I have now recorded an audiobook of the powerful article below about this case….

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E. Michael Jones’ massive and brilliant book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit ….

….goes in detail into how VERY judeophilic many Southerners had been until the Frank case.

They felt the Jews had been “on their side” in the Civil War, and this was partly true!

The British Rothschilds did want a Confederate victory so the USA would break up, and be reabsorbed right back into their British Empire!

Since Judah P. Benjamin (photo & see further below, in the article) was the Treasurer of said Confederacy, that meant to many Confederates whose heads were afflicted with wishful thinking that the Jews were their friends or at least trusty allies with them, the honor-based, chivalry-avowing Southern boys.

Well, all Southern and Northern Christian Zionists who are ready and willing to hear the truth need to know is this:

1) Leo Frank, the PRESIDENT OF B’NAI B’RITH OF GEORGIA, an Ivy League graduate, and married into a top Georgia Jewish family (not some lowlife escapee from the Polish ghetto), raped and murdered a virtuous, young, white teenage girl who was raised a farm girl and was earning an honest living in the pencil factory he managed:

2) He then sought to frame an innocent man, the black janitor, who certainly would have been lynched in that heyday of lynching

3) NY Jews and their Pinkerton type came to down to bribe and threaten witnesses

4) the northern Jew press bashed the South ferociously and Georgia in particular during the trial and thereafter

The other states (depicted by shocked women, and driven by the diver, Uncle Sam) watch the bigoted Georgians grabbing hold of innocent Leo

5) they corrupted the previously revered Governor of the State of Georgia

6) Frank was never exonerated, just “pardoned” and merely because he supposedly had not exhausted all his appeals when lynched (but he had, unless he could introduce major new evidence)

7) It was not the South that was antisemitic; it was Jewish arrogance that turned a Jew-admiring South over night into antisemites

8) John 8:44 “You are from your father, the Devil” — Jesus said that, yes, to the Pharisee leaders, but as Brother Kapner has pointed out, the Pharisees were no mere sect of that time, but became THE Talmudic scholars and now are the official judaism of today.

 

Caiaphas, the high priest

 

 

Israeli comedy show shows Jesus as a monkey whom a mocking Jewish girl in a bikini nails to a cross, calling  Him a “Nazi” who should stop whining because a few nails don’t hurt (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jtRj5iYurM)

9) Jews lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. They murder, rape, frame, swear false oaths, bribe, defame innocent Southern jurors as antisemites when they were the opposite, initially…..

10) It was their own STUPIDITY that inflamed antisemitism. They should have just disavowed Frank as a renegade scumbag who was not representative of their community, called him a black sheep, expelled him, and the ENTIRETY of Jewry in Atlanta should have, and could have just condemned him. Italian-Americans did not rally to Albert De Salvo, the Boston Strangler, just because he was Italian!

11) but instead, because Jews are a satanic tribe of organized criminals, a CRIME FAMILY, they stood up for their black sheep because they ALL are black sheep. Leo just got sloppy and got caught!

But now the crime family has to show it defends its own!

I am going to use Frank as a battering ram to open the can of worms of the Southern Christian Zionism subject, which is of critical importance in deprogramming enough basically good Southerners back into true Southern values. There are about 50 million of these types nowadays…..

….Born-Again Christian-Zionist Israel worshipers, who are the most dangerous enemies in America of white rebirth. You criticize Israhell and they become hate-filled maniacs. The nastiest look I ever got was from a Southern gal who loved her Jews.

I had a Christian Zionist woman at a local church call the sheriff on me in Ontonagon. She asked what I did. I said, I write on conspiracies, and I think the country has been taken over. She asked: “By whom?” I did not say, but merely showing her the back of the one-dollar bill!

 

She got deathly silent, as if I were Satan himself 😉  and later her friend, a writer, called the sheriff!

Basically, Leo Frank was a child molester, murderer, liar, defamer, briber, adulterer and sex fiend. Only the Jews could rally behind such a man.

 

To change the South and the 50 MILLION Christian Zionists, who otherwise tend toward us, this case must go viral now!

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, THIS MONTH,

 

January 1915

 

Tom Watson blasts Leo Frank

 

 

& the J-Team of newspapers and lawyers trying to get the murdering fiend off!

 

(Five Articles About Leo Frank Case Published in Watson’s Magazine, Jan, March, August, Sept, & Oct, 1915)

 

….the first time Jews openly threw their weight aggressively around in the mainstream newspaper media, not even pretending to be “just good Americans,” but trying to get a rapist-pedophile, a notorious sexually-harassing boss, and top Jew official in B’nai B’rith off just BECAUSE HE WAS ONE OF THEIRS! This is Jewish Supremacism and this is the birth of the Jewish genetic race war against European-Americans.

….while calling everyone else an antisemite, who doesn’t agree with their ethnocentric, received narrative!

It ended eight months after this article with The Day of the Rope for Leo Frank on August 17, 1915! Get ready for a racist Jewish Supremacist and neo-Zionist media explosion on the centennial of Frank’s hanging this August 17, 2015!

And now they are coming out this year with the FIFTH Frank-Was-Innocent movie!

 

Arm yourselves, White men and Women, with the facts from the Leo Frank Research website @ http://www.LeoFrank.org

It’s five years and tens of thousands of dollars in the making; it’s the largest Leo Frank research site and TRUTH site in the world!

 

My 2013 promo-video on this case that I hope everyone will watch:

My essay proving that Frank did it, and he was just obeying the Talmud by doing so!

PLEASE READ: Glory to Mary Phagan and the White Men Who Avenged Her Honor (UPDATED 2015)

https://johndenugent.com/glory-to-mary-phagan-and-the-white-men-who-avenged-her-2/

A first reaction, on Facebook: (CLICK ON THIS IMAGE TO ENLARGE!)

Audiobook script:

Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case,
read by John de Nugent

This article from The American Mercury, published on March 19, 2014, is the republication of an article published 100 years ago by the crusading Georgia publisher Thomas Watson, found in his Watson’s Magazine, Volume 20, Number 3, of January 10, 1915…….

AN AGED MILLIONAIRE of New York City had a lawyer named Albert T. Patrick, and this lawyer… poisoned his own aging client, forged a will in his own favor; was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to the electric chair for these crimes ”and three years ago New York City set him at liberty, a pardoned man.

Through the falling out among Wall Street thieves, it transpires that the sensational clemency of Governor John A. Dix, in favor of Albert T. Patrick, was inspired by a gold mining transaction involving millions of dollars.

Patrick says that he was “pardoned on the merits of the case.”

It was a negligible coincidence that his brother-in-law, Milliken, who had for years resisted Wall Street efforts to get control of his Golden Cycle gold mine, finally yielded it as soon as Patrick got the pardon.

Such is life in these latter days, when Big Money makes and unmakes presidents, makes and unmakes legislation, and makes and unmakes the policies of the greatest republic.

And… there was a man of the name of Morse; and he was a parlous knave to be sure. [Narrator’s note: “parlous” is an old word related to “perilous” and means “dangerously shrewd” and “knave” means a tricky, deceitful fellow.]

He also lived in New York, and he was an adept in the peculiar methods of Wall Street. To Charles W. Morse, it seemed good to organize an Ice Trust, and he did it.

Ellis Island, immigration center for New York City

[Narrator’s note: 1) Ice was used for refrigeration of meat, supermarket food, and food in households. People had “iceboxes” in those days, or their food went rotten. You had to buy ice constantly, and it was hauled to your house in big cubes. It was a huge business. 2) So-called “trusts” were a major economic problem 100 years ago.

 

Icebox

Companies would get together, end price competition, and fix the prices of food, cotton, steel, railroad tickets “ everything — at very high levels, ensuring obscene profits for Wall Street billionaires. This price-rigging by the so-called “trusts” was finally banned, under federal law, in Thomas Watson’s time. (Now back to the article….)]

To prevent Nature from interfering too impertinently with his honest designs, Morse sent boats up the Hudson [Narrator’s note: the Hudson river was next to Manhattan, New York City] to destroy “ the ice “ which was in process of formation on the river.

 

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There is no law against the breaking of ice ”so far as I know ”[though the people need it!] and therefore the curses, the imprecations and the idle tears of the independent ice-dealers availed them nothing.

 

Mulberry Street, Manhattan, 1900

Summer came, in due course; and with it came stifling heat in crowded tenements, the struggle for fresh air and the cool drink, and the sickness that pants for a chance to live. But Charles W. Morse had the ice. Nobody else had any. Charles W. Morse made new rules for the ice market: he not only raised the price, but refused to sell any quantity of his frozen water for less than ten cents.

[Narrator’s note: about ten dollars today, a day’s wages for the poor, who also worked six or seven days a week.]

It seems a fearful thing that our Christian civilization should have reached a stage at which any one man, withholding a ten-cent block of ice, can condemn a sick child to death, but it is a fact. Unless the daily papers of New York and Jersey were the most arrant liars, the weaker invalids in the sardine-boxes called tenements died like flies.

Day after day, the editors pleaded with Morse, begging him to rescind the new rules and to sell to the poor the five-cent piece of ice that they had formerly been able to obtain.

The editorial appeals made to Morse might have softened the heart of the stoniest despot that ever sent human beings to the block, but they did not soften Charles W. Morse.

His relentless car was driven right on, day after day, week after week; and the victims that were crushed under his golden wheels, were pitiful little children.

Later, he made a campaign against the J.P. Morgan wolves of Wall Street, and he came to grief.

[Narrator’s note: J.P, that is, Junius Pierpont .. Morgan was an infamous Wall Street financier, a mega-billionaire, and was hated by millions.

He was a gold-buying partner with the Jewish banking dynasty of Rothschild and possibly, by his Mediterranean appearance as well as behavior, was secretly Jewish himself. His first business coup was during the Civil War, when he 1) paid $30,000 in today’s money to get out of military service; then 2) he bought defective rifles and made a killing by selling them to a Northern general for nine times the price.

He helped the Tennessee Jewish Ochs family to buy and take over the New York Times, he created the US Steel trust which rigged steel prices, and helped engineer the financial panic of 1906, being depicted as a great man when he then, quote, “solved” it.

In this he fulfilled the Yiddish proverb: “Start a fire, then sell a firehose.”

Since Morgan the financier had supposedly saved the nation, the 1906 panic was later used to justify creating the infamous Federal Reserve in 1913 — on the claim that private billionaires like Morgan should run the US economy, and lend all US money to us, at interest. So that was the reference to “J.P. Morgan and his wolves.” Now back to the article.]

The Morgan wolves turned upon Morse, and brought him down. His methods were the orthodox Morgan methods, but he was a poacher on the Morgan preserves; and so, he was sent to the penitentiary, not so much because he was a criminal, as because he was a trespasser.

Being in prison, Morse craved a pardon, and his [Jewish lawyer], Abe Hummel, was not at hand to get it for him.

[Narrator’s note: The rest of this section is amusing, but confusing, 100 years later, but it was hot celebrity gossip when Watson wrote it. To summarize: Abraham Hummel was a little Hebrew shyster with a huge nose who represented organized crime, and made another fortune as a criminal himself, blackmailing rich Gentile married men with so-called “honey traps.” (see: http://ezinearticles.com/?Mobsters,-Criminals-and-Crooks—Howe-and-Hummel—The-Most-Crooked-Law-Firm-of-All-Time&id=6318158)

Excerpt included:

After Hummel’s conviction, he was also disbarred. Furthermore, in 1908, the law firm of Howe & Hummel was enjoined by law from further practice, thus ending an era of lawless lawyering that has never been duplicated.

Howe and Hummel are accurately portrayed in the annals of American crime as the most law-breaking law firm of all time.

Excerpt from the book Bath, Maine’s Charlie Morse

Samuel Untermyer [photo], the Jewish Zionist leader and lawyer who, on behalf of world Jewry, infamously declared war on Hitler Germany in March of 1933, was also involved, being the lawyer for the wife of Morse.

In the end, Abe Hummel and his client Morse, the infamous “Ice King of New York,” went to prison over perjury and a divorce scam, but for only a scandalously short time, showing that in New York, or Jew York, City for that matter, money can get anybody out of jail.

And all this leads Thomas Watson up to the Leo Frank case, where New York Jewish lawyers also were trying desperately to get one of theirs off, a fellow Jew. In this case, it was Leo Frank, after his conviction and death sentence in the 1913 rape, strangulation and murder of a 13-year-old Irish beauty, his sweatshop employee, Mary Phagan. To resume the article:]

Abe, that is, Abe Hummel, was now in Europe, for his health. Abe had got Morse a young wife by the gentle art of taking her away from an older man, Dodge. Morse had looked upon the wife of Dodge; and, while doing so, his memory went back to the time when King David of Israel gazed upon the unveiled charms of Bathsheba. Dodge could not be sent the way of Uriah [Narrator’s note: that is, sent off to die in battle], but the woman could be taken by the modern process of the divorce-court.

Abe Hummel found the fake evidence; Abe managed the case; Abe mildly took a penitentiary sentence which rightly belonged to Morse; Abe spent a short while in prison, and Morse took Mrs. Dodge.

Abe got out of jail and went to Europe. Afterwards, Morse too went briefly to jail, and also went to Europe.

Morse was in the penitentiary for two years, and he became a very sick man. His lawyer said so; his doctor said so; the daily papers said so. Morse was suffering from several incurable and necessarily fatal maladies. His lawyer said so; his doctor said so; and the daily papers said so. Morse was a dying man; he had only a few days to live; his will had been made; the funeral arrangements were about complete; the sermon on the virtues of the deceased was in course of preparation; the epitaph was practically written; and all that Morse wanted was, that Dodge’s wife, and his own, should not have to bear, throughout the remainder of her chequered existence, as the ex-wife of both Dodge and Morse, the bitter recollection that the man who took her from Dodge had died in prison.

Therefore, heavens and earth moved mightily for the pardon of Morse, the dying man. President Taft [photo, left] was so afraid that any delay might seem hard-hearted, and that Morse’s death in the penitentiary might haunt him with reproach the remainder of his life, he hurriedly pardoned one of the grandest rascals that ever was caught in the toils of the law.

Of course, the man was shamming all along; and with indecent haste he revealed himself as the robust, impudent, unscrupulous knave that he had even been, when he was virtually murdering the destitute sick in New York by doubling the summer price of ice.

These cases are cited because they are recent, and have been universally discussed. They are examples of what Big Money can do, when it has a fixed purpose to gull the public, influence the authorities, and use the newspapers to defeat Justice.

Let us now consider the undisputed facts in the case of Leo Frank, about whom so much has been said, and in whose interest Big Money has waged such a campaign of vilification against the State and people of Georgia.

Far and wide, the accusation has been strewn that we are prejudiced against this young libertine because he is a Jew.

If there is such a racial dislike of the Hebrews among us, why is it that, in the formation of the Southern Confederacy, we placed a Jew in the Cabinet, and kept him there to the last?

[Narrator’s note: Judah P. Benjamin [photo] was the Treasurer of the Confederacy, then its Vice-President, and a very powerful man in the Confederate Cabinet.] Why is it, we are constantly electing Jews to the State legislatures, and to Congress?

Confederate two-dollar bill with Benjamin upper-left

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The law-partner of the best criminal advocate at our bar, is a Jew. I refer to Judge H.D.D. Twiggs of Savannah, and his able associate, Mr. Simon Gazan.

The law-partner of the Governor of Georgia is a Jew. I refer, of course, to Mr. Benjamin Phillips, the partner of the Honorable John M. Slaton.

[Narrator’s note: Also Jewish was Luther Zeigler Rosser’s law-partner Morris Brandon. In early July 1913, the law firm of Rosser and Brandon, merged with the lawfirm Slaton and Phillips, producing the most powerful lawfirm in all of Georgia.]

 

The Peachtree State

 

The daughters of our best people are continually intermarrying with Jews; and Gentiles are associated with Jews in fraternal orders, volunteer military companies, banking and mercantile firms, etc., etc.

The truth of the matter is, that the lawyers and detectives employed to save Leo Frank were themselves the authors of the hue and cry about his being a Jew, and they did it for the sordid purpose of influencing financial supplies.

[Narrator’s note: he means — to get in more donations for the Frank defense by playing the anti-Semitism card or Jewish card.]

Wealthy Israelites all over the land have been appealed to, and their race pride aroused, in order that the lawyers and the detectives might have the use of unlimited funds. The propaganda in favor of Frank has been even more expensive than that in favor of Morse.

The rich Jews of Athens, Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc., have furnished the sinews of legal and media war.

I dare say the campaign has not cost less than half-a-million dollars [narrator’s note: about $50 million dollars today. A car back then cost $500 and a house $2,000.] The lawyers have probably been paid at least $100,000 [narrator: the equivalent of $10 million today].

The Burns Detective Agency has no doubt also fingered $100,000. The publicity bills [narrator: for huge display ads in major newspapers across America screaming about antisemitism and prejudice; many of these newspapers falsifying the evidence of the Leo Frank case survived to the 21st century, and Jewish authors who write about the Frank case invariably use these sources] in the daily papers must be enormous.

Under the law of Georgia, no man can be convicted on the evidence of an accomplice. The testimony in the case, apart from that of the accomplice, must be of such a character as to exclude every other reasonable hypothesis, save that of the defendant’s guilt.

Has any civilized State a milder code than that? Could any sane person ask that the laws of Georgia should be more favorable to the accused?

The newspapers which sold themselves to the Burns propaganda, have said, and repeated, that Leo Frank was convicted on the evidence of a “low-down, drunken negro.”

The janitor Jim Conley, who had indeed been in trouble for drunkenness

It is not true. Under the law of Georgia, that cannot be done [because Conley was the accomplice, albeit after the fact, in dumping the body].

And in the Frank case, it was not done.

Before going into the facts of this most horrible case, let us get our bearings by referring to other celebrated cases.

Take, for instance, the case of Eugene Aram of Yorkshire, England, which still possesses a melancholy interest, though the murderer paid his penalty 155 years ago. “The Dream of Eugene Aram” is one of Thomas Hood’s fine poems; and Bulwer made the story the basis of one of his best novels.

Eugene Aram, the learned, respected schoolmaster, was convicted upon the evidence of his accomplice [Narrator’s note: which is not allowed in Georgia]. Apart from this, there was almost nothing against the accused. There was not even an identification of the skeleton of the deceased, which for thirteen years had been buried in a cave. For thirteen years, the scholarly Aram had been leading a quiet, correct life, when he was arrested.

His character previous to the crime was unblemished. Without the accomplice, there was no proof of the corpus delicti [Narrator’s note: a phrase which means the dead body of the murdered person], nor of any motive; nor was there any corroboration that excluded the idea of defendant’s innocence.

But there was testimony to the effect that Aram was in company with Clark (the deceased) the last time Clark was seen in life; and Aram (like Frank) did not even try to tell what had become of the deceased.

This was the circumstance that weighed most against Aram — who confessed after receiving his sentence of death!

[Narrator’s note: All these details are parallels to the Leo Frank case. Frank was the last person seen with Mary Phagan.]

One of the most celebrated of American cases was the murder in 1849 of Dr. George Parkman of Boston by Harvard professor John Webster, a man of great eminence and of spotless character, whose friends were numerous and of the highest standing.

All New England was profoundly stirred when it was learned that Dr. Parkman had disappeared, and that he had last been seen entering the College where he went for the purpose of seeing Professor Webster on a matter of business.

In this case the controlling factor was that Dr. Parkman had disappeared into the Professor’s rooms, and had never reappeared. What became of him? Professor Webster could not answer.

When Rufus Choate, the greatest criminal lawyer in New England, was applied to by the friends of Professor Webster, he offered to take the case if they would consent for him to plead manslaughter.

He meant to put the defense on the line, that the two men had had a quarrel in the laboratory; and that, in the heat of passion the Professor had killed the Doctor.

Webster’s friends declined this proposition, and Choate refused the case.

Webster was convicted, and confessed, after sentence of death!

In the 1911 case of the Virginia wife-murderer, Henry Clay Beattie, the testimony was about on a par, in character and convincing power, with that against Frank in 1913, and in both cases they were convicted; yet, like Frank, Beattie professed innocence, continuing to lustily cry out, “I am innocent! They are about to commit judicial murder,” and there were numbers of our most intelligent people who believed his lies.

He also confessed after he lost all hope of reprieve.

The standard books on evidence teach young lawyers that one of the most striking phases of human nature is the inclination to believe.

Trained lawyers, entrusted with the lives of the Beatties, the Patricks, the Beckers, the Woodfolks, and the Franks, realize the value of the constant repetition, “I am innocent. I didn’t do it! They are about to commit judicial murder!”

Realizing it, they make use of it. Sometimes, they overdo it!

In the 1887 Tom Woodfolk case in Georgia, a splendid gentleman and first-class lawyer, John Rutherford, actually worked himself to death defending a guilty monster who killed his whole family with an ax, among them a precious little girl.

In the Flanigan case too, the best criminal lawyer in North Georgia, Hon. Bill Glenn, made himself a nervous wreck, toiling to save a wretched miscreant who was as guilty as hell, and who didn’t deserve a day out of the Book of Life of any respectable lawyer.

And I venture to predict that when Leo Frank’s attorneys get through with their labors for this detestable sodomite, they will never again be what they were in health, standing, or practice.

Now let us focus on Leo Frank:

He came down from New York to take charge of a factory where young Gentile girls worked for Hebrews, at a wage-scale of five or six dollars a week.

Cornell University in New York State, alma mater of Frank

[Narrator’s note: About $50 a week today, Mary Phagan earned 7.5 cents an hour, or about $4.05 per week, for 55 hours over 6 days].

Leo Frank was a typical young Jewish man of business who loves pleasure, and runs after Gentile girls. Every student of sociology knows that the black man’s lust after the white woman is not much fiercer than the lust of the licentious Jew for the Gentile.

Leo Frank was reared in the environment of “the gentleman friend,” whose financial aid is necessary to the $5-a-week girl. Frank lived many years in that atmosphere. He came in contact with the young women who are paid the $5-a-week, and who are expected to clothe themselves, find decent lodgings, and pay doctor’s bills out of the regular wage of five dollars a week.

Leo Frank knew what this system meant for the girls. In fact, we all know what it means.… but we don’t like to say so. We prefer not to interrupt our bounties to Chinese charities, or check our provisioning of Belgian derelicts.

How gay a life Leo Frank led among the wage-slaves of the North, we do not know; but when he arrived in Atlanta, he seems to have kept the pace, from the very beginning.

To his Rabbi [Dr. David Marx], he was a model young man; to the girls in the factory, he was a cynical libertine. The type is familiar.

[Narrator’s note: Author Thomas Watson, the crusader for the working poor, who was the Populist Party candidate for vice-president in 1896, is here dealing with a little-known aspect of the tragedy of starvation wages.

Not only could a boss demand sex or threaten he would fire the girl, but if a girl, earning a pitiful $50 a week, were merely hit with one large bill, and facing homelessness or the inability to afford medicine for an illness, she would be at her employer’s mercy.  (The disgusted Watson continues, sarcastically..)

A policeman must wear a badge to seize his prey, but the employer-seducer does not. If all the immoral “gentlemen” had to wear a seducer badge to church, attendance would plummet. 😉

With prurient curiosity, the Hebrew Leo Frank used to hover about the locker room where the girls changed their dresses.

[A number of former factory female child laborers testified that Leo Frank had been seen a small number of times voyeuring at the girls’ dressing room.ominously]

A girl [Rebecca Carson] from the pencil factory’s fourth floor spent some time, and frequently, in this locker room, in company with Frank, and they were alone. Neither Frank nor the woman from the 4th floor had any legitimate business alone in the private room of the girls. One of Frank’s own defense witnesses, a white girl, testified to these facts.

Such things cannot be done in a factory without being known to somebody; and that somebody is sure to tell the others.

That is why Mary Phagan detested and rejected him! She was a good girl; and, while her poverty forced her to work under Frank, she was determined not to yield to him in any dishonorable way. But her resistance had the natural result of whetting his depraved appetite.

The lawyers for the defense put Frank’s character in evidence, claiming, via certain witnesses, that it was good. The prosecution had no right to question these witnesses as to details. Then, the State, the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, put up witnesses who swore that Frank’s character, as to lasciviousness, was bad. Again, the State was not allowed to go into details. But the defense could have done so!

The law allows a defendant “ thus attacked “ to cross-examine the witnesses, as to the particular facts and circumstances which cause them to swear that the defendant is a man of bad character. In other words, the law of Georgia authorized Leo Frank to inquire of each one of these witnesses:

“What moves you to testify that I am lascivious? What is it that you know against me? What are the facts upon which you base your opinion? Tell me what you saw me do! Tell me what’s in your mind, and perhaps I can explain, rebut, and remove the evil effect of your testimony.”

That’s the position in which our law places a defendant. It gives him the privilege of sifting the witness, and of drawing from him the particular incidents, or circumstances, which have caused him to believe that the defendant is bad.

It often happens that, when the defendant cross-examines these witnesses against his character, they give flimsy and absurd reasons, thus bringing ridicule upon themselves, and vindication to the accused!

All lawyers know this; and all lawyers “ if they feel sure of their client — put these character-witnesses through the hurdles.

Confident in the integrity of their client, they know that a cross-examination of the character-witnesses will develop the fact that they have been jaundiced by personal ill-will, and have made mountains out of mole-hills.

But Leo Frank’s lawyers did not dare ask any character-witness why she swore that Frank was a man of lascivious character! They feared the details that would come out!

-The Frank attorneys, Messrs. Rosser and Arnold, knew well their client, Leo Frank; they did not dare ask a single witness the simple question, “Why, exactly, do you swear that Frank’s character is bad?”

Frank’s lawyer Luther Rosser earned an estimated $750,000 in today’s money to defend Frank.

They did not dare to ask, “What is it that you know about him?”

They KNEW “ that the answers would ruin whatever chance Leo Frank had; and that it would be suicidal to ask those white girls to go into the details of Frank’s hideous private life.

-In this connection, there is another ominously significant fact that should be weighed: Frank and his lawyers did not offer to allow him to be cross-examined.

Under our law, it is the right of the defendant to make his statement to the jury, and his attorneys may direct his attention to any fact which he omits. But the State cannot ask him a single question, unless he voluntarily offers to.

In this case, where the defendant, Leo Frank, claimed that the only material evidence against him was that of “a drunken negro,” an innocent man would have joyfully embraced the opportunity to save his life, and clear his name! Isn’t it so? Can you imagine what objection you would’ve had to being questioned, had you been in Frank’s place? You are innocent; you could have accounted for your whereabouts at the time Mary Phagan was being done to death.

You would have gladly said, “Ask me any question you like. I have nothing to hide. I am not afraid of that negro. I know that I didn’t commit the crime. I know that I can tell you where-I-was when Mary Phagan was killed.”

Did Frank do that? NO, INDEED!

— Frank sat there and heard Jim Conley’s story. He sat there, and listened, hour after hour, as Luther Rosser, the giant of the Atlanta bar, cross-questioned the negro, and vainly exhausted himself in herculean efforts to shatter the rock of Jim Conley’s simple and straightforward account of the crime.

-He sat there as Jim Conley fitted the damning facts on him, Frank, and he did not dare to do what the negro had done. He did not dare to allow the Solicitor-General [Narrator’s note: in Georgia, “Solicitor-General” is the word for the district attorney, that is, the prosecutor] to cross-question him, as his lawyer, Luther Rosser, had cross-questioned Jim.

Innocent? Was that the courage of conscious innocence? No. Frank prepared a careful statement, and recited it to the jury, and did not offer to answer any question. He knew that he could not afford to!

Helen Ferguson, a co-worker at the pencil factory, had often picked up Mary Phagan’s pay-envelope for her; and had Leo Frank merely allowed Helen to do this that Saturday, he would not now be where he is, on trial for his life ”and poor Mary Phagan would not be a memory of horror — to him, and to us.

Why wouldn’t he let Helen Ferguson draw the pay-envelope that one time? Ah… he wanted Mary to come back personally to get it.

The next day was our Confederate Memorial Day; the next day is the Jewish Sabbath; the next day, in the morning, Mary Phagan is one of the sweetest flowers of the Sunny South; the next day, in the morning, she is seen of all men, rosy, joyous, pure and full of life and hope;

…the next day, in the morning, she goes to Frank for the withheld pay-envelope, with its poor contents of one dollar and twenty cents; and when she is lost to sight, on her way to the den where Frank is waiting for her,

…SHE IS LOST FOREVER.

No man or woman ever sees her more, until the lifeless body is found in the basement.

There were scratch-pad notes lying beside her; and Frank says that the “drunken Jim Conley” not only raped and killed the girl while he, Frank, was unconsciously at his usual work in his office — but that Conley all by himself got the body down to the basement, and then secured the scratch-pad, and composed those four notes. [Conley testified he wrote 4 notes, but only 2 notes were found next to the dead body of Phagan]

In those notes, the negro is not only made to say that a negro “did it, by his self,” but the negro is described so particularly, that he can be advertised for; and no attempt is made to lay it on the white man who is the only other man in the building!

Marvelous negro, this Jim…….

As for little Mary Phagan, she was not quite fourteen years old, and the evidence is all one way as to what kind of girl she had been. As far back as the early days of March, 1913, Leo Frank had begun to ogle her, hang about her, and try to get her into a conversation. The little white boy, Willie Turner, swore to it, and no attempt was made to impeach him. He saw Frank endeavor to force his attentions on Mary, in the metal room; and he saw the girl back off, and say to Frank that she had to go and do her work! He heard Frank when he made the effort to use the job-lash on Mary, saying to her, significantly, “I am the Superintendent of this factory!”

What did that mean?! He had not spoken to her about her work, or about the factory affairs. He was trying to get a personal “chat” going, as he had a habit of doing with other women of the place; and when she excused herself, and was backing away from the man whom she instinctively dreaded, he used that species of employer’s intimidation, “I am the Superintendent of this factory.”

Meaning what?

Meaning, “It lies in my power to fire you, if you displease me.”

Dewey Hewell, a white girl who had worked in the factory under Frank ”and who knew him only too well ”testified under oath that she had heard Frank talking to Mary frequently, and had seen him place his hands on her shoulders, and call her by her given name.

Former employee Frank Gantt testified that Leo Frank had noticed that he, Gantt, knew Mary Phagan, and remarked to him, that is, to Gantt, “I see that you know Mary pretty well.”

Yet, Leo Frank afterwards claimed that he did not know Mary Phagan!

Frank had been monkeying with girls who depended on him for work and economic survival. He was lascivious in character, according to twenty white-girl witnesses, whom Rosser and Arnold dared not cross-examine. Leo Frank’s lewdness drove him toward Mary Phagan, as two white witnesses declared. She repulsed him, as the evidence of white witnesses showed.

[Note: Watson is emphasizing repeatedly “WHITE witnesses,” because the jewspapers are constantly lying that Frank was convicted ONLY on the testimony of a “drunken brute of a negro.” NO — dozens of his white female employees TESTIFIED AGAINST HIM!]

A whopping twenty female employees of the National Pencil Factory testified about the bad moral character of Leo Frank. “Leo Frank’s character for lasciviousness was bad” Two of them:

.

Close-up of the top story:

Myrtice Cato and Marie Karst denounced the sex fiend for months of harassment.

-Her work-mate, Helen Ferguson, applied for the pay-envelope on Friday, April 25th. Frank refused it, and so Mary went in for it herself on the morning of the 26th. She is seen to go up the elevator [stairs] towards Frank’s office.. on the second floor.

He admits that she came to him in his office, and she got her pay!

But no mortal eye ever saw that girl again, until her bruised and ravished body ”with the poor under garments all dabbled in her virginal blood ”was found in the basement.

Where-was-Leo-Frank?!

-It was proved by the testimony of Albert McKnight [narrator’s note: Albert McKnight was the husband of the black maid, Magnolia “Minola” McKnight at the home where Leo Frank and his wife Lucie Selig lived; they lived with her parents] that Frank went home sometime near 1:30 pm that day; the parents were absent;

he just stood at the sideboard in the dining room — for five or ten minutes — did not eat a morsel,

and went out again — toward the city.

A determined effort was made to break down this evidence, but it failed.

-On that same day, Frank wrote to his Brooklyn people that nothing “startling” had happened in the factory since his rich uncle had left. He stated that the time had been too short for anything startling to have happened. The tragedy had already occurred.

That night “ he did something which he had never done before: from his home he called up the night-watchman, Newt Lee, and asked him over the telephone if anything had happened at the factory.

Now Mary Phagan’s body was lying in the basement; and in his agony of suspense and nervousness, Frank was trying to learn whether the corpse had been found!

At three o’clock that same night, Newt Lee [see photo below] found the body, and gave the alarm.

Detective Sharpe called Leo Frank on the phone, asking that he come to the factory at once. Two police officers were sent for him, and he was found nervously twitching at his collar, and his questions were: “What’s the trouble? Has the night watchman reported anything? Has there been a tragedy?”

Why did he think there had been a tragedy at-the-factory?

-If he had paid off Mary Phagan as he says, and she had then gone her way out of the building and into the city ”to attend the Confederate Veterans parade,

or for something else ”why was he calling up Newt Lee, Saturday night, asking if anything had happened at the factory?

NOBODY ELSE THEN KNEW THAT ANYTHING TRAGIC HAD HAPPENED TO MARY, ANYWHERE!

-He was haunted by the dead girl who lay in the basement. To save his soul, he could not get her off his mind! The gruesome thing possessed him, held him, tortured him. Thundering in his brain, all the time, were the terrifying words, “Know that your sin will find you out!”

-During the dreadful hours that followed Frank’s return to the factory, his agitated mind cast about for a theory, a scape-goat, that would keep the bloodhounds off his own trail. He insinuatingly directed suspicion toward Newt Lee, the innocent negro night watchman who, of course, was never there at all during the middle of the day.

He not only hinted at Lee, and suggested Lee, but after somebody had planted a bloody shirt on Newt Lee’s premises, Frank asked that a search be made at Lee’s house. The bloody shirt was found, bloody on both sides! Unless the carrier of the dead body shifted the body from one side to the other, there was no way to account for blood on both sides of any shirt.

But worst of all, whoever planted the dirty old shirt, and smeared the blood on it, forgot to saturate it with the sweat of a black man! There was none of the inevitable, and unmistakable, African scent on that soiled garment ”and yet the armpits of a laboring negro release plenty of African scent.

Not only did Frank try to fix guilt on Lee, but he hinted suspicion of Gantt, the man who went to the factory on the fatal Saturday, after Mary had been killed, to get two pairs of old shoes, which he had left on one of the upper floors.

Leo Frank demurred at Gantt’s going in, and made up a tale about the sweeping out of a pair of old shoes along with the litter and trash. But Gantt caught Frank in the falsehood, by asking him to describe the shoes that had been swept out. Frank “fell for it,” and described one pair. “But I left two pairs!” exclaimed Gantt, and Frank was silenced. Gantt went up, got the shoes, and left. Yet Frank tried to fasten suspicion on him.

Now, use your mother wit:

Why did Frank never cast a suspicious eye, or a suspicious word, TOWARD HIS JANITOR, JIM CONLEY?

He was ready to put the dogs on the tracks of Newt Lee, the negro who worked there at night! He was ready to lead the pack in the direction of Gantt, the white man who had came on Saturday merely to fetch his old shoes.

But he was not ready to breathe the slightest hint toward Jim Conley, whom all the witnesses placed in the factory, and WITH FRANK, during the very time that Mary Phagan must have been ravished.

Why did he keep the hounds off the trail of Jim Conley? Why did he point the finger of suspicion toward Gantt and toward Lee, and never toward Conley?

There is but one answer ”and you know what that is.

Frank could not put the dogs after Conley, WITHOUT BEING RUN DOWN HIMSELF!

-In vain did the detectives who were working to get Frank off endeavor to trace evidence against Lee, and against the fired ex-employee Gantt. In vain did they labor to get the trail away from the men in that factory. But it was all right there, and no earthly ingenuity could move it.

On Monday, after the crime, Frank telegraphed his fellow Jew, Adolf Montag, the factory owner, claiming that the factory had the case well in hand, and that the mystery would be solved. He had employed a Pinkerton detective, but this detective, fortunately, pinned Frank down as to where he was at the crucial hour on that Saturday.

Scott asked Frank ””Were you in your office from twelve noon until Mary Phagan entered your office, and did you stay there until ten minutes before one, when you went to get Mrs. White out of the building?”

And Frank, answering his own detective, said that he was. Thus, his own admission, before his arrest, placed him near the scene of the crime, and AT THE TIME IT WAS COMMITTED.

-Scott again asked: “Then, from 12 o’clock to 12:30, every minute of that half hour, were you in your office?”

-Frank answered, “Yes.”

But he lied!

The unimpeachable white girl, Monteen Stover, who had also come for her pay, testified at his trial that she went to Frank’s office, during that half hour, AND

NOBODY WAS THERE!

Monteen Stover

-No wonder the infamous William J. Burns did his utmost, afterwards, to frighten this young woman “ trying to force her to take back what she had sworn. No wonder he sent the Rabbi after her. He himself threatened her, and then entrapped her in the law office of [the Jew] Samuel Boorstein, and tried to hold her there against her will!

The brassy, shallow, pretentious scoundrel! He richly deserves to be in the penitentiary himself!

-Mind you, when Frank told his detective, Scott, that he was in his office during the half-hour between 12 o’clock and half-past twelve, he did not then know that Monteen Stover had been there. He had not seen her; he had not heard her. He was employed at doing something else, and somewhere else.

At what? And where?

In his statement to the jury — which Frank refused to give under oath, and so he was not cross-examined — in this statement which he’d had months to prepare, Leo Frank said, well, during the time of the crime he might have gone to the water closet.

[Narrator’s note: That is an old word for the toilet. The only toilets on the 2nd floor — where Leo Frank’s office was located — were inside the metal room. The men’s toilet is where Jim Conley said he found the dead body of Mary Phagan after Leo Frank told him (Jim) that he assaulted her in the metal room. See State’s Exhibit A and Defendant’s Exhibit 61.]

In the note that lay beside Mary Phagan’s body, she is made to say that she was going to the water closet, when the “tall negro,” and he was supposedly all by “his self,” assaulted her.

And it was on the passage to THIS toilet, (which, by the way, adjoined the men’s toilet), yes, while heading to this toilet that the crime was committed.

This water-closet idea is found in those telltale “notes” ”the notes that Frank wants us to think the girl wrote while being raped “ and where else do we hear of the water closet? Why, in Leo Frank’s own final statement to the jury!

–Now, would a (quote) “drunken brute of a negro” (as the Frank defense team called the employee Newt Lee), after raping and killing a young white woman within a few steps of a white man’s private office,

[Mary’s clothes; the strangulation cord, made into a noose by Frank, is laid out in the upper-left]

….and with said white man inside of it, linger at the scene of his awful crime to compose four notes?

Would he the the one even needing a theory about the water closet?

Would he have been in an agony of labor to account for the presence of his victim at that place?

Not at all. He would have left that point to take care of itself! And he would have struck a beeline for the distant horizon. Negroes committing rapes on white women do not tarry. Never! NEVER!!

They go, and they keep going, as though all the devils of hell were after them; for they know what will happen to them, if the white men get hold of them.

[Narrator’s note: By way of background, the crime against Mary Phagan occurred during the 40-year period of 1880-1920, when lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan were at their peak, thousands of lynchings occurred, and many of them, about three-quarters, were for black men who had raped white females. Another quarter were for white men who had committed rape, murder or child-molesting.

For example, on June 13, 1913, just a few months, in fact, after the Phagan murder, a black male, Benny Simmons, was seized from jail where he was under arrest for the alleged killing of a white girl, 16-year-old Susie Church in Anadarko, Oklahoma.

Simmons was stripped naked, coated in coal oil, set on fire, then hanged, and while in flames, was shot to pieces.

The local newspaper, the Enfault Democrat , reported that [quote] “The negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh, but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob. As Simmons began to lose consciousness, the mob fired at the body, cutting it to pieces. The mobsters made no attempt to conceal their identity, but there were no prosecutions.” [End of quote]

Thus, in publisher Thomas Watson’s common-sense view, during that heyday of lynchings no black man would sit around, after raping a white girl just feet away from the white boss, and write four notes purporting to be the rape notes composed in mid-rape by the victim!]

[returning to Watson’s article:]

–Now, as for Jim Conley, the factory janitor ” where exactly was he, at the time when Frank was not in his office?

Mrs. Arthur White (the wife of a foreman at the pencil factory who was there with her husband as he finished up some work) swore that Jim Conley (or a negro man that looked like him) was at his place of duty, downstairs. He was sitting down, and there was nothing whatever to attract any special attention to him.

This was at thirty-five minutes after twelve noon, and Mary Phagan had already been to Frank’s office, by his own statement, and had gotten her pay envelope and gone away. But gone where?

Toward the toilet? If so, Frank knew it, and Conley didn’t, for Conley was below, on another floor. Mrs. White’s testimony puts him there.

Who, then, wrote the note about the water closet, and made Mary say she went to it “to make water?”

Where indeed was Mary, when Monteen Stover looked into Frank’s vacant office? And where was Frank THEN?

The supposed note by Mary said she went toward the toilet “to make water.” Frank’s statement to the jury was that he must have been at the toilet too, and in fact at the moment when Monteen looked into his office.

Great God! Then Leo Frank is putting himself — in his own jury statement — at the very same place where the note puts Mary Phagan! -Did you ever know the circumstances to close in on a man as these do on Leo Frank? Out of his own mouth, this lascivious criminal is convicted!

Now, the men’s toilet used by Frank, and to which he said he may have, quote, “unconsciously” gone, and this is important to understand, was only divided by a partition from the ladies’ room to which, the note said, Mary had gone. [Narrator’s note: On Monday morning, April 28, 1913, Leo Frank was at the stationhouse in the presence of his elite lawyer Luther Rosser, and Frank made an unsworn deposition to the Atlanta Police that Mary Phagan came inside his office between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., maybe 12:07 p.m., but this contradicted the testimony of Monteen Stover, who said Leo Frank’s office was empty during this exact same time.]

[Magnification of the upper-right, restroom area, the men’s toilet is where Jim Conley found the dead body of Mary Phagan]

THEREFORE, LEO FRANK PLACES HIMSELF WITH MARY, AT THE TIME OF THE CRIME!

–Furthermore, why did he pretend that he did not know Mary by sight? Why did he go to the morgue twice, and shrink away without looking at her? And then afterwards, in his statement, describe her appearance on the cooling table as accurately and coldly as though he had been a physician, making an expert examination?

Why, on his way to the police station, was he so completely riddled with suspense and anxiety that he, quote, “trembled and shook like an aspen”?

And why, why did this white man never flare up with blazing wrath against the negro who accused him of the awful crime, and gladly embrace the opportunity to face the negro and, being supposedly innocent, put him to shame?

Where is the innocent white man, here in Georgia, who is afraid to face a guilty negro? Where is the white man who would have tamely taken that negro’s fearful accusation, as Frank took it? Would you, as the boss and a white man, have failed to confront your own lowly negro employee, the janitor Jim Conley?

Apart from every word that Jim Conley uttered, we have the following facts.

–Frank’s bad character for lasciviousness;

–his pursuit of Mary Phagan, and her avoidance of him;

–his withholding her pay-envelope Friday afternoon and thus making it necessary for her to return to his office on Saturday;

–his presence in his office in the forenoon, and her coming into it at noon, to get the pay-envelope;

–her failure to reappear down-stairs, or anywhere, and the absence of both Leo Frank and Mary Phagan from his office, during the half hour that followed Mary’s arrival in the office;

–the presence of Conley on the lower floor at the necessary time of the crime;

–the inability of Frank to account for himself at the necessary time of the crime;

–the utter failure of Frank to explain what became of Mary;

–his desperate attempt to place himself in his office at the time of the crime,

–and the unexpected presence of Monteen Stover there, and her evidence that he was out;

–his incriminating lie on that point, and his nervous hurry to get Mrs. White out of the building;

–his strange reluctance to allow Gantt to go in for his old shoes, and his falsehood on that subject;

–his refusal to allow Newt Lee to enter the building at 4 o’clock P.M., although the night-watchman came at that hour, and begged to be allowed to go in and get some sleep;

–his conduct that night, calling up Lee, and asking the officers about the, quote, “tragedy,” unquote, when no tragedy had been brought home to him by any knowledge save his own;

–his efforts to throw the officers off the scent;

–his amazing failure to hint a suspicion of Jim Conley;

–his equally guilty fear of calling Daisy Hopkins to the stand ”Daisy, the woman who was shown conclusively to have visited Frank at the factory, and who had no business there except in her peculiarly shameful line of business [prostitution.

It was this woman that Conley testified he had watched through the keyhole when Frank was sodomizing with her, and Frank’s lawyers dared not put her up as a witness.

Little Mary’s blood marks are found, in the direction of the men’s toilet and the metal room; and Mary’s bloody drawers and bloody garter-straps show that she bled from her virginal womb before she died. Around her neck was the cord that choked her to death. On her head was the evidence of a blow.

Frank could not have been off that floor. He could not have been far away. He had been in his office, with Mary, just a few minutes before. He was back in his office, at 12:35, was seen by Mrs. White, and jumped nervously as she saw him. He stated that his temporary absence from his office may have been caused by “a call of nature.” Such a call would have carried him directly toward the place where the note said Mary went, for the same purpose!

Had you been on the jury, with all these links of circumstances fastening themselves together in one great iron chain of conviction, what would you have believed as to Frank’s guilt?

Now consider Conley:

He was Frank’s employee, and to some extent his trusty. Frank didn’t mind Conley’s knowing about Daisy Hopkins, and other things of the same kind.

Frank did not want Rabbi Marx to know anything about his secret sins, but he didn’t care if Conley knew.

Rabbi David Marx ran the Atlanta synagogue 1895-1946

Therefore, Conley was the person to whom he would naturally turn when the Mary Phagan adventure went wrong. Frank needed help now to dispose of the body, for Frank had a vast deal at stake. His social position, his business connections, his fellowship in the B’nai B’rith,

….his standing in the synagogue, his wife and mother and father and uncle ”all these imperatively demanded that Frank dispose of that terrible dead girl!

Would Conley have cared what became of her body?

Do negroes who violate white women stay to dispose of the bodies? [or stick around to write murder notes?] Never in the world. Their first thought is to get away themselves, and they do it, whenever they can.

What hindered Jim Conley, if he was the rapist, from being in the woods, sixty miles away, by the time Mary’s body was found Sunday morning? Nothing!

If he had raped and killed the girl, he could securely have gone out of the building, out of the city, and out of the State, before anybody knew what had become of Mary Phagan.

Atlanta in 19o6; a French magazine depicts an actual white riot after a black crime wave

But Leo Frank couldn’t afford to run! He had to stay.

Ask yourself this hypothetical question and then reverse it:

 

Was it more natural for a negro to rape a white girl, and stay where he was, in the belief that he could lay the crime on a white man….

 

— or was it more natural for a white man to do it, remain where he was, and hope to fix it on a negro?

It is unnecessary to relate Jim Conley’s evidence in detail. He made out a complete case against Frank, and he was corroborated by white witnesses at every point where any of the facts came within the knowledge of others.

Of course, there could be no witnesses to what he and Frank did with Mary’s corpse, but so far as the physical indications of the crime existed, they contradicted Frank, and corroborated Conley.

According to the allegations made by Conley’s lawyer, William M. Smith, the friends of Leo Frank made strenuous efforts to corrupt Conley, then scare him, and perhaps poison him, before the trial began.

William J. Burns afterwards made a fool of Smith; but Smith did not attempt to escape from the allegations which he had formally, in a legal paper, made against the friends of Frank. According to Smith, Conley’s life was in danger, and measures were taken to protect it.

(…) The indictment against Frank was voted unanimously by the grand jury, on May 24th, 1913. He had been in jail since the Coroner’s jury had committed him May 8th.

His trial commenced on the 28th of July, and more than 200 witnesses were examined.

On the 25th of August the Judge, L.S. Roan, charged the jury to come to a verdict, and they went to their room for deliberation.

In a comparatively short time, they returned, saying they had made a verdict, and the defendant’s attorneys, waiving his personal attendance, polled the jury. That is, each juror was asked if the verdict of guilty was his verdict.

This perfunctory right is the only one that the law allows a defendant at that stage of the trial.

Frank was asked on August 26th what he had to say, as to why the sentence should not be pronounced on him. He had nothing of consequence to say, and he was sentenced to be hanged on October 10th, 1913.

On October 31, Judge Roan denied a motion for new trial, and the case was taken to the [Georgia] Supreme Court, which reviewed the evidence and sustained Judge Roan, Feb. 17, 1914.

An extraordinary motion for new trial was made and overruled in April, 1914.

Then, the lawyers of Frank raised the point that he had not been personally present when the jury rendered their verdict. This was treated as trifling with the law and with the court. It never was a right, under English or American law, for a defendant to be personally present all the time.

Had Frank been personally present, he could not have done anything more than his lawyers did, to-wit, poll the jury. That is a formal, valueless right which is almost never exercised, and which never has panned out results in Georgia. Jurors do not bring in a verdict until they all are agreed: the verdict is each juror’s verdict. Otherwise, there is a dead-lock and a mistrial.

After the best criminal lawyers of the Atlanta bar had exhausted themselves in behalf of Leo Frank, the case was given to that calliope detective, William J. Burns ”the fussy charlatan [photo] who hunts for evidence with a brass band, and a searchlight.

With an uproarious noise, he invaded Georgia, and breezily assumed that the Frank case had just begun. He began it all over again. He went to the factory to look over the physical indications, just as though the crime had not been committed a year before Burns got to Atlanta.

He raised his voice, in a boastful roar, and invited mankind to watch him, “the Great Detective,” as he went sleuthing over the premises of that factory. The way the man talked was something phenomenal, prodigious, cyclonic, cataclysmic. Every morning the papers were full of Burns, the Great Detective. Every day we had to eat, drink and digest Burns. Every night we had to think, talk and dream about Burns. The whole State, and all the papers, got to looking toward Atlanta, as a Muslim does toward Mecca, for Burns was there.

With inconceivable rapidity, Burns made up his mind, and announced his decision. Nay, he roared it from the castellated battlements, so that the whole human race could hear.

He had discovered that the crime on Mary Phagan had been committed by a moral pervert of the worst type. He had discovered that no one who had been suspected and arrested, was guilty. The miscreant who did the deed was “at large,” and Burns knew where to get him when he wanted him.

Then Burns shot out of Georgia, and went north ”presumably to put his hands on that miscreant who had never been suspected, and who in Burns’ own words, “is at large.” Everywhere that Burns went, the noise was sure to go. The papers resounded with Burns. The Baltimore Sun, (of the Jew Abell) the New York Times, (of the Jew Ochs), …the New York World, (of the Jew Pulitzer) and other Hebrew organs proclaimed the joyful news, “Burns clears Frank!”

Adolphe Ochs and his daughter Iphigenia, 1902

It was airily assumed that the claim of Burns outweighed the coroner’s jury, the grand jury, the petit jury, the judge, the witnesses, and the lawyers.

What did it matter to this asinine mountebank that Frank’s case had been given to the fullest measure the liberal metes of our statutory law?

Is every man to have two trials, because he wants them?

Is any man entitled to exceptional rules, usages and privileges?

Did the three New York gunmen who in 1912 shot Herman Rosenthal get two trials? [http://my.ilstu.edu/~ftmorn/cjhistory/casestud/hit.html]

They also were Jews, and they also were vehement about their “innocence.” Yet before their execution in the electric chair — they confessed.

Is the richly connected Jew, Frank, entitled to better treatment in Georgia, than those indigent Jews got up in New York City?  The Abells, and the Ochses, and the Pulitzers did not raise much fuss for the Hebrew gunmen.

But if Mary Phagan had been Jewish, and Leo Frank a Gentile, would all this scurrilous crusade , have been waged in the Jewish newspapers to get the killer off, and defame the state and people of Georgia?

Or if Frank had killed a Jew, as the New York gunmen did, would these Jewish millionaires be equally lavish with their money and their abuse?

Do they imagine that we care nothing for the other thousands of Mary Phagans, these white working girls in the sweatshops, that are still alive?  Is no check ever to be put upon the employers of girls, who insolently take it for granted that the girls can be used against their will for the lascivious purposes of a heartless boss?

Shall the Law trace no line of protection around the children of the poor, and say to arrogant wealth, “Touch them only at your peril?”

Upon what monstrous theory of shoddy aristocracy, and commercial snobbery, is based the idea that, in pursuing Mary Phagan, entrapping her, ravishing her, and choking her to death, this lascivious pervert did not foully outrage every decent white man who has a pure daughter, granddaughter, sister or sweet-heart?

Back to William J. Burns, the Great Detective…. who rooted around in several Northern cities, endeavoring to discover the criminal who “is at large.” Burns failed to find this mysterious criminal. Then he returned to Atlanta, and began his virtuous efforts to both suppress evidence and invent it.

For his dastardly campaign against the pencil factory girl Monteen Stover, who only told the truth that she did not see Leo Frank in his office, he richly deserves to be tarred and feathered in every State where he shows his brassy face.

For his abortive purchase of the affidavits of Rev. Ragsdale and the deacon, Barber, he richly deserves a penal term.

In May 1912, President Taft, upon the recommendation of Attorney General Wickersham, set aside some verdicts in some Oregon cases, in the U.S. Courts, upon the express grounds that WILLIAM J. BURNS and his AGENTS HAD ILLEGALLY PACKED JURIES!

No wonder Burns skipped out ”the braggart, the faker, the crook, the coward!

His right hand man, Dan Lehon, was expelled from the Chicago police force for being a detected crook; and Lehon is actually a better man, and a braver man, than the contemptible Burns.

It was via this bought and perjured Burns-ian “evidence” that Frank endeavored to secure a new trial. But any effort to suppress evidence is indicative of guilt: Frank did that.

An effort to fabricate testimony is indicative of guilt: Frank did that.

An effort to seduce the attorney of an accessory, and to have that attorney betray his client, is indicative of guilt, especially when the attorney in question is willing, but not able, to shift suspicion to his own client.

Encircling Frank, and nobody else, are these convicting circumstances:

Motive; opportunity; unexplainable movements, sayings and conduct; contradictory statements; presence at the time and place of the crime; attempts to inculpate innocent persons; efforts to intimidate witnesses, suppress evidence, and use perjured affidavits; and lascivious character in dealings with many girls in that factory.

Of course, Frank wanted Mary Phagan not to kill her, but to enjoy her. His murder of the girl was incidental. He did not resolve to choke her to death, until after he realized that if she left the metal room alive after an attempted rape, she would go out and raise the town, and he would be lynched by the infuriated people.

Then he called for Conley’s help, and his plan was to get him to burn her corpse in the furnace.

And because he had used Conley in his cover-up, and for other things before that, involving women not his wife, and was therefore afraid of what [Conley] might say, Frank never once suggested to the policemen, or the detectives, to question Conley, who was in the building when the crime happened.

Question Newt Lee, the night watchman, BUT DON’T QUESTION CONLEY, THE DAY MAN, WHO WAS THERE WHEN MARY WAS!

Why did Frank ignore THIS negro, at that time, and try to fasten the guilt on the other negro, Newt Lee?  Because Newt could not implicate Frank; Jim Conley could.

There you are; and all the lawyer-sophistry in Christendom cannot get away from it.

“A drunken negro!” That shibboleth, of late adoption, is now the main thrust of Frank’s statements. In his many newspaper articles, in the editorials which the Jewish papers publish, in Burns’ various proclamations and war whoops, in the pleas of the lawyers, it all simmers down to repeating ad infinitum:

It was Jim Conley, that “drunken brute of a negro.“————–

Now when did Conley become the “black beast” of the case?

Burns himself did not make him the scape-goat when he uproariously bore down upon Atlanta, and lifted the floodgates of his jackass talk. At that time, the guilty man, quote, “is a pervert of the lowest type; he has never been arrested; he is at large.” Burns was going to spring a sensation by pouncing upon somebody that had never even been suspected! He was going to show the Atlanta police and the Pinkerton Detective Agency that they ought all to have gone to the the “William J. Burns School of Detectives.”

Conley certainly was was not at large; Conley had been arrested in other cases; arrested in this case, he had been investigated, interrogated, and relegated to his proper position as accessory, because he dragged the body after Frank killed her.

Therefore, Conley was not this imaginary mystery pervert that Burns THEN had in his omniscient optics, roaming around the North.

Not until all his turbulent efforts to find a straw man had failed, did he and Lehon bribe the poor old black preacher Ragsdale, and his even poorer deacon, Barber, to swear that they had heard Conley tell another negro that he had killed a white woman at the pencil factory. It was the clumsiest, Burns-iest piece of frame-up that I had ever read; and I immediately picked it to pieces, in my weekly newspaper, The Jeffersonian.

The papers had barely reached Atlanta for sale on the streets, before Ragsdale broke down and confessed ”and now Burns, the inciter of perjury, is afraid to put himself within the jurisdiction of the Georgia courts.

And when did Leo Frank, the manager of the factory of the National Pencil Company, discover that his employee, Jim Conley, was a drunken brute of a negro?

Not while employing him, not for two long years! Not while allowing him to remain inside the factory, that Saturday afternoon, when Newt Lee was not permitted in to go to sleep. Not while Frank’s own detective was probing, here and there, this one and that one, in the effort to find a lead. Not while the Coroner had the case in charge. Not once did Frank aid the police, the Pinkerton Detective, or the City detectives, by so much as a suspicious glance toward the “drunken brute of a negro.”

Why not?

This young, lascivious Jew is Ivy League, a Cornell graduate. He is as bright as a new pin, and keen as a needle.

Cornell Yearbook — Leo in all his early-on arrogance

But in the tremendous crisis in which he found himself that Saturday afternoon, his brain was in turmoil, “a whirling gulf of phantasy and flame.” Hence, having made a terribly criminal mistake, he followed it up, as most criminals do, by nervously making minor mistakes.

It was a mistake to move that bleeding body. It was a mistake to lie to Gantt about those old shoes.

It was a mistake to refuse to let Newt Lee enter. He was acting STRANGE. It was a mistake to show so much anxiety to get rid of Mrs. White. It was a mistake to call up Newt Lee and inquire whether anything had happened at the factory.

It was a mistake to ask the policemen, Rogers and Black, whether a “tragedy” had taken place “at the factory.” But of course, the crowning mistake was to take Jim Conley into his confidence in the mistaken effort to dispose of the corpse.

The one mistake in calculation led to the other, and these two led to the third; to-wit, the writing of those four notes, in which he made the dead girl say she had gone to the toilet “to make water.”

Are you supposed to believe, whether a member of the jury or any reasonable citizen, that a so-called “drunken brute of a negro” would seize a white girl, inside their common workplace, and on a quiet legal holiday, at noon — not outside a bar Saturday night! — then violate her person, choke her to death with a cord, and then… sit down…and compose four notes about it?

Are you really to accept that a “drunken brute of a negro” would attempt such a crime within a few steps of the white man’s office; and would leave the stunned, unconscious victim on the floor while he searched around to find a cord with which to choke her to death? The hands of said “drunken brute of a negro” would have been all the cord he needed!

When you put up Jim Conley as the murderer of Mary Phagan, you better not waver an inch… because nothing going before the crime points to him; nothing that is shown to have happened at the time and place of the crime, points to him; and nothing that occurred afterwards points to him. Against Conley, the only finger that is pointing is that of Leo Frank!

Had the State endeavored to convict Conley, it too would have found that Frank’s evidence against Conley stands alone! It has no corroboration whatsoever. And Frank is actuated by the irresistible motive of saving his own neck.

Therefore, the case against Conley is the word of Frank, and nothing more.

When you put the negro in as the rapist and murderer, you confront the following difficulties:

–Frank’s first intention to shield Conley from suspicion;

–Frank’s attempts to cast suspicion on Lee and Gantt;

–Frank’s preconceived wording that a “tragedy” had happened “at the the factory”;

–Frank’s haunting of the morgue, yet shrinking from the sight of Mary Phagan’s accusing face;

–Frank’s refusal to face Conley, and to have a talk with him, in the presence of witnesses;

–Frank’s absence from his office at the time of the crime, and his false statement that he was in the office — which Monteen Stover contradicted;

–Frank’s efforts to “approach” Conley, intimidate him, or come to terms with him, as his lawyer, William M. Smith, sets out in his statement to the court; and Frank’s attempts to make Monteen Stover perjure herself.

–Frank’s bribery of Reverend Ragsdale, and the deal that was made with William M. Smith, by which he was supposed to betray and help slip the noose of death over the head of his own client, “the drunken brute of a negro.”

Was there ever a fouler attempt than that? Was there ever a completer failure?

You cannot imagine that the intellectual Frank has not kept in the closest communication with his lawyers, his detectives, and his friends, in these almost superhuman efforts to save his guilty life.

It is not Jim Conley that has struggled to pull himself out of the meshes. It is not Jim Conley that endeavored to corrupt Frank’s witnesses, and seduce Frank’s lawyers. It was not Jim Conley that went out to hire a preacher and a deacon to swear away the life of Leo Frank!

A five dollar bill, called then correctly a banknote, because issued by a bank based on its actual deposits. Five dollars then was worth $500 today.

It was not Jim Conley who attempted to use the purchased affidavits, to mislead the Court, befuddle the public, and escape Justice.

It was Frank, whose lascivious conduct before the crime points in the direction of guilt. It was Frank who could not be seen, heard, or accounted for at the time of the crime. It was Frank whose actions were suspicious after the crime. It was Frank whose conduct, since the trial, has been that of a desperate criminal, frantically and blunderingly endeavoring to escape his doom.

None of this will fit Jim Conley, or anybody else. It fits Frank! It cannot be made to fit anybody but Frank.

Then who is guilty?

Either the white man, or the negro, or both, ravished and killed that little girl. However, the bloodmarks say she was killed on Frank’s floor, not far from his private office ”AND NEAR HIS TOILET, WHERE HE SAYS HE MAY HAVE GONE ”and not on Conley’s floor, where Mrs. White saw the negro, and at that time.

Even the note says she was killed on Frank’s floor, on her way to the toilet, where she had gone “to make water,” therefore, next to Frank’s toilet ”not on Conley’s floor at all.

Did Conley leave the lower floor, come up to Frank’s floor, and do the deed? Why, Conley could not have known that Mary was not in Frank’s office, for that was where he had seen her go. Girls came on Saturdays to Frank’s office for their pay. Would he murder her in Frank’s office? Absurd!

Conley did not know where Mary was at that time. He was downstairs! Leo Frank was the only human being that knew where Mary was, at that identical moment! He was the paymaster, and she had come for her pay.

He himself says that she had been in his office and had gone out; and he knew that she did not take the elevator up or down, but went towards the metal room — to see whether the metal which she was to work with had come.

He followed her, overtook her, solicited her, put his hands on her ”and likely she screamed! Then he struck her, knocking her down, fiendishly mistreated her, and then, horror-struck at the sight, and terrified by his consciousness of the consequences, he went and got the cord which choked her life out.

Take Jim Conley’s story, and every proved incident dove-tails into it.

Take Frank’s story, and every proved fact collides with it.

Then who is guilty?

Ah, who knows a man so well as his wife [photo of Lucille Selig Frank] does? This young married man, who had a young wife, must have been outraging every feminine instinct of her honest nature. For two long weeks after Leo’s arrest, Lucille Frank would not go see her husband in the Tower, the Fulton County Jail.

In your bitter time of trouble, if your own wife, living nearby, holds aloof, there must be something hideously wrong with you! As the Christian saying goes, regarding originally Mary, Jesus’ mother, “Last at the Cross, and first at the grave.” Women are true!

It shines a terrible light on Leo Frank that his young wife held back! What kind of pressure, do you think, finally conquered her reluctance?

And poor little Mary Phagan! The chiefest of poets has sung of the proud Roman lady who refused to live after her honor had been taken; but, in the hearts of right-thinking men, Lucretia of old, ravished by a king’s son, is not more noble in her death than this pencil-factory girl of Georgia, who gave her life in defense of her chastity.

[Narrator’s note: One hundred years ago, educated Americans all knew a great deal about ancient Roman history, and why? To learn for our own country the lessons of the rise and fall of the mighty Roman Empire — so America would not rise and then fall in the same way as did Rome.

Augustus

 

Roman legionaries

 

 

Barbarians burn and loot the city

 

 

 Ruins of the Forum

People today have no idea who Lucretia was,  or know anything about this key incident involving the honor of a Roman lady, this crisis that triggered the rise of mighty Rome.

Lucretia was a married woman and aristocrat, but the early Romans were still living under the brutal boot of the foreign kings of Etruria. A certain Sextus Tarquin, son of the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus, that is, Tarquin the Haughty,  came to visit her when her husband was away on a trip. As he was a distant relative of her husband, she let him in.

Though a wealthy blue-blood, she was not busy gossiping or partying but instead, along with her servants, was working at her spinning wheel, spinning wool to make clothes.

That night, however, Sextus Tarquin, son of the Etruscan king, somehow feeling provoked by her reputation for virtue, invaded her bedroom, her husband away, and with a sword at her throat, raped her.

After he left, the outraged Lucretia sent messengers for her husband and father to come quickly. She told them she had been ravished by the king’s son, and her honor had been taken. Lucretia pulled out a dagger, stabbed herself in the heart, collapsed and died before her menfolk.

This vicious crime by the foreigner, and her death to protest the rape, forced the men to act, not talk, releasing finally the Roman fury of long standing against the domineering Etruscans. The Roman men rose up in arms, drove out the Etruscans, avenged Lucretia’s suffering and death, and liberated their nation on the basis of honor, national honor and the honor of women. Rome was started by great deeds, not words.

Julius Caesar

Thus, the rise of Rome from a tiny Italian city to a superpower stretching across Europe, Africa and Asia with a population of one hundred million…

…began with one virtuous woman’s refusal to accept rape, preferring death to dishonor. It was her deed as a woman that inspired manliness in the men.

Our American ancestors of 100 years ago knew this story well; Watson merely had to refer to it. In the year 1915 the Lucretia story had survived, and taught generations of Westerners, for 2,400 years — but now, in our time, this story of honor has been forgotten.

Returning now to publisher Thomas Watson’s article.….]

When the City of Atlanta witnessed the parade of the time-battered remnants of the Confederate armies …

….that had given so many precious lives in defense of those things that men hold dear,…

 

…only the angels and the Great God above witnessed the struggles of Mary Phagan for the priceless jewel that good women hold dear.

And there must have been blinding tears of unutterable pity, as those celestial witnesses looked down upon that frightful deed. Among all the horrible crimes that make humanity pale and shudder, there has been no blacker crime than that.

Only “a factory girl!” That’s what the papers kept on saying.

Yes; she was only a factory girl; there was no glamor of wealth and fashion about her. She had no millionaire uncle; she had no Athens, Georgia friends of the same religion, ready to raise fifty thousand dollars for her; she had no mighty connections to wield influence, muzzle newspapers, employ detectives, and manufacture public sentiment.

 

 

 

 

Only a factory girl; therefore the Solicitor-General, our Hugh Dorsey, has had no outside help, has found his path of duty one of arduous toil, has fought his way at every step in the case, against overwhelming odds, and he won simply .. and solely .. because he had the Law, and the Evidence, on his side.

Honor to Hugh Dorsey!

Just as Prosecutor Whitman of New York bravely met the hell-dogs of organized crime, and lashed them into cowed defeat, Dorsey triumphed over Big lawyers, Big detectives, Big money, and Big newspapers in Georgia.

And because an enthusiastic people caught up this young hero in their arms, after he had fought the good fight and won it, we are accused of saturating the court-room with “the spirit of mob violence”!

It’s an outrageous libel on the State of Georgia! No man ever had a fairer trial than Leo Frank, and no man was ever more justly convicted.

Never before did any criminal who had exhausted, in his own behalf, every known right, privilege and precedent of the law, resort to such a systematic and unprecedented crusade against civilized tribunals, orderly methods, and legally established results.

If Frank’s lawyers, detectives and newspapers are to have their way, then the Law Code, the American Jury System ”proud achievements of the most illustrious lawyers that ever lived ”will have suffered a degradation not known since the packing of juries in the New Orleans cases — a decade ago — so infuriated the people that they rose in their wrath and wreaked vengeance upon those Italian assassins.

During all the stormy times of the Pitt-Eldon regime in England, our jury system rode triumphantly through its waves. One intrepid lawyer, Thomas Erskine, was able to vindicate the noble truth, that the main effort of our judicial system is this: to get twelve honest men into the jury box.

So proud was Erskine of the fact that our system had come out of the terrible ordeal untarnished and with added glory, that he took for his motto, to be emblazoned on the panels of his carriage ”“Trial by jury.”

That which the most consummate of English advocates gloried in, we are asked to be ashamed of; and we are asked to condemn the verdict of Frank’s jury, when Frank himself is utterly unable to show that the law did not give him those twelve honest men as his jurors.

What more could it have given? What more did it have to give?

Nobody compelled Leo Frank to move down here from New York, and become a citizen of our state of Georgia. He came of his own free will. Why has he any more rights than a native does?

If Frank had been living in London at the time he crushed the life out of that little human flower, little Mary Phagan, he would have long since gone the swift road that Dr. Hawley Crippen travelled to his merited doom.

[Narrator’s note: This refers to an American doctor from Michigan, living in 1910 in London, England, whose wife disappeared.  Her skin was found in the basement; he fled to Canada, was brought back to England, was tried for murder before an English jury in October of 1910, he was convicted and hanged in a British prison the next month, and no one protested because he was tried by the English.]

“Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” [Narrator’s note: This is a direct quote from the Jewish Bible, from Genesis chapter 9, verse 6.]

Is Frank, the Jew, to be an exception to Mosaic law? Is alleged race-prejudice to save him from the just penalties of both his law and ours?

God knows, my sympathy is profound for those who sin through sudden passion, who are drawn astray by some irresistible temptation, who are lured to vice and crime by intense love or burning hate. For the man who kills another openly and who says to society “Yes, I did it! I had a right to do it. Here I am, take me, and try me!” ”for such a man I have the broadest charity.

But for the man who waylays the road, or who basely stands outside a dwelling at night to murder its resident ”I have no pity whatsoever.

So, in a case like Frank’s, where a married man, a college-bred man, a man of the most creditable connections, deliberately lives a double life, debases himself to unnatural and inordinate lusts, and sets himself to the foul purpose of entrapping the one pure girl who was trying to save herself to be some good man’s wife, I admit, I freely admit, that it is in me to be as stern as the Law of the Twelve Tables.

Somebody must resist the dissolvent power of Big Money, and a muzzled press, or society will fall to pieces.

In all the imperial limits of Atlanta, were there not enough purchasable women, or lewd girls, to sate the lusts of Frank? Why was he so hell-bent to take this one little girl?

With his command of money and of opportunity, was he not the man of many flocks and herds?

Let us turn to The Book [narrator’s note: Watson is referring to the Bible], and read the old, old story, ringing yet with the righteous wrath of the Prophet, and moving men’s hearts yet with its infinite pathos: [Narrator’s note: Watson is referring to the Old Testament and the book now of Second Samuel 12:1-7]

12 And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, “There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.

² The rich man had exceedingly many flocks and herds:

³ But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

⁴ And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.

⁵ And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan,

“As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: ⁶ And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

⁷ And Nathan said to David,

Thou art the man!”

 

Not long ago, a rich Hebrew, most influentially connected, stole two million dollars from the working people of New York, many of whom were Jews. Henry Siegel stole the money under the familiar disguise of a commercial failure. He was tried and convicted ”and sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand dollars, and to serve nine months in prison. Whereupon, the Pulitzer paper, The World, admits that there does seem to be in this country one law for the rich and another for the poor.

Now, in the State of Georgia, we are doing our level best to prove that the law treats all men alike, and the Pulitzer paper is doing its best to defeat our aim.

[Narrator’s note: Watson next refers to northern newspaper campaigns for racial equality down south, where strict legal segregation existed.]

The New York World has taken sides with the Negroes, against the white people of the South, and on all occasions. It claims that the Negroes are as good as we, and that the Negroes should enjoy social and political equality.

So extreme has been the Pulitzer paper on this line that it sharply reproved President Woodrow Wilson in the matter of the William Monroe Trotter episode. [Narrator’s note: President Wilson, who was born and raised in Virginia, in the South, actually increased segregation among federal employees, and he and Trotter, a black activist, had a fiery argument in the ‘White House.]

The New York World virtually says that the President deserved the insolence of the negro delegation, in that he had not interfered to prevent the heads of the federal Departments from requiring that the negroes use separate water closets, &c.

Yet in the Frank case, the great point criticized by the World and the other Jewish papers is that a key witness against Frank was a negro!

It seems that for northern Jewish newspapers, Negroes are good enough to vote, make our laws, hold office, sleep in our beds, eat at our tables, marry our daughters, and mongrelize the Anglo-Saxon race, but the same group is  not good enough to testify against a rich Jew!

It is all wrong for us to disfranchise the Negroes, all wrong to require them to
eat in separate restaurants, use separate wash-rooms, and go to separate toilets; all wrong for the President to allow any difference between whites and blacks, but no negro must be put on the witness stand against a Jew with unlimited money.

That sort of logic is a fair sample of all the Leo Frank special pleading. None of it would be tolerated for a minute, had there not been systematic propaganda in favor of this worst of deliberate criminals.

From the very necessity of this case, we have to take the evidence of negroes ”else Justice would be defeated.

After all, criminals do not summon the most upstanding citizens in the community to come and witness their crimes.

A murder in a brothel must of necessity be witnessed by bad women. No good woman is there to see it ”nor any good man, either.

Time and again, in Georgia, as in all States, it has happened that the only witnesses to a crime were negroes, or bad white men. What is the law to do, in such cases? Must it let murder go unpunished, for the lack of white witnesses of sterling character?

Every case must of necessity stand on its own merits, and be judged by its surroundings. A witness, otherwise objectionable, may become invincible by reason of the nature of his association with the criminal, and with the details of the crime.

In his proclamations to the public, Leo Frank pushes the claim that the reviewing court has never passed upon the question of his guilt, or innocence.

In other words, he asserts positively, in a carefully prepared written statement, that the Supreme Court of Georgia has never reviewed the evidence in the case.

What an arrant falsehood! Every tyro in the legal profession knows better.

In a first motion for a new trial there are three grounds which are so invariably taken, that even the form-books lay them down, as stereotyped.

The defendant always alleges that the verdict was strongly and decidedly against the evidence, against the weight of the evidence, and without evidence to support it.

Therefore, the Supreme Court had to pass on the evidence. The Supreme Court did pass on the evidence. And the Court did say that the evidence was sufficient to sustain the verdict.

-There was no “mob” threatening the Supreme Court. There was no military display menacing the Supreme Court.

Those serene, experienced judges were not twelve terrified jurors, for whom Leo Frank is now so sorry.

On their oaths and their consciences, those superb jurists, coolly deliberating in private and in the profoundest security, had to say whether the evidence set forth in the record was sufficient to warrant the verdict of those twelve jurors.

And those Justices, upon their oaths and their consciences, said the evidence was sufficient.

Yet Leo Frank has the brazen effrontery to argue that his case has never been tried, except by twelve men who were scared into a verdict by the Atlanta “mob.”

-This attempt at misleading a sympathetic public is on a par with the efforts made to suppress testimony, to frighten those girl witnesses, and to buy up Ragsdale and his deacon. [Narrator’s note: Two priests came forward to admit that they had been bribed by members of Leo Frank’s advocacy group to sign affidavits falsely claiming they heard Jim Conley confess to the murder of Mary Phagan.]

-It is on a par with that pulpit crusade against the verdict they started in Atlanta. It is on a par with William J. Burns’ “utterly confident” explorations in Cincinnati and New York. It is on a par with Burns’ interviews with Arthur Conan Doyle, the novelist behind “Sherlock Holmes,” John Burroughs and whole lot of other people who have never seen the record in this case, nor been charged with the fearful responsibility of trying this man for his life.

-The State of Georgia and its Judiciary, and the honest jurors who swore their oath to try Frank fairly, have been vilified, held up to scorn, and made objects of derision and hatred, by irresponsible persons who know nothing of the evidence, except that Jim Conley is a negro.

-The public has been gulled, again and again, by the noisy protestations of William J. Burns, and by the assurance that something wonderfully sensational about the case would explode very soon.

But nothing ever comes of it. Every time there is a showdown, it is the same old thing. The same old facts are confirmed: the lethal pursuit of the girl by Frank; the same old undisputed, and damnable, fact of the little victim being lured back to his private office, where her only goal was to quickly get her depressing and pitifully meager wages, and then leave; the same old unexplained disappearance of the girl, and the same old utter inability of Frank to give an account of himself at the time of the crime.

-Let me quote one sentence from a masterful book which has recently been published, and which has been widely read. Its author is Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin; the name of the book is, “The Old World and the New.”[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Alsworth_Ross]

This expert in sociology makes an honest study of immigrants to America, the changes brought about by them, the diseases, crimes and vices incident to this foreign flood, et cetera.

On page 150, he says ”

“The fact that the pleasure-loving Jewish business men spare Jewesses, but PURSUE GENTILE GIRLS, excites bitter comment.”

-This “bitter” comment is made by the city authorities, who have had to deal with these pleasure-loving Jewish business men who spare the Jewish girls, and run down the Gentile girls!

If Professor Ross had had the specific Frank case in mind, he could not have hit the ball harder.

Here we have indeed the pleasure-loving Jewish business man. There we have the Gentile girl.

Here we have the typical young libertine Jew, who is dreaded and detested by the city authorities of the North, for the very reason that Jews of this type have an utter contempt for the law, and a ravenous appetite for the forbidden fruit ”a lustful eagerness enhanced by the racial novelty of the girls of the uncircumcised!

The Frank case is enough to depress the most hopeful student of our times. It has shown us how the capitalists of Big Money regard the poor man’s daughter. It has shown us what our daily papers will do for the interests of wealthy criminals. It has shown us how differently the law deals with the rich man and the poor. It has shown us that some of our lawyers, members of the Bar Association, are ready to hire crooked detectives and pay witnesses to lie in order to defeat Justice.

It has shown us that these dishonest lawyers are eager to have the federal courts step into the province of our State Courts, and set a shocking new precedent — which would mean that whoever has the wealth to hire attorneys for years on end can run the gamut first of our state courts, and then run the gamut of the federal judiciary in order to change the result of the decision of the jury.

And the end will not even then be reached. If no court will disturb a righteous verdict, clout with politicians must be tried.

The most insidious, sinister and powerful pressure will be brought to bear upon the Board of Pardons, and upon the governor to prevent the law from taking its course, and to give another depressing instance of the difference ‘twixt the rich and the poor.

-It is fair and proper to assume that our state officials will do their duty, as the sacred oath dictates, “without fear, favor, affection, reward, or the hope thereof.”

Collier’s [magazine in Philadelphia], however, has taken it upon itself to announce that Leo Frank will not be executed.  Therefore, Collier’s has been guilty of hindering the action of the Georgia Pardon Board, and the Georgia governor.

[Narrator’s note: Collier’s was the dominant weekly magazine in the United States at this time, with a one- million circulation, and was viewed as investigating honestly the major scandals in America. In the Frank case this rag ruined its reputation by falsifying the facts of the case and caught red handed doing so.]

-Collier’s is publishing a series of articles on the case. They are similar to Mr. C.P. Connolly’s rigamaroles in the Baltimore Sun. They basically regurgitate the one-sided statements of the New York Times and the World. William J. Burns seems to have won the confidence of Mr. Connolly, and Mr. Connolly’s articles echo the statements of Mr. Burns.

-These newspaper articles, propaganda by Big Money against the rule of law, are all based on Leo Frank’s statement to the jury, called ex parte because he refused to be cross-examined.

-Not one of these newspaper articles deals with the undisputed facts, which form a chain of circumstantial evidence that solidifies the effect of the direct testimony by witnesses.

-These intensely partisan articles are predicated upon the allegation that some men on the streets of Atlanta shouted “Hang the damn Jew!” and then upon the baseless assumption that the jury even heard these supposed cries, and finally that the jury was controlled by them.

Not once have these hirelings for the defense argued the actual, proved, material, controlling facts that compelled the jurors to vote guilty.

Now let me ask: do Jews that are rich care for others Jews who are poor? No. 

[Narrator’s note: 100 years ago there often were separate synagogues for the rich, educated, upper-class Jews from Germany — such as the Frank family or the Montags, who owned the pencil factory, or the Albert Einsteins and the Warburgs, and Rothschilds, who as German Jews felt superior, and, on the other hand, the poor, working-class Jews from the slavic countries, such as Poland and Russia had their own poverty class synagogues which were often makeshift ad hoc congregation rooms. In fact, an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Forward of August 23, 2013 confessed that, quote, “Frank’s experience in Atlanta served to unite [America’s] German and Russian Jews in ethnic cohesion.“ Author Thomas Watson is here referring to the complaint that is still heard today, “the Big Jews don’t care about the Little Jews.” (Continuing….)]

Suppose Leo Frank had been a pennyless Hebrew immigrant, recently arrived from Poland, and peddling his wares from house to house to get a few dollars for the wife and child he left behind in the old country. Would the wealthy German Jews, of Athens or Atlanta, Georgia; of Baltimore, Maryland; of Brooklyn, or Manhattan, or Philadelphia, be spending half-a-million dollars [Narrator’ note: about $50 million today, about as much as the Ken Starr investigation of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky] to save him from the legal consequences of premeditated and depraved crime?

Or suppose, looking at it another way, Mary Phagan had not been the daughter of white Christian sharecroppers, but instead banker Jacob Schiff’s offspring?

[Narrator’ note: Jacob Schiff (photo left) was a New York, German-Jewish banker, and some say the richest man in America at that time, richer than Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, or steel baron Andrew Carnegie.]

Or suppose Mary had been August Belmont’s daughter?

[Narrator’s note: Belmont [photo right] was an immigrant, German-Jewish billionaire, whose original name was Schönberg, and the founder of the Belmont Stakes in horse racing, and chairman of the Democratic Party of the United States.]

Or what if Mary Phagan’s father had been Joseph Pulitzer of the World, or the daughter of Adolf Ochs of the New York Times, or Mr. Collier’s daughter, would Leo Frank, killer of this child, still be depicted in every newspaper in America as the victim, and the people of Georgia as the criminals?

It hasn’t been all that long ago since Collier’s magazine, up in Philadelphia, published the slander on the honor of our Southern white women, in which the editor alleged that our white women falsely accused poor negro men of rape to hide the sordid fact that they had consented!….

Having championed the negro rapist against the Southern white woman, the same Collier’s now champions an abnormal sodomite, who comes as near to carrying his perversion on his very face as any lascivious degenerate ever did in human history.

‘The New York investigator, William J. Burns, knows that he has discredited himself, and he is now using C.P. Connolly of Colliers as his new megaphone. C.P. Connolly [photo] is flooding the country with literature, finely printed on the glossiest of paper, and illustrated by an idealized drawing of the horribly sensual face of Frank.

 

The purpose is to divide public opinion, generate mawkish sentiment, and manufacture a sympathy which will influence the authorities. The most outrageous lies about an Atlanta “hang-the-Jew mob,” and about the Atlanta military, and about the jury being “terrorized,” are being recklessly circulated nationwide, all to save as guilty a man as was ever arraigned, and to besmirch a State whose laws, juries and judges are notoriously inclined to the utmost in leniency.

There was certainly no Big Money behind the case against Leo Frank. There were honest Atlanta police-officers, an upright Pinkerton detective, some white factory girls and white employee men who could neither be bullied nor bought, maybe because they knew Mary and the nice girl she was; twelve honest jurors in the box and a just judge on the bench; an able, fearless and energetic Solicitor-General as the State’s representative; and before them a long chain of proven facts and circumstances, which, not even needing the testimony of the negro janitor Conley, excluded every other reasonable hypothesis save that of the murderous guilt of the defendant Frank.

Above all towered our Supreme Court of Georgia, which ignored the attempted intimidation by the Atlanta Journal ”a Georgia paper that prostituted itself to Big Money and declared that the execution of this fiend, this Leftie Louie of the pencil factory, would be, quote, “judicial murder.”

Leo Frank and Mary Phagan, the pursuer and the pursued, the hawk and the dove, the wolf and the lamb ”there they are!

But the bones of our little Georgia girl are mouldering in the ground, while Leo Frank, martyr, poses for another photograph, and composes another statement, and his rich, powerful champions declare defiantly that he will not be punished.

May the Almighty Source of Justice and Power give unto the Governor of Georgia the strength to withstand all blandishments, all improper influences, all mawkish appeals, and to stand firm, BY THE LAW, and do his duty, as the jurors and the judges  have ALL done theirs!

The systematic and hugely expensive campaign of LIBEL that has been waged against the people of Georgia in regard to this case has logically and necessarily created the following  situation, to wit ”

If the Pardon Board, or the Governor, intervenes against the execution of Frank, that intervention will be inevitably understood as a condemnation of the Atlanta jurymen, of Fulton County Judge Leonard Strickland Roan, of Superior Court Judge Benjamin H. Hill, and of the Georgia Supreme Court. The charges made by Frank’s lawyers, by Frank himself, by William J. Burns, by the big Jewish newspapers, and by Collier’s, strike at the integrity of our judicial system, and the fairness toward this Hebrew of our race itself. The courts are accused of trying this man by riot and hysteria instead of by evidence and law. The people themselves are branded as condemning the man only because he is a Jew, and on the groundless lies of our apparently favorite kind of witness here in the South, quote, “a drunken brute of a negro.”  

Are those charges true? If they are, the juror and courts, and the people of Georgia, have framed an innocent man out of hate, and are eternally disgraced.

This is what is at stake if the Pardons Board and governor weaken.

=======================

The Big Money propagandists say that the charges are true. Alleging them to be true, the propagandists demand that the Pardon Board and the Governor change the sentence of the Law.

Shall this charge be countenanced by the Pardon Board, and the Governor? Shall wealthy outsiders invade the State of Georgia, and take this case into their own hands? Shall foreign influences usurp the functions of our courts, and dominate the administration of our laws?

No other State tries its criminals in the newspapers, in the pulpits, in the banks, or in the back-rooms where politicians juggle! The daily papers and Collier’s did not attempt to dictate to the State of Virginia in the McCue and Beattie murder cases. Nor did the papers attempt to annul the law to save the lives of the gunmen who shot the Jew gambler.

What is infinitely worse than the murdered gambler Rosenthal case, infinitely worse than the McCue and Beattie cases, is this:

Leo Frank was a libertine who kept after this thirteen-year-old, AND KEPT AFTER HER, and AFTER her, with the lust of a satyr in rut, and the ruthless determination that she should not escape him. He knew for months she loathed him and what he lusted for was wrong!

All over this great Republic, lawlessness is raging like the wild waves of an ocean. All over this Christian land, crimes against women are taking wider range, vaster proportions, and of types more twisted and fiendish.

The white-slaver stands almost openly in crowded streets, in waiting rooms, and at factory doors, with his net in his hands, ready to cast it over some innocent, unsuspecting girl.

The lascivious employer ”from the highest to the lowest, from the lawyer and politician who advertise for secretaries and stenographers, down to the department stores, the small factories, the laundries and the sweat-shops ”wicked men are on the lookout for poor girls and young women who can be tempted by money or forced by brutality.

Do not we all know it?

Where the girl is of the age of consent, and she consents, that is bad enough, God knows!

But where the girl is good, and wants to stay so, and she is pursued, and importuned, and entrapped, and is not permitted to keep the one jewel that her poverty allows her, but is forcibly robbed of it, and then is killed to hush her mouth ”O what-shall-we-say of that?

And what are we to think of those who forget the poor, weak, lonely little heroine who died for her honor on HER battlefield, in the factory ”and erect monuments only to regiments of men who died for their principles?

The Creator that made me best knows how I revere the brave and good men that stand the storm, resist temptation, keep to the right path, and go to their graves ”martyrs to Faith, Duty, and Honor ”rather than surrender the glorious crown of their manhood.

But the words have never been coined which can express what a true man rightly feels for the woman who is so great in the divine simplicity of unconquerable innocence, that she, like the snow-white ermine of the frozen Arctic, will DIE ,rather than soil the one vestment that God gave her in her poverty.

In this day of fading ideals and disappearing landmarks, little Mary Phagan’s heroism is an heirloom, than which there is nothing more precious among the red hills of Georgia.

Sleep, little girl! Sleep in your humble grave! But if the angels are good to you, in the realms beyond the troubled sunset and the clouded stars, they will tell you that many an aching heart in Georgia yet beats for you, and many a tear, from eyes unused to weeping, has paid you, in rivers, a tribute too sacred for words.

* * *

Transcribed by Penelope Lee. Exclusive to 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!

Related Articles:

• A Mercury Exclusive: Tom Watson on the Leo Frank Case
• Tom Watson: The Rich Jews Indict a State!
• Tom Watson: The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert
• Tom Watson: The Celebrated Case of The State of Georgia vs. Leo Frank
• Tom Watson: A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case

…..To understand why enraged Georgians lynched the convicted Leo Frank after he and his legal Dream Team lost with two juries and five court levels and yet this Money Jew was still maneuvering for a new trial 

The Atlanta Constitution’s April 30, 1913 funeral report

.

TO UNDERSTAND THE LYNCHING, YOU MUST READ THIS HEART-RENDING 1913 FUNERAL REPORT, WHICH WE SCANNED IN FOR YOU:

NOW YOU CAN IMAGINE WHAT THE GEORGIANS MUST HAVE FELT BY 1915 “ WHEN, AFTER TWO SOLID YEARS OF PERJURY, BRIBES AND LEGAL SCHEMING BY LEO FRANK during and after his trial TO GET OFF, AND ALTHOUGH THE US SUPREME COURT CONFIRMED HIS GUILT…..

The USSC from 1860 to 1935 met here

AND THUS FRANK’S FATE WAS FINALLY SEALED, THE CROOKED GOVERNOR THEN COMMUTED HIS SENTENCE.

Purpose?

A new trial,

a new judge,

and new “witnesses,”

all for a new verdict:

“Not Guilty”.

THIS WAS THE RAGE AND GRIEF OF ALL GEORGIA IN 1913

 .

…..Mary’s great-niece writes a great book

How the Most Definitive Book on the Leo Frank Case was Born

The book The Murder of Little Mary Phagan is written by the namesake of the murder victim, Mary Phagan’s great niece named Mary Phagan Kean.

Please go to Amazon.com and purchase this book and read it.

When Phagan Kean was 13 years old, she discovered her given name was no mere accident or coincidence. When people heard her name, they started asking her questions about whether she was related to the famous little Mary Phagan who had been murdered long ago by Leo Frank on Confederate Memorial Day in 1913.

Phagan-Kean would learn a startling secret when people started asking her questions about her curious name, and so she asked her family if she was somehow connected to the Mary Phagan who was murdered so long ago in the National Pencil Factory. When her family revealed the truth about her blood relation, she immediately became insatiably interested in learning about the investigation, and its aftermath. Instantly becoming a life long student of the case at age 13, Phagan-Kean has since devoted every free moment of her life studying volumes of legal documents, and reading every surviving newspaper account surrounding the rape and strangulation of her great aunt, 13 year old Mary Anne Phagan (1899 to 1913) and the biography of Leo Max Frank (1884 to 1915).

The book is both very touching (especially at the beginning) and yet very factual throughout. Mary was just everyone’s honey child, adorable in every way, and her end was so terrible. You can see why her grandfather would start sobbing just beginning to talk about Mary and the crime, and then would start to wail and could not continue, decades after the crime. The punishment Leo Frank received could not stanch his tears.

***

(from the book by her great-niece, quoting her father).

“The South hadn’t really recovered from the ravages of the War Between the States, and Georgia was no exception. The economy was shifting from the land to industry. Families were resettling from small towns and farms into the urban areas. Wives and children were often forced to work in factories to help the family survive.

“Mary Phagan was a beautiful little girl with a fair complexion, blue eyes, and dimples. Her hair was long and reddish brown and fell softly about her shoulders. Since she was well developed, she could have passed for eighteen. Her family all called her Mary, rather than her full name of Mary Anne.

“Mary was Grandmother Fannie’s youngest child. Your grandfather says that she had a bubbly personality and was the life of their home. Mary was jovial, happy, and thoughtful toward others. When she was with her family, she’d show her affection for them by sitting in their laps and hugging them.

“The last Phagan family gathering was a ‘welcome home’ for Uncle Charlie. There the family had begun to notice how beautiful Mary was. Lily, her cousin, who is still living, tells me that she envied Mary a particular dress she had on. It was called a ‘Mary Jane dress’ long, with a gathered skirt and fitted waist. Lily and her sister Willie were ‘skinny,’ and Mary’s dress looked better because she was ‘heavier’ than them. They both wanted their dresses to look like Mary’s did on them.

“Early in April, Mary was rehearsing for a play she was in at the First Christian Church. The play was ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and of course Mary played the role of Sleeping Beauty.

Your grandfather tells me that he would take Mary to the church and watch her rehearse. The scene where Sleeping Beauty is awakened by a kiss always made him and Mary giggle. 😉

She would watch her brother with her eyes half-closed, and then begin to giggle when he cracked a smile. It seemed that that scene took an eternity to rehearse.”

I could picture Mary on the stage playing the little Sleeping Beauty.

“April twenty-sixth was Confederate Memorial Day, a Saturday, and a holiday complete with a parade and picnic. Mary planned to go up to the National Pencil Company to pick up her pay and then watch the parade. She told Grandmother Fannie she’d be home later that afternoon.

One of the last things she did was to iron a white dress for Bible School on Sunday. She was a member of the Adrial Class of the First Christian Bible School, and she wanted to look her best so she might win the contest given by the school.

“She was excited about the holiday, though, and wore her special lavender dress, lace-trimmed, which her Aunt Lizzie had made for her, they tell me. Her undergarments included a corset with hose supporters, corset cover, knit underwear, an undershirt, drawers, a pair of silk garters, and a pair of hose. She wore a pair of low-heeled shoes and carried a silver mesh bag made of German silver, a handkerchief, and a new parasol.”

At 11:30 a.m. she ate some cabbage and bread for lunch. [JdN: This diet is another reminder that this was not a rich family, but it did have lots of love.]

[Mary] left home at a quarter to twelve to go to the pencil factory. She was to pick up her pay of $1.20, a day’s work.”

My father sighed and looked out the window.

“When Mary had not returned home at dusk, your great-grandmother began to worry. It was late, and she had no idea where Mary could be.

Her husband went downtown to search for Mary. He thought perhaps she had used her pay to see the show at the Bijou Theater and waited there for the show to empty, but found no sign of her.

He returned home and suggested to Fannie that Mary must have gone to Marietta to visit her grandfather, W.J. Since they had no telephone, they couldn’t communicate with the family to verify that Mary was with them. Fannie sort of accepted this explanation, since she knew how Mary loved her grandfather. It did seem plausible that she could be with the family in Marietta. But Fannie, being a mother, spent a restless night.”

My father paused, stared into the middle distance. I could see my grandfather pointing to Mary’s photograph, then to me, then sobbing almost uncontrollably.

My father continued.

“The next day, April 27, 1913, Grandmother Fannie’s worst fears were confirmed. Helen Ferguson, their friend and neighbor, came to the house to tell them she had received a phone call about Mary. Their Mary had been found murdered in the basement of the National Pencil Company.”

The company, a four-story granite building plus basement, was located at 37-39 Forsyth Street. It employed some one hundred people, mostly women, who distributed and manufactured pencils. Its windows were grimy. It was dirty. It had little ventilation. Most of the workers were paid twelve cents an hour. It was in fact a sweat shop of the northern, urban variety.

The Venable Hotel was converted into a pencil factory; the Atlanta federal building stands here today.

Mary worked in its second floor metal room fixing metal caps on pencils by machine. Her last day of work had been the previous Monday. She was told not to report back until a shipment of metal had arrived.

“Her body was discovered at three o’clock in the morning on April twenty-seventh, in the basement of the pencil company by the night watchman, Newt Lee. Her left eye had apparently been struck with a fist; she had an inch-and-a-half gash in the back of the head, and was strangled by a cord which was embedded in her neck.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Her undergarments were torn and bloody and a piece of undergarment was around her hair, face, and neck. It appeared that her body had been dragged across the basement floor; there were fragments of soot, ashes, and pencil shavings on the body and drag marks leading from the elevator shaft.” […]

“Daddy, how did Grandmother Fannie stand up while the trial was going on?”

He told me that she was to be the first witness called to the witness stand. She tried to compose herself; her tears were flowing freely down her cheeks and she was sobbing as she gave her statement:

“‘I am Mary Phagan’s mother. I last saw her alive on the 26th of April, 1913, about a quarter to twelve, at home, at 146 Lindsey Street. She was getting ready to go to the pencil factory to get her pay envelope. About 11:30, she had lunch, then she left home at a quarter to twelve. She would have been fourteen years old on the first day of June. She was fair complected, heavy-set, very pretty, and was extra large for her age. She had on a lavender dress trimmed in lace and a blue hat. She had dimples in her cheeks.”

When Sergeant Dobbs described the condition of Mary’s body when they found her in the basement, when he stated that she had been dragged across the floor, face down, that was full of coal cinders, and this was what had caused the punctures and holes in her face, Grandmother Fannie had to leave the courtroom,” my father said.

Again, the autopsy photo

Now it was I who had to compose myself. I was now starting to feel the pain and agony that all the family had felt for years.

“When the funeral director, W.H. Gheesling, gave his testimony, he stated that he moved little Mary’s body at four o’clock in the morning on April 27, 1913. He stated that the cord she had been strangled with was still around her neck. There was an impression of about an eighth of an inch on the neck, her tongue stuck an inch and a quarter out of her mouth.”

“Daddy, was Mary bitten on her breast?”

“Yes, but there was no way to prove it because certain documents have mysteriously disappeared.”

“Who besides Grandmother Fannie attended the trial?”

Other than Grandmother Fannie, all the immediate family, including your grandfather and Mary’s stepfather, were present every day. Mary’s mother and sister were the only women, along with Leo Frank’s wife and mother, who were permitted in the courtroom each day.”

[…] “The newspapers gave a daily detailed report on the court proceedings, and there were many ‘extras’ printed each day. Not one newspaper ever reported any of the spectators shouting ‘Hang the Jew’ nor did I ever hear that any member of our family made that or any similar statement.

Judge Roan was considered by all to be more than fair. The Atlanta Bar held him in high esteem for his ability in criminal law. Otherwise he would have never been on the bench.”

“Was Leo Frank defended well?”

“Leo Frank’s lawyers were the best that money could buy. He had two of the best criminal lawyers in the South, Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold.

I have been told that Rosser’s fee ran well over fifteen thousand dollars. In those years that was a small fortune. These lawyers were the most professional and brilliant lawyers the South had to offer.

But the defense these brilliant lawyers were to offer was not good enough to offset Hugh Dorsey’s tactics. If there was any brilliance at that trial, it was Hugh Dorsey’s.

The people of Georgia were so impressed by him that he was later rewarded with the biggest prize in state politics: he was elected governor of Georgia.” […]

“The Atlanta newspapers of 1913 show the law firm of Rosser & Brandon, 708 Empire, and the law firm of Slaton & Phillips, 723 Grant Building, as merging. Then the 1914 Atlanta Directory shows the law firm of Rosser, 27 The Legacy Brandon, Slaton & Phillips, 719 723 Grant Building. They were also listed in the Atlanta Directory in 1915 and 1916.

Slaton was [thus] a member of the law firm that defended Leo Frank.

“Governor Slaton was a man that Georgia loved and admired until June 21st, 1915. Then love turned to hate.

The people believed that Governor Slaton had been bought. His action caused the people of Georgia to take the law into their own hands, to form a vigilante group and seek justice that they believed had been denied them.”

Governor Slaton had Leo Frank moved from Atlanta for his own protection. He was moved to the Milledgeville Prison Farm, just south of Macon.

The vigilante group traveled [down there] by car, Model T Fords, and removed Frank from prison. All of them were respected citizens. They called themselves the ‘Knights of Mary Phagan’ and this group later became the impetus for the modern Klu Klux Klan.

“Remember, there were no paved roads in those days. This trip was made at night. Not one guard was hurt, not one shot was fired, not one door was forced. The prison was opened to them. Many in Georgia felt that justice was being done! It was the intent of the vigilantes to take Leo Frank to the Marietta Square and hang him there.

Dawn caught up with them before they could reach Marietta. They stopped in a grove not far from where little Mary was buried. Then they carried out his original sentence, ‘to be hung by the neck until dead.’

Shaken, I asked, “Daddy, were there any Phagans at the lynching?”

He gave me a simple answer.

“No! And everyone knew the identity of the lynchers. But not one man was charged with the death of Leo Frank, not one man was ever brought to trial.” .

The next question I asked upset him tremendously:

“How do you feel about the lynching, Daddy?”

He related to me what his father had felt when he had talked about the lynching. Grandfather felt that justice had been served and so did the rest of the family. But I would not let up.

“But how do you feel, Daddy?”

“I feel the same way my family did — justice prevailed.”

To understand the actions that these men took on August 17, 1915, I would have to try and transport myself to those times, he said.

“You must try to understand what they felt, what would drive them to take the law into their own hands. You must not try to judge yesterday by today’s standards. By doing this, you are second-guessing history and no one, but no one, has ever been able to do that.”

“Daddy, how about Jim Conley? What part did he have in the death of little Mary Phagan?”

My father said that, reportedly, for the first time in the history of the South, a black man’s testimony helped to convict a white man. The best criminal lawyers in the South could not break this semi-literate black man’s story. The circumstantial evidence and Jim Conley’s testimony caused Leo Frank’s conviction for the murder of little Mary Phagan.

“Your grandfather told me and this can be confirmed by my sister Annabelle that he had met with Jim Conley in 1934, in our home, to discuss the trial and the part Conley had played in helping Leo Frank dispose of the body of little Mary.”

My father became adamant: “There is no way my father would have let Jim Conley live if he believed that he had murdered little Mary.”

My father then related the conversation that my grandfather told him had taken place. He said to Jim Conley, “Let’s sit down and talk awhile, Jim.” And Jim said, “OK.”

My grandfather then said, “I want to know how you helped Mr. Frank.”

Jim said, “Well, I watched for Mr. Frank like before and then he stomped and whistled which meant for me to unlock the door and then I went up the steps. Mr. Frank looked funny.

He told me that he wanted to be with the little girl, she refused and he struck her and she fell. When I saw her, she was dead.”

Grandfather asked, “But why did you help him if you knew it was wrong?”

And Jim said, “I only helped Mr. Frank because he was white and my boss.”

“Were you afraid of Mr. Frank?” my grandfather asked. Jim answered, “I was afraid if I didn’t do what he told me him being White and my boss, that I might get hanged. [At that time, it was common for blacks to be hanged.] So, I did as he told me.”

***

Wikipedia on “Lynching”

Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.^[2] [That comes to about 100 Blacks lynched per year, almost always for rape and/or murder, and heavily in Georgia and Alabama.]

Lynching of a Black man in the early 1920s in Lawrenceville, Ga., just 32 miles from Atlanta, and notably in the town square. If Frank had pinned the rape and murder on Jim Conley, who already had a criminal record, Conley would have been in very serious trouble — and Frank knew it. Conley had done four weeks on a chain gang for an offense the fall of the previous year while he was an employee at the National Pencil Factory.

***

Grandfather then asked, “What did you do after you saw that little Mary was dead?”

There are, my father grinned, two versions of that meeting: his sister Annabelle’s and his father’s my grandfather’s. The version my Aunt Annabelle told him was that she was coming out of a grocery store and saw their father, William Joshua Phagan, Jr., and a black man walking (she said “nigger”) down Jefferson Street towards the house. She said to her father: “Daddy, what are you doing with that nigger man?” Grandfather said, “Now, don’t you know who this is?” “No, I don’t,” Annabelle said. And Grandfather said, “This is Jim Conley.” “Oh, this is the man who helped kill Aunt Mary,” she exclaimed.

Then Jim Conley said, “No, I didn’t kill her but I helped Mr. Frank. I was to burn the body in the furnace but didn’t.”

They went inside the house and talked about an hour in the kitchen.

Annabelle was in the other room watching her brothers (Jack and my father) and her sister Betty. My father also remembers that his father continually questioned Jim Conley about why he helped Mr. Frank. He recalled that his father got emotional and at times had to hold back the tears. Jim said, “I got scared. Like I said before, I had to help Mr. Frank him being white and my boss. Mr. Frank told me to roll her in a cloth and put her on my shoulder, but she was heavy and she fell. Mr. Frank and I picked her up and went to the elevator to the basement. I rolled her out on the floor. Then Mr. Frank went up the ladder and I went on the elevator.”

“Did Mr. Frank tell you to burn little Mary in the furnace?” my grandfather asked. “Yes, I was to come back later but I drank some and fell asleep,” Jim said. Then Grandfather said, “Jim, I believe you because if I didn’t I’d kill you myself.”

Then, my father recalls clearly, Grandfather and Jim Conley went out together for a drink. That was all my father could remember.

“How is it, Daddy, that a black man would help someone dispose of a body?” “Remember the times,” my father said. “In those years, a black would do almost anything his boss told him to do. His life depended on whatever the white man decided. Lynchings were taking place almost daily in the South. Jim Conley was a black man in Atlanta in 1913, one who could read and write, but more importantly, he was not simple.

He was a man who would do what any man would do to stay alive: he would mix the truth with lies self-consciously, knowing full well that his life was at stake.” My father shook his head. “He would give four different affidavits.”

Here was a man that knew he was walking on a red-hot bed of cinders. He knew that no matter which way he turned he would be burned.

Conley returned to the pencil factory with the Atlanta detectives and showed them how he had found the body of little Mary in the metal room, how he had moved the body, tied up with some cloth, with the help of Leo Frank, and how it took both of them to move her body to the elevator.

in the basement, Conley said, he rolled the body out on the floor. Then he stated that Leo Frank went up the ladder, to be on alert for anyone coming into the factory.”

Here I asked, “Does this explain why little Mary was dragged face down across the basement?”

“Yes,” he said. “It seems logical in that one man could not carry her body without help. So she was dragged.”

“But, Daddy, why would Jim Conley do this, knowing full well that he was now mixed up in the murder of little Mary? He must have felt that his actions could cost him his life.”

“Jim Conley did know what he was doing, but there were two factors that outweighed his sense of righteousness: fear and money! Fear of the white man and greed for money. And this is what he later told my father when they met.”

The last thing I wanted to know was a question that my father had asked his father over twenty years ago.

“Why has the Phagan family taken a vow of silence?” “Grandmother Fannie made a request that everyone not talk to the newspapers. Her request was honored. It’s that simple.”

I thought over my father’s words for quite some time. His was the Phagan family’s story of little Mary Phagan. It was some time before we sat down again to talk about the shadow of Mary Phagan and how her legacy had affected his life.

But one summer morning my father sat down beside me wanting to talk about his grandmother little Mary’s mother.

“I recollect that many times I woke up in grandmother Fannie’s bed trying to figure out how I got there beside her. My grandmother and step-grandfather, I’ve been told, loved me very much, and they would come to our house and while I was asleep, would take me in their loving arms, and take me home with them. […]

“Grandmother Fannie was a very special person to me. I remember her talking to me about her daughter, little Mary. I could never understand why there were tears in her eyes when she talked about little Mary.

“It’s very hard on a small child to watch one’s grandmother cry and not being able to understand what’s really going on. I took what I felt was the only course open to me: I put my arms around her and told her that I loved her.

Then, more tears flowed and she hugged me even harder.”

My father stopped and sat, his chin in his hand, looking out the window. I could hear the calls of the birds clearly.

“Daddy,” I said, “if you want to stop… ”

“No,” he said, “I don’t want to stop.”

He went on. “In 1937 my parents bought their first home in Atlanta, 760 Primrose Street Southwest. It had three bed-rooms, a living room, kitchen, and dining room connected to it and one bathroom with no shower. My dad worked in the cotton mills as a weaver and my mother opened a hamburger, hot dog, and sandwich stand on the corner of Hunter and Butler Street, which was only a half of a block from the ‘big rock jail.’ This was the same jail that Leo Frank was held in, known as ‘The Tower.’

I was a student at Slaton Grammar School, which was named after the father of the governor who had commuted Leo Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment.”

Grandmother Fannie meant more and more to me as I was starting to understand what life is about. After all,” his eyes twinkled, “it had to happen sometime! And the question was starting to come up, no matter where I was: ‘Are you, by any chance, kin to little Mary Phagan?’ “‘Of course,’ I replied every time, ‘she was my aunt.’

This generally resulted in more questions about little Mary. I would answer those questions the best I could from what I could remember from stories that I’d heard from members of my family. People would then relate them to me on what they had heard from their pasts. The one question they always asked was ‘How did little Mary’s mother take her daughter’s death?’

And this invariably brought a silence in the group of people around me. I came to understand that this question would cause adults to hang onto every word I said. And just as invariably I’d feel humongously sad as I tried to put into words how my grandmother felt. Time had not healed the loss of her daughter. And maybe it never would.

“Little Mary, you understand, was the youngest of five and because she was the last child, she was doted on by all, even her grandfather, W. J.

“Grandmother Fannie would describe to me how she would comb little Mary’s hair and put it up in pigtails, dress her up in her finest clothes to go to church. A small child is always beautiful to its parents, but little Mary was really beautiful and she was going to be a real beauty when she grew up. As she approached her teenage years, there was no doubt that she was going to be a beautiful young woman.” […]

“Grandmother Fannie passed away in 1947, while I was in the Navy. I made the trip home for her funeral. But when I arrived home, she had already been buried. She was laid to rest beside her daughter, little Mary Phagan.

The peace she couldn’t find in life she found, I hope, in death.”

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…..A reaction

(From a former Marine Corps officer in Florida)