2

Atlanta’s Northern Jew

The State of Georgia

versus

Leo M. Frank

The southern Negro stands halfway between slavery and freedom. On one hand, he is his own man, able to own property, to be compensated for his labor and even, in some areas, to vote. On the other, he must endure many forms of segregation, perform his community’s less desirable chores, and suffer whatever slings and arrows his white neighbors choose to send his way. But occasionally he finds himself an honest-to-goodness hero. This metamorphosis occurs whenever he mounts the witness stand to testify against another Negro whom, for one reason or another, the state wants to put out of the way. In Atlanta, in 1913, it didn’t seem to make much difference that the victim was a twenty-nine-year-old northern Jew.

After he graduated from Cornell, Brooklyn-born Leo M. Frank married a Georgia girl. With her parents’ help, he was able to buy a small interest in the National Pencil Factory, a medium-size enterprise which operated out of a four-story building on South Forsyth Street in Atlanta. National employed more than one hundred employees, most of whom were women, and Frank, who was also its production superintendent, directly supervised their work from his tiny second-floor front office.

The factory building was a narrow rectangular structure which ran 150 feet back from South Forsyth Street to a small alley. The entrance to the plant was through an enclosed hallway on the first floor. An elevator shaft was located in this hallway near the foot of a glass-enclosed stairwell. Behind this shaft there was a hatchway which opened into the basement. Outside of a boiler and some lockers for Negro employees, the cellar was empty.

The stairs led up to the building’s second floor where Frank’s small cubicle was located. His office opened into a large room where most of the plant’s clerical help worked. At the very rear of the building was National’s metal room where tips were attached to the ends of completed pencils. The metal room, which was separated from the rest of the second floor by a wooden partition, was entered by means of a double glass door. The actual manufacturing of lead pencils was performed on the third and fourth floors.

National’s employees were normally paid at noon on Saturday. However, Saturday, April 26, 1913, was a holiday—Confederate Memorial Day—and Frank had met his payroll the day before. But some of the girls who worked in the metal room had been laid off the preceding Monday because the plant had run out of pencil tips. Some of them decided to take advantage of the holiday and pick up the few dollars owed them for their single day’s work. One girl, fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan, who lived in an Atlanta suburb, decided to kill two birds with one stone—she would pick up her pay at the plant and then take in the parade which was scheduled to start at two p.m.

Mary ate an early lunch of cabbage and wheat bread and left her house at 11:45. She boarded a street car which let her off at the corner of Broad and Hunter Streets, just a block away from the pencil factory. She arrived at National shortly after noon and went immediately to Frank’s office where she received a pay envelope containing $1.25. She asked the superintendent whether a new supply of metal had arrived and, when he said “No,” she left the office, and he listened to her footsteps as she went down the stairs to the first floor. Only one other person was ever to see her alive again.

Fifteen hours later, Newt Lee, the factory’s night watchman, was making his rounds through the darkened building. In the cellar, near the back of the building, he found the body of Mary Phagan. The girl had been strangled and it appeared that she had probably been raped. Although no spermatozoa were found on her body or her clothes, the epithelium of the walls of the vagina was torn and bruised and her underwear, which was ripped, was spotted with blood. From the condition of her clothes, it was obvious that whoever had killed the girl had dragged her body along the cellar floor. There was a deep cut on her head and numerous bruises on her arms and legs.

Newt Lee was a Negro which was enough to make him a prime suspect. He was immediately arrested and thrown into the Fulton County Jail, and it seemed that the Atlanta police had more than enough to mark the case solved. But because somebody thought that Frank had appeared unduly nervous when he was informed of Mary’s death, the police decided to book him, too. Frank proved anything but an uncooperative prisoner. He hired private detectives to assist the Atlanta constabulary in its efforts to find the girl’s murderer, and persuaded his captors to allow him to spend some time alone with Lee in his cell in order to induce him to talk.

But the night watchman stuck to his plea of innocence and was soon released while his employer was held for the action of the grand jury. A garrulous prostitute informed the police that Frank had telephoned her the night before the murder and pleaded for a room. He had told her that it was a matter of “life and death.” She also swore that, on the day after Mary’s body was found, he had offered her a large sum of money to leave town. Although she later repudiated her entire story and disappeared, the damage was done and Frank, who was referred to by a local magazine as “this filthy, perverted Jew of New York,” was indicted on May 24, 1913, for Mary’s murder.

When the dead girl’s body was found, two notes, scribbled on sheets of paper ripped from a scratch pad, were discovered on the floor near her. Written in pidgin English, they claimed that “a long tall negro” had been making love to Mary and that “i write while play with me.” According to the author “he said he wood love me, laid down, play like the night witch did it, but that long tall negro did buy his self.”

The police were convinced that Frank had written the notes in an attempt to throw the blame on Lee. This theory was somewhat shaken when, on the Thursday after the murder, a Negro porter named Jim Conley was discovered scrubbing a bloodstained shirt in the factory’s basement sink. Conley, who was later described as a “low squatty Negro with a gingercake complexion,” was picked up and lodged in the county lockup where he languished for almost three weeks. However, when he finally convinced the police that he could not write, he was given back his shirt and released.

Then Harry Scott, a Pinkerton operative engaged by the pencil factory to solve the crime, discovered that Conley was much more literate than he had let on. Now thoroughly frightened, the porter was returned to jail where he poured out a tale of sex and murder that was sure to find ready listeners. He said that on April 26th he had stood watch for Frank, who habitually used the factory as seraglio, when the superintendent had assaulted and killed Mary Phagan. Then, after helping his employer hide the body in the basement, he had written the two notes which had been found near her corpse. In all, he told the investigators from the Solicitor General’s office four different versions of this story. As each one was investigated and found untenable, Conley assured his avid audience that “Sure, I lied but I swear to God I am telling the truth this time.” The following July, he was to tell a fifth story on the truth of which a man’s life was to depend.

Although Frank testified before the coroner’s jury and claimed that he neither knew Mary Phagan nor had killed her, he was swiftly indicted for her murder and his trial began on July 28, 1913, in the Fulton County Courthouse before Superior Court Judge L. S. Roan and an all-male jury. By the time the trial got under way, all Atlanta had prejudged the “Jew of New York” and the newspapers were off and running on an orgy of sensationalism that was not to die down until Leo Frank had become the symbol of the Gate City’s greatest shame.

Conley was, by all odds, the prosecution’s most important witness. Ordinarily, the testimony of a Negro who “always seemed to be kind of nervous or half drunk” wouldn’t have carried much weight in a Georgia court. But what Arthur Garfield Hays referred to as “counter-prejudices” were at work. To the rednecks, a Jew from Brooklyn was even worse than a “no-account nigger” and Conley’s audience was sublimely ready to believe every word he uttered.

He told a fantastic story. Frank had come to him early on the morning of April 26th and said: “I want you to watch for me like you have been doing the rest of the Saturdays.” According to Conley, for more than two years he had been picking up a little extra change by acting as Frank’s lookout while the superintendent was enjoying himself with various women in his office. “I always stayed on the first floor ... and watch for Mr. Frank, while he and a young lady would be upon the second floor chatting.”

On this particular Saturday, the witness had been given very precise instructions as to the afternoon’s activities. “Now, there will be a young lady here after a while,” Frank had told him, “and me and her are going to chat a little.” When the girl arrived, the superintendent would “stomp like I did before” and Conley was to shut the door that led to second floor. “Now, when I whistle, I will be through, so you can go and unlock the door and come upstairs to my office like you were going to borrow some money from me and that will give the young lady time to get out.”

Shortly after noon, he swore, he had seen Mary Phagan climbing up the steps to the superintendent’s office. He had heard her footsteps approaching Frank’s cubicle and then the sound of two people walking toward the metal room. A few minutes later, there was a scream, followed by the sound of someone running from the metal room to the front of the building. At that moment, another young lady had entered the building, walked up the stairway to the second floor and immediately come down and left the factory. How she had opened the locked door was anybody’s guess.

Apparently, Conley was used to an occasional scream or two emanating from the second floor on Saturday afternoons because he promptly went to sleep. “Next thing I knew, Mr. Frank was up over my head stomping, and then I went and locked the door ... and the next thing I heard Mr. Frank whistling. When I heard him whistle, I went and unlocked the door just like he said and went on up the steps. Mr. Frank was standing up there at the top of the steps, shivering and trembling and rubbing his hands like this. He had a little rope in his hand, a long, wide, piece of cord. His eyes were wide and they looked right funny. He looked funny out of his eyes. His face was red.”

After Frank had composed himself, he told the porter that there had been a little trouble upstairs. “I wanted to be with the little girl,” he had said, “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. Of course, you know that I ain’t built like other men.”

The two men had then gone upstairs to the metal room where Conley had picked up the dead girl’s body and carried it to the elevator. He had taken it to the basement where it was placed on a trash heap near the rear of the building. Then, Frank had ordered him to write the two notes which were eventually found near the corpse. The porter insisted that the defendant had dictated the notes to him and had promised him $200.00 for his help in covering up the crime. Frank’s bank balance on the day before this grandiose offer was exactly sixteen dollars.

After Conley had graphically described the murder itself, Hugh M. Dorsey, the Solicitor General of Georgia, made him recount what he had witnessed on other Saturdays when he claimed Frank was entertaining some of the easier ladies of Atlanta in his upstairs lovenest. He remembered one girl in particular, a Daisy Hopkins, who had been a steady visitor to the second-floor playroom. Just before Thanksgiving of 1912, he had inadvertently wandered into the superintendent’s office where he saw Daisy “sitting down in a chair and she had her clothes up to here, and he was down on his knees and she had her hands on Mr. Frank and I found them in that position.” When the couple left the office, they found the inquisitive porter waiting in the anteroom.

Q. What was said when they saw you?

A. When Mr. Frank came out of the office, Mr. Frank was hollering, “Yes, that is right, that is right;” and he said, “That is all right, it will be easy to fix it that way.”

According to Conley, the defendant was equally at home in other parts of the factory. “I have seen him another time,” he said, “There in the packing room with a young lady lying on the table.”

Q. How was the woman on the table?

A. Well, she was on the edge of the table when I saw her.

Before he left the stand, the witness, who proudly described himself, in Frank’s words, as “the best nigger I ever saw,” had titillated the spectators with a running account of two years as a peeping Tom in the pencil factory. What went on during those languorous Saturday afternoons was enough to shock a satyr. “Why,” Conley said, about Frank, “I have seen him in a position I haven’t seen any other man that has got children.”

But Frank wasn’t the only one whom Conley had observed making hay in what must have been the most sybaritic factory in Georgia—or anywhere else, for that matter. Once, Frank and his paramour of the moment had been joined by a Mr. Dalton and another lady. They had told the porter to “go down and see nobody don’t come up and you will have a chance to make some money.” Dalton, who was to return to the plant on many future occasions, usually took his playmates down to the basement. From his first-floor observation post, Conley was able to watch both the stairs leading to Frank’s office and the hatchway to the cellar. He evidently proved to be sharp of eye for, until the death of Mary Phagan, no one in Atlanta knew that more was being made at National than pencils. For his services, he received from twenty-five cents to one dollar a sortie. Although Dalton later testified that he had found the factory a convenient place in which to make love, he denied that he had ever seen Frank similarly occupied.

According to Frank, Mary Phagan had arrived in his office at 12:12 p.m. that Saturday. Another metal room worker, Monteen Stover, who had also gone to the factory to pick up her pay, said that she had been in the plant from 12:05 to 12:10. Since Conley had sworn that Miss Stover had entered the building after the dead girl, then Mary must have entered the plant before 12:05. However, Frank’s stenographer had taken the last of his dictation at 12:02, at which time she went home. Thus, it was clear that the only time in which the superintendent could have been alone with Mary was between 12:02 and 12:05. Lemmie Quinn, the factory foreman, had seen him in his office at 12:20 when, Quinn testified, he had exhibited no sign of nervousness.

According to its schedule, the English Avenue car on which Mary had taken her last ride was due to arrive at the corner of Broad and Marietta Streets at 12:07½ p.m. Mathas, its motorman, was certain that “we were on schedule.” He also believed that “we got to Broad and Hunter about 12:10.” It was at the latter crossing that Mary had left the street car and gone directly to the factory which was only a block away.

Hollis, the conductor, was just as definite. “We ran on schedule that day,” he testified. “We got to Broad and Marietta 7½ minutes after 12, schedule time ... it takes 2½ minutes to run from Broad and Marietta to Broad and Hunter. I have timed the car again and again since then.” Occasionally, a car would run ahead of schedule but “hardly ever.” He insisted that it was “against the rules of the company to get to the city ahead of time.”

The division superintendent backed up the motorman and the conductor as far as the schedules went. However, he remembered that the men frequently came in ahead of time. Just a week before the trial, he had suspended a motorman for arriving a few minutes before his scheduled time. Sometimes, one car would “cut off” another which was ahead of it and come in much too early. On one occasion, he had seen one car cut off another which was scheduled to arrive at Broad and Marietta at 12:05.

In rebuttal, the prosecution put one of the line’s inspectors on the stand. He had never heard of a 12:07½ time for reaching Broad and Marietta; as he remembered it, the schedule called for a 12:07 arrival at that crossing. On one occasion, he had seen Mathas cut off the car in front of him. The men liked to come in ahead of schedule “on relief time, for supper and dinner.” In fact, the crew on Mary’s car had been relieved for lunch just after it arrived in the center of the city after dropping her off at Broad and Hunter.

At 12:50 that day, Frank had announced to several people in the factory that he was going home for lunch. Three employees had seen him leave the building ten minutes later and a dozen witnesses passed him as he walked home where he arrived at 1:20. Yet Conley had said that it had been 12:56 when he had seen Frank at the head of the stairs with a piece of rope in his hand. He had also testified that the two notes had been written after one o’clock and that Frank was still in the building when the porter left at 1:30.

Conley had stated that Mary’s body had been taken to the basement in the electric elevator that serviced the building. But two factory employees who had been working on the fourth floor that afternoon had not heard the whirring noise that always accompanied its operation. More important, a pile of trash that Conley himself had observed at the bottom of the elevator shaft on Saturday morning was not crushed by the descending car.

The porter had also insisted that Mary had been killed in the metal room. However, no blood was found anywhere on the second floor or in the elevator cab. But in the basement, Atlanta police had found blood scattered on the floor, the walls and the inner door that led to the alley in back of the plant. Incidentally, the hasp of the outer door had been pried off with an iron bar.

Frank’s attorneys were convinced that Conley, who was on a holiday toot, had attacked Mary and killed her. It was their opinion that the cinders which were found all over her clothes indicated that Mary had put up quite a battle for her life in the cellar and that it had taken the drunken porter some time to kill her. After her death, he had suddenly come to his senses and decided to write notes putting the blame on a “long, sleam tall negro.” Since he was a stocky, light-colored Negro, this description would, he had thought, prevent suspicion from falling on him. His last precautionary effort had been to wash his bloodstained shirt in the basement sink on the Thursday after the murder.

In addition to trying to prove that Frank was a sexual deviate, the prosecution was determined to show that he had had his eyes on Mary for a long time. W. E. Turner, a boy who worked as a messenger at National, said that “I saw Leo Frank talking to Mary Phagan on the second floor about the middle of March.... There was nobody else in the room then. She was going to work when he stopped her. She told him she had to go to work. He told her that he was the superintendent of the factory and that he wanted to talk to her ... she backed off, and he went on towards her, talking to her. The last thing I heard him say was he wanted to talk to her.” At this point, Turner had left the floor and had seen and heard nothing else.

Dewie Howell, a girl who had once labored in the metal room with Mary, had been found by the prosecution in Cincinnati’s Home of the Good Shepherd. Miss Howell had worked at the pencil factory during February and March of 1913. She had “seen Mr. Frank hold his hand on Mary’s shoulder. He would stand pretty close to Mary when he talked to her. He would lean over in her face.” Irene Jackson, another National employee, had seen him open the door of the girls’ dressing room one afternoon and stare inside.

After Frank had been arrested, four policemen came to the jail with Conley in tow and insisted on seeing the defendant. Frank had refused to talk to them because his lawyer wasn’t to be present at the conference. Dorsey took great pleasure in pointing out that it had been one of the private investigators hired by the factory at Frank’s request who had suggested that Conley be taken to the superintendent’s cell in an effort to shake the truth out of the porter. He was later to tell the jury that Frank had not been so coy at the time he had requested permission to visit Newt Lee’s cell when the night watchman was still under suspicion.

Since the time of Mary’s visit to the factory was crucial to both the state’s and the defendant’s cases, each side tried to show by the condition of the food in her stomach how many minutes had elapsed between her 11:30 lunch and the time she died. Dr. H. F. Harris, Dorsey’s medical expert, was the secretary of the Georgia Board of Health while Dr. W. F. Westmoreland, who testified for the defense, was its former president. Harris thought that the girl had eaten her cabbage and wheat bread “perhaps three quarters of an hour or half an hour or forty minutes, or something like that, before death occurred.” Westmoreland estimated that death had occurred nearer to one o’clock. Both physicians had previously been involved in an altercation provoked by charges of professional misconduct being filed against Harris by Westmoreland. The former was subsequently cleared and his accuser forced to resign as president of the Board of Health. There was bad blood all around and the two physicians effectively neutralized each other.

When the defense took over, it tried to dispel the aura of sexual degeneracy that the Solicitor General had so painstakingly developed. A reward of $5000.00, offered by William J. Burns to anyone who could turn up a single immoral act in Frank’s past life, went begging. Even the Atlanta police, who could hardly be classed as impartial observers, were unable to locate any evidence in Brooklyn or Ithaca that in any way implicated the defendant. So clean was his record that Chief Beavers did an about-face and insisted that the police had never claimed that he was a degenerate. But if Atlanta officialdom had changed its mind, the man in the street still saw Frank as the anti-Christ.

Dorsey, who was later to refer to the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde in his summation, had also introduced testimony that Mrs. Frank had never visited her husband in jail. What could be clearer evidence that he was guilty of murdering what Tom Watson’s The Jeffersonian referred to as “our little girl—ours by the Eternal God!” To rebut these inferences, the defense put witness after witness on the stand to testify to Frank’s good character. But Judge Roan consistently permitted Dorsey to undermine the effect of their testimony. The cross-examination of Mary Pirk, a National worker, was typical.

Q. You never heard of a single thing immoral during the five years?

A. Yes, sir, that’s true.

Q. You never knew of his being guilty of a thing that was immoral during the five years—is that true?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. You never heard a single soul during that time discuss it?

A. No, sir.

Q. You never heard of his going in the dressing room there of the girls?

A. No, sir.

Q. You never heard of his slapping them as he would go by?

A. No, sir.

The trial was destined to last for a month. As it wore on, popular feeling against Frank grew by leaps and bounds. In its last week, the Solicitor General was carried down the steps of the courthouse at the end of each day on the shoulders of a surging crowd that shouted, “Hurrah for Dorsey.” On August 23rd, when one of Frank’s character witnesses was on the stand, the spectators began to laugh and it took all of Judge Roan’s courtroom savvy to quiet them down. An hour later, a claque in the rear of the room began to applaud exchanges of causticities between Dorsey and various defense lawyers. Again, Judge Roan stepped into the breech and restored some sort of order. But apparently he was at the end of his resources because he promptly called in the police and the Fifth Georgia Regiment to keep the restive audience under wraps.

On August 25, 1913, the trial’s last day, the courthouse was ringed by thousands of people who shouted such pleasantries as “Hang the Jew or we will hang you!” into the Pryor Avenue windows of the first-floor courtroom. As the Atlanta Constitution described it, “A veritable honeycomb of humanity spread over the section ... Men and women clung to the walls of buildings and stood in doorways. Windows were crowded with women and girls and children. It was as though a street audience had gathered to watch an eventful procession.”

The situation grew so bad that Roan cleared the courtroom when the jury announced that it had decided on a verdict. The cheering from the outside reached such a crescendo that it was almost impossible to hear the foreman inform the judge that he and his colleagues had found Leo Frank guilty of murder in the first degree. When a court bailiff leaned out of a window and shouted the word “guilty,” a reporter noted that “a combined shout ... rose to the sky. Pandemonium reigned. Hats went into the air. Women wept and shouted by turns ... Few will live to see another such demonstration.”

Judge Roan, who had previously said that “if Christ and his angels came down here and showed this jury Frank was innocent, it would bring him in guilty,” denied his attorneys’ motion for a new trial despite the fact that he publicly acknowledged that he did not know “this morning whether Leo Frank is innocent or guilty.” The next day, Frank was sentenced to be hanged in the courtyard of the “common jail of Fulton County.” Before Roan went through the dreary formalities that marked the first step in taking a man’s life, he afforded the slender, dark-haired defendant an opportunity to make a last statement. Frank, in a voice that was all but drowned out by the clamor outside the courtroom, swore that “I am innocent of little Mary Phagan’s death, and have no knowledge of how it occurred....”

On February 17, 1914, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the death sentence. Ten months later, the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene although Mr. Justice Holmes was moved to state that “I very seriously doubt if the petitioner has had due process of law ... because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd.” It looked very much as if Leo Frank would never live to see his thirty-first year.

But on June 30, 1915, Governor John H. Slaton, with rare courage, sacrificed his political career and commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. Unfortunately, his beau geste was an empty one because, several months later, a mob broke into the prison hospital where Frank was recovering from an attack by a fellow prisoner who, in a frenzy of self-righteousness, had cut his throat, rushed him back to Atlanta, and hanged him from a tree that grew in front of Mary Phagan’s house. After the jury’s verdict, the defendant had asked a reporter, “Can it be that the law, and our system of its administration, is so inexorable that truth and innocence may never be heard after once the die is cast? Is the door forever closed and the way barred?” His swinging body was the answer.