The Murder of Little Mary Phagan

Phagan-Kean, Mary

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by Ann Hendon

WITH OVER 500 pages, more than twice the length of the first (1987) edition, the newly-revised and expanded second edition of The Murder of Little Mary Phagan is now available for purchase.

The author, Mary Phagan-Kean, states: “This book is the great work of my lifetime, a compelling personal journey, a tale of the shocking sex murder and abuse of my great-aunt, 13-year-old Mary Phagan — and it’s the story that the ADL and other shadowy forces don’t want you to read.”

This is the book that finally and definitively brings the truth about the murder of Mary Phagan by her killer, sweatshop boss and B’nai B’rith official Leo Frank, to light. It’s available now! Click the link or scan the QR code to get your copy at a discount price today.

Introduction to Mary Phagan-Kean’s Insights into the Murder of Her Great Aunt

HERE ARE SOME of the key points offered by Mary Phagan-Kean in her latest interview with social media activist Ryan Dawson. (video above)

Mary Phagan-Kean’s journey into the dark and complex narrative surrounding the murder of her great aunt, Mary Phagan, began unexpectedly. Her father first shared the story after her name was recognized by a teacher, sparking a lifelong quest for truth and justice. The tale, as recounted by her father, painted a grim picture of Leo Frank, the man convicted of Mary Phagan’s murder. According to testimony, Frank was a sexual pervert who molested numerous young girls and even boys, earning him the moniker “the B’nai B’rith pedophile” — a reference to the fact that he was president of the Atlanta chapter of the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith, the organization which gave birth to the powerful ADL, or “Anti-Defamation League.” Frank was even re-elected president of the group after his conviction for murdering little Mary.

The Vigilance Committee, which consisted of leading community leaders and which sought “Southern justice” after a corrupt governor (who was a partner in the law firm that defended Frank) commuted Frank’s death sentence, played a pivotal role in the case by executing him themselves after, as they saw it, outside influencers had illegally prevented his lawful hanging. (The New York Times-invented “Knights of Mary Phagan” never existed. That moniker was likely invented to link the Vigilance Committee to similar-sounding “Knights” factions of the Ku Klux Klan, in order to smear the Committee.)

The lynching of Frank was the first done by automobile, quite a feat considering the limited ownership of automobiles in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 — further proving that prominent citizens, who were outraged by Governor Slaton’s involvement in the law firm that defended Frank, and his commutation of his sentence, were involved, and not a “mob.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization with a vested interest in the outcome, has been relentless in its efforts to secure a full pardon for Frank for decades. Their tactics, however, have been marred by deception and misinformation, leading to numerous hoaxes, including false claims about a pardon (the existing “pardon” does not address his guilt at all).

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father never mentioned Frank’s Jewishness but emphasized his perverse behavior. Her grandfather, Mary Phagan’s brother, was deeply emotionally affected by the case, becoming distraught when asked about it, particularly noting the resemblance between Mary Phagan-Kean and little Mary.

The narrative surrounding the case is fraught with controversy. Jews have even attempted to portray Mary Phagan as a seducer, a claim that Mary Phagan-Kean vehemently rejects.

There has been documented collusion between Jewish groups and officials to alter the wording on Mary’s commemorative plaque, with the altered plaque suggesting that Frank was exonerated for the murder — which he was not. This alteration occurred under the cover of night and was set up during secret meetings from which the Phagan family — and the public — were excluded, further obscuring the truth.

Rabbi Steven Lebow, a prominent figure in the area Jewish community, demanded that Mary’s marker be changed because it “offended” the Jewish community to tell the truth about the non-pardon. This defense of a convicted child rapist and murderer is a strange hill for Jewish groups to die on.

During the 1960s, when Jewish authors Leonard Dinnerstein and Harry Golden were writing their books on the case, the trial transcript mysteriously disappeared, making it unavailable for public scrutiny.

The best outcome of the efforts of both sides in this case, Mrs. Phagan-Kean says, has been the creation of a team to digitize and make all relevant documents on the case available and searchable online. And the best way to study the case, she avers, is to examine these newspaper articles in conjunction with the Brief of Evidence (all now available on leofrank.info and leofrank.org). Contrary to popular belief, the newspapers were pro-Frank and had Jewish editors, contradicting the notion of an anti-Frank, anti-Jewish atmosphere. Nevertheless, the firsthand reports of the trial at that time were mostly honest and paint a very different picture from that of the “Leo Frank is an innocent victim of anti-Semitism” narrative being pushed today. (One can learn, for example, that the grand jury that indicted Frank included four Jews out of 21 members, and that all voted to charge Frank with the murder.)

The Jewish community’s claims that Frank did not know Mary Phagan are untenable. Frank walked past her daily for a year, handled her pay packets weekly, and even directed police to investigate James Gannt, claiming he was “close to” Mary. These actions suggest a familiarity that contradicts his claim of ignorance.

The Anti-Defamation League’s never-ending defense of Frank has inadvertently contributed to the cause they claim to oppose: anti-Semitism.

Mary Phagan was brutally raped, as evidenced by the autopsy report, which, though difficult to read, showed no markings on her body except those of strangulation. There was blood in her panties, and family proof confirmed she was not on her menstrual cycle. ADL-linked author Steven Oney referred to Mary as a “voluptuous woman,” a claim that Parade magazine attempted to exploit this by implying she was “flirting” before her death, a particularly odious insinuation.

A 1980s miniseries, inspired by Harry Golden’s book and dubious material from Alonzo Mann, was produced without consultation with Mary Phagan’s family. This miniseries further muddied the waters of the case.

In a more recent development, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, under pressure from Rabbi Lebow and the Jewish power structure, established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” in Atlanta. This unit, ostensibly to exonerate falsely convicted individuals, including Blacks, was really created explicitly to push for the exoneration of Frank. They have even floated the idea of a new trial for Frank, despite the extreme improbability of a proper prosecution more than a century later.

Contrary to ADL claims, the “mass exodus” of Jews from the area after the Frank case never occurred. This is one of the many hoaxes that will be debunked in the forthcoming new edition of Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan.

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father’s enduring belief was that “the truth will always win,” a sentiment that continues to guide her quest for justice.

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Source: leofrank.info

by Karl Hess Stegall

On March 11, 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean—the great-niece of young Mary Phagan, whose brutal murder in 1913 at the hands of Leo Frank shocked a nation and shaped its legal and social institutions—appeared on the Stew Peters television program to recount the legacy of a crime that has reverberated through history. Her full interview may be viewed by clicking the video link above.

The trial, conviction, and execution of Leo Frank—a sweatshop owner and official of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith—were not merely the resolution of a terrible crime but the catalyst for the founding of one of the most formidable organizations in modern America: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Established in the wake of Frank’s conviction, the ADL has long positioned itself as a guardian against injustice, yet its function has increasingly become one of suppression, punishing those who dare to expose Jewish abuses of power. With the support of its allies in media, academia, and government, the ADL has, for over a century, insisted upon a revisionist narrative: that Frank was an innocent victim of anti-Semitism. The weight of evidence, however, tells another story—one that cannot be dismissed, for it is inscribed in the thousand-page Brief of Evidence and in the unbroken affirmations of every court that examined the case, from the Grand Jury to the Georgia Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court of the United States—and every level of the justice system between them. Frank, despite his considerable wealth and the defense of the most renowned legal minds of his day, was found guilty in proceedings that withstood the most rigorous scrutiny.

In her interview, Mrs. Phagan-Kean speaks not only of legal documents and court decisions but of personal revelation. She recounts the moment she first discovered her relation to Mary Phagan and the shock of learning that powerful forces had spent more than a century distorting the truth about her great-aunt’s fate. Faced with a campaign that sought to turn a murderer into a martyr, she made the fateful decision to devote her life to setting the record straight.

Significantly, Mrs. Phagan-Kean is no bigot or “anti-Semite.” Indeed, after her father—who served as the leader of the color guard honoring a fallen Jewish airman—became close to the airman’s family, she grew up knowing them only as “grandma” and “grandpa” after the family unofficially adopted hers. That relationship remains unbroken. Her mission, therefore, is not one of blind enmity but of devotion to the truth.

That truth has been hidden and distorted by Frank’s allies, often by dishonest and desperate means. Frank’s defenders, unwilling to accept the weight of evidence against him, engaged in a series of efforts to obscure the facts, including:

• Framing innocent Black men. In their first attempt to divert suspicion, Frank’s defenders sought to implicate night watchman Newt Lee by planting a fake bloody shirt in his home. When that deception failed, they turned to janitor Jim Conley, planting a fake “bloody club” and pay stub in an effort to shift the blame—a campaign that continues into 2025. If Frank were innocent, why would his supporters need to resort to such elaborate crimes?
• Inventing a bite mark hoax. Long after the trial, Frank’s defenders concocted a claim that bite marks had been found on Mary Phagan’s body—marks that supposedly did not match Frank’s dental records. But this assertion collapsed under scrutiny, as the original autopsy made no mention of such wounds, and dental X-ray analysis was not introduced in Georgia courts until seven decades after Frank’s trial.
• Slandering Mary Phagan. In a grotesque reversal of victim and perpetrator, some of Frank’s supporters spread the shameful lie that the 13-year-old girl had enticed him—an act of slander that served only to highlight their desperation.
• Fabricating the myth of an anti-Semitic mob. Frank’s defenders alleged that a frenzied, hate-filled crowd besieged the courtroom, shouting, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” and similar threats. Yet contemporary photographs and newspaper reports contradict this claim, revealing a trial conducted with order and gravity, not with the chaos of racial animus.
• Tampering with historical records. Under the cover of darkness and without the knowledge of the Phagan family, Frank’s defenders clandestinely altered the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s gravesite, replacing the truth with the falsehood of his “innocence.”
• Secret meetings with government officials. Starting in the 1980s, and still happening even in 2025, private discussions continue between Frank’s advocates and officials in Georgia and Fulton County, from which the Phagan family and the public are deliberately excluded. The goal is clear: to obtain an official exoneration for a man whose guilt was established beyond all reasonable doubt.

And this is but a fraction of their elaborate effort to rewrite history.

Mrs. Phagan-Kean announces in this interview that a new and greatly expanded edition of her book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, will be released this year. This updated volume will offer even more evidence—evidence that exposes the deceit, manipulation, and calculated erasures that have defined the defense of Leo Frank for over a century.

History, as the Durants often reminded us, is a battlefield where truth and falsehood wage an unending war. To understand the present, one must understand the forces that have labored, decade after decade, to exonerate a man justly convicted of the rape and murder of a child. It is a struggle not merely for justice in the past but for clarity in the present, for the lessons of history remain the foundation upon which the future is built.

Be sure to share this interview. The forces that shape history are at work even now, and only through knowledge can one resist their distortions.

by Dale Bennett

ON THIS, the 110th anniversary of the rape and strangulation murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by her sweatshop boss — and Atlanta B’nai B’rith president — Leo Max Frank, let us remember her young life and reflect on the massive Jewish propaganda machine that has been attempting to whitewash her killer’s reputation for more than a century.

Besides the victim, Mary Phagan, there were five people in the National Pencil Company building when she was killed on 26 April 1913. We know that four of them didn’t do it. That leaves Leo Frank.

110 years later, the ADL is still trying to frame the janitor, Jim Conley, for Mary Phagan’s murder: How likely is it that Conley, a Black man—in 1913 Georgia—would rape and kill a White girl just a few feet from the unlocked glass-paneled front entrance door of the National Pencil Company, where people were coming and going all day, right at the foot of an open staircase at the top of which was Leo Frank’s open office door? Preposterous.

Leo Frank was elected the Atlanta B’nai B’rith president of the Gate City Lodge #144 in 1912 and his Summer of 1913 conviction for the rape and strangulation-murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had galvanized B’nai B’rith HQ to found the ADL less than two months after the fact.

Even though Leo Frank was convicted in late August 1913, in September 1913 his 500-member Independent Order of B’nai B’rith fraternal organization in Georgia voted unanimously (see Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1913 at leofrank.info) to re-elect him their president. So while Leo Frank was incarcerated in the city jail as his appeals were wending their way through the appellate courts, he was running the affairs of this powerful Atlanta Jewish group like a powerful mafia boss behind bars until the Autumn of 1914. He was not re-elected once the affidavits, testimony, and evidence of the Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court records were revealed to the public (available at the Internet Archive and leofrank.info).

A must-read on the topic is “100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty” from the American Mercury, and another important source every student of the case must read are the contemporary works of Tom Watson.

I encourage everyone to please listen to the works of investigative journalist Tom Watson in the audio books by Vanessa Neubauer, from the pages of Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine, January, March, August, September and October of 1915.

I promise you won’t be disappointed.

1. Introduction
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/03/audio-book-tom-watsons-the-leo-frank-case/

2. Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/01/tom-watson-the-leo-frank-case/

3. Tom Watson: A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/03/audio-book-tom-watson-a-full-review-of-the-leo-frank-case/

4. Tom Watson: The Celebrated Case of The State of Georgia vs. Leo Frank
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/06/audio-book-the-celebrated-case-of-the-state-of-georgia-vs-leo-frank/

5. Tom Watson: The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/07/audio-book-tom-watsons-the-official-record-in-the-case-of-leo-frank-a-jew-pervert/

6. Tom Watson: The Rich Jews Indict a State!
http://nationalvanguard.org/2015/07/audio-book-tom-watsons-the-rich-jews-indict-a-state/

Tom Watson articulated the evidence, testimony and exhibits of the Leo Frank trial with such force and power it is impossible to believe Leo Frank is innocent. Listen and find out why!

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Source: leofrank.info

by H.L. Mencken

WHEN THINGS get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man them rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don’t do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum’s rush and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American yellow-bellies, or every time some jobholder goes to work and does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I.W.W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks.

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by himself, or they couldn’t have it at all.

He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted.

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down or bawled him out.

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn’t allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn’t nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of these here kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn’t like, or by holding up their salaries, so that they had to knuckle down or not get no money.

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn’t wear no uniform.

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain’t got no use for, and don’t want to see loafing around.

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

Interfering with business.

Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments, and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was.

He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so that he could do whatever he pleased.

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

Now he washes his hands of us and even goes to work and declares war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain’t got no more.

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us.

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn’t want to.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don’t care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

When we complained to the English we didn’t get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we give them plenty of warning that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn’t have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we was, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we’d have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn’t like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn’t pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain’t for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now a free country, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don’t want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not taking no more English orders no more; and that, being as we are now a free country, we can do anything that free countries can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it.

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Author’s Note

From THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE. THIRD EDITION, 1923, pp. 398-402. First printed, as “Essay in American,” in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 7, 1921. Reprinted in THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, SECOND EDITION, 1921, pp. 388-92.

From the preface thereof:

It must be obvious that more than one section of the original is now quite unintelligible to the average American of the sort using the Common Speech. What would he make, for example, of such a sentence as this one: “He has called together bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”? Or of this: “He has refused for a long time, after such dissolution, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise.” Such Johnsonian periods are quite beyond his comprehension, and no doubt the fact is at least partly to blame for the neglect upon which the Declaration has fallen in recent years, when, during the Wilson-Palmer saturnalia of oppressions [1918-1920], specialists in liberty began protesting that the Declaration plainly gave the people the right to alter the government under which they lived and even to abolish it altogether, they encountered the utmost incredulity. On more than one occasion, in fact, such an exegete was tarred and feathered by shocked members of the American Legion, even after the Declaration had been read to them. What ailed them was simply that they could not understand its Eighteenth Century English. This jocosity was denounced as seditious by various patriotic Americans, and in England it was accepted gravely and deplored sadly as a specimen of current Standard American.

****

Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

by Scott Aaronson

IT MAY WELL BE the greatest murder mystery of all time. Some assert that the Mary Phagan murder case is solved, but those who so assert are of two different and mutually exclusive camps. And those two camps still stand diametrically opposed to this day, four generations later.

The case aroused the outrage and ire and vengeance of two great communities. One, the Jewish community, feel overwhelmingly today, and felt to a lesser but still substantial extent in 1913, that Leo Frank was tried and condemned simply because he was a Jew. They believe that Leo Frank is so obviously innocent that he never would have been tried had it not been for endemic anti-Semitism in 1913 Atlanta. And they have been remarkably effective in making  Southern anti-Semitism the leitmotif of virtually all drama, documentary, and other remembrance of this case for the last half century. The other, the largely Christian Southern gentile community, believed overwhelmingly in 1913 – and to an unknown but doubtlessly  large degree still believes today – that justice was done when all the jurors, and every appeals court in the land including the Supreme Court of the United States, after a monumental and impressively-funded defense, agreed that Leo Frank was fairly tried and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan. And it must rankle Southerners almost beyond words to be accused of anti-Semitism, when no Christian community anywhere on earth has so respected and welcomed Jews, has so openly acknowledged its spiritual roots in Judaism, or has so enthusiastically supported the Jewish state of Israel.

It all begins with Mary Phagan, a sweet and lovely 13-year-old girl on the threshold of womanhood. She was loved and treasured by those who knew her well. When her all-too-real tragedy began, she had just played the part of Sleeping Beauty in a church play (and, her family tells us, was unable to stop giggling during the rehearsals of the kissing scene). Barely a teenager, she was nevertheless providing support to her family — at the wage rate of seven and a half cents an hour (see Gannt testimony, coroner’s inquest) — working as a child laborer in the sweatshop of Atlanta’s National Pencil Company.

Late on Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, brightly dressed for the parade and festivities that were to take place that afternoon to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, Mary Phagan went to pick up her pay of $1.20 from factory superintendent and part-owner Leo Frank. Frank was a businessman who was so well-respected in Atlanta’s very successful Jewish community that, at the age of 29, he had become the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith.

Mary Phagan never made it to the parade. Her bloody body was found at three o’clock the next morning in the factory basement, brutally used, beaten, and strangled to death. The sudden end of Mary Phagan’s brief life shocked Atlanta, then the entire South, and ultimately the entire nation.

Her death became the center of intense public outrage and interest, and Frank was charged with her murder. Jewish businessmen, publishers, and organizations from all over the country made Frank’s defense a cause célèbre, and the large sums donated enabled Frank to procure the most respected lawyers in the state and even to appeal his case to the highest court in the land. But to little avail — ultimately Leo Frank was found guilty of the unspeakable killing of little Mary, and his appeals were rejected by every court that heard them.

Frank was sentenced to hang, to much public satisfaction. But in 1915 John Slaton, the state’s outgoing governor, under tremendous pressure from both sides, made the decision during the last moments of his administration to commute Frank’s sentence to life in prison — despite the fact the he, Slaton, was a senior partner in the law firm that defended Frank.

Outraged by what they saw as corruption and a miscarriage of justice, a group comprising some of the region’s leading citizens laid careful plans to abduct Frank from his prison cell and carry out the jury’s original sentence of hanging — and they did so, lynching him not far from Mary Phagan’s home.

It is this second horrific death by strangulation — Leo Frank’s — that occupies the public mind today. Frank, not Mary Phagan, is the locus of tragedy, of moral lessons, of outrage and mourning. Mary Phagan’s life, and the horrors she endured in her last moments, are almost forgotten except as a backdrop for Frank’s persecution and death at the hands of alleged anti-Semites. Her tragedy, and her family’s grief and outcry for justice, have been turned into little more than footnotes.

I said there were three strangling deaths. The third is the strangling to death of the truth. Much of the real history of this case, and the actual, primary evidence that was brought to light at the time, is almost unknown today — at least to that vast majority who consume the academic works, popular dramatizations, articles, and books that have addressed the subject of Leo Frank in recent decades. Instead of real history, investigated and recounted with a deep commitment to objectivity, we are given a simplistic, moralistic narrative of an obviously innocent Leo Frank victimized by bigoted anti-Semites who subjected him to a sham trial and an horrific lynching — with the added fillip that the undoubted killer was an African-American, Jim Conley, who was never prosecuted because anti-Semitic fervor demanded Frank’s blood. This narrative is such an imposture that not even the honorable supporters of Leo Frank in 1913, were they alive today, would recognize or endorse it. It is a farrago of emotional blackmail, half-truths, omissions, and outright hoaxes. I write so that the readers and students of today can at long last see that, whatever prejudices there may have been in 1913 Atlanta, those that prevail in the mediasphere of the early 21st century are far worse.

This sham history will collapse, sooner or later, as new generations of investigators rediscover the evidence that has been brushed under the rug in recent years. Young historians, some of them not yet born, will make their reputations and earn their doctorates exposing the hoaxes that now seem to buttress (but will ultimately undermine) the false narrative.

Will this rediscovery of the truth cause a backlash of real anti-Semitism against Southern Jews or Jews in general? I think not. Just because a few soi-disant leaders, cranks, haters, and self-promoters palmed off their paranoiac vision of the Frank case on a generation is no reason for a real vendetta. I intend to show that a middle path that respects truth above ethnic and religious loyalty is needed, and Jewish voices should, I hope, be prominent in leading the way if we are to avoid another swing of the knife-edged pendulum of hate.

One of the most remarkable things I discovered when writing about this case was that many of the original articles about this case — even major ones — and affidavits, sworn statements, and utterances of great import from the central participants in the case, were not available online, not searchable, not findable, not even readable. That is, until a courageous man named Mark Cohen, almost 100 years after the fact, scanned in and uploaded nearly all the relevant contemporary newspapers, magazines, and surviving trial materials to his Web site, leofrank.org. I deeply appreciate Mr. Cohen’s efforts in doing this service for us, for our posterity, and for history. (I do not, however, endorse all of Mr. Cohen’s theories of, or conclusions about, this case.) It was a monumental effort that must have taken years. Even then, though, the material was largely not searchable because most of the fragile, faded papers from which the uploaded PDF files had been made were not of good enough quality to allow them to be turned into text using OCR technology. So, to provide the most important evidence to you, the reader, I found myself retyping — and, as I typed, reliving — the events of 100 years ago exactly as they were reported at the time. In recent years, another independent Leo Frank archive, located at leofrank.info, took on the task of transcribing all the relevant contemporary articles on this case, a monumental project that is still ongoing.

All that was available to the researcher – until very recently – about the Frank case, and to the reader and student, was practically all derivative writing, mostly decades or a century removed from the events, and with minuscule exceptions all slavishly devoted to the received narrative of Frank’s absolute innocence and pervasive Southern anti-Semitism.

For many, the evidence against Leo Frank could not pass the test of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I am not sure that I could have authorized the opening of the trap door beneath him myself. But, to the jury which tried him, it did pass that test. The judge rightly charged the jury to throw aside all preconceptions and prejudices and judge the case on the evidence alone. We should do the same.

If we cannot open our eyes to see what the people of that time and place saw, if we dare not examine the evidence for ourselves and throw aside the distorting lens of the media’s current depiction of the case, then we are indulging ourselves in feel-good (or, for many, feel-bad) fiction. If we do that in the Frank case — a case in which the received narrative is one of blood libel against the people of the South, against an entire people and culture — we have abandoned responsibility for our children’s future and any shred of honor we might once have possessed.

I have spent most of my life in the South, and learned much from its people. All of us, Jew and Gentile, black and white, deserve better. We should respect the truth above all. Lying to right a perceived wrong is compounding the wrong, prolonging and augmenting the hate we claim to oppose.

* * *

The Crime: Mary Phagan’s Death by Strangling

ON SATURDAY morning at 11:30AM, April 26, 1913 Mary Phagan ate a poor girl’s lunch of bread and boiled cabbage and said goodbye to her mother for the last time. Dressed for parade-watching (for this was Confederate Memorial Day) in a lavender dress, ribbon-bedecked hat, and parasol, she left her home in hardscrabble working-class Bellwood at 11:45, and caught the streetcar for downtown Atlanta.

Before the festivities, though, she stopped to see Superintendent Leo M. Frank at the National Pencil Company and pick up from him her $1.20 pay for the one day she had worked there during the previous week.

She had been laid off for most of that week because the material needed for the tipping department in the metal room, where she worked, had been late in arriving.

She entered the grim and massive four-story Victorian building a few minutes after noon, and proceeded up the stairs to the second floor, where both Leo Frank’s office and — more than a hundred feet further back — her own department were located. By all accounts, she did not know that Jim Conley, the company’s African-American sweeper, was sitting in the shadows on the first floor behind the staircase, near the elevator and the “scuttle hole” ladder that led to the basement. Strangely, even though it was his day off,  and even though the factory superintendent was around, Conley was there, partly hidden by darkness but not stealthily concealed, doing no work — drawing no pay — and apparently doing nothing but watching.

As Conley watched, a few moments later, at 12:05, one of the factory’s other working girls, 14-year-old Monteen Stover, arrived to collect her pay. She also walked up those same steps, also failed to notice Jim Conley, and also entered Leo Frank’s office. Mary had not left. But Monteen found no one there. Frank’s office was in two sections, an outer office and an inner office. Looking for him, Monteen saw that the outer office was empty, so she went into the inner office, and saw that it was empty too.

She looked down the hall toward the rows of factory machinery. There was nothing but motionless silence. So she decided to wait. She waited a full five minutes, according to the office clock. She saw and heard no one. Shortly after 12:10 she left by the same route she came, again encountering not a single person. (The exact timing of Mary Phagan’s visit was disputed later, with some Frank partisans insisting that Monteen arrived before Mary. Frank himself stated on April 28 of Mary that “She came in between 12:05 and 12:10, maybe 12:07, to get her pay envelope, her salary.” Clocks and watches in 1913 could easily be off by several minutes. Nevertheless, it appears clear that Monteen Stover failed to find Frank, or anyone, in his office at around the time that Mary was there. Frank told detectives that he never left his office from noon to 12:45.)

After one o’clock, Leo Frank left to go home for lunch. His wife and mother-in-law were waiting in their best finery, ready to go to Atlanta’s opulent opera house, where New York’s Metropolitan Opera was on tour, presenting a matinee performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. After eating, Frank returned to the factory while not far away the somber, intoxicating strains of Donizetti’s prelude wafted over the wealthy Atlantans in their temple of culture, and while the common folk readied themselves to salute the aging heroes in grey who were marching together, perhaps for the last time in their lives.

Almost no one knew it at the time, but by one o’clock one young life was already over. For her there would never again be parades, or music, or kisses, or flowers, or children, or love. Mary Phagan never left the National Pencil Company alive. Abused, beaten, and strangled by a rough cord pulled so tightly that it had embedded itself deeply in her girlish neck and made her tongue protrude more than an inch from her mouth, Mary Phagan lay dead, dumped in the dirt and shavings of the pencil company basement, her once-bright eyes now sightless and still as she lay before the gaping maw of the furnace where the factory trash was burned.

*  *  *

ON FRIDAY, the day before the murder, Leo Frank had told the factory’s African-American night watchman, Newt Lee, to come to work Saturday afternoon at four, as Frank wanted to leave around four so he could attend a baseball game with his brother-in-law Mr. Ursenbach. But upon arriving at four, Lee said that Frank appeared extremely nervous and insisted that Lee leave the factory and “have a good time” somewhere else and return at six. When Lee suggested he might instead just sleep for a couple of hours on the premises, Frank rejected the suggestion, repeating that Lee should depart for two hours.

Frank again seemed very nervous when Lee returned at six, and even visibly jumped back when he noticed that a former employee named Gantt had arrived about the same time as Lee. Frank was to claim that this was because Gantt was a large man and had in fact been fired by Frank not long before. Frank would also later state, however, that he believed that Gantt was close to Mary Phagan and so his visit might have been interpreted as being to inquire about her whereabouts.

Newt Lee made his rounds as usual that night, but he didn’t go all the way into the basement until around three in the morning. There he discovered the lifeless body of Mary Phagan. He tried and failed to reach Leo Frank by telephone. He then called the police.

Lee described the events of that afternoon and night to detectives, beginning with his first arrival at the factory:

The front door was not locked. I pushed it open, went on in and got to the double door there… The front door had always been unlocked on previous Saturday afternoons. After you go inside and come up about middle ways of the steps, there are some double doors there. It was locked on Saturday when I got there. Have never found it that way before. I took my key and unlocked it. When I went upstairs I had a sack of bananas and I stood to the left of that desk like I do every Saturday. I says like I always do “Alright Mr. Frank” and he come bustling out of his office. He had never done that before. He always called me when he wanted to tell me anything and said, “Step here a minute, Newt.” This time he came up rubbing his hands and says, “Newt, I am sorry that I had you come so soon, you could have been at home sleeping, I tell you what you do, you go out in town and have a good time.” He had never let me off before that. I could have laid down in the shipping room and gone to sleep, and I told him that. He says, “You needs to have a good time. You go downtown, stay an hour and a half, and come back your usual time at six o’clock.” I then went out the door and stayed [out] until about four minutes to six. When I came back the doors were unlocked just as I left them and I went and says, “Alright, Mr. Frank,” and he says, “What time is it?” and I says, “It lacks two minutes of six.” He says, “Don’t punch yet [a reference to the company’s time clock — Ed.], there is a few worked today and I want to change the slip.” It took him twice as long this time than it did the other times I saw him fix it. He fumbled putting it in, while I held the lever for him and I think he made some remark about he was not used to putting it in. When Mr. Frank put the tape in I punched and I went downstairs.

While I was down there Mr. Gantt came from across the street from the beer saloon and says, “Newt, I got a pair of old shoes that I want to get upstairs to have fixed.” I says, “I ain’t allowed to let anybody in here after six o’clock.” About that time Mr. Frank come bustling out of the door and run into Gantt unexpected and he jumped back frightened. Gantt says, “I got a pair of old shoes upstairs, have you any objection to my getting them?” Frank says, “I don’t think they are up there; I think I saw the boy sweep some up in the trash the other day.” Mr. Gantt asked him what sort they were and Mr. Frank says “tans.” Gantt says, “Well, I had a pair of black ones too.” Frank says, “Well, I don’t know,” and he dropped his head down just so. Then he raised his head and says, “Newt, go with him and stay with him and help him find them,” and I went up there with Mr. Gantt and found them in the shipping room, two pair, the tans and the black ones.

Not long after, Frank did something that, according to Lee, he had never done before:

Mr. Frank phoned me that night about an hour after he left, it was sometime after seven o’clock. He says, “How is everything?” and I says, “Everything is all right so far as I know,” and he says “Goodbye.”

…There is a light in the basement down there at the foot of the ladder. He told me to keep that burning all the time. It has two little chains to it to turn on and turn off the gas. When I got there on making my rounds at seven o’clock on the 26th of April, it was burning just as low as you could turn it, like a lightning bug. I left it Saturday morning burning bright. I made my rounds regularly every half hour Saturday night. I punched on the hour and punched on the half and I made all my punches. The elevator doors on the street floor and office floor were closed when I got there on Saturday. They were fastened down just like we fasten them down every other night. When three o’clock came I went down the basement and when I went down and got ready to come back I discovered the body there. I went down to the toilet and when I got through I looked at the dust bin back to the door to see how the door was and it being dark I picked up my lantern and went there and I saw something laying there which I thought some of the boys had put there to scare me, then I got out of there. I got up the ladder and called up the police station. It was after three o’clock… I tried to get Mr. Frank on the telephone and was still trying …I guess I was trying about eight minutes.

Eventually Newt Lee gave up on Frank and called the police. When the officers arrived and were directed down the ladder to the basement by Lee, they discovered the mysterious handwritten “death notes” in the sawdust near the body. These notes purported to be written by Mary Phagan herself, but were later proven not to be so. They seemed the work of someone barely literate, and the language used was similar to Southern African-American dialect. They read:

Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me doun that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it was long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me.

he said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.

When the notes were read out loud in the presence of Lee, he exclaimed “that’s me, boss” (or words to that effect; the exact phrase was disputed) when the words “night witch” were reached, Lee obviously assuming that “night watch” — as in “night watchman,” as we would say — was what was really meant. Added to the facts that Lee was a “long slim tall negro” and dark complected (“negro black”), the notes said such a person did the deed “by his self.” It did appear that the writer of the notes was trying to implicate Lee.

Detectives also found a bloody handkerchief ten feet away, one shoe, and some sheets of paper and pencils. Oddly, Mary’s hat and parasol had apparently been tossed in the bottom of the elevator shaft. Along with a quantity of miscellaneous trash, some human excrement was also found in the shaft, which was crushed and caused a stench when the detectives rode the car down later in the day. There were marks indicating Mary’s body had been dragged across the basement floor, and her bloody, bruised face was smeared with dirt and cinders. The dragging marks began at the elevator shaft.

Lee was an obvious suspect and was immediately arrested – but was later shown to be completely innocent – and suspicion of him grew when someone, likely someone associated with Frank, planted a fake bloody shirt at his home, and when Frank himself changed his statement and claimed that punches were missing from Lee’s time card.

* * *

Christianity, Anti-Semitism, and the American South: Background to the Leo Frank Case

GEORGIA, as a part of the South, is a place where, though freethinkers are certainly not unknown, the vast majority of the population is deeply committed to Christianity – largely Protestant, fundamentalist Christianity. One’s personal “walk with Jesus” is taken very seriously here, and the religion informs almost every aspect of private, family, and public life. The fundamentalist worldview is dominant, as it is throughout the South, which, along with a few border states, is not called the “Bible Belt” for nothing. This was doubly true in 1913.

One of the core beliefs of fundamentalism is literalism, a belief that every word of the scriptures was directly inspired by God and is literally true. The position of the average Georgian on the Bible is expressed in the saying, common in the South, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The history in the Bible is, therefore, accurate, including God’s special preference for the Jews as His people, an especially holy people. The prophetic visions of the Bible are, therefore, infallible, including the centrality of Israel and its people to God’s plan for heaven and earth. The law set down in scripture is, therefore, to be obeyed absolutely, including its commands to honor and bless God’s Chosen. The Old Testament –  the entirety of which is by, about, and for Jews – is not glossed over or minimized by fundamentalists, as it is by some Christian denominations. It is God’s word; it is absolute truth no less than the New Testament. And Jehovah, the Jewish God of the Old Testament, is to fundamentalists the one and only God.

Most important of all to fundamentalist Christians, Jesus was born a Jew, spoke in the synagogues, and was in fact the prophesied Jewish Messiah. The Jewish faith, the Jewish prophets, and the Jewish people themselves were the sources from which Christ came and without which Christ could never have existed.

It is the South that is the center of Christian Zionism. Many a sermon and many a ministry in the South have as their basis Genesis 12:3, in which God says of the Jews: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.”

In 1909, four years before Mary Phagan’s murder, the first edition of the Scofield Reference Bible was published by Cyrus Scofield. It was innovative in that explanations of, and details about, the Biblical texts were printed in a column alongside the actual verses. Scofield’s Bible was tremendously popular and influential in fundamentalist circles and remains so to this day. Scofield wrote in his note to Genesis 12:3:

It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.

In subsequent editions Scofield’s followers expanded the note, adding “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Harry Golden reported in the American Jewish Committee’s magazine Commentary that, shortly after the establishment of the Jewish state, “Bonds for Israel” salesmen in the South would purposely seek out Christians, since they were almost all enthusiastically pro-Zionist. If asked about their reasons for supporting Zionism, a typical fundamentalist Christian response was “It’s in the book!” – meaning, of course, the Bible. Such was the dominant Southern Christian position, and this attitude toward Jews cannot have materialized suddenly in 1948, nor even in the one generation or so from Leo Frank’s trial to that date. If anything, Christian-Jewish relations were better at the inception of the Frank case than afterward, as the case left scars that are yet to be fully healed.

Those who posit a pervasive anti-Semitism in Georgia a century ago can point to a few obscure pamphlets and some of Tom Watson’s populist diatribes (though Watson himself disclaimed anti-Semitism and a few years later attacked Henry Ford for his racial condemnation of Jews). But it seems quite unlikely that any major Southern publication could match the New York Tribune editorial of 1882, which stated of Jews, “There must be some other cause than their religion which makes these people dreaded as permanent inhabitants by every country to which they come.” One is entitled to doubt that any distinguished Southern journal would have dared to reprint the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette editorial of 1879 which remarked about Jews that “It is strange that a nation which boasts so many good traits should be so obnoxious.” Additionally, as far as is known, Atlanta never had the “honor” of having a branch of the “American Anti-Semitic Association” within its borders, as Brooklyn, New York did in 1896.

In the 1890s, it was not in Marietta, Georgia, but in Saratoga Springs, New York where hoteliers famously posted signs reading “No Jews or Dogs Admitted Here.” In that crucible of Southern identity, the Civil War, Southerners made a Jew their Secretary of the Treasury in the person of Judah P. Benjamin, while the North in the person of Ulysses S. Grant physically expelled all Jews from all areas under his control, which included large parts of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, cruelly demanding in a time of war and in an age of slow transportation that they be gone from this huge territory “within 24 hours.”

After the prolonged political battle of many New York Jews against Tammany Hall in New York City, in 1901 the city’s corrupt police force retaliated by attacking a Jewish funeral procession, billy clubs flailing. Nothing even remotely similar has been reported about the Atlanta of that era; in fact, knowing what we know about Southern-Jewish relations, it seems utterly inconceivable.

John Higham, in his “Social Discrmination Against Jews 1830 — 1930,” a work commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, called the South “historically the section least inclined to ostracize Jews,” and drew attention to the “striking Southern situation” of almost no discrimination against Jews there. True, Jewish-Gentile relations had somewhat declined there by the mid-twentieth century, and the massive campaign during the Frank appeals to paint his prosecution, and the South generally, as anti-Semitic – and the eventual creation of the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of Frank’s death – played their part in this change. The revived 20th-century Ku Klux Klan, inspired in part by the otherwise invisible and perhaps even nonexistent group that took responsibility for Leo Frank’s lynching, the Knights of Mary Phagan, was quite different from the original Klan: It took an overt and aggressive anti-Jewish position.

But the aftermath of the Frank trial had no part, of course, in the attitudes of the people of Atlanta on the day Mary Phagan was murdered. All things considered, the South in general and Atlanta in particular seem to have been, if anything, safe havens for Jews where they might escape from the anti-Semitism that was rampant around the beginning of the last century.

*  *  *

ATLANTA was not without real prejudices, though. The transformation of the South from an agrarian economy into an industrial one, with all its attendant evils, such as child labor, was the cause of passionate outcries for reform. The businessman, especially the industrialist, was not always looked upon with favor.

With industrialization came Northerners — often rich Northerners — who were commonly perceived as lording it over poor Southerners from illustrious family lines who, it was widely thought, ought to have been their social superiors. And the scars of the Civil War still ran deep. The war, and the sometimes brutal “Reconstruction,” was still within the living memory of the older generation. Many Atlantans of 1913 had personally experienced the killing of loved ones, defeat, exploitation, rape, poverty, hunger, dispossession, disenfranchisement, military dictatorship, and worse. The city itself had even been deliberately set afire by Union forces during the war. Though young Georgians had not experienced such horrors, they all had parents or other loved ones who had.

Southerners in 1861 had enough sense of peoplehood to separate themselves from the Union. The humiliating defeat of 1865 and the decade-long federal occupation had made that sense of peoplehood — of being a people apart, an oppressed nation within a nation — even stronger. And it bred a sense of distrust of authority, of resistance to established power, of direct vengeance on wrongdoers when the System failed to act, that suffused the very air of the South, from the sleepiest hamlet to the vibrant, burgeoning, modern, and industrial Atlanta that was rapidly arising from the ashes.

The African-Americans of the South were yet another nation within a nation. Freed by Lincoln’s decree during the war, and briefly ascendent during Reconstruction when almost the entire Southern white population was disenfranchised, black people were quickly relegated to second class citizenship when self-government was restored to the former Confederacy. Almost all of them poorly educated and in poverty, and viewed as impulsive and potentially violent, they were the first to be suspected  — and, almost universally unable to employ competent counsel — the most likely to be convicted of violent crimes. Even worse for them, if it was popularly perceived among the white community that an African-American was using a lawyer or the “letter of the law” to avoid responsibility for a crime, or if authorities were simply too insistent that a black man or woman had legal rights that ought to be respected when “everybody knew” he or she was guilty, an abduction and an extra-legal hanging — a lynching — was often the result.

“Lynch law,” as it came to be called, often targeted African-Americans, though some “no account” Southern whites were its victims too. The lynching of a Jew, though — and lynching would ultimately be Leo Frank’s fate — was, as far as I have been able to determine, unheard of.

The “color line” in the South (and, in fact, in some parts of the North as well) forbade sexual contact or marriage between the races, and the rule ran far deeper than a mere written law. The violation of a white girl or woman by a black man was viewed as especially heinous and the man even suspected of such an act, to say nothing of one convicted of such an act, especially if the woman was harmed or killed, was probably not long for this earth.

In the race-conscious South of 1913, Jews were considered white. In fact, in the newspapers of Atlanta before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, Frank was referred to as a “white man” on innumerable occasions by reporters, witnesses, African-Americans, fellow Jews, pro-Frank partisans, and anti-Frank polemicists. Jews, furthermore, were not known for violent acts or crimes, nor feared as violators of white women. If anything, they were seen as an unusually industrious, intelligent, and law-abiding segment of society, even if they were a bit peculiar in their religious views. Marriage between Jews and Christians might have raised a few eyebrows in both communities — just as did intermarriage between members of widely different Christian denominations — but it was far from unknown, and such couples were not ostracized. In fact, Leo Frank’s own brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, with whom he canceled an appointment to see a baseball game on the day Mary Phagan was killed, was a Christian.

If there was prejudice against Leo Frank in 1913 Atlanta, it was almost certainly not because he was a Jew. He was, however, a capitalist, a business owner, a manager, an employer of child labor, and a Northerner with an Ivy League education. He also came to be known during the course of the trial as sexually profligate. These facts probably did count against him.

* * *

Source: Author

Content retrieved from: https://leofrank.info/three-deaths-by-strangling-mary-phagan-leo-frank-and-truth/.

WE ARE proud to present today, on the 107th anniversary of the foul murder of Mary Phagan, the third and concluding part of our audio version of an extremely rare contemporary book on the murder and the trial of Leo Frank, her killer, entitled The Frank Case — read by Vanessa Neubauer.

It becomes obvious in this concluding segment that this is a pro-Leo Frank book. Not only is Frank’s very odd unsworn statement (in which he literally spent hours going over every irrelevant detail of his company’s financial statement, and which obviously did not make a good impression on the jury) praised to the skies, but long extracts from it are quoted — some of them twice!

Nevertheless, despite its partisan bias, this is a valuable book. It is valuable for what it does not contain. Despite being rather pro-Frank, and being written in 1913, literally weeks after the events it describes took place, it does not allege, as modern pro-Frank propaganda-pieces do, that “anti-Semitic mobs” shouted threats including “hang the Jew or we’ll hang you” at the judge and jury. It does include the acknowledged episode of Frank’s attorneys asking for a mistrial after prosecutor Dorsey received some mere applause from the courtroom audience during the trial — but not a single mention of the much worse “hang the Jew” threat allegation, nor of any defense references to it or to anything similar. It’s safe to conclude, I think, that such threats simply never took place and are a later invention — for surely the defense, if not the judge, would have taken notice of them.

There is also no mention of “bite marks” on Mary Phagan’s body, another decades-later hoax conjured up by pro-Frank partisans. Such a sensational development could hardly have been ignored by the defense, prosecution, or a lurid-headline-loving press.

We at the Mercury are offering this audio book in three parts in April of the year 2020, in commemoration of the life of young Mary Phagan, who died at the hands of Leo Frank on 26 April, 1913 — 107 years ago this month.

To hear part 3, the concluding part, of The Frank Case, simply press the play button on your screen.

Click here to see all the installments of this audio book published (the total is three installments).

THE AMERICAN MERCURY now presents the second part (of three parts) of our audio version of what is probably the most hard-to-find book on the murder of Mary Phagan and the trial of Leo Frank — 1913’s anonymously published The Frank Case — read by Vanessa Neubauer.

The Frank Case: Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery now continues as we get into the detailed story of the trial itself.

One very interesting thing strikes me about this section of the book. Even though the book, I find, is moderately pro-Frank, what it reveals about the atmosphere surrounding the trial tends to strongly disprove the modern “Frank was railroaded by anti-Semitic Southern Whites” theory.

1. The book states that, after Mrs. Frank attacked the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, in an open letter during the proceedings, the phrase “Dorsey is prejudiced [against Jews]” could be heard “on the lips of men all over the city.” That doesn’t fit with the idea that Atlantans were strongly anti-Semitic. And they weren’t: Numerous Jews have said that the South then, as now, was the most pro-Jewish area in the country.
2. The book goes on to say that “many on the street sympathized with Mrs. Frank’s letter denouncing Dorsey,” which reinforces the previous point.
3. Even though the crowds surrounding and eager to get into the courtroom are described in the book — and remember, The Frank Case was published in the city where the trial took place, just weeks after it ended — nowhere are the supposed “anti-Jewish mobs” surrounding the courthouse, screaming “hang the Jew or we’ll hang you” mentioned. They were not mentioned because they did not exist. The “screaming mobs” are the product of the well-oiled and heavily-funded pro-Frank propaganda machine. That propaganda machine was begun in 1913 by cynical advertising mogul Albert Lasker (who was paid hundreds of thousands for supporting Frank even though in private he suspected Frank was a sexual pervert) and continues today under the aegis of the “mainstream” media and pressure groups like the ADL. (The ADL was founded by the B’nai B’rith, of which Leo Frank was an official at the time of his crime and conviction.)

We at the Mercury are offering this audio book in three parts in April of the year 2020, in commemoration of the life of young Mary Phagan, who died at the hands of Leo Frank on 26 April, 1913 — 107 years ago this month.

To hear part 2 of The Frank Case, simply press the play button on your screen.

Click here to see all the installments of this audio book published thus far (the total will be three installments).

by Ron Unz

ALTHOUGH my own academic background is in theoretical physics, I’m the first to admit that field seems in the doldrums these days compared with human evolutionary biology.

The greatest physics discoveries of the last couple of years–the Higgs Boson and strong evidence for Cosmological Inflation–merely confirm the well-established beliefs that physicists have had since before I entered grad school. It’s nice that such experimental evidence means that individuals such as Peter Higgs, Alan Guth, and Andrei Linde, whose names have been prominent in the standard textbooks for decades, have received or will surely soon receive their long-deserved Nobel Prizes, but little new has been learned. Or so is the impression of a lapsed theoretician who left that field over twenty-five years ago and who mostly follows it through the pages of the major newspapers.

Meanwhile, human evolutionary biology has been on a tear, partly due to the full deciphering of the human genome over the last couple of decades and our increasing technical ability to effectively read archaic DNA from thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the past. In recent years we have seen shocking discoveries that most humans possess small but probably significant Neanderthal ancestry and that important genetic changes have regularly swept through our genome. On the theoretical side, it was long assumed that human genes had changed little since Cave Man days, but we now understand that in some respects human evolution may have actually accelerated during the last ten thousand years as our rapidly growing population provided a much larger source of potentially favorable mutations, while agriculture and civilization were simultaneously applying strong selective pressures.

Although my other projects have prevented me from following these developments except through newspapers, blogs, and books, such evolutionary issues have long fascinated me. During the early 1980s I even participated in the field, studying under Harvard’s E.O. Wilson and felt that if physics had not been an option, evolutionary biology would have been my next choice. I remember telling all my skeptical friends in 1979 that Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was probably one of the most important books of the decade, and I stand by that opinion today.

Yet although our understanding of the origins of modern humans and their biologically-influenced behavior has grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades, these world-changing developments seem to have received extremely scanty coverage in the mainstream press, meaning that many of them have probably not penetrated into the public consciousness of those who are not academic specialists. The assumptions and world-views of most American intellectuals and journalists often seem stuck in the 1980s, clinging to ideas that are almost completely outmoded and incorrect, much like Soviet biology into the 1960s was still crippled by the Stalinist legacy of Trofim K. Lysenko, who had argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics and purged all those biologists who disagreed.

America’s own Lysenko is surely the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose platform in the prestige media and widely assigned books have massively influenced entire generations of college students and thinkers. Unfortunately, just like his Soviet counterpart, Gould promoted ideologically motivated misrepresentations of reality, sometimes backed by outright scientific fraud, and people who read his books are regularly absorbing falsehoods.

In a further parallel to the Soviet case, Gould and his Marxist circle of friends and allies, including Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and several others, regularly sought to purge or otherwise silence their most honest and courageous colleagues. During the 1970s, Harvard’s Wilson became their particular target for daring to publish his landmark book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and their wild ideological charges led radical student demonstrators to demand the university fire one of its brightest tenured stars and even to physically assault the mild-mannered Wilson at a meeting of the American Academy of Sciences. Although Gould seems to have been a rather mediocre scientist, some of his radical allies such as Lewontin were first-class researchers, but also ideologues who allowed their politics to dictate their science.

While I was a graduate student at Cambridge University during the mid-1980s, these events occasionally came up in casual discussions across the dining tables. On one such occasion, a former grad student of Lewontin’s said that during the height of the sociobiology controversy he had asked his mentor why he was leveling such ridiculous accusations against a colleague, with the reply being that those accusations were admittedly scientific nonsense, but they served the political interests of Marxism, which was far more important. Meanwhile, given Gould’s strength in words but his weakness in thinking, I find it reasonably likely that he simply believed many of the absurdities he was spouting.

As the years and the decades have gone by, I’ve always assumed that Gouldism was about to lose its grip on American intellectual life, but that assumption has always proven wrong. The totally absurd notion that genetics plays a relatively small role in influencing most human behaviors represents a zombified doctrines, absorbing endless seemingly fatal scientific wounds at the hands of prominent scholars but remaining almost unkillable, more like a religious dogma than a scientific doctrine.

For example, in 2002 Harvard’s Steven Pinker, one of America’s most prominent evolutionary psychologists, published The Blank Slate, an outstanding critique of this incorrect reigning dogma, which specifically included a lengthy debunking of Gould, Lewontin, and their circle. Not only was the book a huge seller and glowingly discussed throughout the MSM, but I was stunned to read an equally favorable review in The Nation, pole-star of America’s political Left. I naturally assumed that the full collapse of Gouldism was underway, an impression enhanced once the august New York Times later published an article describing an important instance of Gould’s scientific fraud.

But a year or two ago, when I heard smart intellectuals still citing Gould, I asked a prominent academic how that would possibly be the case. He explained that whereas in the 1990s, probably 99% of intellectuals believed in Gould, the massive revelations of recent years had merely reduced that support to 95%, leaving Gouldism almost as entrenched as ever. Whereas worldwide support for Stalinism substantially collapsed following Khrushchev’s 1956 “Secret Speech” Gouldian nonsense seems to have largely avoided that fate.

But perhaps that is now about to change.

One of the oddities of American intellectual life is that although a full-fledged scientific revolution in human genetics and evolution has been taking place for the last couple of decades, very little of this has been reported in the mainstream media, perhaps because the findings so totally contradict the numerous falsehoods that so many senior editors presumably imbibed during the introductory anthropology courses they took to satisfy their science distributional requirement as undergraduates.

Indeed, when I consider the major news stories on evolutionary breakthroughs I have read in our MSM over the last dozen years, the overwhelming majority seem to have been written by a single individual, Nicholas Wade of The New York Times, who recently retired after twenty years as a editor and reporter at our national newspaper of record, following previous decades of work at top scientific publications such as Nature and Science.

When I asked around a little, my impression was confirmed. Our nation of over 300 million may be in the forefront of evolutionary discovery, but Wade has long been almost the only reporter seriously covering these fascinating developments in the mainstream print media. Meanwhile, the weekly New York Times Science Sectionseems to be moving in the direction of People Magazine, with so much of the coverage seemingly focused on phone apps, dieting, and phone apps to assist with dieting. For example, fully half of the Letters page in this morning’s print edition was devoted to a heated debate on the “Science of Overeating.”

But while his former colleagues often focus on the transient and the trivial, Wade has spent the last couple of years producing an outstanding book to bring awareness of the revolutionary discoveries of modern genetic research to a broader American audience. Generations of Soviets had been taught the inheritance of acquired characteristics in their universities, and I assume they must have been shocked to discover it was all an ideologically motivated hoax. I suspect that many complacent American intellectuals may have a similar reaction to Wade’s book, which focuses on the highly touchy subject of the genetic nature of our distinct human races and the implications for society and history, bearing the descriptive title A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I’d certainly rank Wade’s book as the most important popular presentation of these ideas at least since Pinker’s Blank Slate. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I was also very pleased to see him substantially cite my own major articles from the last couple of years on race, IQ, and wealth and the Social Darwinist roots of modern China.

All too many socially-conditioned Americans have absorbed the Lewontin-Gould mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” which from a scientific perspective is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel. It is perfectly correct that the notion of “hill” is ill-defined and vague–what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?–but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races–genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness–is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle, and one which was probably accepted without question by everyone in the history of the world except for deluded Americans of the last fifty years.

Anyway, let us suppose that the Gouldians rising up to denounce the heretic, such as anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, are given their way and the common term “race” is purged from our scientific vocabulary as being meaningless. Well, large-scale genetic population clusters obviously continue to exist in the real world and are an important element in ongoing research, both medical and evolutionary. So it would make sense to conveniently replace an overly cumbersome multisyllabic phrase with a short single-syllabic word now suddenly gone unused, namely “race.”

Indeed, I would suggest that one of the sources of present-day confusion is that the very term “race” has undergone an unfortunate metamorphosis over the course of the 20th century. Today, when people speak of “races” they are almost invariably referring to the continental-scale mega-races such as Asians, Africans, and Europeans. These “races” certainly exist and are highly meaningful and distinct in genetic terms, with blogger Steve Sailer slyly noting that the cover of Prof. Luca Cavalli-Sforza definitive tome on human genetic diversity displays a colored worldwide map looking much like what Sen. Strom Thurmond in his dotage might have drawn on a napkin with crayons.

But I would argue that restricting the term race to merely that small handful of huge groupings is extremely wasteful and we are far better off also applying the term to its traditional meaning, typically aimed at much smaller population groups. One hundred years ago, every educated individual casually used phrases such as “the Anglo-Saxon race,” “the Hungarian race,” and “the Chinese race,” and this is exactly the usage to which we should restore. To be sure, these particular genetic population clusters are naturally grouped into higher-level clusters as well–with Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles all being branches of the larger Slav race, itself a component of the European mega-race, but the word can remain flexible in scale without producing any serious confusion. All these groups are exactly the sort of natural statistical clusters that regularly appear during genetic population analysis, and we might as well use the traditional popular term for them rather than inventing an entirely new one.

As for the full contents of Wade’s book, several reviews have already noted a few small glitches here and there and I myself certainly took issue with some of his arguments. For example, I think he is much too accepting of Gregory Clark’s influential 2007 book arguing that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain because the British had undergone nearly a thousand years of uniquely strong selection for economic success, a thesis I find extremely doubtful. I also think Wade should have given far more attention to the seminal Cochran-Harpending theory that the rapid growth of human population after the development of agriculture has produced an equally rapid acceleration in mutation-driven evolution during the last ten thousand years, and Wade’s omission surely explains why the notoriously arrogant and irascible Gregory Cochran published such an unfriendly review on his own blogsite. Certainly everyone should explore all sides of the ongoing debate and a small racialist website has conveniently gathered together annotated links to the dozens of reviews across the web, favorable, unfavorable, and mixed. But reading the book itself is essential for anyone interested in the current state of human evolutionary science.

I’d originally intended to publish my own perspective several weeks ago and was delayed by other pressing matters. But I have been very pleased to see that Wade’s book is beginning to receive the major attention it so greatly deserves. American intellectuals must begin shedding a half-century of lies and dishonesty based on the dismally unscientific dogma of Stephen Jay Gould and instead start to discover what modern evolutionary biologists and genetic researchers have all known for years or even decades. A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times may represent a huge step forward in achieving this important goal.

* * *

Source: The Unz Review

THE AMERICAN MERCURY is proud to present the first part of our audio version of a rare, almost-suppressed book on the murder of Mary Phagan and the trial of Leo Frank, 1913’s The Frank Case — published almost immediately after the events it details took place, when they were fresh in the minds of Atlantans. Only one original copy is known to survive, though there are rumors of others. This book is also unique as it is the earliest known book published about the case.

Its full title is The Frank Case: Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery. It was published anonymously. It highlights the events leading up to the trial and aftermath surrounding the April 26th, 1913, murder of Mary Phagan by her sweatshop boss, the superintendent of the National Pencil Company, Leo M. Frank. The book strives to maintain neutrality and includes a dramatically-rendered history of this sensational crime.

Published by The Atlanta Publishing Company, Atlanta, Georgia, in September 1913, the one known surviving copy is very fragile, printed on acidic paper, and in rapidly-deteriorating condition. This rare and possibly unique volume was scanned by Georgia State University and made available to the general public. We are now proud to present The Frank Case as an audio book.

The book’s Preface reads:

The sensational case of Leo M. Frank is undisputedly Atlanta’s and the south’s greatest murder mystery of modern years.

The story of how little Mary Phagan was foully murdered as she went to get her pay at the National Pencil factory, revolting and horrible as it is in its details, naturally interests every working man and every working woman.

The mystery of the crime compels the interest of everyone who hears about it.

“The Mary Phagan murder mystery,” however, lost its identity when Leo M. Frank, superintendent of the big factory where the humble little employe met her death, was arrested and it became the Frank case.

In no other murder case in the south has there been such intense interest. It has become more than the ordinary murder mystery; more than the story of a man of position charged with slaying in lustful passion a little factory girl. The reason of the unusual importance of the case is, it is charged, that Frank is being persecuted because he is a Jew.

The story of the fearful crime; of the principal developments of the four months that followed it, and finally the story of the great, trial, where for a solid month the two greatest criminal lawyers in the south battled against the keen wits of Atlanta’s solicitor general to save Frank, has been told by press reports.

Many of the interesting features about the Frank case, however, have never been printed, because the newspapers dared not embody them in their accounts.

This work ends with the conviction of Frank in the superior court of Fulton (Atlanta) county. Trial did not end the case, for immediately after the young defendant was sentenced to pay the death penalty, a motion for a new trial was made, and it will be months, probably years, before he hangs, if he ever does. From the day of his conviction, however, the fight for Frank’s life became a technical legal battle. The real story ends with the trial and every essential feature is given here.

THE AUTHOR.

We are offering this audio book in three parts in April of the year 2020, recorded by Vanessa Neubauer, in commemoration of the life of young Mary Phagan, who died at the hands of Leo Frank on 26 April, 1913 — 107 years ago this month.

To hear part 1 of The Frank Case, simply press the play button on your screen.

Click here to see all the installments of this audio book published thus far (the total will be three installments).