Tax Lawyer's Blog

In the same year that Congress enacted the income tax code a thirteen year old Atlanta factory worker named Mary Phagan was found dead in the basement of the National Pencil Company.

Ever since I saw the television miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan back in 1987, the case of Leo Frank (pictured at right at trial with his wife) has intrigued me.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the story:

• Frank was the manager of a Atlanta pencil factory when a 13-year-old Marietta girl named Mary Phagan was found murdered in the company’s basement.
• Two handwritten notes were found next to the body and were purported to be written by Phagan while she was being raped by her murderer.
• A black sweeper named Jim Conley was questioned and initially swore that he could not read and write, but when the police produced several samples of his writing he changed his story and admitted to writing the notes.
• Conley then said he wrote the notes at the behest of Leo Frank who had murdered the girl and planned to pin the blame on the black night watchman, Newt Lee.
• He said that Frank had murdered Phagan on the second floor and then asked him to help move the body to the basement. 
• Evidence was not properly preserved or examined and some pointed the finger at Conley who the politically ambitious prosecutor Hugh Dorsey (he later became Governor of Georgia) said couldn’t have committed the crime because he wasn’t bright enough to think up the scheme.
• Frank was convicted and sentenced to death.
• The conviction was appealed to the Georgia and U.S. Supreme Courts but in each case was denied, although Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stated his doubt as to Frank’s guilt.
• Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison with the hope that the truth would come out. It was a decision that destroyed his political career and almost cost him his life.
• Angry at the commutation, a gang of  powerful Marietta community leaders, including a former governor, a sitting judge, a state prosecutor and a former mayor, abducted Frank from prison without resistance and lynched him.
• It is the only known case of a Jewish person being lynched on U.S. soil.

Steve Oney has now written what many believe to be the definitive account of the murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent sham trial and lynching of her Jewish superintendent Leo M. Frank.

What makes And the Dead Shall Rise different than, and I think superior to, that other great account of the Frank case, Leonard Dinnerstein’s The Leo Frank Case, is that Oney deftly manages to place the reader in the era and locale in which the drama took place.

When Oney describes the stifling August heat in the overcrowded courtroom I find myself loosening my collar. When he talks about the post-lynching throng of wide-eyed gawkers that defiled Leo Frank’s carcass I get goosebumps and momentarily feel as if I were the target of an irrational hate-filled mob.

That Frank was Jewish certainly played a role in his conviction and lynching, but Oney does an excellent job of showing that the defense team, Frank often leading the way, was perfectly willing to suggest to the jury that Jim Conley had killed Mary Phagan because the murder had all the earmarks of “a negro crime.”

And the Dead Shall Rise is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the post-reconstruction South, the dangers of propaganda, and the vicissitudes of human nature. It’s a chilling story chillingly told.

The Leo Frank case has had far reaching effects, many of which are still felt today. The murder of a lowly factory girl, the trial and conviction of her Jewish boss, the scorched earth effort by wealthy Jews to overturn that conviction and Frank’s brutal abduction and lynching, resulted in (among other things) a clamor to enact stricter child labor laws, the creation of The Knights of Mary Phagan, which would be transformed by William Simmons into the Ku Klux Klan, and the formation by B’nai B’rith of the Anti-Defamation League.

Here is Leo Frank’s final statement to the jury:

Gentlemen, I know nothing whatever of the death of little Mary Phagan. I had no part in causing her death nor do I know how she came to her death after she took her money and left my office. I never even saw Conley in the factory or anywhere else on that date, April 26, 1913.

The statement of the negro Conley is a tissue of lies from first to last. I know nothing whatever of the cause of the death of Mary Phagan and Conley’s statement as to his coming up and helping me dispose of the body, or that I had anything to do with her or to do with him that day is a monstrous lie.

The story as to women coming into the factory with me for immoral purposes is a base lie and the few occasions that he claims to have seen me in indecent positions with women is a lie so vile that I have no language with which to fitly denounce it.

Gentlemen, some newspaper men have called me “the silent man in the tower,” and I have kept my silence and my counsel advisedly, until the proper time and place. The time is now; the place is here; and I have told you the truth, the whole truth.

Links:

• The Leo M. Frank Collection
• The New Georgia Encyclopedia: The Leo Frank Case
• The Leo Frank Lynching: The Georgia Historical Society
• Denise Noe: The Lynching of Leo Frank

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