The Leo Frank Case REVISED EDITION

The Leo Frank Case REVISED EDITION Leonard Dinnerstein The University of Georgia Press Athens and London To Myra Contents PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION IX PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION XV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XIX I. The Murder of Mary Phagan II. Prejudice and Perjury J6 III. An American Dreyfus 62 IV. The First Appeal 77 v. Tom Watson and WilIiamJ. Burns 84 VI. Wisdom withoutJustice 107 VII. Commutation 1I4 VIII. Vigilante Justice IJ6 IX. Aftermath 148 APPENDIX A. Excerpt from the Appeal of Frank's Lawyers for a New Trial 16J APPENDIX B. The Ballad of Mary Phagan 1M APPENDIX C. Freeman's Tale 169 APPENDIX D. A Georgian's View 172 NOTES 179 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 221 INDEX 247 Preface to Revised Edition The Leo Frank Case covered the last two tragic years of a young man's life. The book launched my professional academic career in 1968. It is still read today. I am gratified by its reception and staying power. However, as a graduate student I had no intention of writing what is now called "social history." I thought of myself as a "po litical" historian. But after I passed my doctoral oral examinations at Columbia University in 1963, my wife suggested that I consider choosing and researching a more contemporary topic: civil rights. Professor William E. Leuchtenburg approved the idea. Upon leav ing Dr. Leuchtenburg's office, I mentioned to a woman in the eleva tor, whom I had never seen before or since, that I was going to write on the civil rights movement. She replied, "Remember, the Jews were involved in civil rights before it became a Negro issue." I took her remark to heart, went home, called a friend who had just finished a dissertation on the history of the American Jewish Committee, and asked him if he had any suggestions for me. He said that I should write about Leo Frank because there were many boxes of unused manuscript material about him at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. My response was: "Who's Leo Frank?" Nonetheless, I pursued his recommendation, found out that no one else was working on the topic (or so I was led to believe), and em barked upon my project. After I had completed seven chapters of the dissertation, Harry Golden's A Little Girl!s Dead, another work x Preface to Revised Edition exclusively on the Frank case, appeared. I was extremely upset be cause in 1963 Harry Golden, a popular American Jewish writer and publisher of the Carolina Israelite, had written to me that he had "a vast material on the Frank case and your proposed dissertation will not really go over the same materials. My Frank book uses the case only incidentally for the story of Populism, the growing pains of the South, and of the Jews, the Bible Belt, etc." However, when Golden's A Little Girl Is Dead appeared in 1965, I thought that I would have difficulty getting my manuscript published. My apprehensions proved to be unfounded. While writing my doctoral dissertation on the subject, in the mid-196os, I had no idea that it would evolve into a work that people would still read forty years later. In fact, it never occurred to me that I was writing something especially significant; at the time I thought that I was exposing an injustice that occurred in the United States during the Progressive era. It was a monograph that I simply hoped would be published; I had no way of knowing the impact that it would have on scores of students and general readers as well 'as the contribution it would provide to the development of a more professional analysis of the American, and especially the Southern, Jewish past. In 1966 I heard about a competition cosponsored by the Jewish Publications Society and Columbia University Press to publish a new work inJewish History. I submitted my manuscript but it came in second. A member of the selection committee later recalled why the committee had spurned it. "After all," he said, "it was only a doctoral dissertation." Nonetheless, Columbia University Press published the manuscript. Upon the book's publication in 1968, the Library of Congress Dewey Decimal System (used to classify books prior to the cur rent Library of Congress system) assigned it a call number indi cating that the contents constituted a "true crime" rather than a study of a major injustice in American history committed during the Progressive era. The following year, Saturday ReviC'W chose The Leo Frank Case as one of the four cowinners of the annual Anisfield- Preface to Revised Edition XI Wolf Awards given to books that "have made a significant contribu tion ... to intergroup understanding." While doing my research for the Leo Frank project, I became aware of how little had been written aboutJews in the South. Most of the extant books on American Jewish history focused on how well Jews had adapted to, and absorbed, the culture of the domi nant group and how much Jews had contributed to the development of the United States. I do not think that I found a single general work on American Jewish history that did not discuss how many Jews had fought and died during various wars in which the United States had participated. It was almost impossible to find any works in AmericanJewish history, especially Southern Jewish history, that questioned or criticized aspects of accepted American culture or the nature of American justice. The Leo Frank Case was probably the first scholarly effort focusing on the treatment of Jews in the South. It explained the ambivalence that Southerners felt toward Jews. In addition, it showed the poor judgments that some Jews made when trying to defend Frank and obtain a new trial for him. To be sure, there were many contemporary periodical articles on Leo Frank. From 1913 to 1915, several attorneys, inquisitive journal ists, and wealthy AmericanJews, especially in the North, sought to have Frank retried after he had been convicted of murder. Once the lynching occurred, in August 1915, and the discussions of it af terward died down, the name and experiences of Leo Frank prac tically disappeared from books and articles about American Jewry. Occasionally there would be a work that mentioned Frank, espe cially in 1954, the three hundredth anniversary of Jewish settle ment on the continent, but no serious analysis of how the Frank case developed had appeared. (In 1939 historian C. Vann Woodward included a chapter on Frank in a biography of the Georgia Populist Tom Watson, but the Frank affair was examined in the context of Watson's political career during the Populist and Progressive eras.) Jewish publications either avoided/the subject or merely mentioned that Frank had been a victim of/an anti-Semitic public. By the 1960s, a decade in which critics reexamined injustices xu Preface to Revised Edition in many areas of American life, the Frank case was not the only "crime" that attracted the attention of scholars. Ethnic experiences during and after the civil rights era of the 1950S and 1960s became a subject of intense societal concern and historical analysis, and the backgrounds of many groups of Americans were examined. This originally started in the 1950S with the reexamination of the African American past, but the pace accelerated in the 1960s and thereafter. Few critical analyses of Jews in the United States had appeared before those years. Afterward Jews were among the American eth nics who received the most extensive attention from professional historians. Since the 1970S, several additional accounts of Leo Frank's experiences have been published and there has even been a Broadway musical (Parade, 1998) on the subject. The best of the books, Steve Oney's seven hundred-page work And the Dead Shalt Rise, won the NationalJewish Book Award for history in 2004. Why the Leo Frank case has captured the imagination of so many must be explained. The murder of a thirteen-year-old girl was a sensational story. Aside from the shock of the event and the brutality of the murderer, the public response to the incident re vealed many of the existing concerns of poor white Southerners. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-cenrury industrialization in the South lured rural Southerners into the cities. In the newly established factories, employees adjusted to the difficulties expe rienced in controlled and demanding environments. Moreover, parents in the South feared the consequences for their children working under the supervision of perhaps lascivious employers. For these people the murder highlighted the costs of industrializa tion and brought forth public discussion of a variety of societal concerns, including the lawlessness of a growing urban metropolis and the vulnerability of children who slaved ten or more hours a day in industrial sweatshops. The murder also served as a lightning rod for the expressions of resentment of labor for management, and of the South for the North, which had begun to impose its own culture on the Southern way of life. These combined reasons suf- Preface to Revised Edition XIlI ficed to arouse suspicions about Frank and to allow Southerners to quickly accept the testimony of the prosecution's witnesses and the verdict of the jurors. In 1982, when eighty-two-year-old Alonzo Mann, former office boy in the firm that Frank managed, came forth with an affidavit stating that he had additional evidence that tended to exonerate Frank of the murder, there was renewed national inrerest. The Nashville Tennessean published a special Sunday supplement on Leo Frank on March 7, 1982, reviewing the history of the Frank case and evidence presented.

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