Paris/Touro, July 7, 2011 The Legacy of the Frank Case Steve Oney

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1 1 Paris/Touro, July 7, 2011 The Legacy of the Frank Case Steve Oney Shortly before dawn one morning in the mid-1960s, fifty years after the lynching of Leo Frank, two middle-aged men drove into Oakland Cemetery, a vast and historic graveyard on the edge of downtown Atlanta. When they reached the Jewish section a ghetto of Hebrew-inscribed stones the men, who carried garden tools and a cardboard box, walked to an unmarked plot and started digging. These were the nephews of Leo Frank s widow, and the cardboard box held her cremated remains. Lucille Frank, who had died of heart disease in 1957, had requested that her ashes be strewn in an Atlanta park, but a local ordinance forbade it. For a couple of years, the family warehoused the ashes at a funeral home. Later, they stored them in the trunk of a car. No one was quite sure what to do with the remains of the martyred woman. The only thing the family agreed on was that there would be no public ceremony even after half a century, they feared that renewed attention to the Frank case might stir violence. Eventually, Lucille s nephews decided on a plan. They would quietly inter their aunt s ashes between the markers for her mother and father, and that was what they did. After a prayer, they drove away. There is no monument or record only the family knew Lucille s final resting place. Early in my research for And the Dead Shall Rise, Alan Marcus, by this point an old man, told me about the morning he and his brother buried Lucille s ashes. We were sitting at a restaurant in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was quiet and calm, but I immediately realized the emotional importance of the story. It bespoke the enduring impact of the Frank lynching on Atlanta s Jewish community. Here it all was the trauma, the denial, and the apprehension that the hostility that had exploded in 1915 could explode again. Was this an irrational fear? I think not. In the late 1950s, the Temple, Atlanta s main reform synagogue, was bombed. No one was injured, but for Southern Jews the attack was terrifying, reinforcing the view that the passions unleashed by the Frank case were alive. It was best not to raise the subject.

2 2 The same week Alan Marcus told me about Lucille s anonymous burial, I traveled to Sarasota, Florida, to visit an aging lawyer named Eugene Clay. I had been corresponding with Gene, a native of Marietta, the Atlanta suburb where Leo Frank was lynched, for months. He knew why I was coming, and he did not relish the prospect. No sooner had he ushered me into his office than he began crying. Yes, he said, I believe my father was one of the men responsible for the lynching of Leo Frank. The Clays are a great Southern family. Alexander Stephens Clay, the patriarch, was a United States senator. General Lucius Clay, Gene s uncle, was military governor of Germany during the Berlin Airlift. Herbert Clay, Gene s father and Lucius s brother, was the chief prosecuting officer for the old Blue Ridge Circuit Court, which included Marietta. Herbert Clay was an instrumental figure in the small, powerful group that masterminded the Frank lynching. Among his compatriots were a former governor of Georgia, a superior court judge, and a sitting state legislator. These men organized the 25-member party that abducted Frank from a state prison deep in the heart of Georgia without firing a shot, drove him nearly 150 miles on unpaved roads in the dead of night, and hanged him the next morning near the former home of Mary Phagan, the child laborer Frank was convicted of murdering. It was a daring and outlandish crime. None of the participants was prosecuted or indicted. Gene Clay and I became friends, and over time he introduced me to the children and family members of other men involved in the Frank lynching. Most still lived in Marietta, and most were initially wary but for varying reasons. Some were ashamed of what their relatives had done. A few were defiant, intent on guarding a secret. This was not something people wanted to talk about. For the town of Marietta, whose leading citizens planned the lynching and whose farmers and merchants carried it out, the subject was nearly as painful as it was for Atlanta Jews. Victims and victimizers, while they can t be equated morally, were for many decades equally mute on this matter. There was finally another group that didn t want to address the Frank case Atlanta blacks. In the affair s aftermath, Jim Conley, the black, self-confessed accomplice to the Phagan murder and the star witness against Frank, led a checkered life. He was convicted of public drunkenness, wife beating, and armed robbery. He served a long sentence in the state prison. As time passed, popular opinion in the South began to

3 3 shift. Conley, not Frank, was widely regarded as the killer. In Atlanta, home of the Civil Rights movement and a progressive black power structure, the Frank affair was seen as an anomaly that reflected badly on the black community. Although years passed during which people rarely spoke of the Frank case, it from the start projected great symbolic import. On Thanksgiving eve 1915 barely three months after the lynching the modern Ku Klux Klan held its first rally and cross burning just outside Atlanta. Three men who d been part of the lynch mob were there. Meantime, the Anti-Defamation League, formed in 1913, took the lynching as a sign that anti-semitism, much as Jews would have liked to deny it, was a factor in American life. The Frank case, in sum, was a touchstone for polarizing emotions and forces. It took time for the pall cast by the Frank affair to dissipate, and not just in the South. The subject is inherently dramatic a double murder mystery and a social history but popular culture largely ignored it. They Won t Forget, a feature film based on the case, appeared in 1936 with a busty young Lana Turner in the role of Mary Phagan. The picture, however, made no mention of the Frank character s Jewish faith. Over the years, there were a few books A Little Girl Is Dead by the popular Jewish writer Harry Golden and the excellent The Leo Frank Case by Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian of American Jewry but by and large the story was ignored. It offered no neat morals or resolutions. It was deeply disturbing across religious and racial lines. The less said the better. Things remained this way until the mid-1980s when 85-year old Alonzo Mann made a startling charge. At the age of 14, Mann had worked as Leo Frank s office boy. He had been in the pencil factory on the day of Mary Phagan s murder. As he now told it, he had seen Jim Conley carrying the girl s body shortly after the crime was committed. Conley, Mann said, had threatened to kill him if he spoke up. Now, some seventy years later, Mann who was in failing health was breaking his silence. I conducted the final interview with Alonzo Mann in 1984 at a veteran s hospital in Tennessee. Mann s late-in-life revelation sparked a passionate new interest in the Frank case. A group of Atlanta lawyers sought a posthumous pardon for Frank. Once again, experts filed into hearing rooms to debate the Phagan murder. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles initially refused to grant Frank a pardon. While Mann s evidence cast new light on the case, it was not probative. So the lawyers reworked their application, asking the

4 4 Board of Pardons and Paroles to concede that Georgia by failing to provide protection for Frank at the state prison had denied him his Constitutional rights. The board granted the lawyers revised request. The state of Georgia had made late and inadequate amends to Leo Frank. In the aftermath of the posthumous pardon, I wrote an article about the Frank case for Esquire and plunged into research on And the Dead Shall Rise. Despite the new openness about the subject, I faced an uphill climb. Much of the evidence including the trial transcript had disappeared. Yet many documents letters, lawyers files, all the old newspapers survived. Moreover, sons and daughters of most of the major participants ultimately agreed to speak to me. Over time more of it than I like to admit I acquired a thorough understanding of the case. I knew the strategies of the opposing counsel, the personalities of the witnesses, the hopes and fears of Frank and his wife, the anxieties of the Jewish community, the pain of the Southern working class, the popular songs of the day, and the ugly passions boiling beneath the surface. Thanks to the help of Gene Clay and a Marietta newspaper editor named Bill Kinney, I also learned the identities of the men who lynched Frank and how they got away with it. For eighty-eight years, this had been a deeply held secret. When And the Dead Shall Rise was published and the story was finally laid bare, it made front-page news. Today, nearly a century after the lynching, the Frank case continues to raise hard questions. Was he the victim of an anti-semitic prosecution? Once Frank was sentenced to death, should his supporters have rallied to him as a Jew or as a wrongly convicted man? In other words, did Frank s supporters, by raising the matter of anti-semitism, play into the hands of anti-semites? And how should we view Georgia Governor John Slaton? He commuted Frank s sentence and by so doing destroyed his political career, yet he was a partner of Frank s lead counsel. Was he a noble figure who made a hard call or guilty of a conflict of interest? There is also, of course, a last question. Could an anti-semitic incident of this magnitude occur in America today, and if it did, how would we face it? These are few easy answers. I don t think Frank was the victim of an overtly anti- Semitic prosecution, but in the aftermath of his conviction he was undoubtedly the victim of vicious anti-semitic attacks. He was commonly called the lecherous Jew by his chief

5 5 antagonist, editor and future United States Senator Tom Watson. Yet by rallying to him as a Jew, his supporters may have exacerbated these attacks. Following the publication of my book, I got to know Frances Lasker Brody, the daughter of the advertising executive Albert Lasker, who paid for Frank s defense during the appeals process. Frances told me that her father believed that by making anti-semitism an issue he d committed a colossal error. He d poured gasoline on a blazing fire. He blamed himself for Frank s fate. As for Governor Slaton: yes, he had a conflict of interest, but he made a decision of conscience. I don t believe in closure. While wounds may heal, the events that caused them are everlasting. That said I attended a remarkable program in Atlanta in It was the theatrical premiere of The People vs. Leo Frank, a PBS documentary based largely on my book. The theater was just a couple miles from the site where Frank was lynched, and among the 2,000 in attendance were Jews and blacks, people who believe Frank innocent and others who believe him guilty and, most startling, relatives of lynch party leaders. It was a civilized evening of the sort that would have been unimaginable even a few years before. Afterwards, a former Georgia governor whose wife was the granddaughter of a lynch-party member led a smart discussion about the case. There were no outbursts of racial or religious animosity just earnest questions, genuine curiosity, and good will. Most students of the Frank affair believe that Frank did not murder Mary Phagan. In And the Dead Shall Rise, I make a strong argument for his innocence. Jim Conley s lawyer ultimately concluded that Conley Frank s chief accuser was guilty, and I use this lawyer s research to unravel the case against Frank and buttress the case against Conley. But barring the discovery of fresh forensic evidence, we can t be sure. Frank was the last person to admit seeing Mary Phagan alive. He behaved strangely in the days after the killing, and Conley s trial testimony was powerful and cannot be dismissed. As for the lynching, it was a premeditated murder pulled off with brutal audacity. The lynch party abducted the most celebrated prisoner in America from a well-guarded prison without firing a shot, drove him across the state, and lynched him at dawn the next day. The crime, while appalling, was brilliantly executed, and it s the main reason people remain transfixed by the Frank affair. There are also, of course, the underlying issues. The Frank case exposed fault lines that are still very much with us. Rich versus poor, Jew versus gentile, white versus

6 6 black each of these oppositions is enough to ignite great hostility. The Frank affair had them all. In the end, the Frank case was a tragedy, and tragedies resist a tidy summing up. For years, people couldn t look at the case. Now we can, and what we see is unsettling which is as it should be. To me, the Frank s case s legacy is its ability to undermine our assumptions about law and society. Things can go wrong fast, and that s important to remember. It s also important to remember that we should strive to be fair, vigilant, and just. At times, however, our best efforts are not enough. The Frank case was one of those times.