William J. Burns and the Great Leo Frank Case Carnival

Introduction

IN 1914, six days short of the first anniversary of the strangulation-murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish businessman and B’nai B’rith official Leo M. Frank on Confederate Memorial Day, 1913, the Frank case entered its most frenetic public phase. A major legal decision was slated to be dropped in a few days. By then, Frank had already been convicted of the gruesome murder of Mary. But Frank’s defense team, flush with money from a national publicity campaign, was furiously working to get witnesses to reverse their testimony, and get Frank a new trial or exonerated one way or another — an exoneration effort that still continues today, led by Jewish groups including the ADL (Anti-Defamation League).

Famed — some would say notorious — private detective William J. Burns (hired months earlier by the Frank defense and paid out of a nationally-raised fund organized by wealthy Jewish businessmen Albert Lasker of Chicago and Adolph Ochs and Louis Marshall of New York) returned to Atlanta, where Mary’s murder had taken place, by train from a secretive trip to the “Big Apple” and announced he was ready at last to deliver his long-promised report on the case, a document he had been teasing in the national press since early April.

Across town at Atlanta Police Headquarters, State’s witness Albert McKnight sat in a self-requested jail cell, having walked in on April 15, 1914 and asked Chief of Police James L. Beavers for protection after un-repudiating his original affidavit in the case. He had repudiated it in a second affidavit he had given to Frank’s defense operative Captain C.W. Burke, an affidavit Burke had paid for, McKnight now admitted, with the promise of a $100-a-month Pullman job.

Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey spent the day assembling counter-affidavits from witnesses.

Frank’s high-priced attorneys, Luther Z. Rosser and Reuben R. Arnold, whose extraordinary motion for a new trial had been filed four days earlier on April 16 and had already won Frank a stay of his April 17 execution, worked on adding late-arriving affidavits as amendments to the motion and roughed out their oral argument.

Tye, Peeples, and Jordan (also working for Frank and doubtlessly paid out of the massive war chest from the national publicity campaign), whose parallel constitutional motion had been filed the same day arguing the verdict should be set aside because Frank had not been in the courtroom when the jury rendered it, assembled their supporting affidavits on the absence issue.

The clock was running on Judge Benjamin H. Hill, who would convene the hearing on both motions two days later, on Wednesday, April 22, 1914 — and would deny them both.

* * * * *

“THE TRUTH IS ON THE MARCH”
William J. Burns and the Great Leo Frank Case Carnival

by Carl Carnie

ADVERTISING MAGNATE Albert Lasker, who led a cynical personal crusade on behalf of Leo Frank in coordination with Jewish elites from New York and Chicago, did not coin the once-famous phrase he used. Émile Zola wrote, “La vérité est en marche, et rien ne l’arrêtera” (“The truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it”), in the closing paragraph of J’Accuse…! on January 13, 1898, sixteen years before the Jewish-American ad man appropriated it. What Lasker did was pinch the well-known line Zola originated during the Dreyfus Affair, polish it, and weld it to the Leo Frank defense campaign as a branded American slogan.

That act of importation made ‘The Truth Is on the March’ a thing of strange, exotic, and dangerous beauty in the United States. The mobilizing tagline was drawn from a highly disputed French military treason scandal that had afterward been politically engineered and media-manufactured into a “miscarriage of justice” in the minds of the public during the late nineteenth century. Lasker then freshly rebadged it for use in the Frank case. He pressed it into service on behalf of a convicted sex killer with zero connection to the Dreyfus case — except for the fact that both of the accused were Jews. More than a century later, some of Leo Frank’s posthumous advocates still insist on calling the Mary Phagan case “the American Dreyfus Affair,” which is exactly the misreading that Lasker’s motto was designed to produce.

“The Truth Is on the March.” Six plain words repurposed by an advertising executive who helped sell cigarettes, Palmolive soap, and Sunkist oranges for a living, applying the same art of persuasion he had perfected at the Lord and Thomas agency while helping addict a nation to nicotine and laying the commercial groundwork for a cancer epidemic. Lasker turned the catchphrase into one of the most effective pieces of ad copy ever written. It had everything a catchphrase needs: gravity, momentum, moral certainty, and the implied drumbeat of Union soldiers trampling south to right a wrong. It would do enormous work for the Frank campaign, raising millions of dollars and changing the minds of millions who knew the case only through the lens of Lasker and his confederates in the press. The effects lasted more than a lifetime. They still reverberate today.

But in April 1914 what was actually marching into Atlanta was not Truth, but a cadre of clowns.

The William J. Burns Detective agency made a show of their arrival, press agents in tow. It was like a circus caravan in slow motion, a snake of painted wagons rolling up Peachtree Street with a brass band in the lead and a line of carnies trudging behind, all gilt and bunting and fresh shellac.

Then the ringmaster stepped off a creaky train in Atlanta’s Terminal Station, with nothing in his hands but smoke. Then the showman barked, “Step right up, goys and goyls! Have I got a story for you!”

What the Lasker operation needed, and what Lasker bought when he brought in the high-priced self-promoting Burns, was a carnival barker. Not necessarily a detective. A showman. A mountebank. A man who could stand in front of the lofty tent with his thumbs hooked in a red vest and bellow, “Roll up, roll up, see the great vindication of Leo Max Frank, the innocent man framed by an ignorant mob of Southern Jew-haters, the truth revealed for the first time here in this tent, just one thin dime.”

William J. Burns played that role with real skill. He was an infamous egotist that would put Donald Trump to shame. He had the nickname the press had given him — “America’s Sherlock Holmes” — stitched into the lining of his elegant and expensive coats. He had a national reputation he could sell to deep pockets.

What he did not have was evidence.

Investigative journalist Tom Watson saw him for exactly what he was and pinned the label down in January 1915, calling Burns “that calliope detective” and “the fussy charlatan who hunts for evidence with a brass band and a searchlight.”

The vaporware at the center of the big tent

Burns did not bring evidence to Atlanta. He brought ballyhoo. By the time he arrived on the morning of April 20, 1914, his unseen “report” on the Frank case had been floating through the American press for roughly three months, morphing from whisper to tease to forthcoming-any-day-now to nearly-ready to almost-here, never once solidifying into something a judge could read, a prosecutor could cross-examine, or a clerk could file. It was the phantom deliverable. The card dealer’s sleight-of-hand. The rabbit that stayed stubbornly in the hat no matter how many times the ringmaster reached in with a flourish.

Watch the timeline, because it was genuinely a dark comedy, one that played hideous games with the feelings of Mary Phagan’s kinfolk and with the blue-collar Georgians who, like little Mary, were struggling to make ends meet during fifty-five-hour workweeks running from Saturday to Saturday. The multimillionaire Burns and the multimillionaire Lasker were from another world entirely.

On April 6, 1914, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Burns Completes His Frank Report.”

On April 20, 1914, the Atlanta Journal announced Burns had returned from his mysterious rail junket and was “ready to make his report whenever the attorneys for the defense want it.”

On April 22, Judge Ben Hill denied Frank’s “extraordinary motion” anyway.

On April 24, two days after Hill’s ruling, the same New York Times that had declared the report “complete” three weeks earlier ran the piece “Hold Back Report of Burns on Frank.”

Completed on the sixth. Ready on the twentieth. Held back on the twenty-fourth. The report did everything a real document does — except appear in a courtroom, except get tested by cross-examination, except appear at all.

It was Schrodinger’s evidence: alive in the headlines, dead on delivery, and the box never got opened.

Burns was running vaporware a century before Silicon Valley. What he was selling wasn’t a detective’s conclusion. No. He was selling the perpetual anticipation of a detective’s conclusion. Every week of “almost ready” was a week the donor checks kept clearing. The actual product — the signed, evidence-annexed, witness-listed document that could be placed in a judge’s hands and defended under oath — would have been a disaster for the Burns Agency, because once delivered, it could be examined. Once examined, it would stop selling tickets and running up bar tabs. So the strategy was simple. Never finish it. Never even start it. Announce it forever. Hold it back. Promise it tomorrow. Issue fragments. Leak “conclusions.” Tease the reveal. Let the caravan roll on. And get the hell out of town before the bullets start.

The clown car was carrying Chicago money

The men writing the checks were not fools, but either they were being played by Burns — or Burns was giving them exactly what they wanted, an impression of Leo Frank’s innocence. Possibly it was a bit of both. Lasker was in Chicago running Lord and Thomas. Marshall was in New York running the American Jewish Committee. Schiff was on Wall Street. Ochs was at the New York Times. None of them was going to show up at the Fulton County courthouse and ask Burns for a page count. They were going to read the New York papers at breakfast, see the Burns byline, and feel reassured that their money was producing results. And that was the whole point. The circus was not pitched at Georgia. The circus was pitched at a half-dozen breakfast nooks on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and the Chicago Gold Coast. It was also aimed at people too busy making a living to investigate for themselves, just as the preposterous ADL version of this case is today.

The Chicago money and the New York money kept flowing like a river of gold because Burns kept the smoke machine running, and as long as the smoke kept rolling out under the tent flaps, the customers outside believed there had to be elephants and magicians inside.

The January 30, 1915, Atlanta Constitution eventually put numbers on the flow: “Large Sums Paid to Burns Agency, Haas Tells Court.” The receipts came out only after the circus had left town.

“The Truth Is on the March.” he said. Stirring words. Napoleonic verbs. What was really coming to town was a clown car.

The three-ring racket

Watch the choreography from the grandstand. The headlines are in the papers week after week: Burns is in Europe. Burns cables back. Burns dispatches an operative. The operative arrives. Burns leaves. Burns is returning. Burns has returned. Burns is in conference with the solicitor. Burns is not in conference. Burns goes to New York. Burns sends word from Newark. Burns is back from Nashville. Burns is in Atlanta. Burns is in Marietta. Burns is being chased out of Marietta by a mob. Burns has been rescued. Burns has lost his Atlanta license. Burns has left town. Every one of those movements generated a news cycle. Every news cycle was a fresh poster tacked to a fresh lamppost. Every news cycle was a sensation of gossip and rumor.

Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian covered the tour with the acid pen Watson had been sharpening his whole life. Watson wrote 30,000 pages during his lifetime that survived to the 21st century. Pencil in hand, he called his writing “sawing wood.” Historians describe his writing as having its own life force of venom, wit, and electricity.

His headline-writing skills impress too:

April 23, 1914: “How Much Longer Will the People of Atlanta Endure the Lawless Doings of William J. Burns? What Right Has This Sham Detective to Tamper With the Witnesses That Told the Truth?”

April 30, 1914: “The Frank Case; the Great Detective; and the Frantic Efforts of Big Money to Protect Crime.”

May 7, 1914: “William Jackass Burns, at Another Angle: Some Tarnished Lawyers; Some Bought Newspapers; and the Murder of a Little Georgia Girl.”

Watson was not subtle, but on the Burns question specifically he was not wrong either. He saw a paid performer mistaking himself for a fortune-teller, and he named him for it, week after week.

The rage that cut both ways

The carnival did not just infuriate Frank’s detractors — though it certainly did that, all the way to a Marietta sidewalk in May 1914 where a mob had Burns by the collar before Dan Lehon could drag him out of town.

Even Frank’s own supporters on the ground in Atlanta began to get impatient with Burns. Every leaked teaser that failed to produce anything substantial was a withdrawal from Frank’s shrinking reserves of public benefit-of-the-doubt. Every day Burns spent working a press gag in New York, Chicago, or Atlanta was a day the clock ran down on Frank’s stay of execution.

The men writing the checks in Chicago and New York could afford an infinite theater run. Frank could not. He was in a cell in The Tower watching a calendar with a deadline on it, listening to a ringmaster in a distant city promise a cavalry that never came.

The poisoned booth

Now came the reward. Burns offered a thousand dollars — and the journalist and Frank sycophant Connolly in 1915 would claim the figure eventually climbed to five thousand — for any person anywhere in the country who could produce evidence of a single immoral act across the entirety of Leo Frank’s thirty years of life. On its face, it looks like a challenge thrown to the prosecution. Look closer and it is something much more clever than that.

Any witness who walks up to the booth, raises a hand, and offers real information damaging to Frank’s character is now, by definition, a bounty-chaser. The second they claim the money, defense counsel stands up at the next hearing and says, with total accuracy, “Your Honor, this witness has a direct financial interest in the testimony he is about to give. He is a paid claimant. His credibility should be weighed accordingly.”

The reward stamps every witness it attracts with a mark in ink that reads “impeachable” the moment he opens his mouth, anywhere. And the more astute kind of witness would see that, and therefore never come forward.

So you can see how the reward does “reverse work” too — and this is where the con really shines. The longer no claimant comes forward, the louder Burns can proclaim that no compromising material on Frank’s character exists anywhere on Earth. Look at the silence, he says. I offered a thousand dollars and nobody took it.

The silence is not exculpatory. Silence in the face of a tainted bounty proves only that nobody wanted to climb into the poison ivy.

It may mean no relevant evidence exists. It may equally mean that anyone with relevant evidence saw the bear trap and stayed out of it. It may mean that the witnesses with the most relevant material — the young women who had already testified in 1913 about Frank’s conduct around teenage girls at the National Pencil Company — had already paid the reputational price of testifying once, under oath, and were not about to volunteer to be called Burns’ bounty-chasers on top of it.

The informational content of the silence is zero. The rhetorical content, however, is enormous.

Meanwhile, Burns’ show rolls on. The “full truth” is always in the future, tomorrow, next week, next month, next never.

That is the deepest trick the Burns operation taught the Frank campaign, and it is the trick that is still being run today, more than a century later. The Truth is always marching. The Truth is never arriving. The Leo Frank vindication is always around the next bend. The exoneration is forthcoming. The absolution is coming. The exculpation is near. The new evidence will be revealed next year, next decade, next generation, in a book not yet written, in a documentary not yet funded, in a pardon petition not yet filed.

In 1914 the deliverable was Burns’s “report.” In 1986 it was a “humanitarian” pardon that explicitly declined to address guilt or innocence, and left the conviction intact. In every intervening year some new Frank partisan has stood in front of a microphone and told the county, the state, the country, and the whole world, with all the credibility of a man who has never read the Brief of Evidence, that Leo Frank “deserves to be exonerated.”

Not a single one of them has ever produced court-admissible evidence that would survive cross-examination by Hugh Dorsey, or Hugh Dorsey’s dog for that matter.

That is the inheritance Burns bequeathed. A memorable slogan lifted from someone else’s work. A “report” that wasn’t even a report, just an unclaimed reward and some offhand opinions. A “report” that is never cited by Frank partisans because it wasn’t even a report at all.

The Chicago money paid the freight. The New York money paid the lighting. The Georgia public paid the cover charge in social trauma, lynching, and endless denigration in the alien-owned “national press.” And when the tent came down and the caravan moved on, what remained in the middle of the empty lot was exactly what had been at the center of it from the start. Nothing. A handbill on the ground reading “The Truth Is on the March,” and under those words, very small, the words “Admission $1,000 and your soul.”

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Citations

Wikipedia contributors. (2026). “Albert Lasker”; Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved April 20, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lasker

Leo Frank Case Research Library. (2024). New York Times chronology of Frank-case coverage, February through May 1914. https://leofrank.info/newspapers/new-york-times

Wikipedia. (2026). “Leo Frank”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank

Wikipedia. (2026). “Louis Marshall”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marshall

Wikipedia. (2026). “William John Burns”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_John_Burns

Watson, T. E. (1915, January). “The official record in the Leo Frank case.” Watson’s Magazine, calling Burns “that calliope detective” and “the fussy charlatan who hunts for evidence with a brass band and a searchlight.”

Atlanta Journal. (1914, April 20). “Burns now ready to present Frank evidence.” Page 16, column 5. Reproduced at
http://MaryPhagan.com

Atlanta Constitution. (1915, January 30). “Large sums paid to Burns agency, Haas tells court.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive. https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Atlanta Constitution. (1914, May 2). “William J. Burns driven out of Marietta.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Atlanta Constitution. (1914, June 20). “Burns is dropped by police chiefs.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Watson, T. E. (1914, April 23). “How much longer will the people of Atlanta endure the lawless doings of William J. Burns?” The Jeffersonian, Vol. 11, Issue 16. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Research Library. https://leofrank.info/enright/the-jeffersonian.html

Watson, T. E. (1914, April 30). “The Frank case; the great detective; and the frantic efforts of big money to protect crime.” The Jeffersonian. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/jeffersonian-weekly

Watson, T. E. (1914, May 7). “William Jackass Burns, at another angle: Some tarnished lawyers; some bought newspapers; and the murder of a little Georgia girl.” The Jeffersonian. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive. https://leofrank.org/newspapers/jeffersonian-weekly

Connolly, C. P. (1915). The Truth About the Leo Frank Case. Vail-Ballou Company. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/reactions/the-truth-about-the-leo-frank-case

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Source: Author

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.

In this year of 2024, on the 111th anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, we present this article, based on a piece from the alternative media.

by K.A. Strom and Valdis Bell

I BELIEVE IT was the great writer Daniel Concannon who first said that in America, no matter who you vote for you always get Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt looks like a particularly filthy gunsel from a 1940s gangster movie. He makes Peter Lorre look handsome. He’s the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (or ADL), which is perhaps the foremost anti-Gentile hate operation in America today. It is the ADL who decides what you get to hear or see in the media, and what you are allowed to say in public and on social media. It would be better named the Defamation League, as one of their main activities is defaming and deplatforming and smearing and financially and personally ruining anyone who exposes Jewish crimes or the genocidal nature of the Jewish agenda.

As proof that the ADL gets what it wants, and what it wants is to silence anyone who inhibits the Jewish agenda of a brown America, look at what happened to populist Tucker Carlson last year. The most highly-rated talk show host on the dinosaur media, so well-liked that a recent poll puts his popularity higher than that of the entire Fox News Network where he appeared, Carlson was fired by mega-Zionist and possibly crypto- or part-Jew Rupert Murdoch without reason being given. Jonathan Greenblatt has been pushing for Carlson to be fired for at least two years. Take a look at this softball CNN interview with Greenblatt from 12 April 2021. CNN is owned and run by Jews.

Greenblatt gets all worked up emotionally when he tells Brian Stelter, “Tucker Carlson has got to go!” calling for him to be deplatformed, and literally a few seconds later screeches “This is not cancel culture.” Right. Greenblatt and the ADL goddamned invented cancel culture, for the gods’ sake. It’s the very basis of their existence. Apparently Tucker had mentioned the increasingly obvious fact that there a media agenda to replace the heritage population of the US and Europe and other Western nations. (It’s okay for the controlled media to mention this, they often do, so long as they frame it as a good and inevitable thing. But Tucker hadn’t made the obligatory ritual incantations, and that might stir up the peasants and get them thinking maybe, just maybe, someone is trying to hurt them — something that Greenblatt and his ilk cannot tolerate.)

Now, I’m not a hod carrier for Tucker Carlson. He articulates many of the problems we face well. He informs us about a few parts of the media’s agenda that the rest of the Jewish-controlled media try to downplay or keep hidden. But, like Lucy Van Pelt and her football with Charlie Brown, at the last moment he always pulls away and leaves us without knowing who is behind these things and why they do what they do. In some cases he out-and-out misdirects our people into thinking that Democrats are the real problem — not Jewish power — and that Republicans, some of them anyway, are the real solution. He scrupulously and cleverly and rather disgustingly dances around the issue of Jewish/Zionist power. Sometimes he tells us that it’s some shadowy “woke” conspiracy or airheaded “groupthink” trendiness that’s “behind it all.” (Truth be told, we as people need “groupthink.” All peoples need groupthink — that is, thinking of themselves as a group and committing themselves to their group’s survival — in order to even exist at all. Tucker Carlson says that’s a bad thing, promoting some vaguely libertarian strain of populism — or maybe it’s a populist strain of libertarianism; it doesn’t really matter, either one is death for us. So I am not a big fan of Tucker Carlson.

But Carlson went too far for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. And he was hugely popular. So he had to go. And, going against — insanely against, I might add — their own economic interests, the Murdochs fired him. Pleasing Jews is more important, apparently, than billions in revenue.

And it is this same Greenblatt and same ADL that is allowed to give “training courses” to police officers nationwide, telling the officers just who it is who is “dangerous” and who should get especially intense law enforcement scrutiny. It is this same ADL that meets with social media executives — including Elon Musk — and tells them who it is who should have a voice and who should be stifled or silenced. It is this same ADL that tells our national and state and local legislators what laws should be passed and what speech should be banned.

Speaking of pleasing Jews, witness the shocking behavior of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. For the second time in history — and DeSantis did it the first time, too — an American governor has signed a bill into law while in a foreign country. It was a bill supported by the ADL and specifically crafted to make distribution of fliers criticizing Jews into a felony. And guess which country DeSantis was in when he signed it? If you guessed Israel, you’re right. DeSantis, who, like Tucker Carlson, makes a lot of noise in apparent opposition to certain of the most outrageous parts of the Jewish agenda, knows who he has to please. Don’t fool yourself; DeSantis still has ambitions to be a major elite political player. His signing of this flagrantly immoral and illegal restriction on our speech while in Israel is deeply significant: a symbolic bowing to his masters, in a place sacred to his masters, signaling he wants their approval for a “move up” in status, something that only they really decide.

I’ll embed the tweet from neocon Jew Rep. Andy Fine, who said: “made a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) to deliver @GovRonDeSantis HB 269, the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States. To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison. Never again means never again.” All of this surmounts a picture of DeSantis signing the sacred bill, with two smirking Jews looking on. Do I have to tell you that the bill has nothing to do with “attacking” Jews, but only with distributing literature that criticizes them or exposes their activities?

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with Mary Phagan. And who is she, anyway? Well, you need to understand the murder of Mary Phagan in order to understand how we got from the Land of the Free to the point where a greasy, sleazy item like Greenblatt gets to decide what our laws should be and what you can say without getting fired or going to prison.

It all began when 19th-century Americans, woefully unaware of reality when it came to Jews, mistakenly thought that Jews were just another kind of European and let them stream into our country in huge numbers. Jews, knowing they were a separate race and with fanatical racial loyalty, immediately began to organize and acquire power for themselves, especially power over the press and eventually all mass media as they emerged.

Initially, Jews in the southern US adapted themselves to the reality of Jim Crow and positioned themselves publicly as “White” and supportive of White institutions.

But all that changed at high noon on 26 April, 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia.

It happened on the second floor of the National Pencil Company building on Forsyth Street. It was a sweatshop where child laborers, mostly White girls, spent their youth making pencils for the company’s Jewish owners for 60 hours a week and more, earning only pennies an hour.

13-year-old Mary Phagan was one such girl. She came that day to the office to collect her pathetically meager $1.20 pay. There she met the sweatshop’s Jewish boss and stockholder, Leo Frank, in his office on the second floor. Leo Frank was also the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization that would spawn the ADL later that same year.

It was a holiday and no one else was on that entire floor. Frank paid her, and then took her into the factory’s “metal room,” in the rear part of the second floor, as far as possible from the stairway and elevator, and from prying eyes and ears, on the pretext of checking to see if the metal supplies she needed for her work had come in. He closed the doors behind them as they walked.

Near the rear wall, standing in front of a metal lathe next to the toilet entrance, Leo Frank did to Mary Phagan what he, according to numerous witnesses, had often done with his teenage girl employees: He attempted to take sexual liberties with her. She resisted. Frank knocked her down forcibly, hitting her in the eye and striking her head against the unyielding metal lathe, opening a bloody gash that he may or may not have seen at first. While she was stunned, he pulled her garments up above her waist and raped her right on the red-stained floor in front of the toilet, lying in her own flowing blood.

When he was “done,” seeing the blood and doubtlessly realizing his predicament should Mary tell others of his actions, he found a piece of the twine used to pack supplies in his factory, wound it tightly around Mary’s neck, and strangled her to death. He then tore off a piece of her lace underwear, placed it around her neck as if it were a lace necklet and so it covered the marks of the strangling.

He then summoned the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, to enlist his aid in the moving and, he hoped, the burning of Mary Phagan’s body. Conley knew that Frank liked to “chat” in private with the prettier of his young White employees, as he had kept watch for Frank on several occasions while such “chatting” took place. And, in fact, he was keeping watch for him near the factory’s first-floor entrance at that very moment. Frank told Conley that he had struck the girl and accidentally killed her. The lace “necklet” might have served to conceal the strangling — at least conceal it from Conley. It could never fool police investigators. But, if Conley had burned the body for Frank as planned (as it turned out, he never did), there might never be any police investigators. Conley and Frank moved Mary’s body to the basement.

Frank and his legal team tried to frame the Black night watchman, Newt Lee, for the murder. Among other things, they forged his time card, and planted a fake bloody shirt at his residence. When that framing attempt failed, they tried to frame Jim Conley — and, 111 years later, they’re still trying to frame him. They planted a fake “bloody club” and pay envelope near the place where Conley kept watch for Frank that day. But that fake was exposed, too. The true evidence kept building up, and the proof was overwhelming that Frank was the killer. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

But Frank had something that ordinary defendants, Black or White, never have. He was not an “ordinary citizen.” He was a Jew, a member of the supposedly “chosen people.” He was also an actual official of the Jewish power structure — the head of Atlanta’s division of the B’nai B’rith. He had the already massive power, money, media ownership, and political influence of the organized Jewish community nationwide behind him. They refused to let the verdict stand. They funded a multimillion-dollar legal and PR campaign to get him a new trial, to make millions of gullible people believe he was innocent and a saintlike “victim of anti-Semitism,” and to get his sentence commuted. They were only partially successful. All his numerous and expensive appeals, which went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, failed. And the death sentence was carried out by an outraged citizenry after a corrupt governor commuted it. The Jews did fool a great number of Americans about Frank, however.

And the Frank case galvanized Jews to see heritage Americans as their enemies. The Leo Frank case was not only the first time the Jewish power structure flexed its muscles so openly to change public opinion and to get what it wanted from the political and legal systems. It was also when they decided that their alliance with White people was at an end. From that day forward, and intensifying greatly after World War 2, the Jews have been ramping up a (slighty) covert war on White people at the very same time that they made overt war on Arabs and others in the Middle East.

Everything else flows from that day. What that Jew pervert did to Mary Phagan on the metal room floor that day 111 years ago this week led directly to Jonathan Greenblatt telling you what you can and cannot say today — led directly, in fact, to the founding of the ADL just a few months after Mary Phagan breathed her last.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story.

***

Source: based on an article at National Vanguard

In this year of 2024, on the 111th anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, we present Lawson Wellborn’s classic article analyzing the 1980s testimony of Alonzo Mann, which is often misused by Jews, and those under Jewish influence, when they attempt to exonerate Frank. It is worth noting that not all scholars and researchers agree with Wellborn in calling the death of Leo Frank a murder — many regard it as simply the carrying out of the lawful sentence of the court in the face of an illegal commutation of the sentence by a corrupt governor.

by Lawson Wellborn

WITH THE recent commemorations of the death by lynching of Leo Max Frank, public attention has been fixed once again on the remarkable dual murders of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank. As is fairly well-known at this point, 13-year-old Mary Phagan was murdered in the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta on April 26, 1913. Leo Frank, her boss and last person to admit seeing her alive, was convicted of the murder.

His appeals went up to the Supreme Court of the United States and his conviction upheld at every level. Frank’s appeals to the administrative agencies of the State of Georgia also brought no change. Only when Governor John Slaton, a law partner of the Frank defense team, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment was Frank’s life apparently spared. But the outrage felt in Georgia over the impropriety of the Governor pardoning a client of his own law firm on his last day in office (and widely suspected of being bribed) resulted in a band of leading Marietta men planning and executing a daring break-in at the State Prison in Milledgeville, abducting Frank and driving over the primitive dirt roads of Georgia all night to hang him in Marietta at sunrise the next day.

The astonishing murder of Leo Frank has tended to soften the public’s view of his guilt in the murder of Mary Phagan.

Was Frank guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan?

His own subsequent murder is not material in establishing his innocence in the matter. It represents what might be called the “Ox-Bow Incident” mentality. We so dislike vigilante justice that we have a tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to the victims of such lynchings. Even in a case like this where Frank’s guilt was upheld at every level of the appellate legal system we recognize his subsequent murder as an assault on the entire legal system.

Francis X. Busch, a renowned trial attorney of a half century ago, pointed out one of the most powerful pieces of evidence against Leo Frank. “As has been argued in support of the jury’s verdict, that in the passage of nearly forty years since Frank’s brutal execution, not a single additional fact pointing to his innocence has come to light.”¹ Busch went on to worry if Frank may have been the victim of “one of the most flagrant miscarriages of justice in American criminal annals.”

The Phagan family conducted a full and complete interview in 1934 with Jim Conley, the star witness of the State against Leo Frank. Conley was also the man the Frank defenders settled on as the most likely murderer instead of Leo Frank. The Phagan relatives’ interview with Conley convinced them that Conley was telling the truth about Mary’s murder. Mary Phagan Kean wrote “[t]here is no way my father would have let Jim Conley live if he believed that he had murdered little Mary.”²

Thus it came as something of a shock to the general public that in 1982 newspaper attention suddenly focused on the elderly Alonzo Mann. Mr. Mann was about the same age as Mary Phagan at the time of her death and had testified as a defense witness for Frank in his capacity as Frank’s office boy at the murder trial. Now Mann emerged from the shadows with the startling revelation that he had actually seen Conley carrying the apparently lifeless body of Mary Phagan down the front staircase when he re-entered the Pencil Factory on April 26, 1913. Jerry Thompson,³ Nashville Tennessean veteran reporter and anti-Klan investigator, worked up Mann’s story and brought before the public.

Mann was given lie detector tests and passed them. “Lie detectors” are not admissible in court in Georgia — unless all parties agree. They are of limited effectiveness because pathological liars and the very best of con artists often pass while persons of a more nervous disposition fail — even when the latter are telling the truth.

The Georgia Courts have mocked “lie detector” tests as follows:

There is simply no “lie detector,” machine or human. The first recorded lie detector test was in ancient India where a suspect was required to enter a darkened room and touch the tail of a donkey. If the donkey brayed when his tail was touched the suspect was declared guilty, otherwise he was released. Modern science has substituted a metal electronic box for the donkey but the results remain just as haphazard and inconclusive.⁴

On the national level the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1998 in United States v. Scheffer,⁵ that courts could bar the admission of the results of polygraph examinations in all cases without violating an accused’s constitutional rights. The Court did so because it noted that there is no consensus in the scientific community on the reliability of the “lie detector.” In short, the highest court in the land holds the “lie detector” to be “junk science.”

Mann’s ability to pass such a questionable test at best implies that he either completely believed his story or was an excellent story teller.

The Nashville Tennessean article was a tremendous hit; it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and picked up by newspapers all over the nation. On television and radio programs commentators gleefully announced that Mann’s testimony erased all doubts — baseless though they might have been — that Frank was actually innocent of the murder of Mary Phagan. As the Tennessean’s headline for the special supplement of March 7, 1982 shouted: “AN INNOCENT MAN WAS LYNCHED.” Books, docudramas and prizes for investigative journalism rained down on the heads of the crusading scribblers.⁶

Mann’s story was significant in that it directly contradicted Conley’s testimony of how Conley got the body of Mary Phagan to the basement of the factory after the killing. As the reader may recall, Conley was definitive in his testimony that he used the elevator to transport the corpse. The elevator had always interested the Frank partisans and Mann emerged as the last living witness to the case to discuss this exact issue.

The affidavit executed by Mann may be summarized as follows:

He was called as a witness for Frank, but he did not then reveal to any lawyer about his knowledge contained in the affidavit. Now, he was coming forward after the lapse of seventy years. “I want the public to understand that Leo Frank did not kill Mary Phagan.” He blamed his parents, his speech impediment and his fear of the crowds outside the trial “yelling things like ‘Kill the Jew!’” for his reluctance to speak up. Mann stated he was too young at the tender age of 14 to have realized that if he told what he saw that Frank would have been found innocent.

Here is what Mann claimed he saw the day Mary Phagan died. When Mann arrived at the factory at 8:00 a.m, Conley was seated under the stairwell of the first floor of the Pencil Factory. Conley had already consumed a lot of beer. Mann ignored Conley’s request for money and went up the stairway to assume his duties as Frank’s office boy. Frank arrived shortly afterwards. Mann worked till before noon when Frank permitted him to leave to join his mother for the Confederate Memorial Day parade. Mann promised Frank he would return after the parade and Frank allowed that he would probably still be at the Pencil Factory.

Leaving shortly before noon, Mann had not seen Mary Phagan come to collect her pay. Conley was still lounging in the stairwell when Mann left the factory. Mann did not pinpoint his departure time. He states he could have left between 11:30 or 11:45.

He stated “[I]t could not have been more [emphasis added] than a half hour before I got back to the pencil factory.” In other words, Mann returned somewhere between 12:00 and 12:15 based on his statement. Mann entered by the front door again, and looking to his right, saw Conley with Mary Phagan’s limp body (although he didn’t know Mary’s name at the time) standing between a trap door that led to the basement and the elevator shaft. He observed no blood or wound on the body of this limp, short white girl dressed in “pretty, clean clothes.” Mann was of the impression that Conley was about to dump the body down the trapdoor. He could not recall if the elevator was on the first floor; if it was not, then the shaft would have been open as well. “…[I]n a voice that was low but threatening and frightening to me he [Conley] said: ‘If you ever mention this I’ll kill you.’”

Mann started up the stairs to the second floor. He thought he heard movements up there, but thought better of it, turned and fled out the front door. Conley reached out for him, but Mann “raced away from the building.” Arriving at home, he told his mother — whom he was to have met at the parade — what he had seen. She immediately advised him never to tell a soul. “She told me that I was never, never to tell anybody else what I had seen that day at the factory. She said that she didn’t want me involved, or the family involved, in any way. She told me to go on about my business as if nothing had happened and that sometime soon I would have to quit working there. From then on, whenever I was at work, I steered clear of Jim Conley. I kept away from him and he did the same.”

“When my father came home my mother explained to him what I had seen and what Conley had said to me. My father told me to forget it and never mention it.”

Later, when questioned by detectives, Mann never told them about his return to the Pencil Factory building. At Leo Frank’s trial, while testifying as a witness for Frank, Mann only answered the questions he was asked. He was following the advice of his mother and father and did not volunteer any further information. Mann offered his opinion that Conley was after Mary’s pay; he was not planning a sexual assault.

“Many times I have thought since all this occurred almost seventy years ago that if I had hollered or yelled for help when I ran into Conley with the girl in his arms that day I might have saved her life. I might have. On the other hand, I might have lost my own life. If I had told what I saw that day I might saved Leo Frank’s life. I didn’t realize it at the time. I was too young to understand.”

Family members continued to tell Mann not to tell anyone his story for years afterwards. An Atlanta newspaperman unnamed by Mann (but said by others to have been Ralph McGill, another crusading, Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal journalist) was disinterested in his story.

Mann also contradicted the testimony of the female factory employees who accused Frank of bringing women into the factory for immoral purposes. Mann never witnessed any such conduct.⁷ (Mann did not mention that he began working for Frank on April 1, 1913 so he had only been at the factory for twenty-six days at the time of murder.)

The Mann affidavit reopened the drive of the Jewish community for a “posthumous pardon” for Leo Frank. At a press conference at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center on April 1, 1982, the drumbeat began again. Jerry Thompson, at the press conference, was asked about the Phagan family’s reactions to all this information. “Jerry Thompson stated that some Phagan family members upheld their belief in the convicted Leo Frank’s guilt while others ‘were trying to be objective.’”⁸ “Sherry Frank (no relation to Leo Frank), area director of the American Jewish Committee, said Jewish leaders would like to make a possible exoneration of Frank an issue in the gubernatorial race this year.”⁹

Alonzo Mann, possibly because of his age and infirm heart, refused to respond to any questions except through his handlers at the Nashville Tennessean. This author contacted the Tennessean and was so informed at the time the news broke. Mary Phagan Kean was given the same answer, but because of her family connections she was finally able to meet Mr. Mann and form some impressions about him. She thought him “a fine gentleman; he believed what he had seen to be evidence of the truth.”¹⁰

Since Mann was never subjected to any cross-examination nor, evidently, even tough questioning about these matters, we are left with three possibilities concerning the worth of his testimony on an historical basis. It has long been held in Anglo-Saxon law that trial by affidavit is worthless and the cross-examination of a witness is essential to establish the truth or falsity of a proposition. So while Alonzo Mann’s affidavit is valueless from a legal standpoint, it does have historical significance and must be so analyzed as we find it.

Mann’s recollections could be (1) completely accurate and factual; or (2) weakened by seventy years of guilt and blurred memories, but basically accurate; or (3) a complete fabrication drawn up either by himself or with the assistance of other parties for a number of plausible reasons.¹¹

Since Mann cannot be examined, having answered to the highest tribunal on March 19, 1985, let us look more closely at the statement itself.

First of all, Mann states that mobs were shouting things like “Kill the Jew” outside the trial. The most careful writers on the subject all agree that this is an urban myth with no basis in fact. Steve Oney, the most recent author on the subject, points out that there is no contemporary evidence for such a statement.¹² Governor Slaton in his commutation order denied that Frank had been tried by a mob. But, like the typical urban myth, the legend persists. It is probably propelled by later events after the Slaton commutation and the assault of the “Knights of Mary Phagan” on the State Prison in Milledgeville.

In the statement Mann put himself as leaving the factory between 11:30 and 11:45. In his trial testimony, as recorded in the brief of evidence, Mann testified twice that he departed at 11:30.¹³ Since his testimony was given closer in time to the event in issue, we may presume that at least he was inaccurate in the later affidavit as to the time of his departure unless he was fudging on that topic when testifying for Frank at trial. So Mann’s affidavit is clearly at variance in this important matter with his own trial testimony given relatively shortly after the event. Given the heavy emphasis the defense attached to the timing of the assault on Mary, this is significant to say the least. It would seem highly unlikely that the skilled interrogation by Frank’s attorneys failed to unearth the later departure time (to say nothing of Mann’s return to the factory) given their theory of the case turned on the time element so heavily.

It is also noteworthy because of the importance attached to the timing of the arrival of Mary at the Pencil Factory. The defense made much of the testimony of streetcar operators that Mary could not have possibly arrived at the factory prior to 12:12 p.m. Although Dorsey seriously damaged this theory in his cross-examination, the defense steadfastly held to this narrative. If Mann’s recollections are correct, then pressing his affidavit times to the furthest, most favorable limit for Frank, the latest Mann could arrive back at the factory on the fatal day is 12:15 p.m. Under Mann’s time constraints, Mary had to be able to ascend the staircase, obtain her pay envelope from Frank, ask about work on Monday and descend the staircase, be attacked by Conley either upstairs or downstairs (without Frank hearing any struggle or screams in the otherwise quiet factory, as it was a holiday) be lifted up and carried by Conley to the point where he was seen by Mann next to the “hole” and elevator shaft. All this had to occur within an absolute maximum of three minutes. If Mann’s statement that he was away from the factory for not more than one-half hour is true, then in order to get Mary to the factory after Monteen Stover testified she arrived, Mann’s departure time had to change.

Stover’s unimpeached testimony is that she was in Frank’s outer office from 12:05 until 12:10 by the clock on the wall in the office. Frank was absent from his office and not a sound was heard by Stover. Consequently, the defense always asserted that Mary arrived two minutes after Monteen left — just enough time for the two of them to miss each other on the staircase and the street outside the factory. If Mann was gone for no more than thirty minutes, then his departure time must be shifted forward from his trial testimony or else he returns before Mary, by Frank’s testimony and the elaborate defense calculations, could have even arrived at the factory. No Frank defender has offered any explanation for the new time problems created for the defense by Mann’s affidavit.

Consider the plausibility of the affidavit statements concerning the response of Mann’s parents to the news that their son had witnessed what was doubtless the most sensational murder of their lifetimes. Conley returned to work on Monday, April 28th after the murder. Mann evidently returned to work as well according to his affidavit. Conley would continue to report to work until his arrest on May 1.

Can we believe that a fourteen year old lad would report to work alongside a black man who he had every reason to believe had committed the murder of Mary Phagan? Mann would have permitted an innocent man, the black night watchman Newt Lee, to languish in the jail while the sweeper Jim Conley, whom he feared — now with better reason than ever before — looked malignantly at him each day. Is that believable — even in present day America?

Gentle reader, life in 1913 Atlanta was considerably rougher. Keep in mind what Mann asked us to believe. Once he eluded Conley’s outstretched hand, he was on the sidewalk outside the factory. The streets of Atlanta were teeming with crowds attending the Confederate Memorial Day parade. If he raised his voice to call for help, a crowd would have quickly responded. The life expectancy for Mr. Jim Conley would have been very short if a crowd of 1913 whites found a black man holding the limp (and possibly dead) body of an adolescent white girl in that time and in that place. Yet Mann didn’t know what to do; he didn’t alert any policeman he may have chanced to meet nor the trolley crewmen on his way home. He didn’t speak to anyone till he got home. He raced straight home where his missing mother had already arrived. His parents, certainly not made of stern stuff, advised silence. Even after Frank was arrested the Mann clan remained mum.

The most amazing part of the affidavit is Mann’s statement that his loving parents, worried about the family getting involved in all this, still advised him to return to work where he would be in close proximity to the purported murderer, Jim Conley. Did it never occur to any of them that Conley could just as easily silenced the only witness to see him with the girl’s body? Why advise their beloved son to return to the zone of danger and yet remain silent?

But suppose all of this was true. The Manns thought Conley so dangerous to Alonzo’s safety that they remained silent and let their son go back to work with a homicidal maniac. Once Conley was in police custody that problem was resolved. What was more, a reward was offered for evidence leading to the conviction of the murderer. Did the Manns have no interest in talking about a murderer now in police custody with the additional attraction of a cash reward?

Conley is thought to have died about 1962. Why didn’t Mann come forward then? Surely he didn’t fear the powers of Conley to do him harm extended beyond the grave.

Finally, we come to Conley, “the Prince of Darktown.” To listen to the Frank defenders recite their narrative, Conley was a criminal mastermind who was able to outwit and frame poor Leo Frank and thereafter to withstand the pounding and intense cross-examination of the finest criminal defense attorneys in Georgia of their day. All the time, the criminal mastermind was well-aware that a white boy of fourteen had seen him with the body! Under these circumstances, would Conley have shown up at the National Pencil factory on the Monday after the murder insouciant and confident? Clearly, Conley appeared because he believed he was safe and protected from whatever role he had in this homicide. If Mann saw him on the first floor landing and Conley knew it, why would he loiter at the plant until he was arrested on May 1? Reason and experience with criminal defendants dictates that had the incident occurred as Mann related, Conley would had caught the first freight train headed out of Atlanta and “rode the rods” to any distant geographical point to escape the accusing finger of Mann and the pursuing lynch mob. If Conley did choose to remain in town, wouldn’t he have taken more effective steps to silence a witness than simply warning Mann to shut up?

Furthermore, why would the Moriarty criminal mastermind of Conley not incorporate the Mann incident into his statement and confession to the police? If Conley’s confession was concocted, why would he go to the trouble of inventing the tale of the elevator knowing that Mann stood able to give him the lie? He could have even used Mann to bolster his story by claiming that he carried Mary’s body down the steps at Frank’s direction and dropped it down the trapdoor. Furthermore, Mann could verify that story! “Bring in the office boy and question him!” Conley could have challenged Mann and turned an uncertainty into supporting evidence.

Conley, though, stuck to his version of how the body was transported to the elevator and never volunteered that Mann was a possible witness.

Conley was bringing Mary down the stairs. Where had they been? Why had Frank heard nothing if the assault took place virtually in his office? Additionally, the condition of Mary Phagan’s body when found was quite different than described by Mann. This can only be accurate if Mary was unconscious and then revived when Conley got her to the basement. When Mary’s body was found it was filthy, her dress was torn and she was so blackened by soot and dirt that some of the police could not tell what race she was. (Which could lead to a third explanation for her death. That explanation, unexamined by all the Frank apologists, is that Frank assaulted Mary in the metal room. She was knocked against a machine and fell unconscious. Frank thought her dead and summoned Conley. Conley then finished the job after she came to in the basement. Before dying, Mary apparently put up a real struggle. This explains some of the irregularities in both Frank’s and Conley’s stories. But the preference is to depict Frank as a martyr, a real mensch. This alternative doesn’t please the Frank community. Frank would still be a murderer under the law of almost every state in the union and in 1913 would have gotten the death penalty.)

One member of the Pardons and Parole Board considering Mann’s affidavit pointed out that Mann dropped out of school to work against his parents’ wishes. “Why would a man who wouldn’t obey his parents about school,” [Michael] Wing wondered, “obey them when it came to potentially letting an innocent man hang?”¹⁴

Furthermore, Mann showed no concern that day about Leo Frank, a man for whom he expressed respect in later years. Frank, after all, should have still been in the building when Mann returned to find Conley toting a dead girl in his arms. Mann stated he thought he heard movement upstairs. He evidently never considered the fact that Frank — whom he believed to be in his office upstairs — or anyone else still in the factory could have been in peril even decades later when reviewing the case.

And we have the issue of the defense attorneys and police investigators. Evidently, none of them were able to pierce the veil Mann and his family cast about his covert knowledge. This young lad was able to fool even trained investigators who were desperately trying to either free their client or uncover the real story. The defense attorneys interviewed him and decided to use Mann as a witness for Leo Frank. Nevertheless, this naive lad of 14, who had no idea that his information could save an innocent man’s life and who quaked in terror of the now incarcerated Conley, never gave his secret away.

Given the huge problems with the 1982 Mann statement on its face, it is impossible to believe that Mann told the truth in that document. All human experience runs directly contrary to the behavior he attributes to almost every participant in his affidavit.

The Phagan case was cursed from the very beginning with people volunteering “tips” and “clues.” It appears most likely that Alonzo Mann was merely the last of many to offer a fanciful solution to the case.

Since his solution was superficially suited to the Frank defenders’ longstanding press campaign to exonerate Frank, it has received fabulous coverage. Many articles and news statements flatly assert that it closes the case entirely.

As helpful as the Mann statement appeared to be at first blush to the Frank defenders, it does have a major defect; it merely disputes Conley’s testimony about how the body was transported to the place it was found. It does not establish whether Conley or Frank was the murderer.¹⁵ After all, Frank was still upstairs when Mann says Conley was carrying the body from that location. What was Frank doing upstairs when Mary Phagan was attacked?

Thus because of these shortcomings and infelicities in Mann’s statement, the document was not of sufficient gravitas or credibility outside of press newsrooms to create the expected popular groundswell which would impel the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to issue a pardon or other exoneration of Frank from culpability in the murder of Mary Phagan.

But the shortcomings outlined above did not give serious pause to the Frank camp.

Because it disputed the Conley testimony, it was immediately ballyhooed, without close consideration, as a complete exoneration of the Leo Frank.

It does no such thing.

References

¹ Busch, Francis X., Notable American Trials: Guilty or Not Guilty (London: Arco Publications, 1957), 74.

² Phagan (Kean), Mary. The Murder of Little Mary Phagan (Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press, 1987), 28.

³ Thompson had worked as an informant infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan for the paper and afterwards became an ardent Frank advocate insofar as Leo Frank’s guilt in the Phagan murder was concerned.

⁴ State v. Chambers, 240 Ga. 76, 81, 239 S.E. 2d 324 (1977). While written in dissent, this language has been adopted by the Supreme Court in subsequent cases such as Carr v. State, 267 Ga. 701, 482 S.E. 2d 314 (1997). The author has had personal experience with “lie detectors” as well. He was unable to convince an examiner that while he had been a union member, he was not a labor organizer when required to take a test for employment. The job was denied. Georgia will admit lie detector tests if both sides agree, but the reader can envision the value of testimony that both sides see as helpful. Basically, the “lie detector” seeks to “bolster” the credibility of a witness. It is not admissible in most American courts. More recent concern about national security following the terrorist episodes of September 11, 2001 has further eroded the credibility of “lie detectors.” A CBS News, “Not Close Enough for Government Work,” report dated October 8, 2002 reported the National Research Council as stating “National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/not-close-enough-for-government-work/

⁵ 118 S.Ct. 1261 (1998)

https://www.dauberttracker.com/documents/authorities/Scheffer.pdf

⁶ Phagan, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, 246

⁷ Ibid., 247–261.

⁸ Ibid., 262.

⁹ The East Cobb Neighbor of April 6, 1982 as quoted in Phagan, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, 264–265. Indeed, it did become an issue. Candidate and eventual victor Joe Frank Harris stated he would pardon Frank — even though the governors of Georgia had no legal or constitutional authority to do so.

¹⁰ Phagan, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, 311.

¹¹ Neuroscience is pressing forward on the issue of memory function. Suggestibility in interrogation, memory distortion in the aging process and abuse of substances (such as alcohol) are all at issue in Mann’s recollections. Memories of traumatic events have been shown to change with time and it has been convincingly demonstrated that in some cases that physic phenomena in the nature of memories are often created for traumatic events that did not actually happen. These are all problems with honest witnesses, let alone witnesses that may have been influenced by a desire for fame, notoriety or mere lucre.

¹² See Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise (New York: Pantheon, 2003). An example would be at page 343. There were times when the audience would laugh or applaud, but the jury, when out of the courtroom, were not sure for whom the demonstrations were intended. In newspaper interviews and public appearances Oney flatly states there were no “Kill the Jew” chants.

¹³ Brief of Evidence contains the entire direct testimony of Alonzo Mann in 16 sentences, most of which deal with who was in the factory. The cross-examination was but three sentences dealing with the time Mr. Frank was out of the office.

Brief of the Evidence. In the Supreme Court of Georgia, Fall Term, 1913, Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error, 123.

https://www.leofrank.org/presenting-the-leo-frank-trial-brief-of-evidence-1913-and-leo-frank-georgia-supreme-court-records-1913-1914/

¹⁴ Clark J. Freshman, “By the Neck Until Dead: A Look Back At a 70 Year Search for Justice,” American Politics, January, 1988, 31.

¹⁵ Logic would follow that disproving a critical part of Conley’s testimony does and should create doubt about other parts of his testimony: Falsum in unum, falsum in omnibus. But the same maxim applies to Mann’s statement — which was not exposed to days of grueling cross-examination by skilled attorneys.

* * *

Source: Occidental Observer

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 Philip St. Raymond

WE ARE very pleased to present here a new American Mercury video based on the widely reprinted 2013 Mercury article by Bradford L. Huie, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty, and using the audio book read by Miss Vanessa Neubauer as its basis. The article was written for our centenary retrospective of Mary Phagan’s 1913 murder. It provides in cinematic form an assessment of the Leo Frank case — perhaps the most amazing and intriguing murder mystery in American history — that simply cannot be found in the controlled media.

This ultra-high-resolution video is freely available to download so that you may keep it on your personal hard drive and re-upload to video sharing platforms.

Today, the noose of censorship is being pulled ever-tighter by a media/government complex that is desperate to keep its lies and its crimes hidden from the public. Thus this video — exposing one of the first major operations on American soil of that complex — is very timely and important today. The American Mercury is proud to, once again in our 97-year history, bear witness to the truth.

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Source: Author

Why is it that the family of Mary Phagan, the victim of rapist and murderer Leo Frank, are given no voice at all as the Jewish lobby pressures Georgia to exonerate the killer — who was also a high B’nai B’rith official? The following Phagan Family Position Paper was originally published at littlemaryphagan.com.

MY NAME is Mary Phagan-Kean and I am the great-niece and namesake of “Little Mary Phagan,” the thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by Leo Max Frank, the president of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith Lodge No. 144, on April 26, 1913.

Leo Frank was the manager of the National Pencil Company – a sweatshop factory where over a hundred children labored, and where the Sam Nunn federal building stands today. Little Mary Phagan was 12 years old when she started working there in 1912, and Frank admitted he was the last person to see Mary alive.

In fact, the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming and on August 25, 1913, after a month-long trial in the Fulton County Superior Court, Leo Frank was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and on the next day, he was sentenced to hang for the murder of Mary Phagan.

What followed was an unprecedented effort by Leo Frank and his legal team and supporters to pin this horrific crime on everyone but himself. It is an effort that continues to this very day. The Leo Frank case is no “cold case.” It is obvious to anyone who objectively considers the case evidence that Leo Frank was rightly convicted for this heinous crime.

Today, his supporters have targeted a black man named James Conley who worked as a janitor at the factory. Evidence shows that after Frank beat and strangled Mary he was unable to move the body. He called on Conley and ordered him to help him conceal the crime and swore him to secrecy. After initially concealing Frank’s crime Conley ultimately revealed to authorities the true events of that day. The detail he gave was so shocking and so convincing that he became the state’s star witness against Leo Frank. Frank and his legal team’s response was to accuse Conley of the murder, and that has been their story for a century.

But Mary’s killer was not James Conley, and the state of Georgia proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Leo Frank alone murdered Little Mary Phagan.

The Phagan family has no objection to anyone expressing their opinions about the Leo Frank case, but we do insist that organizations and personal campaigns not distort the truth and facts to use this case for their own political purposes. For over 100 years, each passing decade brought with it dubious revelations of “new historical evidence” falsely claiming to exonerate Leo Frank. The Phagan family has stated since 1982 that if there were clear-cut evidence to clear Leo Frank of this heinous crime, we would be the first to ask for an exoneration. However, such historical evidence has never come to light. Rather, there are considerable data, extensive documentation, revealing archival material, and legal, court, and government records that only support and even strengthen the guilty verdict.

Phagan Family’s Statement on the Latest Attempt to Exonerate Leo Frank

It was reported in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that on April 26, 2019 [ironically 106 years to the day after Mary Phagan’s murder] that the Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard [defeated by Fani Willis on November 6, 2020] had established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” that he said would review the Leo Frank conviction of 1913. Those named as participants in this move were the following:

• Former Governor Roy Barnes
• Rabbi Steven Lebow
• Attorney Dale Schwartz
• Melissa D. Redmon, director of the University of Georgia Law School
• Former Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears
• Former Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher
• Former Cobb County Superior Court Chief Judge J. Stephen Schuster
• Assistant District Attorney Van Pearlberg

The Family of Mary Phagan believes that these individuals have colluded since August of 2018 to find a way to vacate the murder conviction. ADL attorney Dale Schwartz was quoted thus: “we’re still trying to get a new trial that would, in effect, exonerate him.” [In 1914, several attempts were made to “exonerate” Leo Frank using “new evidence” that included witness affidavits later found to have been forged or obtained by bribery and other illegal means. See the Atlanta Constitution of May 5, 1914, p. 1.]

Clearly, the new agency was a blatantly political scheme that had nothing to do with justice. It was set up, it appears, at the behest of the above-mentioned Frank advocates for one purpose only – to help Leo Frank escape culpability for his crime. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 7, 2019), Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard stated, “The Frank Case helped inspire the creation of the new unit” and that former Gov. Roy Barnes “will serve as a consultant.” Barnes admitted that he “had lobbied the district attorney [Howard] to re-examine Frank’s case.”

Let us be clear what that means. Those statements alone convince us that the Conviction Integrity Unit has already determined the outcome of the Leo Frank case. According to the article, “Barnes said he is convinced that this will happen. ‘There is no doubt in my mind, and we’ll [Who is “we?” — Ed.] prove it at the appropriate time, that Frank was not guilty.'”

For years Roy Barnes has been promoting a fraudulent narrative about the Frank case, and in particular that the 1913 trial was illegitimate because it was “mob-dominated.” He said that “there were just mobs of people. And as the jury would go [to] the courthouse every day, the mob would scream, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!”¹

This charge is a blatant lie that has been disproven by the scholars of the case. It was made up long after the trial by an overzealous writer trying to make a name for himself. Only Barnes continues to repeat it.² For this and many other reasons Governor Roy Barnes is simply unfit to participate in any serious inquiry into the Leo Frank case.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard (with former Governor Roy Barnes) announces “Conviction Integrity Unit” to re-open Leo Frank case. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 7, 2019. Once again, most advocates and so-called experts who determine Leo Frank is not guilty have relied on blatantly false information and politically biased propaganda. Frank’s conviction was upheld by thirteen separate courts and judges in his thirteen appeals from Fulton County to the United States Supreme Court. Every court affirmed the trial was fair and the jury was not “mob terrorized.”

What’s more, driven by the need to exonerate a Jewish leader, they intend to convict an innocent African American man, James Conley – Frank’s employee that he ordered to help move the body. They ignore the 20 young girls and women who testified under oath that Frank sexually harassed them at the factory. Frank’s attorneys refused to cross-examine ANY of them, and later admitted that they were all telling the truth.³

Nonetheless, Frank’s advocates spread fabrications, propagandize falsehoods, distort the facts and change headlines of original newspapers to promote the hoax of not guilty. The real miscarriage of justice is that in this time of the #MeToo movement, they seek to override a duly convicted child rapist and murderer’s conviction.

The Evidence Points to Leo Frank’s Guilt

Most people are not aware that there was blood and hair evidence at the murder scene, that Frank changed his alibi several times and lied to police, and that he sexually harassed his young girl employees. Most people are unaware that Leo Frank hired private detectives who planted evidence and bribed and intimidated witnesses to change their testimony. They even hatched a plot to murder the African American James Conley who became a key witness against Leo Frank.⁴

Most people are not aware that the two detective firms Leo Frank hired; the Pinkertons’ National Detective Agency and the Burns Detective Agency concluded Leo Frank was guilty of the murder!

At his own trial Leo Frank refused to be sworn on the Bible and be cross-examined. A lot has been covered up about the case, including Leo Frank playing the race card to play to the white jurors’ prejudices about black men.

In 1915 and under intense political pressure Gov. John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. But even as he signed that commutation order he also wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court “found in the trial no error in law” and had “correctly in my judgment [found] that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the verdict.”

The fact is that Leo M. Frank was found guilty under Georgia law with facts and evidence, not with political bullying. The good people of Georgia can make up their own minds about Leo Frank’s innocence or guilt by delving into the historical records themselves. Having researched the Leo Frank/Mary Phagan murder case, including spending thousands of hours examining court records, newspaper reports, and private and public archives, I ask you to please consider the following facts:

Sexual harassment by Leo Frank: the Harvey Weinstein of his era

On Saturday April 26, 1913, Leo Frank used the opportunity of a deserted factory and his power as the company boss to lure Little Mary Phagan to a back area of the factory and attempt to rape her. Mary resisted and, and in the struggle Frank struck her and knocked her unconscious, and then strangled her to death. He left a trail of clues leading to himself, so within a few days of the murder he was arrested.

Evidence showed that the murder was sexually motivated, and many of Leo Frank’s own female employees testified to Leo Frank’s history of sexual harassment. They testified that he “got too familiar,” “put his hands on” them, tried to corner them, and proposed sexual acts to them for money.

These teenagers bravely took the witness stand and spoke of Leo Frank’s lewd behavior. Sixteen-year-old Nellie Wood told the court how Frank had pushed himself against her and touched her breast. Fourteen-year-old Nellie Pettis–a witness for the defense–recounted how Leo Frank had propositioned her for sex. Twenty girls in all gave similar testimony about Frank’s improprieties. Several male employees described how they had witnessed Leo Frank “rub up against” young female workers “a little too much.” The testimony was so explicit that the judge had to clear the courtroom of women.

The defense attorneys did not even attempt to cross-examine any of the girls who testified at trial about Leo Frank’s lewd behavior. Instead, Leo Frank’s lawyers argued that his improper behavior was not wrong–that it was a sign of more liberal times! One even said in his closing argument, “Deliver me from one of these prudish fellows that never looks at a girl and never puts his hands on her…”

In the South the LOVE of Jews reigned supreme – not anti-Semitism!

“Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me. It isn’t the source nor the result of this sad story.” – Leo M. Frank, interviewed by Abraham Cahan of the Forward newspaper

Most people are unaware that the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey first brought his case against Leo Frank before a 23-member grand jury that included five prominent members of the Jewish community (including at least two from Frank’s own synagogue), and all the grand jurors signed the bill of indictment against Leo Frank.

The trial judge, Leonard Roan, was once a law partner of one of Frank’s defense attorneys, Luther Rosser and, according to a confidential ADL memo: “In general, the rulings of the trial Judge had been favorable to the defense.” Leo Frank’s defense attorney even declared after the trial: “[W]e do not make the least criticism of Judge Roan, who presided [over the trial]. Judge Roan is one of the best men in Georgia and is an able and conscientious judge.”

The false claims of anti-Semitism before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank are simply unfounded and untrue. The detailed daily accounts by the three Atlanta newspapers – the Constitution, the Georgian, and the Journal, each of which had Jewish editors – reflected no anti-Jewish bias at all. Leo Frank’s religion is only alluded to when it is reported that he is the president of ‘B’nai B’rith, and he is written of with the utmost respect for his prominence in the community. In fact, a University of Georgia study showed that the reportage by Atlanta’s three dailies was openly pro-Leo Frank and exhibited a pronounced pro-Frank bias.

Author Steve Oney, listed by the Anti-Defamation League as an expert on the Leo Frank case, reported: “To the extent that there was bias in the coverage, it was mostly in Frank’s favor…” He goes on to state that Atlanta’s newspapers, “evincing the prejudices of the time, ridiculed the state’s star witness–a black factory janitor named Jim Conley…”

It has been claimed that “anti-Semitism” and the “hatred of Jews” motivated Leo Frank’s conviction and lynching. And yet, incredibly, there was no anti-Semitism expressed by police, detectives, prosecutors, jurors, judge, or reporters! There was no “prejudicial trial” or “mob rule” or anti-Jewish bigotry of any kind.

Mr. Oney refutes the claim that there were anti-Semitic mobs shouting “Hang the Jew!” He told the Jewish Journal:

“[I]t didn’t happen. It was something that someone wrote a couple [of] years after the crime, and then it got stuck into subsequent recountings of the story….Jews were accepted in the city, and the record does not substantiate subsequent reports that the crowd outside the courtroom shouted at the jurors: ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.'” Though there is no record of “anti-Semitism” on the part of the crowd, the courtroom audience, the press, or the prosecutors, that doesn’t mean it was non-existent. As the evidence of his guilt became overwhelming, Leo Frank and his lawyers tried desperately to insert “anti-Semitism” into the trial as a diversionary tactic. They actually staged a courtroom confrontation with a prosecution witness over his alleged previous “anti-Semitic” statements. This officially brought “anti-Semitism” into the trial for the first time. Turns out that witness was working for the Leo Frank defense and was planted to promote their “anti-Semitism” agenda. It was yet another trick by the Leo Frank defense to undermine the court proceeding and to neutralize the evidence of his guilt.

The ADL has been promoting a lie for over a century!

“HANG THE JEW, HANG THE JEW” is what the Anti-Defamation League says was chanted during the month-long trial, but its own expert Steve Oney says it NEVER OCCURRED!

According to Steve Oney, at the time of Mary Phagan’s murder, “Atlanta was a philo-Semitic city. Its assimilated, German-Jewish elite were part of the financial and legal power structure…” Gov. John Slaton in his commutation order also addressed the false claim of an “anti-Semitic mob” surrounding the courtroom pressing to lynch Leo Frank: “No such attack was made and…none was contemplated.” Gov. John Slaton countered the false claim of an “anti-Semitic” atmosphere by reminding Leo Frank supporters that Jews were highly respected and appreciated in Georgia because they had been “conspicuous” contributors to the history and development of the state.⁵

Frank’s Jewish defenders believed he was guilty

By the time of his lynching in 1915 many people – including his Jewish supporters – not only were repelled by Leo Frank’s abrasive personality but also believed he was in fact the murderer of Mary Phagan. Chicago icon Albert Lasker, a Jewish philanthropist and the “father of modern advertising,” paid millions (in today’s money) for Leo Frank’s defense, but he privately admitted that he was not even convinced that Leo Frank was innocent.

Lasker financed all of Frank’s post-conviction appeals and orchestrated his international public-relations campaign that involved media outlets across the nation, including the New York Times. Albert Lasker recalled the meeting in Frank’s jail cell:

“It was very hard for us to be fair to him, he impressed us as a sexual pervert. Now, he may not have been–or rather a homosexual or something like that…”

According to Lasker’s biographer, the men with him during that encounter took “a violent dislike to him.” Lasker “hated him,” and said, “I hope he [Leo Frank] gets out…and when he gets out I hope he slips on a banana peel and breaks his neck.”

Leo Frank’s Trial Defense was one of the most RACIST in American History

Though “anti-Semitism” was not a factor in his trial, Leo Frank’s racism certainly was: Frank’s defense attorneys used the word “nigger” and other racist slurs dozens of times in court. His main attorney told the jury: “If you put a nigger in a hopper, he’ll drip lies.”

Leo Frank argued in court that the many black witnesses that testified against him should not be believed – simply because they were black – and that “negro testimony” – as they referred to it – was by definition inferior and unreliable. At trial Leo Frank’s attorney castigated the white jurors for even considering the testimony of the black witnesses:

“They would rather believe the negro’s word….Oh, how times have changed. I hope to God I die before they change any worse than this…”

Leo Frank’s lawyers argued to the jury of twelve white men that murder, rape, and robbery were “negro crimes” and thus Leo Frank, “a white man,” could not have committed the murder of Mary Phagan. One defense attorney said that “the murder was the unreasoning crime of a negro,” that “It isn’t a white man’s crime.”

Leo Frank’s own racist thinking is reflected in an Atlanta Constitution front-page headline on May 31, 1913: “Mary Phagan’s Murder Was Work of a Negro Declares Leo M. Frank.” The newspaper quoted Leo Frank:

“Here is a negro [James Conley], not alone with the shiftless and lying habits of an element of his race, that is common to the South….No white man killed Mary Phagan. It’s a negro’s crime, through and through. No man with common sense would even suspect I did it.”

Leo Frank tried to pin his crime on two innocent black men

Leo Frank’s supporters then and now have played the race card and falsely represent an African-American man as the “real killer.” For over 100 years James “Jim” Conley has been scapegoated in nearly all the literature on the case. He was a sweeper in the factory on the day of the murder who was ordered by his boss Leo Frank to help move the dead body of Mary Phagan. When James Conley confessed to his accessory-after-the-fact role, Frank and his supporters tried to pin his crime on Conley. Leo Frank’s supporters continue to this day to smear James Conley as a devious criminal who got away with murder, but Conley’s very detailed statement–corroborated by the physical evidence at the crime scene – was so convincing that it became central to the prosecution’s case. (At trial, Leo Frank refused to be cross-examined by prosecutors, but James Conley withstood 16 hours of cross-examination–under oath.)

In 1914, Leo Frank supporters tried to hire a black woman named Annie Maude Carter to slip James Conley some poison while he was in jail waiting to testify at Frank’s hearing for a new trial. She identified the would-be assassins in open court as prominent members of the Jewish community. The plot was exposed in the May 6, 1914 edition of the New York Times.

Before he accused James Conley of the crime, Leo Frank worked overtime to pin the murder on another factory employee – the African-American night watchman who found Mary Phagan’s body, Newt Lee.Leo Frank hired private detectives who planted a blood-soaked shirt in the innocent black man’s home, and then Leo Frank’s attorney hinted to the police where they might find that damning “evidence.” When the newspapers reported that a bloody shirt was found at Newt Lee’s home, it almost caused an innocent man to be lynched. Luckily for Newt Lee, Leo Frank’s private detectives did such a sloppy job at planting the shirt that the police were not fooled at all, and it only increased their suspicion of Leo Frank. That is the point when the people of Atlanta came to believe–and rightly so–that Leo Frank was the murderer of Little Mary Phagan.

Alonzo Mann – the man that is supposed to have exonerated Frank in 1982 – would have CONVICTED him in 1913.

I, Mary Phagan-Kean, examined in detail the dubious claims of Alonzo Mann, who came forward in 1982 – after 69 years of silence – to say he saw Conley with the body of Mary Phagan. It turns out that his new statements hurt Leo Frank far more than they help him.

– Alonzo Mann (who died in 1985) was Frank’s “office boy” in 1913 and from the very start he gave many conflicting stories that are irreconcilable with the known facts: In May 1913 as a young teenager, Alonzo Mann told detectives 3 different stories in 3 separate interviews and gave yet another story in his sworn testimony at trial in August. In those interviews and in his trial testimony Alonzo Mann never mentioned seeing James Conley at all on the day of the murder. At age 83, in his 1982 videotaped session before the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, he gave still more conflicting versions that contradict the testimony of Leo Frank himself!

– What motivated Alonzo Mann to break his 69-year silence on the Leo Frank case by pinning the crime on James Conley? The answer was disclosed at the videotaped private hearing in 1982: behind Alonzo Mann’s obviously scripted, wavering “testimony” was a book and movie deal executed by the Tennessean newspaper–the same Tennessean that abandoned the truth and the facts of the case and any trace of journalistic ethics just to exonerate Leo Frank. So Alonzo Mann was induced to come forward for fame and fortune.

Alonzo Mann in 1913: Tells 4 different versions, and 2 more in 1982. The Phagan family was consulted by the Board in the run-up to the 1983 pardon decision, since the surviving members of the family had a great deal of personal knowledge of and documentation about the case and would be directly and profoundly affected by any decision. It was our Little Mary who had been strangled and very likely raped, after all. And the Board denied that pardon application.

The Jewish organizations tried again in 1986, but this time the Phagan family was not consulted. They were told about the upcoming pardon decision after the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) and its well-heeled allies: Atlanta Jewish Federation and American Jewish Committee had been meeting with and lobbying the Board for six months or more. Why the secrecy? Obviously, the Jewish groups – led by Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith board member and attorney Dale Schwartz – didn’t want the victim’s family to have any say on the matter or any time to alert the public as to what was afoot.

Thus, in 1986 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a posthumous “pardon” to Leo Frank on the basis of the state’s failure to protect him while in custody, but it did not absolve him of the crime of murdering Mary Phagan and Frank’s conviction remained intact.

The state’s 1986 “pardon” did not overturn the guilty verdict

Believe it or not, there are still documents from the Leo Frank case that are being hidden from the public because they have been classified as “GEORGIA STATE SECRETS”! Our repeated attempts to obtain them from the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles were denied again in December 2020. What could they be hiding? What could be so secret about a case that is 106 years old!? And why aren’t the media pursuing this extraordinary government action?

My book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan is available free at: http://www.littlemaryphagan.com

Sources Banned and Censored

On the 100th Anniversary (April 26, 2013) of Mary Phagan’s rape and murder, the trial Brief of Evidence and appeals records of the Leo Frank case were digitized as well as the voluminous Atlanta newspaper reports about the crime.

These sources – and many, many more like them – use to be available on the internet until very recently. Indeed, the books, videos, articles, and court documents that provide a balanced view of the case have been systematical­ly removed from the internet SINCE THE Fulton County CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNIT WAS ANNOUNCED!

No Longer Available

• Original articles from the three major dailies covering the day-by-day progress of the case (removed from archive.org)
• Videos from YouTube that challenge the false idea that Leo Frank was “wrongly convicted.
• Official case documents like the Brief of Evidence, the appeals filings, and the pub­lished trial records have been scrubbed from the internet.
• Books that prove Leo Frank’s guilt and provide a serious case analysis have been banned and censored. My 1987 book titled The Murder of Little Mary Phagan has been removed from some websites where it was previ­ously available for years. The Nation of Islam’s recent book Leo Frank: The Lynching of a Guilty Man has been myste­riously banned from sale on Amazon.com.
• Google searches EXCLUDE articles and documents that show evidence of Frank’s guilt.
• When we made an Open Records Request to the Uni­versity of Georgia, they first said 70 records match the request. When we paid to have them mailed to us, all of a sudden, all 70 records vanished with no explanation!

Fortunately for the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit, the public and the media will still be able to ac­cess those critical official documents that the Leo Frank crusaders are trying to hide. We have made them available at LittleMaryPhagan.com where we believe they will be safe from the Leo Frank censors and their internet cleansing campaign.

Fulton County District Attorney, Paul Howard was defeated in the last election but the Conviction Integrity Unit he set up is still operating under the new District Attorney Fani Willis. Ms. Fani Willis might do well to ask why the original documents in the case all of a sud­den have been removed from the internet, and who had the power to remove them and why. How can the case be carefully reviewed without them? Indeed, the books, videos, articles, and court documents that provide a full and balanced view of the case have been systematical­ly removed SINCE THE CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNIT WAS ANNOUNCED!!! Obviously, Truth has become offensive or objectionable and has been deemed “hate speech” in order to impose censorship. But FACTS ARE NOT HATEFUL!

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis inherited this corrupt process, but will she bow to the same pressure that was put on her former boss to exonerate a man who raped and murdered our family member?

As of today, no word from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on whether her office will finally give long overdue justice to the victim, Mary Phagan. Can we expect that she will stand by her own words?: “Cases won’t be for sale under my administration. Not for an endorsement, not for money, not for anything.” “You have my word, during my tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, we will become a beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation.” “[D.A.] Willis vowed to bring ‘transparency and accountability’ to the DA’s office,” reported the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

She would be the first to do so. We’ll see.

Notes

1 Watch this video at 1:40 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgKcqOXyhc

2 See https://littlemaryphagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FINAL-Barnes.pdf

3 https://littlemaryphagan.com/the-murder-trial-testimony-brief-of-evidence/

4 Atlanta Journal, May 5, 1914, 2. Atlanta Constitution May 6, 1914, 1, 5. New York Times, May 6, 1914, 3.

5 https://littlemaryphagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Steve-Oney-Says-No-New-Evidence-to-Exonerate-Leo-Frank-for-Murder-of-Little-Mary-Phagan.pdf

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Source: Mary Phagan-Kean

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).