The case of Leo Frank involved a 1913 murder and trial in Atlanta, Georgia, that became a national affair. On April 27, 1913, 14-year-old Mary Phagan was found murdered in the basement of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia. The grisly murder shocked the community. Public dismay was heightened by the fact that the scene of the crime had been a factory, a symbol of the encroachments of capitalist industrial economy in the South. Outrage over Phagan’s death quickly turned to a public demand that her killer be caught. Suspicions first settled on the factory’s night watchman, an African American named Newt Lee. The evidence initially implicating Lee, however, turned out to be weak. Prosecutors’ suspicions then turned to the superintendent of the factory, Leo Frank.
The prosecutors built a case against Frank based on circumstantial evidence and rumor. Many of the rumors were later proven false. The evidence against Frank centered on his being one of the few people in the factory on the day of the murder and his inability to provide a persuasive account of where he was when the murder occurred. Other accusations focused on Frank’s alleged sexual perversity. Some women factory workers claimed that Frank had made sexual advances to them. A madam of a local bordello charged that he frequented her establishment. Despite the lack of evidence, the Atlanta newspapers seized every new development as proof that Frank was the killer. His trial thus took place amid the public perception that he was
Guilty.
The Frank case also took on other implications because of what Frank represented in the South. To many, Mary Phagan’s death was proof of the dangers that industrial capitalism would bring to the South. The small family farm was in decline while industry was spreading. Many southern farmers were forced to send their wives and daughters to work in the new factories. Southerners thus saw factories not only as a symbol of the power of industrial capitalism, but also as a threat to their wives and daughters. To add to public fears, Leo Frank was Jewish, which made him suspect in the eyes of many. Anti-Semitism was prevalent in American culture. Racial prejudice characterized Jewish American men as sexual predators who preyed on innocent women. Leo Frank thus became to many a symbol of market power and a danger to the southern way of life. Combined with the predatory character of capitalism in the eyes of southerners, anti-Semitic feelings created an explosive situation that ended in a lynching.
Frank was found guilty. After the trial, many people started to question the verdict. Some of the evidence against Frank was revealed as false. When it appeared that Frank might be granted a lenient sentence, or even worse a new trial, many southerners denounced the possibility as due to his position and wealth. Frank did not, however, live long enough to see another trial. First, another inmate assaulted Frank and slit his throat, a wound from which he was recovering when a lynch mob broke into the jail, removed Frank, and lynched him. The Leo Frank case was one of the last and most visible public lynchings of the Progressive Era. For some traditionalists in the South, his death at the hands of a lynch mob was seen as a kind of urban frontier justice. For advocates of a New South, however, the Frank lynching was a painful reminder of how far southern justice had to travel to become modern.
Further reading: Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
—Michael Hartman
World History
