 4’11”. To do so would defeat the purpose of making Leo Frank seem smaller than he really was in real life, because with the knowledge of the physical size of both Leo Frank and Mary Phagan, it becomes clear Frank could have easily overpowered Phagan. Leo Frank at 5’6″ no longer appears as the revisionist version of a petite girly-man incapable of committing the crime, when one becomes aware the twenty-nine-year-old factory superintendent was seven inches taller than the thirteen-year-old little girl at 4’11”. However, the truth of the matter is that Leo Frank was not 5’6″ tall. His official passport application has him measured at 5’8″ (http://leofrank.org/images/passport-leo-frank/leo-max-frank-passport-application.jpg), and thus based on this, we see the true picture of him nine inches taller than little Mary Phagan. We also know that just as his height is often fabricated by Leo Frank revisionists, they also made his weight much lighter than he really was, saying he was about 130 lbs., but based on his athletic build, he was likely around 155 to 160 lbs. The real Leo Frank was 5’8″ and about 155 lbs. of lean athletic muscle, not the petite version of him at 5’6″ and 130 lbs. The relative difference between the twenty-nine-year-old 5’8″ athlete at 155 lbs. becomes clear against a 4’11” chubby and flabby little teenage white girl who toiled with pencil erases, sitting in her seat for eleven hours a day, fifty-five hours a week, over a total of thirteen months = more than 2,555 hours slaving away at 7 4/11 cents an hour (not the ten to twelve cents an hour Frankites have claimed).

For the first time in more than one hundred years, the centennials of the double strangulation during the years 2013 and 2015, all the lies, fabrications and omissions by the Leo Frank revisionists have been exposed to light. Maybe now after torturing the memory of this little girl and waging a blood libel smear campaign against Southerners and European-Americans for more than a century, it will finally become another battle lost in the Jewish culture war against Western Civilization.

Steve Oney speaks at the People Vs. Leo Frank Round Table: http://www.gpb.org/the-people-v-leo-frank.

The University of Georgia Magazine. Features. March 2004, Vol. 83, No. 4. And the Dead Shall Rise, by Steve Oney. “To produce the definitive book on the 1913 lynching of convicted murderer Leo Frank, the author devoted 17 years of his life—and came to the conclusion that Frank didn’t kill Mary Phagan,” by Steve Oney (ABJ ’79): http://web.archive.org/web/20081016222731/http://www.uga.edu/gm/304/FeatOney.html.

Steve Oney on C-Span (October 11, 2003) speaking about his research and book on Leo Frank: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/178832-1. Not a word about State’s Exhibit B, Monteen Stover, and Leo Frank’s August 18, 1913, admission about his “unconscious” bathroom visit to the metal room — the scene of the crime.

Oney, Steve. “The Leo Frank Case Isn’t Dead.” LA Times, October 30, 2009. The class warfare behind the story of his 1915 lynching keeps it tragically relevant. Steve Oney, author of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” is chief consultant to “The People v. Leo Frank.” http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/30/opinion/oe-oney30

Oney, Steve. “Murder Trials and Media Sensationalism.” Nieman Reports, Spring 2004.The press frenzy of a century ago echoes in the coverage of trials today, http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100884/Murder-Trials-and-Media-Sensationalism.aspx.

Freeman, Scott. “The Truth At Last.” Atlanta Magazine, October 2003, page 98. Article about Steve Oney and his book, And the Dead Shall Rise (2003), http://books.google.com/books?id=FdECAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false.

__________________________________________

Who Killed Mary Phagan?

By Warren Goldstein

Published: October 26, 2003

AND THE DEAD SHALL RISE

The Murder of Mary Phagan

and the Lynching of Leo Frank.

By Steve Oney.

Illustrated. 742 pp. New York:

Pantheon Books. $35.

THE single most famous lynching in American history remains that of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta, convicted in 1913 of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl in his employ. Despite national publicity on his behalf, a lynch mob killed Frank two years later. The case made and broke careers, sparked both the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and fanned Southern anti-Semitism and Jewish racism. ”And the Dead Shall Rise,” Steve Oney’s overlong, occasionally dramatic (and melodramatic), exceptionally detailed first book, recounting the trial and its aftermath, helps us appreciate the enduring fascination of this case.

Raised in Brooklyn, Leo Frank earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell and moved South to manage his uncle’s pencil factory. He soon married into Atlanta’s prosperous, apparently assimilated German Jewish community.

While local boosters touted Atlanta as a gleaming modern metropolis, the city’s industrial, commercial and financial elite drew its wealth from the factories employing masses of poorly paid, badly housed, overworked, malnourished migrants from the countryside. Little of the New Southern prosperity trickled down to Atlanta’s children, many of whom, like Mary Phagan, started factory work at the age of 10.

On April 27, 1913, a night watchman discovered her beaten, contorted body in the filthy factory basement. Mary had been strangled, possibly raped, her face ground in the dirt. Detectives soon arrested Frank, mainly because he was the last person to acknowledge seeing her alive. The murder crystallized working-class Atlantans’ resentment over their children’s exploitation by heartless capitalists. Police and prosecutors leaked ”evidence” that Frank habitually harassed his female employees. That Mary had apparently been garroted by a libidinous Yankee Jew stoked passions throughout the city, and provided grist for all three competing sensationalist newspapers.

Seventeen years in the making, ”And the Dead Shall Rise” provides a feint-by-feint, blow-by-blow account of pretrial, trial and post-trial maneuvering and publicity. Most readers might have appreciated Oney’s own overview of — and judgments about — the often bewildering morass of multiplying, contradictory testimony and evidence. Much of the trial evidence against Frank was circumstantial, and some testimony very likely was coerced. Most damning of all was the confession — actually, three successive affidavits, each more detailed and produced under police interrogation — of a black sweeper at the factory, Jim Conley, who claimed to have assisted Frank in disposing of the girl’s body. Despite his many arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct, and two stretches on a chain gang, Conley proved surprisingly unshakable on the witness stand.

How did the testimony of a decidedly unrespectable black janitor stand up against that of an educated, articulate white man whose lawyer played the race card shamelessly in his summation, arguing, ”Negroes rob and ravish every day in the most peculiar and shocking way?”

Too absorbed in his narrative, Oney does not provide the wider context that answers the question. As the historian Leonard Dinnerstein points out in ”The Leo Frank Case” (1968), the arrival of millions of Russian and Polish Jews in the 1890’s had given rise to a nationwide intensification of anti-Semitic actions, articles and pronouncements, including a federal government report that accused Jews of being heavily involved in the white slave trade. Lurid rumors about rapacious Jews — fueled by the prosecution’s suggestion that Frank was a sodomite who killed Mary when she resisted him — circulated throughout Atlanta, and anti-Frank crowds surrounded the courthouse daily. In this hothouse atmosphere the jury deliberated less than two hours before finding Frank guilty; the next day the judge sentenced him to death.

Organized Jewry intervened, financially and otherwise. Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, and Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, threw their institutions behind Frank. Between The Times’s sympathetic coverage and Marshall’s money, contacts and legal expertise, the case became a national cause célèbre. When the Supreme Court denied Frank’s request for a new trial, two million signed petitions and 100,000 people sent letters asking Georgia’s popular, progressive governor, John Slaton, to commute Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment.

On the other side, the former Populist (and racial moderate) Tom Watson, now a fiery, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic defender of the ”Lost Cause,” entered the fray, using his newspaper, The Jeffersonian, to rally poor white Southerners against the rich Jewish Northern businessmen paying for Frank’s defense. Watson’s virulent attacks strengthened Northern pro-Frank sentiment — but tripled his paper’s circulation. Nevertheless, days before leaving office, Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence. An outraged Watson proclaimed the virtues of lynch law, and a group from Marietta (Mary’s hometown), answered his call. The first to have unearthed a full list of the conspirators, Oney reveals their names and connections, and in riveting chapters explains how the leaders — including a former governor, a respected judge and state legislators — recruited 25 others to execute the daring scheme to kidnap and hang Leo Frank on Aug. 17, 1915.

The case and the lynching reverberated powerfully for decades, though in contradictory ways. Most immediately they catapulted the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, to the governorship in 1916, and signaled Tom Watson’s triumphant return to Georgia politics. They silenced others. Concluding that Jewish outspokenness had hurt Frank and now threatened the safety of all Jews in Georgia, Ochs dropped the case. They inspired still others. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s dissent in the Frank case eventually became a majority opinion protecting the rights of defendants ”hurried to conviction under the pressure of a mob.” Convinced that Jews needed an outspoken advocate against prejudice, B’nai B’rith founded the Anti-Defamation League in 1913 in the midst of the Frank case. And most disturbingly of all, an emboldened Watson called for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, then starring in D. W. Griffith’s racist epic, ”The Birth of a Nation.” On Nov. 23, 1915, at the top of Stone Mountain, ”Colonel” William Simmons obliged, lighting an enormous cross that could be seen for miles.

Warren Goldstein is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford and author of the forthcoming ”William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/books/who-killed-mary-phagan.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

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Check out Steve Oney’s Blog: http://steveoney.blogspot.com/

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Georgia Historical Society takes stewardship of papers on Leo Frank case

Author of ‘And the Dead Shall Rise’ turns over 22 boxes of notes, documents and other records

Posted: January 23, 2010 – 12:15 a.m. | Updated: January 24, 2010 – 7:23 a.m.

By Chuck Mobley

Author of ‘And the Dead Shall Rise’ turns over 22 boxes of notes, documents and other records.

Steve Oney, the author of “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank,” has donated to the Georgia Historical Society his painstakingly gathered collection of papers, which include interviews with people who actually witnessed the infamous 1915 hanging in Marietta.

It was “important” that the collection be housed in the state in which the lynching, one of the most infamous incidents in American history, occurred, said Oney, in a telephone interview from his home in California.

The 22 acid-free boxes he packed, filled with file folders, notebooks, writing pads, note cards and copies of documents, letters and newspaper articles, contain the story – “all of it” – of what happened after Phagan was murdered in Atlanta on Confederate Memorial Day in 1913, Oney said.

The first article

A University of Georgia journalism school graduate, Oney started working on the subject in the mid-1980s, after he’d moved to California as a magazine writer.

While putting together an 8,000-word article for Esquire, Oney interviewed Alonzo Mann, who in 1913 had been Frank’s office boy at the National Pencil Factory. Mann, who was then in his mid-80s, told him that he’d seen Jim Conley, a black janitor at the company, carrying Phagan’s lifeless body through the lobby, Oney said.

Conley told Mann, according to Oney, “If you tell anyone about this I’ll kill you, too.”

Mann, who was then just 14 himself, didn’t report what he’d seen. Frank, largely on Conley’s testimony, was convicted in August 1913 of Phagan’s murder after a sensational 25-day trial in Atlanta.

A Jew from the North, Frank was originally sentenced to death. The commutation of that sentence to life in prison in June 1915 enraged people throughout Georgia, Oney said, and a “cadre” of community leaders in Marietta got together to plot and carry out the lynching, which occurred several weeks later.

That deliberate act of violence, which involved about 40 people, has been the elephant in the room for Marietta ever since, Oney said.

Years of research

After the magazine article came out, Oney signed a contract in 1986 to write a book about the case. It took him 17 years, much longer than he’d originally thought, to do the research and bring the story to publication.

“It’s complicated,” Oney said. You have two great mysteries: Who killed Mary Phagan, and who lynched Leo Frank, along with another major consideration: How did the case ignite a remarkable political maelstrom that pitted North against South?

Atlanta Jewish leaders, in the days after Frank’s conviction, contacted New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs and protested that the trial had been a sham. The newspaper then launched, said Oney, a “moral crusade” and published “incredibly one-sided pieces” about the case.

Tom Watson, a Georgia populist leader who served in several political offices during a long and controversial career, met the Times’ campaign head-on. Watson’s newspaper, Oney said, almost doubled in circulation as Watson constantly labeled Frank a “lascivious Jew” and charged that the Times was trying to subvert Georgia justice.

Amid this polemic, Frank became a political football in what could be called the first red-state, blue-state showdown, Oney said. The “final straw,” he said, was the controversial commutation, and Watson was a loud voice among those calling for Frank’s lynching.

A difficult decision

The book received rave reviews when it was published in 2003. “Oney has a reporter’s eye for detail and a novelist’s sense of storytelling,” said Publishers Weekly. “This is a vivid addition to the literature of race, Jewish studies and Southern history.”

Oney continued to keep the notes, and he even used them occasionally, such as when he served as a consultant to a 2009 PBS documentary, “The People vs. Leo Frank.” But he eventually decided that it was time to turn them over to a place where future students and scholars can research them.

Staffers at the Georgia Historical Society were delighted by his choice.

The Frank case was “one of the darkest moments” in this state’s history, and the collection, once it’s processed, will be “heavily used,” said GHS Senior Historian Stan Deaton. The amount of material, and the scope that it covers, is a testament to Oney’s determination to tell it correctly.

“This will now be,” Deaton said, “the place to start any serious Leo Frank research.”

Steve Oney donates all of his Leo Frank Case research papers to the Georgia Historical Society (22 acid free boxes): http://savannahnow.com/accent/2010-01-23/georgia-historical-society-takes-stewardship-papers-leo-frank-case

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The Leo Frank case isn’t dead. The class warfare behind the story of his 1915 lynching keeps it tragically relevant.

October 30, 2009 | Steve Oney, author of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” is chief consultant to “The People v. Leo Frank.”

On Aug. 17, 1915, Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish industrialist, was lynched just outside Atlanta. The atrocity marked the culmination of an ugly conflict that began with the 1913 murder of a child laborer named Mary Phagan, who toiled for pennies an hour in Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory. Frank, the plant superintendent, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, though he always maintained his innocence. He appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, losing each time, whereupon Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. The decision so angered the general populace that a mob organized by a Superior Court judge, the son of a U.S. senator and a former governor abducted Frank from a well-guarded state prison and hanged him from an oak tree.

The lynching of Frank seems like an incident out of another America, one of gray-bearded Civil War veterans and Jim Crow, Model Ts and ragtime. Woodrow Wilson was president. “The Birth of a Nation” was playing in theaters. The story, however, remains very much alive. Throughout the fall, “Parade,” the Alfred Uhry musical inspired by the affair, has been drawing crowds to the Mark Taper Forum. On Nov. 8, KCET will broadcast “The People v. Leo Frank,” the first full-length documentary to explore the topic.

There are many reasons why the Frank case continues to command attention. For one, both the murder of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo Frank are crimes as puzzling as any Arthur Conan Doyle ever invented. Strange notes, racial paradoxes (an all-white jury convicted the factory boss on the testimony of a black witness) and an intricate conspiracy played a part. But finally the story is still relevant and intriguing because the conflict at its core foreshadows today’s red-state/blue-state hostilities.

The raw material for class warfare was, of course, there from the start — a lovely Southern girl found murdered at a business run by a Northern Jew. But it wasn’t until after Frank’s conviction that matters exploded. At the urging of the rabbi of Atlanta’s Reform synagogue, a nationwide campaign to exonerate the condemned man was inaugurated by Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and A.D. Lasker, the advertising genius behind Sunkist orange juice and Lucky Strike cigarettes. They believed that Frank had not been so much prosecuted as persecuted.

To attract attention to what he viewed as an injustice, Ochs launched the Times’ first — and to this day only — journalistic crusade. Over an 18-month period, the paper published not just dozens of editorials demanding a new trial for Frank but scores of news articles slanted in his favor. For his part, Lasker orchestrated public relations stunts and hired William Burns, the private detective who solved the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, to turn up new evidence. Although Ochs and Lasker were convinced that anti-Semitism had poisoned Frank’s trial, they and their supporters in New York and other urban areas did not take into account how their efforts would come across in the South or in working-class heartland neighborhoods.

Articulating the populist response was future U.S. Sen. Tom Watson, a Georgia lawyer and polemicist of such superior rhetorical gifts and inexhaustible vitriol that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck pale in comparison. Week after week in his widely circulated paper, the Jeffersonian, Watson rebutted Ochs and Lasker, arguing to his vast readership that self-appointed elites representing money and privilege had decreed that a child laborer’s life was not equal in value to that of a Jewish industrialist. “The agrarian rebel,” as historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed Watson, gave voice to a constituency that felt excluded from the halls of power in Washington and on Wall Street. When Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence, Watson called for the lynching.

No one involved in Frank’s death was ever convicted or even indicted. (The chief prosecutor of the county in which the incident occurred helped to plan it.) The polarizing impact of the affair made itself felt almost immediately. On Thanksgiving eve 1915, a few months after Frank was hanged, the Ku Klux Klan held its first modern-era cross-burning atop Stone Mountain, several miles east of Atlanta. (Three members of the lynching party were present.) Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League, which had been founded in 1913, took up the fight against religious intolerance in earnest.

The Frank case, however, was about more than racism and anti-Semitism. It was also about the conflicting perceptions of the nation’s haves and have-nots, the chasm between the people who appear to run things and those who feel they lack a say. While it’s doubtful that a mob could break into a state prison in 2009 and lynch an inmate, it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which something almost as bad transpired. In an era of escalating home foreclosures and rocketing unemployment, endless bank bailouts and hefty bonuses to Goldman Sachs traders, the Frank saga says as much about current events as it does about history.

Source:

The Leo Frank case isn’t dead. The class warfare behind the story of his 1915 lynching keeps it tragically relevant. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/oct/30/opinion/oe-oney30

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Off the Shelf: Letting go of a life’s work
Writer Steve Oney spent decades researching the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, but his voluminous files now belong to history.

January 10, 2010 | By Steve Oney

With emotions wavering between relief and regret, I remove a battered spiral notebook from a metal file cabinet and place it in an acid-free cardboard box open on my office floor. The notebook contains an interview I conducted in December 1984 at a VA hospital in Johnson City, Tenn., with 85-year-old Alonzo Mann. Some seven decades earlier, he told me, he’d seen a murderer carrying a girl’s body through the lobby of an Atlanta factory, but he was only 14 and too scared to call the police. As a result, an innocent industrialist was convicted of the crime and later lynched.

Mann’s assertion goes to the heart of an enduring debate about a great historical mystery. To me, however, the notebook possesses more than just documentary value. It contains the first research I conducted on a project that consumed nearly half my life.

Six years after the publication of “And the Dead Shall Rise,” my book about the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, I am packing my papers for donation to the Georgia Historical Society. The contents of a dozen bulging plastic bins and six overflowing file drawers must be indexed, then placed in the cartons that will carry them from Los Angeles to their new home: Hodgson Hall, an 1875 athenaeum just off Savannah’s live-oak-canopied Forsyth Park.

This is a tedious task, but what makes it more than simply time consuming is that every item conjures intense memories. There go a half-dozen file folders containing notes from tearful conversations with the children of the men who lynched Frank. A bundle of original letters and legal documents recalls its generous source: the now-dead son of a lawyer involved in the case. Dog-eared pages from an Atlanta phone book might not seem significant, but they’re links to the next of kin of a key witness, as well as reminders of the many calls I made trying to track him down. As for the stacks of Xeroxed newspaper stories, they bring back the countless hours I sat staring at microfilm machines in libraries across the country, hoping that by sheer dint of concentration I could summon the past.

Taken together, these materials might well serve as the basis for an exhibit on a kind of research no one in their right mind will ever again conduct. Working without scanners or flash drives, I relied on anachronistic devices and a willingness to camp out in archives for weeks. I ran off most of my newspaper copies on wet process printers, some set for negative film (black print on white background) and others for positive (white print on black background). At university special-collections departments, I took notes with stubby pencils while wearing white gloves.

The piece de resistance is my card filing system. Using 3-by-5 color-keyed cards organized by hand-labeled tabs — “Debate RE rape,” reads one, “Writ of Habeas Corpus,” another — I ultimately filled four shoe-box-sized, marble-paper-covered boxes of the sort favored by graduate students of another era. In my best moments, I think this is the stuff of a magnificent obsession. In my worst, I merely shake my head.

My putative rationale for holding onto everything has been that I’ve been serving as the consultant for “The People v. Leo Frank,” a 2009 PBS documentary inspired by “And the Dead Shall Rise.” The filmmaker and I have needed the papers for fact-checking purposes. But if this is true as far as it goes — director Ben Loeterman and I have spent a lot of time rifling my files — the real reason has less to do with the material’s continuing utility than with my fear of letting it go. During the nearly 20 years I spent amassing my files, I’ve grown fond of them, much as numismatists grow fond of their coins. I’ve also taken strength from them. Here is proof that I’ve done the work that allowed me to identify the men who’d perpetrated Frank’s lynching, arguably America’s worst anti-Semitic incident. And yet, for all of this, the papers have also tied me to a project I was finished with, which is a bad thing.

As I place the last of the files in the acid-free boxes, I realize I am rolling away a stone that for too long has impeded my future. Getting the material out of the office will allow me to move forward. Furthermore, not only do the papers belong in Georgia, where most of the events they describe transpired, but now they will be accessible to generations of scholars, which is reassuring, as the Frank case remains a topic of genuine fascination.

The story is rife with conundrums and rich with meaning. An all-white jury convicted Frank largely on the testimony of a black man — unheard of in the Jim Crow South. Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, compromised his newspaper’s objectivity in an attempt to exonerate Frank. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the modern Ku Klux Klan grew out of the affair.

Ticking off these facts, I feel a pang. How am I going to get along without my files? This is the material of a lifetime. But then again, as Todd Groce, president of the Georgia Historical Society, has told me: “Remember, you can come visit all of it any time you want.”

Oney is the author of “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.”

Source: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/10/entertainment/la-caw-off-the-shelf10-2010jan10

Review Introduction by M. C., followed with the book review by Allen Koenigsberg.

Generic Book Information:

Title: An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank
Author: Elaine Marie Alphin
Reading level: Young Adult (High School and College Students)
Library Binding: 152 pages
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
Published Date: March, 2010
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822589443
ISBN-13: 978-0822589440
Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.4 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds

Prerequisites:

Before reading any reviews of ‘An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’ here and on amazon.com, it is important for one to first familiarize oneself with the Author, Elaine Marie Alphin, her background, and the side she takes in the Leo Frank case, which is all clearly revealed on her web site, located here: http://www.lernerbooks.com/anunspeakablecrime/.

After reviewing the contents of Elaine Marie Alphin’s website, and becoming familiar with the views she expresses on the case, and the opinions she asserts, one should then follow through with reading the abridged version of the book, “An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank”, which provides numerous excerpts of the text pages of her book. Available to peruse free in its limited form, online from Google books, located here: An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank By Elaine Marie Alphin (Google Books Online). Though the free Google books version of her work is limited to an extent, there is still enough of the book available to give one an idea of her bias, sympathies and some of the racial assertions she makes — which will be quoted here.

Borrow, Don’t Buy!

Should one want to read the actual physical book, the best recommendation is to avoid purchasing it, because irregardless of the political position or side one takes on the Leo Frank case, the book is weak on the facts and filled with countless errors, several of which will be discussed at length. In these regards the best option is to save money and instead inquire to determine if one can borrow a free copy from a local library or through inter library loan. If a copy of the book is not available at your local library, consider buying a used version of the book, instead of a new copy. The used price of this item on Amazon.com should give you an indication of whether or not the reviews of this book are mostly accurate or inaccurate.

A complete digitized version of this book will likely make it’s way online in the future as all books are ultimately destined.

Start By Reading the Official Leo Frank Trial Documents:

To put everything in proper context, it is strongly urged, before obtaining a free copy of this book in question from the library, to carefully study primary sources of Leo Frank case legal documents concerning the trial and appeals (see the Georgia Supreme Court Archive 1913+ available). By reading and studying the dry leaves of the official records in the Leo Frank case one can make their own independent interpretation of the facts and evidence, without the skewed biases of the unilateral artificially created majority position created by secondary source writers who are typically Leo Frank partisans and weave together falsehoods on the trial and aftermath.

Becoming fairly acquainted with the Leo Frank trial evidence and testimony, reading the 1913 to 1915 newspaper accounts of the case will enable one to better understand the chain of events, so as to be able to clearly see the problems, flaws and issues (and what was left out) with Elaine Marie Alphin’s interpretation of the Leo Frank saga and why her version of the Leo Frank affair lacks truth, veracity and legitimacy. More importantly, understanding the facts and evidence in the Leo Frank case should make it clear why Elaine Marie Alphin can not be considered a reliable academic or scholarly source.

Is Elaine Marie Alphin perpetuating the bogus and artificially created popular-culture myth surrounding Leo Frank that his conviction was a vast bigoted anti-Jewish conspiracy and bigoted political-social injustice? Was Leo Frank really suspected and convicted on trumped up evidence because Leo Frank was a Northern Jew? These are questions that can only be answered by studying the primary sources of the Leo Frank case and early 20th century Georgian history.

From the Prosecution Side of the Leo Frank Equation: Elaine Marie Alphin, has joined the ranks of open and vocal Frankites (Leo Frank cult members), who have for the last century been perpetuating numerous lies, smears, slanders and defamation against the people associated with the “prosecution side” of Leo Frank case, the smears often include making broad sweeping racist, prejudiced and bigoted statements against Southerners. Elaine Marie Alphin, achieves these crass political and antagonistic social ends, utilizing a plethora of media tools and proselytizing media methodologies on her website, including using portions of her book, informational PDFs, audio and video, to: Frankite, “politically correct” and “transsexualize” the Leo Frank case from the prosecution of a pedophile, rapist and murder, flipping it into the struggle of a Promethean stoic hero, a noble Jewish martyr mellow dramatically being thrown on the funeral pyre of ethnoreligious racism, anti-Jewish prejudices and bigotry.

Reflections of the Jewish-Gentile Culture and Race War

From the European-American Perspective: Elaine Marie Alphin’s book represents pouring high octane gasoline on the smoldering Jewish-Gentile relations, the manifested and subtle “Jewish-Gentile ethnoreligious cultural race war and conflict” – which the “Leo Frank Case” was not in its beginnings, but has artificially become by Frankite agitators and trouble makers.

A Dirty Bloody Race War Between Jews and Gentiles

Tom Watson called Leo Frank partisans and followers of the Leo Frank rapist-pedophile-strangler exoneration cult – Frankites. The word seems quite appropriate, as years, decades and now a century later, there are people still misrepresenting the Leo Frank case in an attempt to socially exonerate and rehabilitate Leo Frank.

Elaine Marie Alphin and other Leo Frank partisans have been using the Leo Frank case to instigate a vicious culture and race war between Jews and Gentiles, and it’s working quite well, the rage in response to the lies, smears and fighting words are smoldering like a series nuclear bomb tests detonated underground with a steady stream of smears against Southerners and European-Americans as a whole coming from the Frankite camp.

To make matters worse Alphin is not even subtle about her disgusting smears against European-Americans, from beginning to end, Elaine Marie Alphin’s book takes every opportunity to engage in loathsome monstrous race baiting, trolling, hypocritical racism and she plays countless unsubstantiated accusations from the racecard deck. You can’t help but feel nausea as you turn the leaves of this “high-production” value book, with each and every weirdo race obsessed admonishment she uncouthly forces into the paragraphs of this culture-war Jewish-Gentile racial propaganda book.

From the European-American perspective, this book reads like the subtle instigation of that eternal war of revenge that has been tightly cycling through and between tribes of people throughout history and as a result Alphin has perpetuated the Leo Frank case into a 100 year culture war between Jews and Gentiles.

Famosus Libellus: Blood Libel Smears Against Everyone Not on the Side of Leo Frank

In the 100 year tradition of the Frankite Smear Mongers, Elaine Marie Alphin in her book basically perpetuates the worst kind of blood libel and racist slander possible against Southerners, Georgians, European-Americans, Christians, local newspapers and Atlantian Police detectives – the Latin phrase famosus libellus means a libelous writing.

Alphin suggests the Police suspected, railroaded, and framed Leo Frank because of anti-semitic and regional bigotry at the time, and the immediate emergence of Leo Frank into the status of prime suspect was catalyzed by the “media frenzy” which impelled the Police to do so (Elaine Marie Alphin WWW, Feb. 2011). Her statements suggest the Leo Frank case was a state sponsored antisemitic railroading, framing and murder supported by the general culture at the time, because Leo Frank was a Northern Jew lynch-crucified on a tree at the blind hands of regional and racial prejudices.

Evidence, Not Racism

People who have studied the Leo Frank case, know that Leo Frank was suspected, because of a mountain of evidence that immediately emerged against him, not because of virulent anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish prejudices, bigotry, media pressure or media frenzies. Jewish and Southern historians note that Anti-Semitism was virtually non-existent in the South and Jews were a respected people that participated successfully in Southern politics, business, law, manufacturing, finance, culture and education. Ironically, white racial separatist Southern culture suited the racially conscious collective Jewish community with a kind of genetic harmony, because Jews happily embraced their own brand and version of racial separatist philosophies in a Jewish assimilation context.

Smears Against the Honor of Southerners: Murder “Innocent” White Jews and Let Free “Guilty” Black Murderers

The ultimate insult.

The substanceless and slanderous statements don’t just stop with the “anti-semitic prejudiced police” and “instigating local newspapers media frenzy”, she implicates Southerners too – All of them. Her statements about Southerners amounts to the worst kind of blood libel defamation, because she is suggesting they didn’t suspect, convict, and lynch Frank because of the mountain of genuine ineluctable evidence which emerged against him, overwhelmingly proving his guilt, but instead because he was an “innocent” White Jew and a “guilty” black man was not worthy enough, in terms of some kind of value, to pay the price for the murder of little Mary Phagan (“even though Conley did it”). You have to read it to believe it! Websites can change, but chiseled in stone book editions can’t.

Does that overt supposition asserted in her book, like many others, pass the common sense test?

Hogwash

The assertion Alphin uses throughout her audio, video and writing tends to indicate she is implicating the whole of Southern people as part of of a vast murderous antisemitic conspiracy directed against Leo Frank because he was a Jew.

More than 100 years ago in 1913, Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold tried the same thing at the trial. Alphin stoops to the lowest, basest and most desperate position possible in her assertions, just like the original Leo Frank Defense team did when they realized they had a losing case, like them, she resorts to playing the antisemitism card to it’s fullest. (See: the two final speeches of Reuben Rose Arnold August and October 1913)

One Hundred Years of Smears: The Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Against European-Americans

Elaine Marie Alphin is making what amounts to the false accusation of “Jewish Blood Libel” against the good people of Georgia and the South, it is the same one being made over the last one hundred years by the Jewish Community. A new artificially created Mythology of Leo Frank is born.

Alphin in the tradition of the Frankite cult is unleashing the ultimate century-old smear against Southern European-Americans, saying the people of Georgia openly, maliciously, intentionally and collectively convicted and assassinated an “innocent” man because Gentiles are collectively antisemitic hate mongers (for no reason?), this 100 year old hideous Frankite position is one which can not be substantiated by any reliable sources or factual evidence, and is made despite the fact there was virtually no recorded antisemitism in the South.

Southerners are politely demanding that these false accusations stop.

From the Far-Right Southerner Position:

Conservative Perspective on Elaine Marie Alphin: Elaine Marie Alphin like all the other Frankites of the last 100+ years are showing their true colors, they are the subversive subset and part of a much larger morbid movement within the blood stream of Western Civilization, a perfidious conglomeration of treacherous people undermining the United States, instigating a no holds barred dirty cultural war, from within, and against the people of the United States of America with these race war instigation fighting words. Her statements are a challenge to the honor of the good people of the South, European-Americans, Christians and American patriots, she is part of the movement instigating an unnecessary ethnoreligious cultural race war between Jews and Gentiles in the libraries, schools, colleges, universities and Internet. Many Southerners incensed by these insane accusations against them consider Elaine Marie Alphin to be a cultural terrorist trying to defame their Southern forefathers including, all Georgians, Georgian Police, Detectives, Government Officials and the DA’s Office with racial propaganda. To top it off Elaine Marie Alphin wants to be a pedophile cheerleader and exonerate a pedophile murderer.

According to Elaine Marie Alphin, Direct Quote:

A black watchman found Mary’s body brutally beaten and apparently raped. Police arrested the watchman, but they weren’t satisfied that he was the killer. Then they paid a visit to Leo Frank, the factory’s superintendent, who was both a Northerner and a Jew. Spurred on by the media frenzy and prejudices of the time, the detectives made Frank their prime suspect, one whose conviction would soothe the city’s anger over the death of a young white girl. (2011)

Take a closer look at the last part of this particular Elaine Marie Alphin Quote, “…one whose conviction would soothe the city’s anger over the death of a young white girl….” … this suggestion on her web site is more subtle and couched, compared to what she more openly and directly suggests in her book about racist White Southerners consciously choosing an “innocent” White Jew over a “guilty” Black Negro…

In the early part of her book, “An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank”, Elaine Marie Alphin, suggests the most perverse smear and outlandish claim that White racial separatist Southerners of 1913 are essentially so depraved, loathsome and antisemitic, that they would rather openly let a “guilty black pedophile-rapist and strangler” go free and instead railroad and frame-up an “innocent” White Jew. This instance will be discussed later with direct quotes from her book, but this little snap shot is to give you more of a warm up idea about one of the newest racial propaganda books to come out of the woodwork and into the limelight concerning the Leo Frank anti-Semitism hoax from 1913 to 2010 and onward.

Factoid: Back in the day circa 1913 to 1915, there was actually a large and successful national group which formed, calling itself the Leo Frank Defense League and their efforts live on today 100+ years later through the generations of new Leo Frank Mythologists.

More on the Elaine Marie Alphin Quote: “…Spurred on by the media frenzy and prejudices of the time, the detectives made Frank their prime suspect…”

The Prejudices of the Time (“media frenzy”)

From the time of the discovery of Mary Phagan’s dead body at 3:17AM on Sunday, April, 27, 1913, till the time Leo Frank was arrested about 56 hours later at 11AM on Tuesday, April 29, 1913, not a single word, sentence, paragraph or page was uttered by the media that was antisemitic, anti-Jewish, instigating or pushing Leo Frank as the prime suspect because he was Jewish or because the regional prejudices (including north vs. south tensions at the time) spurred the police on to arrest Frank and make him a prime suspect.

The prevailing artificial culture created by Frankites surrounding Leo Frank in terms of both its regionalism (or a civil war tension, 50 years after the civil war) and Gentile anti-Jewish racism claims are grossly over exaggerated.

Anti-Semitism was Virtually Non-Existent: Shared Freedom

The fact Anti-Semitism was virtually non-existent in the South is historically well known, and Jews shared in the liberties and religious freedoms that Christians enjoyed. Jews were respected as equals to Whites and Christians in the South, and many Jews were very successful and held prominent positions in politics, education, law, finance and business. The White Racial Separatist South was a free market boon to the Jewish community against the modern claims of the loudest opponents of Western Civilization.

The Media Frenzy Impelled Anti-Semitism and Bigotry?

Not a single anti-Semitic sentence open or covert was ever published in the “media frenzy” suggesting to wrongfully convict Leo Frank from the time of Leo Frank’s arrest on Tuesday, April 29, 1913 at 11AM to the affirmation of his conviction by Judge Leonard Strickland Roan on August 26, 1913.

More than a bakers dozen of higher level judges agreed Leo Frank got a fair trial.

Anti-Semitism: The Media Never Tipped off the People About a Leo Frank Murder Confession.

It was police leaks that made it into the media, not the other way around.

If anything the newspapers at the time “covered” for Leo Frank. In fact the newspapers at the time, never even revealed to the public that Leo Frank made what amounted to a shocking and blunderous murder confession on August 18, 1913 when Frank “unconsciously” went to the bathroom in the metal room at the same time he said Mary Phagan arrived in State’s Exhibit B. If anything they tended to side with him more than he should have fairly and neutrally received during his trial, the newspapers wanted a good fight, because the good fight ensures a total sellout of every newspaper published about the topic. Leo Frank got better coverage than deserving of him.

Ironically, concerning Leo Frank’s 4 hour testimony on August 18 1913, the newspapers said superficially it was far and away one of the best at the trial – even though it was a “ratcheting” rambling disaster filled with damaging and questionable statements which the prosecution attacked ruthlessly. The newspapers never provided deeper analysis on what Frank had said, the newspapers and “Alphin-created” media frenzies had clearly been neutral or favorable to Leo Frank when all things are considered and put on the balancing scale (See: The Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1913 to August 27, 1913).

Not Even Tom Watson Made the Suggestion

In the last 100 years there has not been found a single piece of reliable primary source evidence, open or covert, that suggests Leo Frank – should, would, or could – have been arrested because he was a “Northern Jew”, nor was there any prejudiced groups of people or individuals calling for the police to make Leo Frank the prime suspect because he was Jewish. Nor was their any playing on prejudices, because Frank was a Yankee Northerner. The police made Leo Frank the prime suspect because a mount everest of suspicious clues Leo Frank created himself which tended to overwhelmingly pointed to the guilty finger inward, it was not because of a media frenzy or prejudices of the time. Leo Frank was not a very good manipulator against the police.

Leo Frank Incriminated Himself

The voluminous amount of evidence which came out against Leo Frank within the first 56 hours of the murder discovery will be discussed in long winded detail and is reviewed exhaustively on this web site. Both sides of the Leo Frank case including the prosecution and defense will be given representation on this site. This site intends to apply a telescope, magnifying glass, microscope, wide angle lens and electron microscope on every detail of this case, including putting testimony and evidence through the common sense test (which is sorely needed).

Could a Jew suggest a Blood Libel Smear Couched as the Antisemitism Card, would it have little place in the South?

The Ant-Semitism Card that was played at the Leo Frank trial, left Southerners perplexed. The Jewish community of Atlanta was not only highly assimilated, respected and perceived to be equal and Southern, their was virtually no anti-semitism, especially since thriving Jewish businesses, created countless thousands of jobs for the Gentile community. And despite Alphins expressions that Southern laborers in the South were paid much less than Northern laborers in the North, the locals did not perceive it that way, they were getting much better wages in the city verses their kinsmen that worked as farm staff or worked in the rural areas.

Atlanta was a thriving, alive and growing city. Jews were considered to be God loving people who went to “church”, and when Southerners described Jews going to “church” that didn’t mean they weren’t Jewish or that Jews went to church, that was just the Southern Christian and familiar way of expressing their general respect for Jews who were perceived on the surface as being a moral and righteous people (PvLF, 2009) because they went to their own temple synagogue services each weekend, where they sang, prayed and respected the Creator. On the surface Jews were considered good White people and most Southerners believed it was more than skin deep.

Steve Oney, derailed one of the central Anti-Semitism claims of the ADL and Bnai Brith, he corrected an important historical myth when he stated, authoritatively, that there is no evidence that crowds shouted “Hang the Jew or I’ll hang you,” through the allegedly “open windows of the steamy” Atlanta courtroom where Frank stood trial in the August heat of 1913. The Leo Frank trial court room was the coolest place in the city and had fans and ozoneators (precursors to air conditioners) cooling the air in the court rooms with closed windows. Even with the windows closed, no one was shouting outside “Hang the Jew or We’ll Hang You” or any variation of that Anti-Semitic Hoax.

According to Frey, even after the Frank case had played to its tragic climax in the later half of 1915, Victor Kriegshaber, a German-Jew, was elected president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, in 1916.

Jews Thrived in the South

Jews thrived in the South financially and lived the patrician good life, compared to their fellow Jew yorkers shivering their tooshies off in the cranky 6 to 8 months combined of shitty weather throughout the entire NY calendar year. There were certainly more opportunities to make big money in New York, but “quality of life” is not measured by working your ass off and life away to be buried in a solid gold coffin in NYC. The South had the advantage of milder winters and a lot more elbow room, plus the girls in NY are more stuck up, cold and have constipated personalities, where as the Southern girls are a lot prettier and friendlier on average.

Leo Frank Prime Suspect Because of Evidence, Not Bigotry and Media Pressure

The police made Frank their prime suspect and arrested him within 56 hours of the discovery of Mary Phagan, because many red flags went up concerning things pertaining to what Leo Frank said and what others said about his behavior on that infamous day, especially by the “Night Witch”, Newt Lee, AND NOT because of media pressure, frenzies or prejudices against Frank’s heritage and his former address in Brooklyn five years ago where he grew up.

Leo Frank, the Only Suspect to Act Peculiarly.

Before the police even told Leo Frank about the murder on the morning of Sunday, April 27, 1913, when they paid him a visit, they cautiously observed him, Frank was shivering and quivering like a crack baby (yes, they actually had pregnant women addicted to coke at the time). The body language of Leo Frank tended to be suspicious and he ended up giving himself away since no one else questioned or examined by police and detectives acted so nervous or behaved so peculiarly. This was obvious for detectives and the immediate analysis within the first 48 hours needed to have all eyes turned on him for numerous reasons which will be discussed at length.

Collar and Tie: April 27, 1913, Morning Time

Leo Frank the Superintendent was like anyone else who put on a tie day in and day out, like the average police officers and investigators who paid him a visit at 7AM on Sunday Morning, April 27th 1913, they could put on a collar and tie with their eyes closed, as surely as Frank had done so with ease for the last five years or more during his tenure at the National Pencil Company. However, on that morning of Sunday, April 27, 1913, when the police arrived, Frank had difficulty doing very simple tasks, he struggled and fumbled with his shirt, collar and tie. There were notions Frank was trying to delay going to the factory and trivialize things, these things would turn into questions for the police: Why?

Nervous Rapid Fire Questions

A visibly hung over and strung out Leo Frank was trembling, nervous, shaking, quaking, firing off questions at a million miles a second before the police could even attempt to answer them, and Frank was God awful ghostly pale blue. The voice of Leo Frank was trembling and terribly hoarse possibly from excessive chain smoking the night before, because these behaviors and physiological reflections were noted they may have raised possible red flags of suspicion early on for the police when they started adding things up later.

One simple observation by the police: Leo Frank was the only person freaking and bugging out to the max before the police even told him what it was about when they arrived at his house at 7AM on Sunday, April 27, 1913.

Psychology of Behavior and Emotions

When things in context do not make any sense and seem out of place, the psychology of body language also reveals a lot as well, these things are considered within their context as part of the many intuitive mental tools developed in the arsenal of every police detective investigator since the dawn of civilization, because it was part of their criminal science before they had the nanoscopic forensic sciences we have today. Intuition, wisdom and common sense are some of the most powerful tools then and today, even with the advent of modern sciences, the conscious mind is the most powerful tool in the universe.

Newt Lee Marinated and Interrogated

Once Newt Lee was arrested at the scene of the crime, he would have been drilled and jack hammered into exhaustion about every minute detail of the last 24 hours leading up to the discovery of Mary Phagan’s beaten, strangled and raped body, it would have all been recorded on paper. Another powerful tool in the police is the stenographer, one who captures things down and for later police and detective teams to cross reference it.

What Newt revealed to the police about the behavior of his boss Leo Frank the day before on the afternoon of April 26, 1913, would be interpreted as suspicious by any intuitive detective and reasonably intelligent police staff member, at the very least it raised eye brows, suspicion and little red flags.

The First Arrest Was Very Revealing About Leo Frank’s Behavior

Given the demanding nature of the police and the relatively recent timing of the approximately ~16.5 hour aged murder and its 2nd alerted discovery by police at about ~3:45AM on April 27, 1913, the police would have wanted to know immediately everything that occurred within the 16.5 hours between Phagan’s arrival at the factory (based on Phagan’s Mom, Mrs. Coleman saying on Sunday that Mary Phagan had left for the factory at 11:45) noonish on April 26, 1913 and the 1st discovery of her dead body at 3:15AM in the morning the next day on April 27, 1913. The murder could only have occurred at the factory given common sense and Leo Frank admitted to being one of the only people at the shuttered factory from noon onward who had seen her last. In a virtually empty factory on August 26, 1913 Leo Frank admitted he alone was the last person to see her alive. Naturally this would have raised suspicions against Leo Frank.

Minty Fresh Memory: The Bossman is acting Distressed!

Even though Newt was tired because he had an hour less sleep and was deep into his shift, Newt Lee’s recollection would have been spearmint fresh about his arrival at just minutes before 4PM (3:57 PM) at the factory on April 26, 1913. Newt Lee would have recounted Leo Frank’s suspicious actions which were odd and out of place. Leo Frank was acting very NOTICEABLY weird, nervous, frenetic and unusual toward Newt Lee that day given what happened that day in the factory.

Calm and Cool to High Strung

On April 26, 1913 at 4PM Frank was bustling and behaving in a way that was not like his normal haughty, calm, cool and collected self as the be-throned king and bossman sat in his swivel chair in the second floor window front office and was the B’nai B’rith President.

Using common sense test: Do you think the police couldn’t figure out Newt Lee, the man framed in the contrived murder notes, was innocent considering Lee had started work 4 hours and then 6 hours after Phagan went missing at the factory? Was Phagan locked in a cage for 4 or 6 hours in the basement, until Newt Lee arrived to kill her? most probably not. The police also couldn’t come up with a motive for Newt Lee to set himself up and taken at face value Newt Lee “acted” like an innocent man by attempting to call the Superintendent Leo Frank for 8 full minutes and even though he failed reaching Mr. Frank at his home, Newt was successful when he called the police. The murder notes which obviously seemed to point to Newt Lee the long slim tall negro “nightwitch”, would make it seem odd that he would alert the police about the lifeless body of Mary Phagan. It was not considered typical negro behavior at the time for one to beat, rape and strangle a White girl to death, sit around and write literature pointing to yourself and then calling the poh-po-lice.

The Murder Likely Happened Within Minutes of Her Arrival.

The police and detectives were looking for things out of place, leads and clues which is standard protocol.

Newt Lee’s statements and Leo Frank’s noticeably different behavior don’t necessarily make anyone guilty per say, but it naturally would create some level of suspicion in the intuitive minds of police and detectives, when added to the fact Frank admittedly was the last person to see Phagan alive and the only person in the virtually empty building on his floor on a Saturday State holiday. The murder notes written in classical ebonix caused the police to acknowledge them as possibly “negro” notes and would have made Leo Frank aware of this when they put them in front of him to read.

Keep in mind that at this time Leo Frank does not even dare mention his employee the Negro Jim Conley to the Police at the early stages in the investigation. What makes Frank’s silence even more ironic, is that Leo Frank knows Jim Conley can write, because Frank has Conley’s signed pocketwatch pawn-layaway contracts in his top desk drawer.

The contrived murder notes written in quaint Southern Negro ebonix meant the police had to track down the Black writer and would naturally want to speak with every African-American employee at the factory.

Newt Lee Friday, April, 25, 1913, Circumstances Not Prejudice Made Leo Frank the Prime Suspect

Newt Lee going over the events on April 26, 1913, with the police, leading up to the discovery of the body, would have meant he specifically recounted every detail he remembered about Leo Frank telling him [Newt Lee] to come in to the factory an hour earlier when they spoke together at payroll on payday Friday, April 25, 1913 at 6pm the day before the infamous murder and then once Newt arrived an hour early like he was told to do, arriving on April 26, 1913, at 4pm in the afternoon, instead of his normal and usual 5pm in the evening (1 hour difference), a big red flag went up, when Leo Frank then assertively requested Newt Lee out of the factory at 4 PM, telling him to leave for 2 to 2.5 more hours and go have a good time, this would also raise red flags considering the evidence of the crime in the basement and the metal room. The Police would naturally ask why does Leo Frank try to create 2 to 2.5 more available hours in an empty factory during the late afternoon to evening period on a Saturday and State holiday?

Newt Lee Suggests He Would Rather Sleep for 2 hours. The police asked why not just let him nap in the packing room?

Despite Newt Lee resisting Leo Frank’s request to leave the building by telling Leo Frank he [Newt Lee] was tired because he had an hour less sleep last night, followed by Newt Lee requesting permission to sleep in the packing room for an hour or so, it was perceived as being avoided and rejected by Leo Frank. Newt begrudgingly left the building, something he had never been told to do before during his 3 week tenure.

Frank flat out denied Newt a chance to catch an hour of sleep in the packing room and instead practically pushed-forced Newt Lee out of the factory telling him to come back at either 6pm or 6:30pm and go out and have a good time. Newt Lee chose to leave for 2 more hours at his bosses request, even though he could have theoretically left for 2.5 hours. Newt Lee chose to come back at the much earlier end of the half-hour range given to him by Leo Frank encompassing 6PM to 6:30PM, the time span that Leo Frank gave him was an hour later than he normally was supposed to be there on Saturdays which was always locked in at 5pm.

What more did Leo Frank have to do during these 2 or 2.5 hours? After Police cracked Jim Conley, the question evolved into was he waiting for Jim Conley to come back and finish the job on the promise of $200 to dispose of the body in the cellar furnace?

Once the Night Watch Arrives He is Not to Leave the Premises of the Building

There was also a general non-negotiable rule for the factory nightwatchmen that once they entered the building, they were not allowed to leave the property of the building during their scheduled shift, except for smoking a cig in the doorway of the factory. No other exceptions were generally noted.

6PM April 26 1913

When Newt Lee arrived at minutes before 6pm after a two hour zombie hiatus to go out and “have a good time” after the parade was already over.

Twice as Long on Changing the Time Clock Slip

Frank, who had presumably spent the last 5 years (1908 to 1913) putting in and taking out time slips, for some reason at that exact time when Newt Lee returned from his 2 hours on the town, Frank bumbled and fumbled like a jitterbug with it the time card in front of Newt Lee, struggling to put the new time slip in and making lame excuses that it was difficult, something just didn’t fly with the police.

The police would later ask themselves why are Leo Frank’s hands quivering so intensely he can’t seem to put the time card in the punch clock in the standard normal time?

Cigarette Break

After taking twice as long to put in the new time slip, Newt Lee punched the time clock in Leo’s office and gingerly in his overalls pigeontoed downstairs to the first floor, then he went out to the main stone frame doorway to smoke an evening fag, inaugurating his long Saturday nightwatchman rounds, which also included the grave yard shift.

While the tall and slim red eye’d Newt Lee was sitting on a crate in the front doorway Bogarting away on a 1913 cigarette, an ex-factory employee known as Gantt arrived at the doorway in an unbeknownst manner, he too was a long legged man who just recently made long sweeping urgent steps from the saloon bar across the street. The arrival of Gantt had appeared before Newt and they started chatting away about one of the most important subjects in the universal cosmos, his shoes. Gantt had known Mary Phagan and her family for years, but Gantt wasn’t looking for her, he stopped by the factory to pick up something he would need to find a new job as he was recently made unemployed at the National Pencil Factory over “tudahllahs” to put it in Leo Frank’s Brooklynese.

Gantt came for Four Shoes in total, a black set and a tan set, he had forgotten and left them in the packing room 2 weeks before, the unemployed Gantt needed them to pound the pavement looking for a new job.

I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!

The former accounting employee had been dismissed by Leo because there was a shortage of $2 and he had been responsible for balancing the books properly and did not make good on the missing funds which were attributed to either him taking them, misplacing them or simply the result of poor fund management. When the frazzled Frank rushed out the factory door at 6:15PM, and ran into the former book keeping employee, Frank fell back scared practically trying to crawl away backwards, but it was too late, he was spotted, and had to compose himself. The fear Leo Frank expressed was not because he was scared of Gantt, the Negro Newt Lee could easily have taken that tall skinny bean stalk, Frank had an engram of something else. Frank was in a nearly imperceptibly short moment of fear because Gantt had known Phagan and her family quite well, the immediate mind flash assumption of Frank was Gantt might have been looking for Phagan. It was probably another heart pounding stomach churning moment for Leo Frank after a half day of them.

Black Shoes and Tan Shoes

When Gantt revealed he was only there to get his shoes he left behind, Frank was relieved beyond words, but still, he dropped his head dejectedly, and told Gantt he saw a negro sweep the lost shoes out of the building, (notice that Leo Frank does not mention the Negro sweeper Jim Conley by name, but genericizes it as some negro swept them out) but Gantt changed the shoe color adding another black pair to the mix and out maneuvered the cautiously resistant Frank who was in a rush to get the hell out of dodge and go home, without raising any more suspicions than he might have already created in this 6:15PM, April 26, 1913, little skirmish he acquiesced.

Avoid Drama at Any Cost

Moreover, the last thing Leo Frank really wanted was to create a big drama over the shoes as it might draw suspicion later as to why he doesn’t want someone who knows Mary Phagan from going into an empty and locked up factory to get his shoes. Frank instead told Newt Lee to follow Gantt up and stay with him during the entry, retrieval and exit. From the front door based on factory diagrams and repeating the distance one needs to cover, It takes less than 2 minutes to walk up the stairs, into the packing room and then down the stairs and out of the factory.

It would become stomach twisting and eat away at Leo Frank as he walked away toward the electric-car on his way home, wondering if Gantt was really there for only his shoes. Leo Max Frank had to be sure and couldn’t wait one minute more until he got home.

But before getting home, Leo Frank had something else very important he had to do. Frank continued briskly on his way home, stopped at a store and bought a big box of chocolates for his wife, perhaps out of some kind of normal guilt or remorse, as it certainly wasn’t a “special occasion” or was it?

Frank came home with a big box of chocolates.

Observers are wondering what is Leo Frank doing buying his heavy set wife who weighs more than him a box of chocolates, especially when Skinny Leo Frank always complained behind Lucille’s back about her being his “big fat wife”? There is certainly nothing wrong with buying your wife chocolates, indeed it should be encouraged, but when all things are considered, it suggested Leo Frank was possibly trying to pay down some kind of an invisible guilt and remorse, more than it reflected love. Men who know Men, tended to interpret the chocolate for what it really was, a partly feeble attempt by a guilty man to pay down on his remorse and betrayal.

The Late Evening

For another perspective on what happened at the Frank-Selig house hold that evening on April 26, 1913, Check out Minola McKnight’s affidavit, State’s Exhibit J, that will put that delicious box of chocolates into real perspective. It was one nightmarish late evening at the Selig-Frank residence for Lucy aka Mrs. Leo Frank, an incensed wife who waited nearly 2 weeks to visit her husband after he got arrested on Tuesday, April 29, 1913. Did those actions by Lucy betray she knew the truth, as Magnolia Mcknights affidavit suggests?

Back to 6:30 PM and 7:00 PM on April 26, 1913

Frank did something he had never done before concerning Newt Lee, he called Newt Lee at the factory twice, one time he got no answer at 6:30PM, and a second time he got Newt on the phone at 7PM to find out if everything was OK.

Frank was trying to see if everything went OK (no irony intended) with Gantt and if Newt had discovered the body or not during his rounds, because it was Newt Lee’s job to walk every square inch of the factory in 30 minute cycles. Newt Lee might have done a “half-assed” job when no one was looking and didn’t discover the body right away.

That night Leo Frank would chain smoke his cigarettes and guzzle down the liquor cabinet until he was a glutinous mess, shot gunning and swilling whiskey like it was goin’ out of style. A drink in one hand and one cigarette after the other dangling from his pretty mouth.

A Sense of Urgency: Early Morning, April 27, 1913

However, later when it was so early in the morning the next day, April 27, 1913, Newt Lee needed to use the “negro” toilet in the basement and get into the thinking man’s position, when he stood up after finishing his “bidness” and not wiping himself, he suddenly spotted something in the gloom, it looked like a leg or something. Newt Lee thought the scary looking thing next to cellar’s furnace was a prank — though it certainly was not Halloween — he began to approach it with his smokey lantern in the pitch black basement.

3:15PM, April 27, 1913, Newt Lee Discovers the Body of Mary Phagan

Newt Lee tried to call Leo Frank for 8 full minutes on the phone with no answer, Leo Frank was stone cold drunk in his bed alone, tossing and turning, while his “big fat wife” as he affectionately called her in real life behind her back, slept on the rug next to the bed at the request of Leo Frank (and if you want to know the inside scoup of the erratic events on that evening on April 26, 1913 in the Selig-Frank residence, you can re-read the section on Minola (Magnolia) McKnight).

Suicidal Leo Frank Confessed to His Wife Lucille

Frank nearly poisoned himself to death with whiskey, half-confessed the murder of Phagan to his wife, saying, “He didn’t know why he would murder” and called for his pistol so he could adolf-hitler himself, but the dinky coward had no shame and chose instead to humiliate himself, his wife, family and the Jewish community in a 100+ year ordeal which is still raging today thanks to the Jewish Frankite Cult and its Leo Frank cult activist members who have turned Leo Frank into a cultural icon against Christians, European-Americans and Western Civilization.

It can’t be sad enough, and the Frankites rarely mention that the suspicion against Leo Frank had everything to do with him being the last person to admit seeing Mary Phagan alive and in a virtually empty factory on a Saturday State Holiday, excepting for Frank on the second floor and 2 labor employees hammering away on the 4th floor tearing down a partition, there was no one else in the building in the afternoon — except Jim Conley — the person Leo Frank never brought up and later denies knowing was even there on August 26, 1913. (Brief of Evidence, 1913)

Newsie George Epps

There were also allegations from George Epps, that Phagan had confided in him that her creepy touchy feely boss Leo Frank was inappropriately flirting with her, winking at her, scaring her, running up in front of her when she tried to leave, getting a little bit too close “if you know what I mean” and making subtle sexual innuendos. What we might normally call today, adulterous and aggressive sexual harassment with a pedophile twist.

Bottom Line: Elaine Marie Alphin, Smear Monger or Truth Sayer?

The book by Elaine Marie Alphin is a fantastic collection of lies, disgusting smears, bigoted slander and outlandish accusations against Southerners accusing them of everything from them openly letting a black rapist killer go free so an innocent Jew can be blamed, to antisemitism and railroading Leo Frank because of media frenzy pressure toward the weak minded police — a vast prejudiced conspiracy because Frank was a Brooklyn Hebrew. The list of atrocious utterings in Alphins book are so numerous they must be debunked.

Unscholarly: Weak on the Facts Another Major Issue

This book is NOT a reliable source and should not be cited in scholarly research or papers. The book is not only weak on the facts, but makes every kind of weird racial, Frankite and politically correct accusation against Southerners you could possibly imagine. It reads like titty twister racial guilt and it notions egalitarianisms hunger to regress toward some kind of lower mean. This propaganda book should be labeled a Jewishesque style culture war hate book and for the unsubstantiated slanderous remarks she makes against Southerners in her books, it means she should never be used as any kind of serious source in any place of higher learning, except when educating people on the kinds of lies being perpetuated about the Leo Frank case.

An Unspeakable Crime was written by Elaine Marie Alphin, for high school and college students, it’s a smooth read with good stoppage and flow by a seasoned writer. Even if the book is profoundly weak on the facts, whips up wildly disgusting, psychotic and outlandish defamation, enraging people to a boiling crescendo, and not worthy of high school, college students, teachers, professor, researchers or anyone for that matter, the book is ultimately primarily for the self-deceiving Leo Max Frank extremist group known as the Frankites – not the general public. This proselytizing book is dangerous for the naive as well.

Normal US Grading System: A, B, C, D, F

Alphin gets a B+ for her writing style as the book was mostly a smooth read, it wasn’t quite an A- so it gets an 87 out of 100 for her writing style, but a BIG FAT (what Leo Frank called his wife behind her back) F (eff) for the substance of the book.

Alphin gets an F (failure) for Intellectual Honesty and Intellectual Heroism (telling the truth despite the consequences).

Aphin gets an F (failure) for Facts and Research

As a student reading Alphins book for the first time, I kind of feel like she doesn’t give enough detail, Alphin gets a D for details

Alphin gets an A for Racial Propaganda Political Correctness

Before we get to the book review let’s meet her:

Meet Elaine Marie Alphin

Elaine Marie Alphin was born on 30 October 1955 in San Francisco, California, and attended Lafayette Elementary School in San Francisco. Then her family moved to New York City, where she attended William H. Carr Junior High School. After that she moved to Houston, and went to Westchester High School and on to Rice University.

As an adult:

As you read this book it exudes this feeling like it was written by Alphins deadringer doppelganger, Annie Wilkes the psycho fictional character played by Kathy Bates in the Steven King movie called “Misery” (just add eye glasses)

Total Regurgitation Into the Minds of Children and College Students

Though the book, ‘An Unspeakable Crime’ by Elaine Marie Alphin is well written and easy to read, as it is a huge disastrous disappointment in terms of providing any revelations of quality research and because the book is filled with so many half-truths, mistakes and outright lies, it’s an unspeakable crime such a book will be used to indoctrinate, proselytize and deceive high school and college students about one of the most notorious criminal trials in US history. The bottom line is the book is a Frankite and culture war propaganda tool.

The Specifics: Uncountable Errors

Beyond Left and Right politics and Beyond Prosecution and Defense: The book makes a zillion factual errors, that are easily verified, too numerous to list them all, but the review by Allen Koenigsberg summarizes some of them. In fact some of the factual errors can be classified as such simple mistakes, even novice students of the Leo Frank case could easily point them out. In truth, it is mind boggling that the book was even allowed to be published in the first place, reflecting the declining quality standards of the editorial review process. What makes things even worse is high schools and colleges would let this book be used by them for teaching students about the case, it shows how low the research and educational standards are in the US.

Dumfounding

The dumbing down of America is no longer debatable, it’s a fact – “Thank you”, Elaine Marie Alphin for being part of the downfall of Western Civilization, we the students and teachers of the United States “really” appreciate you and your book being part of school curriculum and your participation in destroying the educational standards of our country. Thank you for butchering the truth. Sarcasm Gratis.

High Expectations, Big Let Down

Many people have very high expectations when a new book comes out on the Leo Frank Case, hoping that some new, insightful and fresh analysis will be revealed about the case. Alas, ‘An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’ by Elaine Marie Alphin is a total and major shake your head let down, and might even be accurately described as the worst overt propaganda book made in bad taste on the Leo Frank case yet published in the first decade of the 21st century or even in the last 100 years. Congratulations to Elaine Marie Alphin.

Leo Frank or Bust!

The book provides nothing more than a regurgitation of the Leo Frank defense side of the equation, it lacks in any originality, pretense of subtlety and nuance of depth. The book is absolute total dishonest garbage, but don’t take our word on it, see if you can get a free copy at the library and compare this book against the official record, and primary sources of the Leo Frank case to see for yourself.

Elaine Marie Alphin Please Fix the Book

It is the sincerest hope that Elaine Marie Alphin will, pretty please, produce future editions of the book that will correct the uncountable factual errors and hopefully provide some interesting analysis instead of just the same old forgery and re-write of other peoples works for gaining some fast and dirty greenbacks. The book in its current form offers absolutely nothing to the Leo Frank Case, it might as well be considered a badly plagiarized re-hash of other peoples works on the Leo Frank case.

Tell Kids What to Think? or Teach them How to Think for Themselves?

What is sorely missing today are books which don’t tell kids what to think, but instead give them the tools and frameworks to think for themselves. ‘An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’ seems to push the Jewish, politically correct, racist and antisemitism victim mentality position in the Leo Frank Case, most children naturally trust adults and give them the benefit of the doubt, which is truly unfortunate in this situation, because this book, aside from making more factual mistakes than possible to mention here, it also makes the most ridiculous and outrageous racist race bending claims that defy logic and common sense. Is that good for high school students and college students? depends who you ask.

We told you earlier we would discuss this in more details…

Early on in the book Elaine Marie Alphin suggests the most shocking and outlandish claim that White racist and racial separatist Southerners of 1913 would essentially and intentionally overlook and let a “guilty murdering” Negro go free over the “miscegenation rape” and strangulation death of a White Girl, so that they could instead convict an an “absolutely innocent” White Jew (I know its too hard to believe, but you have to read this suggestion she puts forward in her book to believe it).

Alphin suggests the ultimate in infinite prejudiced antisemitism, that a “guilty” Negro was not worthy enough to be convicted for the rape, beating and murder of a White girl Mary Phagan because he was a lowly black janitor, so they instead went after a well educated, Northern and “innocent” White Jew to satisfy their antisemitic blood thirst. Sorry for being repetitive here, but the suggestion is so insolent and insulting to ones intelligence, one can not help but feel profound rage that such ideas are being pushed as the truth to high school and college students.

After reading that insanity, it is permanently impossible to ever take Elaine Marie Alphin serious again, she lost complete credibility and makes so many of these kinds of assertions and claims in her book you can’t help but feel indignant. This book is an outrage and because it is part of the culture war against Western civilization, it can not and will not be forgiven – EVER.

Back to the Educational Standards of Our Colleges

As a full time student, it is very frustrating, but speaks of the declining educational standards in the United States and moreover that books written and published for students are not more rigorously checked enough for factual errors and abject politically correct proselytizing. Hopefully the Internet will balance out the declining educational standards created by such authors as Elaine Marie Alphin. This is coming from a full time student.

For those students who become interested in the case, they will hopefully do independent research and come to their own independent conclusions after reading the original primary sources of the Leo Frank case which are now available to the public. What would be great is if there were a book published on the Leo Frank case which was written by a dispassionate researcher and helped students to understand both sides of the case equally well, not push one side or the other. It is unlikely such a book will ever be produced and therefore this web site will serve to present both sides of the case, even the most extreme to centrist positions from the defense and prosecution sides will be presented, so that people can make their own independent intelligent judgments.

Critical thinking requires that people be able to learn and understand many different perspectives and consider why people hold them, even the most outlandish, like the nonsense that comes from Elaine Marie Alphin. Moreover, the ultimate bottom line of critical thinking, requires more than just understanding different perspectives on things, but that people who are engaged in critical thinking should have or develop the evolving mental capacity to fully think for themselves without being gullible or easily influenced by the loudest position or voice. The loudest position on the Leo Frank case, is from the defense side, but how does it stack up against the official record and common sense? It’s a wobbly house of cards – antisemitism cards.

Dear Professors “An Unspeakable Crime”: Not Worthy of High School and College Students

Concerning ‘An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’ by Elaine Marie Alphin, No respectable professor knowledgeable about the Leo Frank case and not a Frankite, would have allowed this book to have been published in its current form, yet now the book is sadly making its way into many high schools and colleges in the United States for the Jewish culture war moveent and political correctness movement geared at dumbing-down America. Absolutely no mercy, this author should be added to the list of authors waging a culture war against Western civilization and this book will be added to the list of works written for the purpose of defaming and destroy Western civilization.

The unspeakable crime is that the book was ever allowed to be published. In terms of the prolific production of books by the carpel tunnel laden Elaine Marie Alphin, what ever happened to the philosophy, quality, not quantity? Elaine Marie Alphin, please stick to writing fiction books, stay as far away from non-fiction as possible, please for the sake of the children, high schoolers and college students (and the general public). You have no excuse.

The Worlds Foremost Expert on the Leo Frank Case

If there is one person perfect for reviewing any book about Leo Frank, it is Allen Koenigsberg, who is the single most knowledgeable person alive today on the case, he has mindfully focused on the deepest levels of research, source comparison, fact checking and analysis from every lens of the Leo Frank saga. He is the perfect man for reviewing, “An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank” by Elaine Marie Alphin.

Koenigsberg is so knowledgeable about the Leo Frank Case he has discovered numerous factual errors made by recognized Leo Frank authors who are considered the preeminent Leo Frank scholars, including Steve Oney, Leonard Dinnerstein, and others. Allen Koenigsberg, has gone to the most extreme, unimaginable and fanatical lengths to obtain primary source materials on the Leo Frank Case and analyzed them from many perspectives. Despite the fact Koenigsberg has not written a single book on the subject, he is more knowledgeable about the Leo Frank case than Steve Oney, Leonard Dinnerstein, and all the other living and deceased writers on the Leo Frank subject combined. In proof and vindication for Koenigsberg, the numerous errors in the books of Oney and Dinnerstein will likely be “quietly” corrected in future editions and releases of their books and moreover the future error corrected versions of their books will likely be published without attribution to him.

Though Elaine Marie Alphin is a lightweight in terms of academic and scholarly research, probably not worthy of being written about or reviewed, because biased Wikipedia, high schools and colleges are using her book as a “scholarly source”, it makes sense to show how depraved and low our educational system and Wikipedia have sunk in terms of using reliable sources.

Provided further below is a very short and concise book review by Allen Koenigsberg about one of the newest “treatments” of the Leo Frank Case, a book called: ‘An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’.

The Above Introduction was written by MC, below Allen Koenigsberg

Now, onto the Amazon.com book review by Allen Koenigsberg…

Allen Koenigsberg: Book Review of ‘An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank’ by Elaine Marie Alphin’.

In this latest book on the Leo Frank Case (152 pages), author Elaine Alphin takes for her title a post-lynching judgment by the Mayor of Atlanta (James Woodward): “a just penalty for an unspeakable crime.” But she has recast that harsh approval of Leo’s Midnight Ride, and added, “The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank.” This is clearly not a volume of subtleties and the reader is thus quickly informed of the writer’s sympathies. It is mostly about the trials and tribulations of the accused and there is little (correct) about Mary Phagan herself.

The book is aimed at young people, and Ms. Alphin notes that in all the literature on the case — despite the abundance of teenagers at so many stages of the events — there has not up to now been a retelling aimed for that audience. It is clearly written, with fine production values, with a large variety of vintage photographs, and rarely have they been reproduced so well. She is obviously entranced with this “miscarriage of justice” and has traveled widely and visited several of the major Archives – all are cited in the back along with the previous major books, and is so current that the recent PBS-TV Special (‘The People v. Leo Frank’) is mentioned.

Some of the original material was of a salacious nature, but all is handled here tastefully. The major problem is that even high-schoolers are entitled to an accurate accounting of this iconic case, and that is where this latest publication falls short. The basic narrative of the crime, and its ultimate resolution at the end of the lynchers’ rope, strikes our sensibilities to this day, and there are still many who would prefer that an innocent Leo Frank be the prime example of American justice gone wrong. But the Jury, in Georgia’s longest trial, heard all of the evidence, and the author seems unaware that the Atlanta newspapers were an excellent source for the day-to-day testimony. As she notes, the stenographic Court Transcript has been lost for some fifty years.

For reasons unknown, Ms. Alphin has Mary Anne Phagan born in Marietta, Georgia and her biological father also dying there. But Mary was born in Florence, Alabama, on June 1, 1899 and her father had died several months before she was born – she was a posthumous child. Fannie Phagan (Alphin wrongly calls her `Frannie’ throughout) raised her youngest daughter and siblings as a single parent and did not (re-)marry John Coleman until 1912 – she was essentially raised without a father. When Mary did not return home by 7pm, her step-father would indeed look for her on the evening of April 26, 1913, but the family never “called the police” as is claimed here. They would learn of their daughter’s death only after a night of waiting, 5:30 the next morning, from one of Mary’s chums.

We would not expect all material to be footnoted in a book like this, but the author (and her readers) would have benefitted from more explanatory Notes at the back. For example, on p. 11, it is claimed that Mary’s body showed bitemarks on her shoulder when found. This is rather a unique statement and was not reported at the time – actually, it derives from one book (‘To Number Our Days’ by Pierre van Paassen) published years later, in 1964, describing a visit by that author to Atlanta in 1922. Van Paassen said these marks had been “x-rayed” and were still preserved in a court folder. But who could (then or now) x-ray such indentations in human flesh? And surely Pierre van Paassen’s parallel claim (through lawyer Henry Alexander) that Leo Frank did not have a trial to overturn would make his report highly suspect. But Ms. Alphin does not question her sources, simply quoting what seems beneficial on each occasion – Oney’s book does the same with this incident (p. 617). Van Paassen would argue that Leo’s dental records (which he also says he saw in 1922) did not match the bites in Mary’s neck and hence he was innocent of the crime. But this is one man’s word at best and does not stand up to even minimal scrutiny.

Although this is (or should be) a case where the devil is in the details, they come thick and fast but are often unverified or wrong. Ms. Alphin states that Leo’s father had retired by 1907 due to a railway accident, and that the family had their basic estate of $20,000 as a result of a financial settlement. However, there is no evidence for this claim, and the 1910 Census shows Rudolph Frank still working (as a salesman). Ms. Alphin does not give a source for this “accident” but it was only mentioned once, in a publication in 1947 by Burton Rascoe, who also gave no supporting details. When Rachel Frank (Leo’s mother) testified at the trial, she explained her husband’s absence by saying that he was too “nervous” to come to Atlanta and was broken down from his work.

Several times, Ms. Alphin refers to Leo and his family as “relatively poor” (but he earned $150 per month as Superintendent of the National Pencil Co.); however, the record shows he had traveled to Europe twice (in 1905 and 1908). Leo’s wealthy uncle, Moses Frank, is cited as having fought for the Confederacy, and this factoid is often mentioned in other books on the case, but it is not true and was only introduced (again without details) by one of Leo’s lawyers (Reuben Arnold) in October of 1913. Leo would later deny it.

It is claimed that the Seligs were a “high society family” but Lucille’s father was at the time a traveling salesman for the West Disinfecting Co., having earlier dealt in various liquor products. On p. 25, Lucille “announced her pregnancy” in the Spring of 1913, but no evidence from that period is offered. This remark apparently derives from Steve Oney’s book (p. 85), where the event is instead dated months later to the early Winter of 1913, but leading to a miscarriage (cited Interviews of 1986 and 1998). Oddly, in all the voluminous correspondence between Leo and Lucille (and many other family members), there is not a single reference (oblique or otherwise) to this lost ‘offspring’ (a tragic result if true). Only 73 years later is this supposed ‘miscarriage’ mentioned.

When one is truly immersed in a murder case, even decades after the fact, one can look at original documents with a new eye. For example, Ms. Alphin seems to have used some of the unpublished Pinkerton Reports generated by the NPCo.’s hiring of that detective agency. But Oney did so as well, and both report that two men in the factory, Ely Burdett and James Gresham, knew more than they were telling. These two indeed worked at the factory, but never testified; however, their names were actually Earl Burdett and James Graham. In a remarkable coincidence, their fathers were in the Forsyth Street building just minutes before Mary was killed.

I could go on…. It is claimed that the ADL was founded as a result of Leo’s lynching in 1915, but the newspaper backing up this assertion (illustrating the caption) is dated two years before, October 1913. Even then, the ADL did not state that it was established because of the crime, the trial, OR the lynching. Standard dates, such as the original Murder Indictment of May 24th (1913) and the lynching of Aug 17 (1915), are mangled and mis-cited.

The Jury had to confront many other details, some of which are omitted here. For example, Newt Lee had been told the day before (by Leo himself) to report early for his watchman’s duties on Saturday, 4pm instead of the usual 5. But when Newt dutifully appeared, on time and after confronting a locked door, Leo sent him away, telling him not to remain in the factory, and only come back at 6pm (an hour later than usual).

Having said all of this, can we surmise more accurately than those who came before us, what really happened on Confederate Memorial Day in 1913? Solicitor Dorsey would argue that it was a crime of passion, that Mary stood up for her Southern honor, and that Leo violently reacted to her refusal. Was that scenario indeed the truth? And was Dorsey (and others) driven mainly by anti-Semitism? Even Steven Hertzberg, author of a well-regarded history of the Jews of Atlanta, exculpates him from this charge. Tom Watson’s diatribes are mentioned and rightly excoriated, but Watson did not publish anything at all on the case until a year after the crime. And Jim Conley? Alphin makes him out to be a Machiavellian character, intelligent and articulate when he wanted, and folksy and charming at other times. Anyone who has studied the case for a while will surely acknowledge that Conley lied about several of his actions that day, but what was really being concealed? Did Jim bear a greater responsibility than he admitted, or was he instead the sole killer, lurking so close to his boss’ office? Why did Leo not permit cross-examination after his own long-courtroom Statement – under Georgia Law, since 1868 (Title VI), it WAS allowed (unsworn), IF the defendant agreed.

It is likely that the case will continue to be debated for a long time, even by anonymous reviewers. But those who argue it and present their best efforts on either side are encouraged to get the details right. First the facts, then the interpretations, not the other way around.

Moreover

It has been suggested (on the Internet, right here!) that in matters of accuracy, a publisher’s Fact-Checking Dept is much more valid that any Reviewer’s comments. Here are the relevant words:

“…the type of fact-checking that a publisher requires before releasing a book such as this, so I’ve got a lot more faith in the book’s sources than his (the Reviewer’s).”

Alas, anyone who works in publishing knows that proper “fact checking” is a lost art, and physical books are as prone to errors as the world wide web. Let us look then at some “facts” that the publisher of ‘An Unspeakable Crime’ has (presumably) verified:

On p. 59, the remarks of Wm Mincey are, shall we say, “misrepresented.” Rosser had claimed he would implicate Conley with a confession from the day of the crime, but Mincey never testified, and the author’s claim of “several women” to confirm it evaporated. So who were these women? The author doesn’t tell us. Even Leo’s lawyers realized that Mincey made it up and refused to put him under oath.

On p. 76, it is argued that Mrs Selig (Lucille’s mother) was ill and hence did not discuss the girl’s murder (at home, over the weekend). But Mrs Selig played Bridge and Poker on those 3 successive nights (for hours) and the illness was never mentioned or specified at the time. So what’s the source – only a lawyer’s convenient claim? And Lucille’s supposed pregnancy? That was only mentioned by a family member in 1998, some 85 years later. Does that make it true?

On p. 131, the author claims that the modern musical ‘Parade’ was written in the year 2000. Yet it opened on Broadway (in NYC) in 1998. Ah, but the Publisher must have checked… and yet the information is still wrong (by two years).

The book claims (on pp. 48 & 138) that Leo Frank was formally indicted for murder on May 23, 1913. But he was indicted on May 24th. So who is right? Guess.

The author states that Alonzo Mann died on March 19, 1985 – only off by a day – he died on March 18th. Is the author or publisher aware that Mann lied about his age (by a full year) when he enlisted in the US Army? I don’t think they bothered to check.

On p. 111, the author quotes a letter from Leo’s niece Eleanore Stern without commenting on how remarkable it must have been for a 3-year-old child to write it. No one checks birthdates any more?

On p. 120, the author even gets wrong the date of the lynching, claiming it occurred on the morning of August 16, 1915. Who was asleep at the switch? The correct date of Aug 17 is then given on p. 139. Teenagers must like to have a choice…

Why the author repeatedly calls Leo Frank “relatively poor” remains a mystery. He was the head of a factory that employed 170 people and was the highest paid man there ($150 per month).

There are three pages of Source Notes (at the back), but no formal footnoting whatever. As a result, we have on p. 49 the unsourced claim that Jim Conley was on the chain gang twice, and once for attempted armed robbery. But Conley’s court records were introduced at the Trial, and this is not supported. It would have been helpful for the reader to know where the author got her “facts.”

There are many other examples of this basic problem in the book, and they may even seem petty to some. But if a work tries to be fair and accurate, it demands the highest standards, for both young and old.

Even teenagers should learn, by example, how to do history right. And that includes being careful with sources, citations, and the use of scholarly material. We don’t want people to think (on p. 10), because of some presumed ‘fact checking department,’ that Mary Phagan was really born in Marietta, Georgia. Census records (and Phagan family documents) show clearly that she was born in Florence, Alabama.

This case can indeed be discussed at the dinner table, and on the Internet as well. But first comes the hard part: genuine historical research. Then we can make up our minds as to the likely culprit. First the facts, then the interpretations. However, I must say that it is wonderful to see youngsters still interested in the past.

“I never truly understood why Alonzo Mann’s belated statements (post-1982) were considered significant by anyone.”

This is a fine point to be sure. But Conley had testified that he moved the body (at Frank’s behest) inside the factory elevator, directly from the second floor to the basement. Alonzo claimed that he came upon Conley carrying the body while on the first floor, and visible to him when supposedly returning to the building.

It does seem rather odd that Conley would leave the front door open if he were truly carrying the body of a white girl – an invitation to sure disaster in 1913 Atlanta.

Alonzo claimed at the Trial that he had called Herbert Schiff’s home twice that morning to remind the missing paymaster to report to work. But Herb never came in and we are left with another small mystery – why did Schiff (who prided himself on his perfect attendance record) not come to work that Sat morning? He would insist at the Trial that he “overslept.”

Mann had only been working at the factory for three weeks when all of this occurred. By 1982, Alonzo was somewhat alone (and lonely), having lost his wife (recently) and losing his only son years before. We can merely speculate why he suddenly came forth with such an odd story, nearly 70 years later. After all, back in April 1913, he reported back to work on Monday the 28th when Conley was still employed. If he truly told his parents what he saw, why would they allow him to return to the premises where he had been (supposedly) threatened with death?

The solution to this crime is one that no one will want.

References:

Amazon.com, Unspeakable Crime Review

An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank
By Elaine Marie Alphin http://www.lernerbooks.com/anunspeakablecrime/. Retrieved February 2011.

-end

Other Thoughts

Though Steve Oney and Elaine Marie Alphin, quote a woman 70 years later who suggested Lucille was pregnant and miscarried, but none of the voluminous letters written between Lucille and Leo hint at any pregnancy or miscarriage, condolences, or mentions, not even subtle or couched appear in them (Koenigsberg, 2010).

The Origin of the Leo M. Frank Teeth X-Ray Photos and Mary Phagan Bite Mark Hoax:

To Number Our Days, Published in 1964 By self-proclaimed Zionist Pierre van Paassen. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-13633. 404 Pages.

Short Stand in Dixieland, Page 237

Line 27: “The Jewish community of Atlanta at that time seemed to live under a cloud. Several years previously one of its members, Leo Frank, had been lynched as he was being transferred from the Fulton Tower Prison in Atlanta to Milledgeville for trial on a charge of having raped and murdered a little girl in his warehouse which stood right opposite the Constitution building. Many Jewish citizens who recalled the lynching were unanimous in assuring me that Frank was innocent of the crime.

I took reading all the evidence pro and con in the record department at the courthouse. Before long I came upon an envelope containing a sheaf of papers and a number of X-ray photographs showing teeth indentures. The murdered girl had been bitten on the left shoulder and neck before being strangled. But the X-ray photos of the teeth marks on her

To Number Our Days Page 238

body did not correspond with Leo Frank’s set of teeth of which several photos were included. If those photos had been published at the time of the murder, as they should have been, the lynching would probably not have taken place.

Though, as I said, the man died several years before, it was too late, I thought, to rehabilitate his memory and perhaps restore the good name of his family. I showed Clark Howell the evidence establishing Frank’s innocence and asked permission to run a series of articles dealing with the case and especially with the evidence just uncovered. Mr. Howell immediately concurred, but the most prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, Mr. Harry Alexander, whom I consulted with a view to have him present the evidence to the grand jury, demurred. He said Frank had not even been tried. Hence no new trial could be requested. Moreover, the Jewish community in its entirety still felt nervous about the incident. If I wrote the articles old resentments might be stirred up and, who knows some of the unknown lynchers might recognize themselves as participants in my description of the lynching. It was better, Mr. Alexander thought, to leave sleeping lions alone. Some local rabbis were drawn into the discussion and they actually pleaded with Clark Howell to stop me from reviving interest in the Frank case as this was bound to have evil repercussions on the Jewish community.

That someone had blabbed out of school became quite evident when I received a printed warning saying: “Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy.” The unsigned warning was reinforced one night, or rather, early one morning when I was driving home. A large automobile drove up alongside of me and forced me into the track of a fast-moving streetcar coming from the opposite direction. My car was demolished, but I escaped without a scratch…. ”

To Number Our Days, Published in 1964 By self-proclaimed Zionist Pierre van Paassen. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-13633. 404 Pages.

Closing questions:

The Questions to Ask About An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank by Elaine Marie Alphin:

What do you call a book which makes warped and racist blood-libel smears against Southern European-Americans which can not be substantiated by any genuine and reliable evidence? What do you call a book which perpetuates century-old lies, half-baked rumors and cheesy hoaxes as the truth? What do you call a book that cherry picks and re-writes history, giving a dishonest version of a well documented murder trial?

References:

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Unspeakable-Crime-Prosecution-Persecution-Frank/dp/0822589443/

Elaine Marie Alphin Blog: http://elainealphin.blogspot.com/

In her book on the Leo Frank case, Elaine Marie Alphin perpetuates the 1964 Pierre van Paassen Mary Phagan Bitemark Hoax found in ‘To Number Our Days’ p. 237, 238: http://www.leofrank.info/library/pierre-van-paassen/to-number-our-days-by-pierre-van-paassen-1964.pdf. The coroner, police, undertakers, physicians or other professionals who examined Mary Phagan’s body never reported bitemarks on her neck and shoulder. Nothing about bitemarks on Mary Phagan is mentioned in any of the three local newspapers (Journal, Constitution, Georgian), the coroner’s inquest, trial, appeals, Governor’s commutation hearing or anywhere else for that matter until a crackpot tabloid journalist propounded this fraud.

Errors and Corrections:

Please politely snail mail errors and corrections about, “An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank” to:

Elaine Marie Alphin
P.O. Box 11423
Bozeman, MT 59719

Update 2014, Frankite Author, Elaine Marie Alphin, died August 19, 2014.

Award-Winning Author Elaine Marie Alphin Dies at 58
http://www.slj.com/2014/08/obituary/award-winning-author-elaine-marie-alphin-dies-at-58/

Elaine Marie Alphin (1955 – 2014) Obituary
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bozemandailychronicle/obituary.aspx?pid=172482186

Leo Frank had appealed his case several times to both the Georgia and United States Supreme Courts, between August 27, 1913 and April, 1915. Every appellate court ruling left his verdict undisturbed and ruled his trial was infact fair in their majority decisions. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled the evidence presented at the trial of Leo Frank was sufficient for a verdict of guilt. Even the corrupt Governor of Georgia at the time, John Slaton, who was part owner and senior law partner of the Law firm, ‘Rosser, Brandon, Slaton and Phillips’ in a 29 page commutation decision in 1915, said he was sustaining the verdict of the jury and appeals decisions in his last words of the clemency document, before signing the executive order on June 21, 1915. The ‘Slaton’ in the lawfirm named, that represented Leo Frank during his trial, is indeed Governor John Slaton. This powerful lawgroup was formed by a merger of two separate firms in early July, 1913: Rosser and Brandon (Jew) merged with Slaton and Phillips (Jew).

In 1986, after years of circus-like media publicity stunts using the affidavit of a senile octogenarian, Jewish political pressure and behind the scenes dealings, the racist anti-Gentile ADL was able to secure a posthumous pardon for Leo Frank, but without exonerating him of his guilt for murdering Mary Phagan. What Lonny Wilk, David Schwartz and other racist anti-Gentile Jews fail to tell people is: Leo Frank made an incriminating admission during his trial, while he was seated on the witness stand on August 18, 1913, where he changed his alibi and supposed him directly at the scene of the crime, when the murder occurred in the National Pencil Company’s factory metal room. This fact is often left out of every retelling of the case by Jews, who also fail to mention Leo Frank changed the time of Mary Phagan’s arrival four separate times and was caught in a number of lies about his whereabouts.

Jewish Supremacism is a virulent cancer and Western Civilization’s foremost problem right now, but global efforts to combat this pervasive Jewish hate, bigotry, prejudice and racism are growing.

Please Boycott all advertisers of the Sun Sentinel newspaper.

QUOTE:

ADL ‘talk-back’ addresses Frank trial’s anti-Semitism (January 27, 2014|By David A. Schwartz, Staff Writer) The Slow Burn Theatre Company production of “Parade,” the story of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank in Marietta, Ga. and his lynching two years later, shows that bigots and anti-Semites must be exposed for who and what they are, Lonny Wilk, Anti-Defamation League Florida associate director, said Sunday during a “talk-back” with members of the audience at the West Boca Performing Arts Theatre.

“The impact of this story is something that needs to be told,” Wilk said. He implored the audience to tell family members, friends and neighbors about the production and “fill these seats” for the musical that runs through Feb. 9 at the theatre on the campus of West Boca Raton Community High School. Frank, a Jewish businessman from Brooklyn who moved to Atlanta to manage his family’s pencil business, was convicted of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl who worked at the company factory. After a trial marked by blatant anti-Semitism, Georgia’s governor reduced Frank’s death sentence to life in prison. A mob, which included many leaders of the community, dragged Frank from his prison cell and lynched him.

The Anti-Defamation League was formed in 1913 in Chicago, in part to combat the anti-Semitism displayed in the trial of Leo Frank. “The mission of the Anti-Defamation League was going to be to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment for all,” Wilk said.

….

The anti-Semitic message is an important one to get out, audience member Elaine Polack of Boca Raton said.

“I wonder how many people were not aware of the anti-Semitic message,” her husband Rudy Polack said.

Ed Behar of Delray Beach said he stayed for the “talk-back” because “I believe the ADL is a beneficial organization. We need them as an advocate. Unfortunately, things like this can happen again.”

…

ADL ‘talk-back’ addresses Frank trial’s anti-Semitism

http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2014-01-27/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jjps-talkback-0129-20140127_1_lonny-wilk-anti-semitism-semitism

Thank you to a viewer named Reuben for bringing this to our attention on Feb. 9, 2014.

The author of the definitive book on the Frank trial and lynching explains why the case still sparks debate a century later

Posted on 9/24/2013 8:00:00 AM by Steve Oney

Photograph courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Throughout the rain-threatened spring morning, pilgrims kept arriving at the Marietta City Cemetery. High school kids researching a history project. A Darlington, South Carolina, lawyer who’d been planning his trip for months. A curious college student. All made their way to the grave of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old child laborer murdered in a downtown Atlanta factory on April 26, 1913, exactly 100 years before. Little Mary’s final resting place, with its hauntingly engraved stone (“Many an aching heart in Georgia beats for you, and many a tear, from eyes unused to weep, has paid you a tribute”), has long been a shrine.

But the girl’s mysterious death and the subsequent tragedy it inspired—the lynching of Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish industrialist convicted of her killing—make the site more than just a place for paying respects. Here, unresolved hostilities still erupt. Among this day’s visitors was eighty-year-old Edward R. Fields, a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, an associate of the late racist politician J.B. Stoner, and a founder of the anti-Semitic National States Rights Party. After offering a prayer and placing a flower, Fields told Leo Hohmann of the Marietta Daily Journal that Frank, contrary to most contemporary thinking, was guilty as charged. As to why many now believe otherwise, Fields declared, “Money is power. And the Jews have the money. They came down here from New York and made movies and wrote stories.” So began the centennial of Atlanta’s most infamous criminal case.

Even after 100 years, the questions linger. Was Leo Frank indeed innocent? Did he receive a fair trial? Did America’s Jews, especially those in the press, misplay their hand, inadvertently igniting the sectional hostility that doomed Frank? How did the lynch mob get away with such a brazen crime? Finally: Could it happen again?

From today’s perspective, the case beggars belief. Mary Phagan, who toiled at a Forsyth Street pencil factory run by Frank, was found strangled to death in the factory basement not long after leaving Frank’s office with her weekly pay: $1.20. Next to her body the police discovered two semiliterate notes that purported to have been written by her (“i wright while play with me,” read one) but were plainly the work of someone else. Jim Conley, the factory’s black janitor, claimed that Frank committed the murder when the girl rejected Frank’s sexual advances. Conley added that Frank dictated the notes to him in an effort to pin the crime on another black employee. Following a monthlong trial in the heat of summer, an all-white jury accepted Conley’s word over that of the Yankee Jew and returned a guilty verdict. A black witness had prevailed against a white defendant in a capital case in the Jim Crow South. The judge’s sentence: death by hanging.

Striking as all this was, what happened next proved even more dramatic. The Northern press, led by the New York Times, took up the story. Tom Watson, a fierce Georgia populist offended by what he saw as one-sided accounts in the Jewish-owned Times, responded in his weekly tabloid, the Jeffersonian, with incendiary rants that featured ugly stereotypes and played up Southern grievances. When the U.S. Supreme Court denied Frank’s last appeal, Governor John Slaton, widely seen as having a conflict of interest (his partner was the lead defense lawyer), reviewed the case. In June 1915 he commuted Frank’s sentence. Soon after, a disciplined cadre of vigilantes stormed the state prison in Milledgeville and abducted its now celebrated inmate. They drove Frank in an automobile caravan some 150 miles through the night to an oak grove near Mary’s family home in Marietta. There they carried out what they saw as the court’s verdict: They hanged Leo Frank. No one was indicted (one of the lynch mob leaders conducted the grand jury inquest), much less convicted. It was a perfect crime.

Little wonder the case remains profoundly unsettling. Not only were there two hideous murders, but religious prejudice, racism, and demagoguery ran rampant, and the law was trampled. When it was over, Atlanta’s Jews—previously secure in their social and business standing—retreated into a twilight of suspicion and fear. As for the leading citizens of Marietta who masterminded the hanging, they bore an abiding shame: the stigma of a lynching. For decades, neither group would speak of the subject. Nor would Georgia’s blacks. Conley, one of their own, gave the testimony that convicted Frank—testimony he had every reason to concoct if, as many came to suspect, he was the real culprit.

Not until the 1980s did the veil of repression and denial begin to lift, thanks largely to the late-in-life revelations of octogenarian Alonzo Mann, Frank’s long-ago office boy. Mann told the Nashville Tennessean that on the day Mary was murdered, he had entered the factory’s lobby and seen Conley toting the girl’s lifeless body. Conley, said Mann, threatened him: If he breathed a word, Conley would kill him. Mann’s story formed the basis for a posthumous pardon application for Frank filed by, among others, the Southern counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that grew out of the lynching. (A second group also emerged from the case: the modern KKK. Three months after the lynching, the hooded fraternity held its first twentieth-century cross-burning atop Stone Mountain.)

In 1983 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to grant Frank an outright pardon, but three years later it conceded that the state had failed to protect his constitutional rights (the break-in at the prison was unopposed) and issued what amounted to an apology. The affair reentered the public consciousness. NBC broadcast a miniseries starring Peter Gallagher as Frank and Jack Lemmon as John Slaton. In 1998 playwright Alfred Uhry, an Atlanta native, and director Hal Prince mounted a Broadway musical about the case, Parade. Finally, in 2003, And the Dead Shall Rise, my attempt to bring every last bit of the dark tale into the light, appeared in bookstores.

In the hours after Mary Phagan’s body was discovered, Leo Frank seemed unduly agitated. There was credible circumstantial evidence against him as well. According to one witness, he was not at his desk at the hour Mary was slain, even though he’d said he was. Also damning, at the trial many female employees testified to his reputation for lasciviousness. But almost certainly Frank did not kill the girl. The murderer was Conley. On the afternoon of the crime, the janitor was in the factory lobby when Mary emerged from Frank’s office with her wages. Drunk and by his own admission in debt, he had the opportunity to rob her, then a reason to kill her.

True, there will always be doubts. The Atlanta Police botched the forensics investigation, and an autopsy was not conducted on the victim until nine days after her death. Moreover, Conley testified convincingly at the trial, while Frank gave a wooden statement. But William Smith—Conley’s lawyer and a central character in my book—demonstrated that Conley lied about the case’s most important physical evidence. In a careful study, Smith, who’d long entertained doubts about his client, proved that Conley, not Frank, was the author of the notes found beside the girl’s body. Governor Slaton relied on Smith’s work when commuting Frank’s death sentence.

Frank’s trial was demonstrably unfair. There were frequent outbursts against him from spectators, and as the jury deliberated, the judge and the lawyers for both sides struck an agreement to keep Frank out of the courtroom when his verdict was read, for fear he would be lynched if acquitted. Still, there’s no evidence for a later claim that crowds shouted at the jury, “Hang the Jew, or we’ll hang you.” That was an invention by Frank’s supporters and is indicative of the heavy-handedness that would mark their pronouncements.

Although most American Jews believed that Frank was not so much prosecuted as persecuted, there was a fierce debate in the Jewish community about how to respond. American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, the constitutional lawyer who handled Frank’s appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court, felt that Frank’s ethnicity should not be a factor in the efforts to exonerate him. Others, among them Albert D. Lasker, the millionaire advertising executive who publicized Frank’s plight, disagreed, and they prevailed, transforming the case into a cause celebre in which religious prejudice was a central issue. Lasker’s daughter, Frances Lasker Brody, told me that in subsequent years her father said he had made a terrible mistake. He’d realized that his tactics had helped foment the backlash in Georgia against Frank.

No one was more convinced of Frank’s innocence than Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, and his conviction, no matter how well-intentioned, led to journalistic excesses. Ochs turned the paper of record into a pro-Frank propaganda machine. It printed hundreds of stories that played up facts in his favor. How biased was the Times? Researchers examining recently located files in the paper’s archives discovered a trove of photographs of the Phagan crime scene in which models reenact the murder in a sequence staged to establish Conley’s guilt. The pictures were commissioned by Ochs as the courts weighed Frank’s fate, and while he did not run them, they offer proof of the thinking behind what he did publish. The Times’ coverage spurred Watson to the rhetorical extremes that laid the foundation for the case’s awful conclusion.

Whatever the lapses by his allies, Frank’s lynching was an act of infamy. The crime was conceived by Marietta’s elite, men whose family names—Brumby, Clay, Brown, Morris—still resonate in high places and adorn prominent buildings across Georgia. It was carried out by farmers and merchants who answered to these worthies. But it was not merely a local operation. As I make clear in my book, the lynching was underwritten by the state legislature, which in the crime’s aftermath funded new construction at the Milledgeville prison. Georgia financed Frank’s lynching. It’s no surprise Frank’s sympathizers lacked the stomach to call for an investigation. In fact, the most startling discovery in the Times archives is a letter to Ochs from a sister who visited Atlanta after the lynching, telling him the city’s Jews had voted to let the matter rest. To look too deeply, they’d decided, could lead to more violence.

In many ways, 2013 bears a great similarity to 1913. Just as the industrial age is presently giving way to the information age, the agrarian age was then giving way to the industrial age, making people anxious about the future. There’s also another familiar element: proliferating and unreliable sources of news. In the early twentieth century, Atlanta boasted three daily papers (the least responsible was the Georgian, owned by William Randolph Hearst), and they deluged the city with extra editions about the Phagan murder. A detective probing the crime—making an observation that could just as easily apply to consumers of media in the era of Facebook and Twitter—described a witness as being “well-read to the extent that she is crazy.”

But the most worrisome parallel is this: The red state/blue state divide that now transforms elections and court decisions into venomous societal litmus tests finds its origins in events like the Frank affair. Under the right circumstances, the same sort of anarchy that engulfed Frank could be loosed again.

There is, of course, one huge difference between yesterday and today: The FBI, at the time of Frank’s lynching a nonentity, now has the authority to investigate civil rights violations and conspiracies. Indeed, just the threat of federal prosecution has a way of deterring atrocities. Even so, the sentiments articulated by ex-Klansman Edward R. Fields at Mary Phagan’s grave are not uncommon. For the next two years—the centennial will continue through August 17, 2015, the 100th anniversary of the lynching—the Frank case will be rehashed from all sides. The last battle of the Civil War and the first battle in the culture wars, it is not over.

Hear the Author

Steve Oney will talk about the Leo Frank case at Georgia State University on October 3. The event is at Speakers auditorium in the GSU Student Center, 44 Courtland Street SE, at 4:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Click here for more details.

This article originally appeared in our September 2013 issue.

[Be There or Be Square] Steve Oney Talk: “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank”

The GSU Jewish Studies Program and the Southern Jewish Historical Society present Steve Oney, author And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank in a public lecture. Mr. Oney will mark the 100-year anniversary of Frank’s conviction in his talk, “Leo Frank 100 Years Later – It’s Still Not Over” on Thursday, October 3, 4:30 p.m. in the Speakers Auditorium, with a book sale and signing event to follow. This event is free and open to the public.

Location Information: Speakers Auditorium, 150 Student Center

Contact Information:

Name: Kathryn McClymond
Email: kmcclymond@gsu.edu

References:

The People v. Leo Frank, The author of the definitive book on the Frank trial and lynching explains why the case still sparks debate a century later by Steve Oney, September 24, 2013
http://www.atlantamagazine.com/agenda/2013/09/24/people-v-leo-frank-steve-oney

Steve Oney Talk on October 3rd, 2013: “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank” Contact Kathryn McClymond
http://calendar.gsu.edu/calendar/EventList.aspx?view=EventDetails&eventidn=14868&information_id=43780&type=&syndicate=syndicate

Audio Interview – 100 Years After: Leo Frank Case Still Raises Questions By Steve Goss, September 30, 2013
http://wabe.org/post/100-years-after-leo-frank-case-still-raises-questions

Q&A: 100 years after Leo Frank arrest, expert on tragic case will speak at Georgia State (October 1, 2013)
http://www.artsatl.com/2013/10/preview-years-later-leo-frank-arrest-lynching-casts-polarizing-net/

The Legal Significance of the Leo Frank Case by Jewish-American Rodger Citron is a Professor of Law at Touro Law Center.
http://verdict.justia.com/2013/09/16/the-legal-significance-of-the-leo-frank-case