Purely Commentary

Manifold Roles of Judge, Governor,
Mob Rule, Newspaper in Atlanta

In "A Little Girl Is Dead" Harry Golden manifests
his finest skills. He proves that he can do a good job at
research. He shows that he can be a good reporter.
He always points to himself as the publisher of the
Carolina Israelite. What is not generally known is that
this paper appears only a few times a year, that it is not
a newspaper but a sort of magazine with personal expres-
sions on life—the best being those related to the South,
where Golden publishes (in Charlotte, N. C.). There was
no way of knowing, therefore, whether, in addition to
writing columns well, Golden also could report properly.
In "A Little Girl Is Dead," published by World, he
proves that he can be a good reporter.
Indeed—with the exceptions soon to be taken by this
reviewer—his newest book is an excellent account of one
of the most notorious trials in history. It brings to light
anew the hatreds and bigotries of the South, it shows how
mobs can influence courts, it reveals the anti-Semitism
of a man of ability who turned hater and bigot and on the
strength of his bias reached the United States Senate.

*

*

"A Little Girl Is Dead" is based on the murder of
Mary Phagan, on April 26, 1913, in the pencil factory in
Atlanta, Ga., that was managed by Leo Frank for his
uncle, Moses Frank. It has been established since then
that the chief witness against Leo Frank, Jim Conley,
was the murderer. But the Atlanta law-enforcers of that
time needed a different type of person to hate: they
needed a Northerner they could accuse of corrupting the
morals of the South and its women, and a Jew was the
best and readiest available victim. So: Conley, an ex-
convict, was well briefed by the prosecution and was
dressed up to make a good appearance; a mob shouted
for a Jew's death; a weakling of a judge—this is where
Golden is unconvincing in his story when he tries to de-
fend Judge Leonard Strickland Roan—is influenced by a
mob.
One great man emerged: Governor John Marshall
Slaton, who must have received information proving that
Conley, not Frank, was the murderer, and he commuted
Frank's sentence to life imprisonment. Then came the
mob, broke into the jail, drove 170 miles from the Mil-
ledgeville Prison Farm to Marietta, lynched the innocent
man, then mutilated his body.
* * * *
It all came about because the mob inside the court-
room shouted "kill the Jew," and Judge Roan would not
declare a mistrial. It was all because of the vile anti-
Semitic campaign that was conducted by Tom Watson in
his filthy sheet "The Jeffersonian" in which he incited to
riot. It all happened because men who should have known
better—we have been told that Ralph McGill, then on the
Atlanta Constitution, was among them—believed Frank
to be guilty. Yet Golden would have us believe that the
love for the "white flower of Southern virginity" moti-
vated the scandal. That's a pack of nonsense! It was an
outrageous occurrence in which the hated Negro became
the saint when an opportunity arose to hate a Jew even
more and it was the failure of law-abiding citizens to act
like men, with courage! Only Governor Slaton had cour-
age— and he sacrificed a political career in the hope of
saving an innocent man's life. He risked his life and barely
escaped a threatened lynching. His wife, who was shame-
lessly abused—was that Southern respect for womanhood?
—supported him in his act. Glory to their names. But
Judge Roan was guilty, the prosecutors were guilty, the
McGills, if they swallowed the pills of hatred, were guilty.
Golden raises many issues in his book. Aside from
proving the prejudices of Prosecutor Dorsey, of exposing
the mob's actions, he also deals with the attitude of the
Jewish community. He hints at fears, but indicates that
when the American Jewish community finally realized
that an anti-Semitic case was being enacted, the Jews
stuck by the young, accused Jew, who had been honored
soon after coming to Atlanta by being elected president
of Bnai Brith.
But there was fear and hesitancy in Jewish ranks at
the outset. Later, Albert D. Lasker stepped in and financed
the defense to the tune of $160,000. Louis Marshall pre-
sented the appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and
Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes
were in the minority ruling in Frank's behalf.
* * *
Leo Frank was not a rich man, but the constant cry
was that he was a Northern capitalist. Defense pleadings
didn't help, and no evidence counted for a sou with a
bigoted prosecution, court and community.
The simple wife, who to the very last, until her death
in 1957 at the age of 69, was the Atlanta lady, remained
a widow, earning her livelihood in a fashion shop,
and always signed her name to checks as "Mrs. Leo M.
Frank." Her name should be recorded among the heroic
women of our century.
It would be useless for our present purpose to con-
tinue quoting from Harry Golden, to refer to the anti-
Semitic comments, to mention again the bigotry of Tom
Watson and his appeals to hatred and to anti-Semitic bias.
What matters now is the history of a case.

H istory of a Tragic Case: When Mob Rule
Convicted Leo Frank in Atlanta in 1913

Jewish News (this reviewer carried this item under the
heading "The Range of Personal Liberty":

Writing in the Reporter, on the topic "The Curbing of the
Militant Majority—A dissent from the classic liberal interpreta-
tion of civil. liberties in America," John P. Roche, who is the
Morris Hillquir Professor of Labor and Social Thought and chair-
man of the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, asserts
that—
Anyone who cherishes the ideals of individual freedom and
justice can never relax his efforts to push forward the frontiers
of liberty. But the historian of civil liberty in the United States
(though himself a civil libertarian who realizes that history
can grant no absolution) has the obligation to assert the
relative proposition that the contemporary American, despite
the existence of a huge centralized state, is today free to enjoy
a range of personal liberty unknown to his ancestors.
He supports his contentions with many examples to prove
that we have made progress.
In the course of his analysis his recollections lead him to the
tragic Leo Frank case (even so liberal a Southerner as Ralph
McGill believed Frank to have been guilty), and he writes:
One final example may illuminate the shadowy place in my
argument. On April 26, 1913, a tragic sequence of events began
in Atlanta, Georgia, when Mary Phagan was found raped and
murdered in the basement of Moses Frank's pencil factory,
managed by his nephew Leo. Leo Frank was accused of the
crime, indicted, tried, and convicted of murder. The evidence
was Hinny and wholly circumstantial; the prosecution's key
witness, Jim Conley, was certainly himself the murderer. But
in no real sense was Frank on trial: the Jews were in the cage.
"Our little girl—ours by the eternal God!," bellowed Tom Wat-
son, the agrarian demagogue who was to be elected to the
Senate in 1920 on a program that mixed equal parts of anti-war
Populism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism, "has been pur-
sued to a hideous death and bloody grave by this filthy pervert-
ed Jew of New York." Frank's lawyer was told bluntly, "If they
don't hang that Jew, we'll hang you." In this atmosphere Frank
was sentenced to hang (Watson editorially licked his chops at
the prospect of vengeance on this "lascivious Jew"); eventually
after successive appeals the United States Supreme Court
rejected Frank's contention that the state of Georgia had denied
him due process of law. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., joined by
Charles Evans Hughes, dissented brutally from the seven justice
majority which implicity ruled (technically they declined juris-
diction) that Frank had been granted his full legal remedies
under the Constitution. "Mob rule,"" said Holmes, expounding a
position taken for granted by today's court, "does not become
due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury.
. . . it is our duty (to declare) lyncn law as little valid when
practiced by a regularly drawn jury as when administered
by a mob intent on death."
It appears that by this time the Georgia judges were well
aware of Frank's innocence. Conley had confessed to his lawyer,
who, bound by the lawyer-client relationship, could not reveal
the information. Finally, incapable of standing silent while
Frank was railroaded to the gallows, the counsel confided the
matter to Judge Arthur Powell, who was his intimate friend.
The latter apparently passed the information on to Governor
John Slaton, though still under the seal of secrecy. But
with Watson on the was path, no one wished to assume re-
sponsibility for letting "the Jew" go free, or even for ordering
a new trial. Finally with Frank about to hang, Governor Slaton
risked his own neck and commuted the sentence to life im-
prisonment. Frank, secretly removed from Atlanta to Milledge-
ville Prison Farm, was immediately knifed by a fellow convict
and was soon seized by a mob and lynched. "We regard the
hanging of Leo Frank as an act of law-abiding citizens," ob-
served the Marietta Journal, and Tom Watson chortled, "Jew
libertines take notice."
Back at the statehouse in Atlanta, only the intervention of
armed troops prevented a frenzied mob from hanging Governor
Slaton and dynamiting his home. When Slaton left office, and
Georgia, three days after commuting Frank's sentence, his once
promising political career was over. And when Tom Watson
died in 1922, Eugene V. Debs sent his widow a letter praising
this "heroic soul who fought the power of evil his whole life
long." More appropriately, the Ku Klux Clan sent a huge floral
cross.
The experiences of those who have been engaged in the
battle for justice and for social equalities have, indeed, been
varied. Imagine even a Eugene V. Debs speaking commendably
about a vile bigot! Winston Churchill, who has been called "a
Zionist" by Chains Weizmann and other noted leaders, lost his
temper and modified his friendship when he was angered by the
Moyne assassination. There were Presidents of our country who
spoke of the '"damned Jews" who irritated them when they were
pressured in behalf of Nazi victims and in support of the Jewish
National Home in Palestine, and later rendered assistance to
the Zionist cause.
The instances of intolerance, mingled with passing fits of
anger; of occasions when the most liberal of men failed to act
in behalf of the oppressed, can be multiplied numerous times—as
Roche indicated and to which many of us can attest! We are
inclined to agree with him: we have made considerable progress.
The present race issue proves it. People are a bit better today.

If, as indicated, Judge Roan knew about Conley's
guilt, why didn't he act? If he was as honest a judge as
Golden claims, why didn't he declare a mistrial when the
mob began to dominate over the courtroom instead of the
judge? Was he afraid? Then what makes him such a fine
gentleman in retrospect?
McGill is quoted considerably in Golden's book. Why
isn't McGill quoted on the Frank case during his service
on the Atlanta Constitution? And since McGill was on or
near the scene, and did not act, of what avail is his com-
ment in his review of Golden's book in the Detroit News
that there had been an injustice and that Golden's book
now exposes it?
*
*
*
Golden gives this information about the Conley con-
fessions in the concluding portion of his book:

"In 1947, Conley turned up at the police station,
this time on the minor charge of drunkenness. (That
was after several other arrests and after serving in the
chain gang.) His name didn't appear again in the
Atlanta newspapers until 1962, in an obituary.
"He told at least three people he killed Mary
Phagan. He gave a deposition to that effect some ten
years later; and he told Annie Maude Carter. (Conley
had written love letters to her.) A fourth person also
knew Conley had killed the girl. That was a Negro
friend who played checkers with Conley in the base-
ment that morning of April 26, 1913. Whoever he was,
he may well have witnessed the murder.
"Jim Conley was lucky. He might have told all
Atlanta he murdered Mary Phagan; it was obvious that

Golden mentions that when Watson died there were
two bouquets on his coffin—one from Eugene V. Debs and
another from the Ku Klux Klan. "Nothing sums the man
up better than the polar opposites represented by these
two floral tributes," Golden comments about bigot Watson.
But Clarence Darrow also at one time admired Watson.
Now it is asserted that the Bnai Brith Anti-Defamation
League came into being as a result of the Frank tragedy.
There are many angles to the Frank case that must
not be buried in history's forgotten documents.
In our Commentary in the Aug. 2, 1963, issue of The

2 Friday, January 7, 1966 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

—

Louis Marshall

Ralph McGill

Harry Golden

By Philip
Slomovitz

Tom Watson and Hugh Dorsey would never have be-
lieved him. Nor probably would 1913 Atlanta. An
average of four Negroes were lynched every month in
those years. The people of Georgia needed a different
atonement for the murder of the pretty but sad little
girl, Mary Phagan.
"In 1916 Marietta Camp #763 of the United con.'
federate Veterans erected a monument over the grave
of Mary Phagan, and in 1960, the white supremacists
tried to exploit the tragedy. A Robert Bowling of
Atlanta was chairman of the 'Remember Mary Phagan
Committee: The circular he issued urging citizens to
visit the little girl's grave, claimed, ‘. . • the Jews are
behind the Supreme Court's decision to destroy the
white race.'
"Once there were elaborate plans in Marietta to
build a white brick wall around the oak tree from
which Leo Frank was hanged. For nearly 50 years after
the lynching, the area around Frey's gin on the Roswell
Road was known as Leo Frank's Woods. Now the lynch
site is gone. It lies buried under four lanes on Inter-
state Highway '75, which bypasses Marietta."
* *

"Hang the Jew, hang the Jew," was the consistent
cry heard in the Atlanta courtroom.

In "I Can Go Home Again," published in 1943 by
a former jurist, Arthur
G. Powell, who sat on the bench next to Judge Roan
while he prepared to charge the jury, said Roan told
him: "This man's innocence is proved to mathematical
certainty." Judge Powell himself wrote that Frank was
innocent, that: "I know who killed Mary Phagan, but I
know it in such a way that I can never honorably make
the information public as long as certain persons still
are living . . ."
. Judge Powell also wrote that Governor Slaton "told
friends privately that he would have granted a full par-
don, if he had not believed that in a very short while

North Carolina University Press,

the truth would come out."
Let it be recorded to the credit of people like Jane
Addams, Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives
Champ Clark, Senator William Borah, as well as Louis
Marshall and A. D. Lasker that they and many others,
came to frank's defense. It wasn't all a black mark on
America's good name. While Watson was rousing the mob
to ask for the hanging of "the Jew pervert," the country's
leading newspapers condemned the outrage. That's when
Easton accused William Randolph Hearst of operating on
Nathan Straus' money.
* * •

If Jews were on occasion panicky over the situation

in Atlanta, how will Atlantan react to the Frank story
now? Indeed — how are nan-Jews in Georgia reacting to
it NOW?
During the Leo Frank trial and shortly thereafter,
there were differences of opinion as to the action that
was to be taken by Jews. As indicated, Louis Marshall
acted and secured an important minority ruling from
Justice Holmes. There also developed, two years after
Frank was lynched, a controversy between two American
Jewish spokesmen—Henry Berkowitz and Jacob Henry
Schiff. Berkowitz held a pulpit in the Philadelphia Rodeph
Sholem Congregation. Schiff was American Jewry's lead.
ing philanthropist. Berkowitz was the founder of the
Jewish Chautauqua Society in 1893. Because he wanted
to send a lecturer to the University of Atlanta. in behalf
of the Chautauqua Society, in 1917, Schiff was infuriated.
The story, as culled from the record of the American
Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and as reported in The
Jewish News (July 5, 1963) follows:

On Feb. 25, 1918, Schiff asked the Jewish Chautauqua
Society to accept his resignation from the society's board of
directors. The reason he offered was his "advancing age,"
but other letters in the Schiff correspondence at the Americafl
Jewish Archives gives rise to a suspicion that loss of confi-
dence in the society's philosophy had as much to do with .
Schiff's resignation as "advancing age." These letters reflect
the bitter feelings aroused in American Jews by the tragic
Leo M. Frank case of 1913-1915.
Two years after the lynching, the Jewish Chautauqua
Society proposed to send a lecturer to the University of
Georgia. Jacob Schiff was outraged. "I am strongly of the
opinion," he wrote Berkowitz on Dec. 24, 1917, "that the
Chautauqua Society should have nothing to do with the
University of Georgia, be it only as a protest against the
outrageous conduct of a considerable number of the people
of Georgia, and especially of Atlanta, in the Frank case, and
in electing the man (Dorsey) who 'hounded poor Frank
death, as Governor of their. State."
Berkowitz felt quite otherwise and answered on Dee. 28,
that a favorable response to the university's request for a
Jewish Chautauqua lecturer would create "the opportunity for
thousands who never come into touch with Jewish teachers to
secure clear and accurate information by direct, personal tO•
quiries after the lectures. By these means misunderstanding.
misinformation, perverted ideas and prejudices are being cleared
away," and it was on these grounds that the society's board of
directors had "considered favorably the proposal to invade the
hot-bed of ignorance concerning the Jew and prejudice against
him. as revealed by the unspeakable horrors committed in the
State of Georgia . . . We feel that only by the slow but
thoroughgoing methods of education can a fairer attitude of
mind and a better condition of affairs be created . . . The
members of our Board . . . seemed to think that we could do
a helpful service by sending a good man into that section
(Georgia) to carry some light into the benighted minds Of
the people."
Schiff was not at all mollified and three days later urged
on Berkowitz that "it will be more self-respecting if the Jewish
Chautauqua Society does for the present not get into touch
with the University of Georgia, as it is apparently desired to
do (by the university)." Shortly thereafter, Schiff resigned
membership on the Jewish Chautauqua Society's board of
directors.

to

This is history. It is a record of an historic ease—
of the most tragic chapter in the history of American
Jewry. As in the instance of the Nazi terror, it can not
and must not be forgotten, since the inhumanity of man
to man must always be exposed and injustice must be
held up to the light of day to assure that it won't be
repeated.
The Holmes brief on the Frank case is now used as
a weapon in courts against mob rule. Let it remain as a
lesson for all time to come that cowardice on the part
of judges and newspapermen will not be tolerated. And
let it also be said—as in the instance of Jacob Schiff's
rebellion against Henry Berkowitz—that those who speak
up against bigotry are to be admired, especially when they
defy the fears of panic-stricken men.

