Let’s Get Frank: Who Killed Little Mary Phagan?
Leo Frank was a Brooklyn Jew who’d relocated to Atlanta in 1908 to help manage his uncle’s pencil-making business, the National Pencil Company. He acted as the factory’s superintendent.
Leo Frank (Library of Congress)
Mary Phagan (Wikimedia Commons)
On Sunday morning, April 27, 1913, the soot-covered corpse of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered near an incinerator in the factory’s basement. Her body showed signs of having been strangled to death—and possibly raped—the night before. Blood stained her garments. The young woman was known to have worked at the plant on a part-time basis, tasked with operating a machine that inserted erasers into the tips of pencils. She had dropped by the day before to collect her weekly pay ($1.20).
The criminal investigation orbited around several suspects, including Jim Conley, an African American who worked as the factory’s janitor, before landing on Leo Frank. He was arrested and charged on April 29, and on May 24 the Fulton County Grand Jury handed down a formal indictment of murder. The shocking homicide of a child would soon become national news of the most lurid kind. The lead prosecutor in the case, Atlanta Solicitor General Hugh Dorsey, would push a sensationalized ‘sexual predator’ narrative. The people of Atlanta pulsated in anticipation of the courtroom drama to take place in their city.
The 1913 trial lasted from July 28 to August 25. Those fortunate enough to obtain seats inside the courtroom evidently thought of themselves as spectators at a sporting event. Like local fans, they had come to witness, to cheer, and applaud justice meted out. The prosecution’s star witness, 27-year-old Jim Conley, would provide damning testimony over the course of his three days on the stand.
After deliberating little more than two hours, the jury returned the verdict an expectant courtroom yearned to hear: guilty as charged. Judge Leonard Strickland Roan sentenced the defendant to death. Due to the highly enflamed atmosphere of public sentiment and the very real threat of significant violence, Judge Roan had not allowed the defendant or his lawyers to be present in the courtroom when the verdict was read. That would prove an important point of contention throughout the subsequent appeals process.
The entire city erupted in delirium at the verdict; the streets grew congested with crowds cheering in celebration of the Phagan family’s vindication and the jury’s validation of decency, justice, and moral clarity. Jubilant marchers hoisted prosecutor Dorsey on their shoulders as they shouted “Kill the Jews” and “Little Mary is avenged.”
In the following years, the national press picked up the story—especially journalist A. B. MacDonald of the Kansas City Star.
At the same time, Frank’s defense team found themselves immersed in a flurry of appeals winding through the state and federal courts, eventually landing before the Supreme Court of the United States. Oral arguments in Frank v. Magnum took place over two days, February 25-26, 1915. In a 7-2 ruling announced on April 12 with Justice Mahlon Pitney writing for the majority, the Court declined to intercede on Frank’s behalf, resigning him to the fate of the lower court’s conviction and sentencing. But their decision included a stinging dissent from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (joined by Justice Charles Evans Hughes) which drew alarming attention to Frank’s denial of due process on account of the “mob dominion” surrounding the trial, both inside and outside the courtroom. In language echoing the reporting of Kansas journalist A. B. MacDonald, who had determined “It was not evidence that convicted Frank. It was the mob.”
Leo Frank on Trial.
(Wikimedia)
Holmes wrote the following:
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase ‘due process of law,’ there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard. Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury. We are not speaking of mere disorder, or mere irregularities in procedure, but of a case where the processes of justice are actually subverted …. The single question in our minds is whether a petition alleging that the trial took place in the midst of a mob savagely and manifestly intent on a single result is shown on its face unwarranted, by the specifications, which may be presumed to set forth the strongest indications of the fact at the petitioner’s command. This is not a matter for polite presumptions; we must look facts in the face. Any judge who has sat with juries knows that, in spite of forms, they are extremely likely to be impregnated by the environing atmosphere.
But the Court had spoken, leaving Frank a guilty man awaiting sentencing. And then someone threw a grenade into the mix. That someone was none other than the out-going governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton. After personally re-examining the trial’s complete record, Slaton decided, on June 20, his last day in office, to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. “I would be a murderer,” he said, “if I allowed that man to hang.” The official announcement was issued the following day, June 21, the day before Frank’s scheduled execution.
Can you imagine the white-hot fury, the indignant outrage of absolute betrayal of those in the community who’d been salivating for hanging day? A local populist newspaper editor, Tom Watson, certainly did, and he hastened to fan the hatred of the maddened crowd into a murderous mob. In his magazine The Jeffersonian, Watson’s headlines decried the moral obscenity of how a “pure little Gentile victim had been defiled by a money-grubbing, sexually perverted New York Jew.” He called openly for mob justice: “Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that a sense of justice lives among the people.”
Well, his readers didn’t require that much coaxing. Before escaping town and the cold-blooded wrath of an enraged citizenry, Governor Slaton noticed his residence engulfed by a baying mob calling for his head. Chanting, shouting, and terrorizing those inside the residence, they hanged the governor in effigy under the sign, “King of the Jews.” Unbeknownst to the rabid crowd, fearing for the safety of Leo Frank, Slaton had secretly relocated the prisoner to a prison farm in Milledgeville, located about 98 miles southeast of Atlanta.
Safety would be something difficult to ensure. On the evening of July 18, 1915, Frank was assaulted by another inmate and had his throat slashed. Swift medical assistance saved his life. Temporarily.
Governor John M. Slaton, 1915 (Library of Congress)
Incensed by news of Frank’s last-minute commutation, a group of twenty-five prominent Georgians, including two former Georgia supreme court justices and a former governor, decided to take matters into their own hands. Anointing themselves the “Knights of Mary Phagan,” they cobbled together a plan of action and set it into motion on August 16. Driving in an eight-vehicle caravan, the self-appointed vigilante crusaders descended on the Milledgeville jail where Frank was being held. After having quickly subdued the guards, they extracted their prey from his cell, stuffed him into one of the cars, and sped off—top speed of 18 mph—through the night and across multiple counties, before arriving the next morning in Marietta, Mary Phagan’s hometown, located about 20 miles northwest of Atlanta! The entire motorized escapade had been on the road a full 15 hours.
In the thick, heavy air of a Georgia summer morning, on August 17, 1915, at about 7 a.m., they lynched Leo Frank from an oak tree at Frey’s Gin Road. Thousands of curious onlookers gravitated to the scene of the hanging. Some merely gawked, others took photos, the more brazen sliced off pieces of his nightshirt for souvenirs. The papers noted that Frank was hanged facing the direction of the house where Phagan lived.
June 21, 1915
Atlanta Jewish Times cover announcing the Leo M. Frank's death sentence commuted.
Leo Frank's body hanging from a tree at Marletta, Georgia, after he had been lynched.
(Times Wide World Photos)
By about 10:15 a.m., a local judge and sheriff arrived at the grim scene. They ordered the body to be cut down. Frank’s remains were quickly hustled into a waiting vehicle to escape the still enraged mob.
Nobody ever faced charges for his murder. One member of the hanging mob wrote a letter to journalist MacDonald justifying the killing of Frank. MacDonald responded with a three-page missive excoriating the writer and all of Georgia for its savagery. Here’s an excerpt:
A page from MacDonald’s response to a member of the lynching party, who had written MacDonald defending the mob’s actions. (Library of Congress)
Four things emerged from this vile event:
Georgia witnessed a mass exodus of Jews from the state. Half of its Jewish population fled to other parts of the country.
In September 1913, the Anti-Defamation League was founded in response to the heightened temper of antisemitism in the country.
The KKK was resurrected by Atlantan William Joseph Smith at Stone Mt. on Thanksgiving night, 1915. Stone Mt. is located about 15 miles from Atlanta.
Tom Watson’s celebrity got him elected a US senator in 1920.
In March 1982, Alonzo Mann, Leo Frank’s former office boy, made a death-bed confession that exonerated Frank of the murder, claiming he’d kept silent for fear of his life and his family’s security.
On December 17, 1983, the Associated Press interviewed 85-year-old Mary Richards Phagan, the closest surviving relative of the murder victim. She declared Frank innocent.
Three years later the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Frank a pardon—but refrained from absolving him of the murder or pronouncing him innocent of the charges.
In January 1989, NBC aired a two-part TV mini-series titled “The Murder of Little Mary Phagan.” It won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries of the Year.
Here’s something to make your eyes widen in disbelief. In 1913, the same year of Frank’s ordeal, another Jew, Menahem Mendel Beilis, was dragged into a Kievan courtroom in far-away Russia to stand trial for the alleged murder of a 13-year-old boy, Andrei Yushchinsky. Beilis was accused of killing the boy for his blood to be used in preparation of matzos for the Jewish Passover meal. His ritual murder trial became an international cause célèbre.
And there’s more. You likely are unaware of the fact that Fiddlin’ John Carson, the “Father of Country Music,” (and a Klansman) made quite a name for himself during the 1920s when he memorialized in song the tragic death of Mary. It was in a sixteen-stanza song titled “Ballad of Mary Phagan.” He also rhapsodized about the tree from which Leo Frank was hanged in “Dear Old Oak in Georgia.” Here’s one line from the latter tune: “Two years we have waited and tales we have listened to … but the boys of old Georgia had to get the brutal Jew.”
The first significant historical analysis of Frank’s trial and lynching was that of Leonard Dinnerstein in 1968. A long-time professor at the University of Arizona, his doctoral dissertation was published under the title The Leo Frank Case. Most recently, journalist Steven Oney revisited the tragic tale in what many consider the most definitive assessment to date: And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (2003).
One final postscript. Eight years after the Supreme Court’s 1915 decision in Frank v. Magnum, the Court reversed itself in Moore v. Dempsey (1923), turning Holmes’ dissent into the new majority opinion. Federal courts were given the green light to intervene when a state trial was dominated by a mob.