The Murder of Little Mary Phagan

Phagan-Kean, Mary

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by Ann Hendon

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

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

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

“DOES the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?”

If you answered the latter, you’re among a quarter of Americans who also got it wrong, according to a new report by the National Science Foundation.

A survey of 2,200 people that was released Friday revealed some alarming truths about the state of American ignorance about even the most simple scientific facts, with many failing to an answer even the most basic astronomy and science questions, according to a release about the survey.

Out of nine questions in the survey, participants scored an average 6.5.

Only 39 percent answered correctly with “true” when asked if “The universe began with a huge explosion.”

Only 48 percent knew that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” according to the statement. Without at least a simple understanding of biological evolution, understanding the realities of racial issues becomes impossible.

The survey was conducted in 2012, but the results were only presented on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.

Heliocentrism, the theory that the earth and planets revolve around a relatively stationary sun, became widely accepted in the 16th century, when Nicolaus Copernicus introduced his astronomical model of the universe, which led to the Copernican Revolution.

Darwinian evolution, the means by which all forms of life diverge and divide into races – which ultimately become new species – was first posited by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace in 1859.

* * *

Source: ABC News

by Revilo P. Oliver (pictured)

THE APPALLING STORY told by Mr. Seelig in the foregoing pages is much more than a personal tragedy that must excite sympathy and pity in every human heart. It is a story that is terrible in the full sense of that word: it should strike terror into the heart of every American who hopes that his children will not regret having been born.

As America’s most eminent journalist suggests in his introduction to the present book, Mr. Seelig’s account should be verified in every particular by diligent and intrepid investigators. But such verification could only confirm what we all know — or would know, if we paid attention to the evidence that has been accumulating for decades.

Mr. Seelig’s narrative confronts us with two facts that cannot be denied, and to which it would be cowardly and disastrous to close our eyes. Those facts are, of course, the ever-increasing perversion of law and judicial process in our country and the epidemic sexual perversion that has brought us to the verge of moral imbecility.

The perversion of law — that is to say, the use of pseudo-legal processes to protect the guilty by destroying the witnesses to their guilt — is both common and notorious. It is so notorious that one can only wonder at the fatuous apathy of a public that does nothing about it because each individual believes that he personally can escape if he, like a rabbit, runs away and silently hides himself in the weeds. In New York City not long ago some forty persons watched from their windows for half an hour while a lone marauder attacked and murdered a woman in the street outside — watched and did nothing, did not even telephone the police, because each was “afraid to become involved.” There have been many incidents like that. The craven spectators belong to a form of life now prolific in the United States, but it requires no learning to see that over-sized rabbits, although able to stand on their hind legs, to jabber, and to vote, are a species that is biologically unfit to survive.

Oetje Rogg

The most notorious and ominous instance of the perversion of law occurred more than twenty years ago, and it has not yet excited the alarm and indignation that such outrages necessarily arouse in nations that are viable. The obscene and tragic farce called the “Sedition Trial” began in 1942 and ended only in 1947. It was an act of Soviet-style terrorism carried out to intimidate Americans. Thirty men and women from all over the country, most of whom had never even heard of one another and who had in common only outspoken criticism of the Communist Conspiracy, were hauled to Washington in hand-cuffs and leg-irons, imprisoned in cells kept dark so that they could not read, and subjected to the most fantastic trial for “conspiracy” ever conducted outside the Soviet Union. The actual trial, based on pretenses so transparent that they cannot have been intended to deceive any intelligent man, was staged in 1944 by the infamous E.E. Eicher, a protege of Felix Frankfurter and Chief Justice of the District Court of the District of Columbia, in open collusion with an incredible Assistant Attorney, Oetje J. Rogge, another protege of Frankfurter and a long-time admirer of the Bolsheviks, whose part in the persecution earned him the distinction of being the personal guest of Stalin in the Kremlin a few years later. The scoff-law judge, Eicher, repeatedly and flagrantly violated the Constitution of the United States, innumerable laws, and the elementary principles of equity and justice on which all laws are based. But the vicious creature that lawlessly presided over a federal court did not succeed in doing the job for which he had been appointed. He died while articles of impeachment for malfeasance in office were in preparation and before he could be brought to trial in the Senate. His sudden death, reportedly from natural causes, averted an investigation and exposure that our enemies in Washington were desperately eager to prevent. The absurd case — ludicrous but for the suffering and irreparable loss inflicted on the hapless defendants and even their attorneys — finally came before an honest judge in 1946 and was dismissed as a “travesty on justice.” But the criminal elements in what is called our “Justice Department,” in an effort to distress their intended victims as much as possible, persisted until the case was finally terminated by order of the Court of Appeals on the last day of July, 1947.[1]

A more recent incident, which to a considerable extent parallels Mr. Seelig’s experience, was the kidnapping of General Edwin A. Walker in Oxford, Mississippi, on October 1, 1962. That crime, although evidently planned with care by the gangsters, was not a complete success, and the main outlines of the story, at least, are now known to everyone. General Walker, a great American and one of our most distinguished military men, had, at great personal sacrifice and with categorical rejection of the bribes offered to him, resigned from the Army so that he could not be silenced by the traitors and international vermin who had taken over “our” Department of Defense. The first attempt to silence him thereafter appears to have been well planned; up to a certain point, everything functioned with the precision of clockwork. In Oxford, Mississippi, one of the professional liars employed by the Associated Press concocted a vicious libel which that “news” service distributed throughout the country. [2] Then goons, many of them recruited from penitentiaries and all holding appointments as U.S. Marshals, went into action under the supervision of one Nicholas Katzenbach, who was on the spot as personal representative of Robert (“Bobby Sox”) Kennedy, then Attorney General of the United States. General Walker’s automobile was illegally stopped on a public highway, and, without warrant or charge of any kind, he was taken before a U. S. Commissioner, who, after practicing shameless deceit on the General, assuring him that he would be released on bond, fixed the bond at the fantastic sum of one hundred thousand dollars. This was evidently a miscalculation, for a bond of twice that amount became available as soon as the General’s friends and relatives were notified, and, to avoid acceptance of that bond, it was necessary for the responsible official of “our” government to go into hiding and to use other dodges until the second stage of the kidnapping was carried out.

That was carried out with exemplary efficiency in less than three hours. In Washington, a person of Russian origins named Kantor, who calls himself Charles E. Smith and holds office as Chief Psychiatrist of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and was therefore another of Bobby Kennedy’s subordinates, dutifully decided that General Walker was probably insane. This man of science later testified that he was able to make this diagnosis at a distance of a thousand miles in a few minutes by simply reading the lies disseminated by the Associated Press. He may, however, have applied the definition devised by Dr. Brock Chisholm, the protégé of Alger Hiss and head of the so-called World Health Organization that was founded under Hiss’s patronage to lead the agitation for “mental health.” Dr. Chisholm officially holds that “mental health” depends on “eradication of the concept of right and wrong,” whence it follows, of course, that anyone who thinks there is a difference between good and evil is obviously insane. Armed with this opinion from “Dr. Smith,” one James V. Bennett, holding office as U.S. Director of Prisons, telegraphed orders to the Marshals in Oxford, who hustled General Walker aboard a plane which at once took off for an unknown destination. It was probably hoped that the destination could be kept secret until the General had been disposed of. It became known, however, that the kidnappers had transported their victim across three state lines [3] to the concentration camp in Springfield, Missouri, that is officially known as a Federal Medical Prison. Mr. Seelig, in a part of his story not included in the present book, says that even before the General’s arrival, word went around among the prisoners, of whom he was one, that the “mental health experts” in charge were gloating over the prospect of having a distinguished American to torture.

Major General Edwin A. Walker

General Walker was stripped of his clothing, thrown into a concrete dungeon, and had his food served to him on the floor — a nice detail which is, in itself, a sufficient index to the mentality of “mental health experts.” [4] The General, however, was too prominent. By midnight, the place where he was being held captive was known. His attorney, General Clyde J. Watts, flew to Springfield at once. Almost simultaneously, Americans all over the country, informed by telephone of what had happened, deluged the prison office with telegrams that indicated, in one way or another, that the prison would be held responsible for the General’s safety. It would have been impossible either to murder the General quietly or to destroy his mind by means of drugs or surgery without arousing national indignation. The Department of Justice made an attempt to hold him for ransom — the ransom demanded being a pledge that he would not tell the public what had happened. When this deal was rejected, the General was released without ransom on the sixth day after he was kidnapped. The plot thus ended in a fizzle, but Katzenbach was later rewarded for his part in it by being made head of the Department of Justice. [5]
There have been many other instances of lawless violence perpetrated by persons who hold office through election or appointment and believe that their status as employees of the American people entitles them to abduct or kill Americans. A case that closely parallels Mr. Seelig’s was that of Mr. Fletcher Bartholomew, who, while “on loan” from his employers (General Mills in Minneapolis) to Radio Free Europe, a crypto-Communist propaganda station secretly operated by “our” Central Intelligence Agency in Munich, Germany, noticed how many homosexual degenerates were on the staff of the radio station. Not knowing what rules in Washington, Mr. Bartholomew thought it his duty to report his observations to the Consul-General of the United States in Munich and to the home office of the Central Intelligence Agency. Accordingly, on July 28, 1956, he was lured into an Army hospital by an Army chaplain and there assaulted by thugs, including a creature who held a commission as Captain in the U.S. Army. Mr. Bartholomew was overpowered by his assailants, strapped to a bed, and reduced to unconsciousness with hypodermic injections. Bound and kept under drugs, he was flown to the United States for incarceration as a “mental patient” in a hospital in which he could have promptly died of a “heart attack.” The plan miscarried, however, because Mrs. Bartholomew refused to be tricked or intimidated, and, when an honorable employee in the office of Radio Free Europe disclosed what had been done to her husband, was able to obtain the support of persons of some influence in the United States. The victim was therefore released. Two years later, in November and December, 1958, the shocking story was made public in a series of radio broadcasts by Fulton Lewis, Jr.

A somewhat similar crime was committed by the Department of Agriculture when an honest attorney first came on evidence of the thefts being committed by little Billie Sol Estes. The attorney, N. Battle Hales, was lured to the office of the Secretary of Agriculture, where he was detained by an administrative assistant while a goon squad was sent to destroy his files. His secretary, Mary Kimbrough Jones, a well-bred lady of fifty-one, tried to protect Mr. Hales’ files and would have been a witness to their confiscation. The Federal gangsters accordingly kidnapped her and hustled her to a “mental health” prison for disposal. An influential and courageous Congressman learned of the crime and intervened in time. The lady was not killed, but her health was for a time broken by the brutality to which she was subjected before her release could be procured. [6]

Many victims of such crimes have had no one to help them. Governmental outrages have become commonplace, and the general public, apparently lost in stupor, seems not to care. When it was disclosed in the Congressional Record (May 4, 1964) that the Attorney General of the United States had tampered with a Grand Jury by sending cases of whiskey and prostitutes (including female Marshals) to the jurors’ rooms, everyone seemed to think that that was just normal. The recent disclosure that blackmailers employed by the Federal government are supplied at our expense with trucks that match those used by local telephone companies so that they can with greater ease violate Federal and State laws and tap the telephones of decent Americans whom the ruling Mafia wishes to harass (see Counterattack, January 28, 1966) — that disclosure, I predict, will stir scarcely a ripple of interest. If people remain indifferent while their scoff-law rulers weave a net of tyranny about them and their posterity, they cannot pretend to be morally superior to the African savages who sold their own children into slavery for a scrap of copper wire or a bit of red cloth.

No one thus far has dared openly to advocate criminal perversion of the law and ostensibly legal authority, and even the most zealous Socialists, if they cannot deny the facts, take refuge in equivocation and sophistry, pretending that each outrage was the result of a “mistake” or “misunderstanding.” Most of us can still recognize evil as evil, and will brook no argument that it is “social good.”

The other perversion with which we are confronted by Mr. Seelig’s tragic story is not so easily understood. Homosexuality is a disgusting and, in some of its aspects, recondite subject, and even the most concise summary of what is known about it would reach the dimensions of a treatise and require the use of languages other than English. There are, furthermore, many reasons why even the most conservative Americans may not recognize it as an evil or may underestimate it.

The American Republic was founded to maximize personal liberty by shackling government, which, as Washington said, is like fire: it is necessary for civilized life, but is devastating whenever it is not kept strictly confined and under control. Our tradition of freedom is still so strong that many American conservatives — especially those who call themselves “libertarians” — believe that police powers should not be used against sexual perverts or persons addicted to the use of opium, cocaine and other hallucinatory drugs. This view, of course, is predicated on the assumption that such vices harm only the individuals who voluntarily practice them — an assumption that is negated by both human history and the social realities of the present.

Men of our race naturally view with contempt the creatures who, though anatomically male, find a perverse and incomprehensible satisfaction in sexual relations with one another. And it is only natural to regard what we despise as ineffectual and therefore harmless, except, perhaps, to weaklings. This instinctive attitude is confirmed by the reasoned arguments of what is now called “Social Darwinism,” a term that is inappropriate since it suggests that the doctrine is of recent origin. Ever since men have reflected on the nature of civilized society, it has been obvious that the human race produces inferior beings that are, culturally and socially, waste products, so that the health of a high civilization, like that of a large city, depends on the provision of an adequate sewage system. That is something for which every rational political theory has had to make provision, not only in the West, but in other civilizations. [7] It can be argued, therefore, that society should not attempt to check such vices as homosexuality and addiction to narcotics, since the more freely persons with such tendencies are allowed to indulge them, the less likely they are to leave offspring. In this way, it is hoped, society will eventually be improved by elimination of the unfit. What this theory overlooks, apart from the practical difficulties that we need not enumerate, is that morality is not simply hereditary. Although there are born criminals, it is very unlikely that there are persons who are born with such innate qualities that they cannot be made criminals during their formative years by education, degrading associations, and insidious solicitation. Even if we grant that the faculty is hereditary, we must number moral integrity, like the ability to see or life itself, among the things that man can easily destroy, but never create.

Christianity, aside from a few bizarre but strangely recurrent heresies, has always used Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of what is justly abominated by both God and man. But it is the tragedy of our time that Christianity no longer provides the social cohesion that made our modern world possible. For a considerable part of our population, including a very influential part of it, the faith of our fathers has become a primitive myth, explicitly or tacitly rejected by those who would think in scientific or practical terms. More important than the number of agnostics and atheists, however, is the fact that the Christian churches have been invaded, and many have been captured, by so-called “modernists,” who in their pulpits cynically exploit what they privately regard as superstition, and, by peddling the sentimental hokum called “the social gospel,” pervert and destroy the very foundations of the Christianity in whose name they profess to speak. They are the worthy successors of the priests of Cybele that Apuleius described in the eighth book of his Metamorphoses, and it is not remarkable that they, instead of expounding the Christian doctrine concerning homosexuality, use their pulpits to defend or even commend a vice of which some, at least, have a more than theoretical knowledge.

Sexual desire, although not so strong a force as hunger, greed, or vanity, is undoubtedly a biological force in every human being, and this fact has made it throughout history a favorite means of manipulating and exploiting men and women. It has been used for that purposes by witch-doctors and shamans of every age, including our own. When Sigmund Freud crawled from the sewers of Vienna with the discovery that persons not so degenerate as he were “sick” and needed to be cured by sexual magic, he founded an extremely profitable racket. In an age of waning religion, the notion that sex is virtually the whole of human life and the only source of happiness fascinated the credulous; and, to an extent seldom equaled in the most orgiastic cults of barbarism, the indulgence of the sexual appetite has become the religion of our contemporaries. The cult has, of course, been propagated enthusiastically by the disciples of John Dewey, who have made the public schools an instrument for promoting “democracy” by injecting into the tender minds of children the belief that life is merely a series of animal satisfactions. As a result, our nation is now suffering from an erotic monomania that ominously resembles the sexual frenzy that swept over France immediately before the insane blood-bath that is euphemistically called the French Revolution. In this context, homosexuality seems to be but one aspect of a much larger problem — an aspect which, since it is particularly repulsive, it is easy to ignore.

Finally, many Americans still regard homosexuality as a moral and social problem that has little relation to politics and to our most immediate and terrible danger, the Bolshevik takeover which, despite all the protests and activity of belatedly awakened Americans in recent years, seems to be progressing with the methodical velocity of an irresistible Juggernaut. In fact, very few saw a connection between the two evils before the publication of R.G. Waldeck’s concise and excellent article, ”Homosexual International,” in Human Events, September 29, 1960. It was only then that people began to notice that, in the Western world, the lairs of treason are invariably also the nesting-grounds of degenerates.

Perverts are disgusting, but you cannot afford to ignore them. Mr. Seelig’s story will give you some indication of the power that those furtive and foul creatures have attained over you — and there are a thousand pieces of evidence to confirm that estimate.

The cause of the dark perversion of human instincts is obscure. Homosexuality is found among many tribes of savages, but that fact has little relevance here. Civilization is by definition the process whereby human beings repress and prevent the conduct and behavior that is characteristic of savages.

The most common explanation of homosexuality in societies that can be called civilized is that advanced by the great traveler and ethnological observer, Sir Richard Burton, in the commentary appended to his famous translation of the Thousand and One Nights. For Sir Richard, the prime cause is geographic and racial. He speaks of the Sotadic Zone, that is to say, the Near East, which is dominated by the Semitic and Hamitic peoples among whom the vice is inveterate and taken for granted, together with the adjacent areas of the Mediterranean basin that those peoples occupy or have penetrated and influenced. It is true that among those inhabitants of the Sotadic Zone, homosexuality is regarded as normal, and Sir Richard believed that that was the consequence of certain anatomical peculiarities that are generally found in males and females of those races. Other observers, especially those who, during the French occupation, observed behavior in the Jewish and Moslem quarters of cities in North Africa, believe that anatomical differences are much less important than the prevalent custom of subjecting infants to sexual abuse by adults and of sanctioning among children in their earliest years an animal-like and perverse sexuality of which most Americans would believe children of three to ten years physiologically incapable. For some of the highly unpleasant details, see The Cradle of Erotica by Allen Edwardes and R.E.L. Masters (New York, Julian Press, 1963).

Whatever the reason, homosexuality is normal in the Sotadic Zone. [8] That merely means that we shall have to restrict our inquiry to Western man, who seems naturally to regard the perversion with instinctive abhorrence.

That does not mean that the problem can be reduced to simple racial terms. For one thing, we know virtually nothing about our ancestors in the stages of savagery and barbarism through which we assume that they must have passed. The nearest we can come to them, perhaps, is by considering the Germanic tribes who lived on the borders of the Roman Empire, which they later overran and sacked, and then occupied. Homosexuality was not unknown among those tribes, but they disapproved of it, and they signified their disapproval by simply hanging perverts to the nearest tree or, preferably, sinking them in mud under a weight of stones, if a swamp was conveniently available. In recent years, archaeologists have recovered quite a number of such bodies from peat bogs in which they were preserved. Those tribes were, of course, pagans, and I insist on that detail because the persons who distort history to poison our culture will assure you that disapproval of homosexuality is something peculiar to Christianity.

Among the Greeks, the extraordinarily gifted people who were the real creators of our civilization, homosexuality appears to have been an alien corruption. It was unknown in the Homeric epics, although in later times perverts, who are incapable of understanding masculine friendship and always seek any pretext to justify themselves, tried to read homosexual implications into the comradeship of Achilles and Patroclus. The aetiological myths all suggest a foreign origin: one states that the vice was invented by Laius in Thebes (where there was a pre-Greek Semitic element), and another claims that it originated in Crete (where the Mycenean Greeks ruled a native population of undetermined ethnic origin) — and we know that centuries later, as Aristotle (Pol., II, 10, 9 = 1271a) remarked with astonishment, on that island homosexuality was permitted by law, perhaps as a means of avoiding overpopulation.

At Athens, homosexuality appears to have been rare before the demoralizing Peloponnesian War, and certainly did not receive any kind of general sanction until long thereafter. It was forbidden by one of Solon’s laws, which was still enforced as late as 346 B.C., when one of the most prominent Athenian politicians, Timarchus, was prosecuted under that law and was probably convicted, although one account says that he committed suicide before the jury brought in its verdict. Plato has himself been suspected, not without reason, of homosexuality, but it is noteworthy that when he elaborated a model constitution for a city-state, he absolutely forbade (Leg., VIII, 8 = 841d) sexual relations between males.

At Sparta, where, we are told, paederasty flourished early, it was forbidden, under the same penalty as incest, by a law attributed to Lycurgus that was still in force in the time of Xenophon (De rep. Lac., 2, 13). It would be tedious to make the rounds of the other Greek states, or to try to determine at what time and under what influences the old legislation and the attitudes that seem to have been natively Greek were made obsolete by toleration and corruption. We may all suspect that first the tolerance and finally the vogue of homosexuality had much to do with the decline of the Greek world, but we cannot prove that, for we cannot show what Greek history, turbulent with internecine, and, in the end, suicidal wars, would have been without that factor. [9]

The Romans, to whom we owe more than to the Greeks, felt Western man’s natural abhorrence of homosexuality. Although degenerates were doubtless born from time to time, the contempt universally felt for perverts probably sufficed to restrain their tendencies, and when it did not, the stern ethos of the nation made short work of them. As late as 125 B.C., when the old paternal authority had been greatly restricted, a Roman of the old school, Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus, who had held the highest offices in the Roman Republic, peremptorily put his own son to death for homosexuality. Such was the unflinching moral code that made the Romans great. It was only after Rome had become a dominant power in the world by decisively defeating the Carthaginians (202 B.C.), the Macedonians (197), and the Seleucid Empire (188), and had suffered a great influx of aliens, including Orientals, that we see the beginning of moral decay.

In 186 B.C., just two years after the Roman legions had shattered the power of the richest and most populous empire of the Hellenistic Age, the Roman Senate, by a still extant decree, tried to suppress the Bacchanalian rites of a cult that, originating in Asia Minor, had reached Rome by way of Etruria, and used the traditional “freedom of worship” as a cover for nocturnal orgies of promiscuity and perversion. Investigation disclosed that the alien “religion” was really a secret conspiracy that worked systematically to seduce and corrupt adolescent boys and girls, and practiced, in addition to sexual profligacy, such associated arts as the forging of wills and murder by poison. And, significantly, a majority of the physiologically male members of the Bacchanalian conspiracy were homosexuals, although the cult made available to them a copious supply of young and libidinous women ready and eager for anything. (For a full account, see Livy, XXXIX, 8-19). All that sounds quite modern, doesn’t it?

In 186 B.C., therefore, we have the first clear instance in recorded history of a clandestine conspiracy engaged in a revolt against civilization by using sex to entice adolescents into a life of depravity and crime — evidently for the sheer pleasure of dragging human beings down to the moral nihilism in which the conspirators find a strange satisfaction. And homosexuality was a major part of a phenomenon that was to be repeated over and over again in the subsequent history of Western civilization.

In 186 B.C., intelligent Romans had to face a truth that few Americans are willing to face today: perverts are formidable, not because they practice a disgusting vice among themselves, but because they are driven by a demonic urge to corrupt and defile all mankind, to propagate not only perversion but every form of crime. From 186 B.C. to 1966 A.D. the evidence constantly indicates that for many degenerates the physical pleasure that they derive from their perversion is quite secondary to the pleasure they derive from ensnaring and degrading children and adolescents who would otherwise become decent men and women.

At Rome, the repression of the Bacchanalians checked the infection for a time, but not permanently. In 149 B.C. or thereabouts the Romans enacted the Lex Scantina de stupro cum masculo, which provided a heavy penalty for perversion. As everyone knows, such laws cannot prevent; they can only discourage, and their most important force is expression of the standards of the society that enacts them. Rome, however, was suffering from creeping moral paralysis that the Senate and conservative magistrates to the very end of the Republic sought to combat by such measures as the expulsion of subversive aliens (which was only temporary, since they, aided by wealth and influence, began to filter back almost at once) and measures to limit the spread of Oriental cults.

The Lex Scantina remained on the books; there were prosecutions under it as late as the Second Century after Christ and perhaps later. But the feeling that had inspired it was gradually eroded, and although homosexuality was never officially legalized, as has now been done in the State of Illinois and will probably be done in our entire nation as soon as Earl Warren gets around to it, the law became virtually a dead letter. Before the end of the Republic, Roman writers who wanted to be thought “intellectual” and “sophisticated,” imitating the literary fashions of Alexandria, which was the New York of the ancient world, did not hesitate to confess — perhaps falsely in some cases — that they were paederasts. And, paralleling what happens in the United States today, one of Cicero’s correspondents thought it a delightful joke when a homosexual pervert was prosecuted under the Lex Scantina before a presiding judge who was himself a pervert. Such a society is fit only for despotism, and despotism was, of course what the Romans got — a despotism under which the old Roman families quickly died out and were replaced by the descendants of their slaves.

We may take our leave of the Romans by reminding ourselves that the Emperor Nero, after murdering his mother in 59 A.D. and his first wife soon thereafter, officially and with all legal and religious ceremony married one of his slave boys, whom he had castrated for the purpose, and also posed himself as a timid and blushing bride when he was, with equal solemnity, married to a lusty slave whom he had emancipated to have as husband. It is not quite certain whether these auspicious nuptials were solemnized before or after he kicked his second wife to death, but it is clear that Nero was as free of prejudices as progressive educators are trying to make our children. The imperial animal was finally eliminated by the Army, but the really significant thing is that his youthful zest, exhibited in these and a hundred other exploits of equal charm, made him a symbol of “democracy,” and he was so beloved by a large part of the populace that for decades after his death the Empire was disturbed by imposters who, claiming to be Nero, had no difficulty in attracting a large and enthusiastic following and flourished until regular troops were sent to put them down. A Great Society always knows its own.

Nero: a degenerate pervert, even by modern standards

I cannot pretend to trace the history of homosexuality in the Western world. Before the inevitable fall of the Roman Empire, Christianity, which explicitly identifies homosexuality as an offense against God, became the established religion, and when the worm-eaten fabric of the Empire collapsed, its territory in Western Europe was occupied by fresh and vigorous peoples, and since many of them were Germanic they brought with them an instinctive repugnance toward perversion that re-enforced the teachings of the Church. As a generalization, therefore, we may say that in the Western world, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the time of the French Revolution, homosexuality was forbidden and punished by very stringent laws, both ecclesiastical and civil. And those laws were enforced, even against persons of high rank. In England, for example, Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven, was convicted of sodomy and executed in 1631. And as late as 1810, at least, a commissioned officer in the British Army and an enlisted man were executed for the same offense. That may have been the last time the death penalty was enforced. In the same year, the persons caught by the police in a raid on a homosexual brothel in London were merely sentenced to the pillory, but that was not exactly light punishment since an indignant populace saw to it that they returned to prison looking more like heaps of garbage than human beings.

Of course, during the fourteen centuries covered by our generalization the laws and the social standards they represented were frequently violated. That is merely what we should expect, since violations could normally be detected only when the violators themselves advertised their offenses. But there were many corrupting influences at work. It would take pages to list them, but it should be noted that some of the most important were anti-Christian movements disguised as Christian heresies or as occult “science.” As everyone knows, a common English term for sodomists is bugger, which is derived from the French bougre, which in turn comes from a slurred pronunciation of Bulgar. The reference is to a sect of heretics, more properly called Bogomils, who held Manichaean doctrines, a few of which, such as denial of the divine birth of Christ and insistence on social and racial equality, are now held by leaders of the National Council of Churches. The Bogomils, who were notorious buggers, were transported from Asia Minor to Bulgaria by the Byzantine Empire, and from their new home they sent streams of zealous missionaries both eastward into what is now Russia and westward into Europe, where, from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Centuries, they planted various local heresies, notably the Patareni in northern Italy and the Albigenses in southern France. One need not believe that all members of the latter sects adopted the sexual practices of the evangelists, but the Bogomil missionaries must have exerted a very considerable influence. Again, along the shifting boundaries of Europe and especially during the Crusades Europeans came into contact with the Semitic peoples among whom homosexuality is accepted as normal, and one result was that the powerful order of Knights Templar, who held strongholds and rich fiefs throughout Europe until they were suppressed, were not only noted as homosexuals but evidently made sexual perversion a part of their ritual. [10] Throughout the Middle Ages and even in the Renaissance systems of magic, including necromancy and most of alchemy, derived from the Kabbalah, were peddled throughout Europe, partly by enthusiasts who were victims of their own (often drug-induced) hallucinations, but principally, we may be sure, by “intellectuals” who had found a convenient means of exploiting the credulity of wealthy suckers. From such occultism it was an easy and natural progress to witchcraft and Satanism, and, as two examples — the infamous Gilles de Rais, Marechal de France in the Fifteenth Century, and the notorious Aleister Crowley in the Twentieth [11] — will suffice to remind us, the worship of evil has always included the practice of homosexuality as an emphatic repudiation of the prejudices that prevent normal men from joyously wallowing in every kind of filthy self-debasement and disgusting crime.

There were other influences, less spectacular but equally insidious. No one can deny that some perverts have a high degree of intellectual ability, including literary talent — one could, for example, compile a very large anthology of well-written poems by homosexuals from Straton of Sardis (Second Century) to Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Paul Verlaine; and many of our contemporaries attribute high literary merit to the novels of Andre Gide, who is the foremost apologist for homosexuality in our time, and to the morbid maunderings of Marcel Proust, who slightly disguised his activities by giving his boyfriends feminine names. I can here mention only two men of letters of the Fifteenth Century in Italy, where, perhaps because the population was so heterogeneous, the perversion seems to have been especially common. Antonio Beccadelli, better known as Panormita, in the collection of obscene poems entitled Hermaphroditus, describes paederasty in terms which suggest that it was, like addiction to opium or hashish, a pleasurable habit that could not be broken — but it is uncertain whether he was writing a description or propaganda. More significant are the confessions of Pacificus Maximus in his Hecatelegium: as a child he was sent to a grammar school in which the headmaster, a secret but enthusiastic paederast, insisted on freeing all his pupils from their inhibitions so that he could have fun with them. In the Fifteenth Century, parents were evidently as negligent or as awed by educational experts as they are today, and I regret to report that the progressive headmaster was not hanged. In fact, he seems to have flourished. And there were many like him.

Perhaps the most important factor of all was one that the new science of genetics has only partly explained: biological degeneration. Here is an example. Louis XIV of France, although he brought on France such evils as highly centralized government and military defeats, was undoubtedly a man. He had, however, a brother, who was almost certainly legitimate, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, who always wore women’s underclothing and was only with difficulty restrained from appearing at court in skirts. This engaging creature was, as protocol required, married to an English princess, but became furiously jealous of his legal wife because he thought her attractive to men whom he wanted to love him. So important a personage as the King’s brother naturally had no lack of ambitious courtiers willing to use him as a mistress, and we are not astonished to find him — or, to be more precise, it — engaged in scabrous political intrigues and suspected of having instigated several secret assassinations. Louis disliked Philippe, but he was not enough of a Roman to purge his own family, nor was he enough of a Christian to feel effective concern at harm done to others. The royal pervert was like an open sore on the body of France when that nation was dominant in Europe. No one can estimate how much harm was done by the conspicuous creature, not merely in spreading perversion, but in exciting every kind of demoralization, including contempt for the whole society and even the religion that permitted so despicable a being to hold rank next to the very highest and to receive honor and flattery, however hypocritical.

We must always bear in mind the fact that homosexuality is commonly associated with perversion of all the faculties and instincts normal to Western men. One example of many is Enrique el Impotente, who was King of Castile from 1454 to 1474. It is significant, I think, that this pathological specimen, who admitted that he could not stand women and had his queen impregnated by an obliging courtier, had an olfactory sense such that he considered the odor of burning leather the most delicious smell in the whole world, with the possible exception of the aroma emanating from the skull of a long-dead horse. It is probably not a coincidence that he had a tender heart for criminals, preventing the execution of murderers and other malefactors whenever he learned of their crimes in time to pardon them, and recruiting those who had distinguished themselves by the number or the sadistic ferocity of their murders into his own bodyguard, which was otherwise composed of imported Moslems. Like the modern “Liberal,” however, Enrique had a heart that was tender only for criminals and felt no compassion for decent people. When Enrique “farmed out” the extremely lucrative privilege of apportioning and collecting taxes (for a percentage) to a wealthy usurer, Rabbi Josef of Segovia, and one of the latter’s colleagues, he authorized those remarkable officials to put to death without even a hearing any citizen who was remiss in paying whatever they chose to demand as taxes. Enrique was also, of course, a pacifist, although he was cunning enough to reach a secret understanding with Spain’s enemies and then declare a fake war as a pretext for extorting more taxes from his suffering people. Enrique, who was also an expert at inflating currency and debasing the coinage by adulterating the silver, had many other progressive ideas. He undoubtedly knew what he was doing when he placed his twelve-year-old half-brother, whom he later poisoned, under a tutor who was a notorious pervert and who is said to have been successful in that branch of education, although there is some doubt and the boy had manhood enough to defend his sister, Isabella, a few years later when Enrique tried to make her promiscuous at the age of fourteen. Whatever hereditary taints account for Enrique, they evidently did not reach his half-sister, who eventually succeeded him on the throne and through whose courage and ability the Kingdom of Castile became the Kingdom of Spain.

The foregoing comments are not a history of perversion, nor are they intended to show (what it would be obviously impossible to prove) that all homosexuals are inhuman monsters. But for at least twenty-two centuries in the Western world, homosexuality has consistently been a factor in repudiation of all morality and hence of civilization itself, which is obviously impossible without a general and instinctively accepted moral code. It is not a question of individuals who indulge in private practices that we consider loathsome and that are, in Christian terms, offenses against the Creator. What we must consider is a species that derives joy from the corruption of our children to its own level and seems driven by an urge to destroy us. As the author of the article in Human Events that I cited above concisely puts it, the members of the Homosexual International “constitute a worldwide conspiracy against society.” And that conspiracy is in our time a subsidiary or ally of the International Communist Conspiracy, not because homosexuals are subject to blackmail, as charitable people are inclined to suppose, but because their instincts lead them to the same frenzied hatred of Western civilization.

That — I repeat — is not to say that all homosexuals are sadists. Of the literary men whom I mentioned above, Wilde seems to have had no criminal tendencies; Verlaine, it is true, tried to kill his lover, Rimbaud (who had participated in the Communist outbreak in Paris in 1870), but he probably had good reason; Gide eventually became “disillusioned” with the Communists and even criticized his former pals; and Proust was virtually a hermit.

It is entirely possible, even probable, that there are more than a few secret homosexuals who have no desire or impulse to destroy mankind, and we should all explicitly recognize that probability. Furthermore, it would be wrong to claim that the more violent homosexuals are all Communists. One thinks, for example, of two wealthy and brilliant undergraduates in the University of Chicago named Loeb and Leopold, who are still remembered because in Chicago in the 1920’s they kidnapped and killed a young boy of their own race and social circle just for the perverted fun of killing him. One thinks also of their contemporary, Fritz Haarman, another distinguished homosexual who attracted some attention in Germany when it was discovered that for many years he had been disposing of his boyfriends, as soon as he became tired of them, by tearing their throats open with his teeth and then grinding them up for sausage, which he sold in a delicatessen. There is no indication that Loeb, Leopold, or Haarmann were affiliated with the Communist Conspiracy, although they certainly had the right instincts for leadership in the international revolution.

We must all face the highly unpleasant fact that homosexuality is usually associated (either as cause or effect — it would be hard to say which) with sadism, [12] and that sadism in turn, when it does not find an outlet in acts of brutal violence, inspires the passion for “equality” and “social justice” that masquerades as “idealism” and is accepted as such by unsuspecting persons who do not see that the only purpose of the “idealists” is to incite the violence and brutality that will give them a vicarious delight even if they have no opportunity to participate in it personally. [13] The very word sadism, by which we designate the lust to inflict pain and degradation on others, is derived from the name of an infamous pervert, the “Marquis” de Sade, author of what are probably the vilest books ever written, who was precisely what we should expect: a great apostle of the doctrine that all men are born equal (“La nature nous a fait naitre tous egaux”), a vociferous advocate of what his successors call “economic democracy,” and a close associate and collaborator of Marat, Robespierre, and other blood-thirsty leaders of the French Revolution. De Sade’s career is merely typical: he was twice condemned to death for atrocious crimes of the kind to which he has given his name, but the sentences, unfortunately, were not carried out; he was in prison in 1790, when he was released by fellow idealists to participate in the “struggle for human rights,” and, in addition to orating about egalite and fraternite, he personally had lots of fun for thirteen years until Napoleon came to power and sent him back to prison. Also typical of the born agitator is the undergraduate at the University of Chicago who in his diary deplored his “inability to control society” and to “run the world.” He determined to make reprisals for the social injustice of which he was thus a victim, commenting “Since I have devoted more time to psychology, it should be easy. . . .I shall attack human nature to my fullest extent.” [14] He could have had a brilliant career as an “intellectual” undermining civilized society in the name of “brotherhood” and “the underprivileged,” but the pervert was so impatient that he committed three murders and was eventually caught.

Homosexuality is only one of several factors in the decline of the West, but it is an important one. As is well known — at least since the publication of Anatoli Granovsky’s I Was an N.K.V.D. Agent (New York, Devin-Adair, 1962) — the Communist Conspiracy maintains in Russia two training schools for sexual athletes. The graduates of one college are heterosexual experts and specialize in the capture and manipulation of promiscuous females who, through wealth or marriage, hold positions of political power or influence in Western Europe or the United States. The graduates of the other school, which may be the more important, are perverts trained to attract perverts. The agents thus trained are, of course, a part of the elaborate mechanism by which the Bolsheviks now control and paralyze civilized nations. But the Conspiracy is thus exploiting a condition that it has helped create. It is undoubtedly true that the international vermin have been working for centuries, with the secrecy and patience of termites, to destroy Western civilization by eating away all its beams and rafters — by debauching and defiling every part of our culture from art and music to science and philosophy; and they have worked above all to destroy morality, the foundation on which all civilization must rest. That much is certain. The only question is how much of our present plight is the result of the termites’ work and thus reparable, if we still have the will and strength to act in time, and how much is the result of natural rot, through biological deterioration or human unwillingness to bear for long the burden of high civilization, and therefore inevitable. And that is a question that I see no means of answering with precision and certainty. [15]

Confronted, as we are, by cunning, insidious, and implacable enemies in our midst, we dare not disregard the ever increasing prevalence of homosexuality in our society. As R.G. Waldeck summarized it in Human Events, “the (homosexual) conspiracy has spread all over the globe; has penetrated all classes; operates in armies and in prisons; has infiltrated into the press, the movies, and the cabinets; and it all but dominates the arts, literature, theater, music and TV.”

So long as the degenerates were furtive and discreet, the American public had no conception of their number and power.

Sumner Welles

To be sure, ever since Franklin Roosevelt led his great horde of traitors and degenerates into our capital, everyone who knew anything about the operations of Washington knew that perverts held important posts, and after the Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, was beaten by one of his Negro “husbands” in a fit of jealousy, people began to suspect that there was more than wit to the Washingtonian humor [16] that took it for granted that “our” State Department was dominated by perverts. But even so, Americans, with their habitual optimism, encouraged by the silence of the newspapers and magazines, liked to believe that the infection was more or less confined to that one department of government or, at least, was not very widespread. And, of course, ever since the establishment of Roosevelt’s conception of the Presidency as an office to be used to impose a totalitarian dictatorship on the American boobs and to beat them into slavery to “world government,” the great and illegal powers of that office have been used to protect perverts. In 1950, for example, an investigating committee under the chairmanship of Senator Hoey (see Senate Document 241, Eighty-first Congress) ascertained that there were at least seven thousand perverts in positions of importance in all agencies and departments of the Federal government (including, nota bene, the Department of Justice), but the testimony was suppressed by an Executive Order from the White House, in open and flagrant violation of the Constitution, and the Senate of the United States, a once august body, supinely submitted to that usurpation.

The general public had little comprehension of such matters until the perverts, with arrogant confidence that they — or, to be more precise, their Bolshevik masters and protectors — already had the Western world by the throat, began to advertise themselves and to claim openly their “civil rights” as a “minority group” comparable to Jews and Negroes. This concerted crawling out from the woodwork seems to have begun in 1951 with the establishment of the “World Federation for the Rights of Man” and the publication in West (yes!) Germany of a magazine for perverts, Die Insil. (By this time, of course, every Western country, including the United States, has a number of periodicals published in its own language and specifically addressed to perverts.) Even so, most Americans were astonished, or even shocked, when the President of the Washington chapter of a league of “male” perverts, the Mattachine Society, [17] under oath before a Congressional Committee, testified that there were a quarter of a million homosexuals in Washington, and that at least two hundred thousand and probably more were employed in the Federal government. There was, perhaps, some slight additional shock at the discovery that the Mattachines’ head was seconded by Professor M.H. Freedman of the Law School of George Washington University. (Alas, poor George! He was not a “fellow of infinite jest,” and I fear that his gorge would rise, if he knew that Freedmans were capering under his name.) Prof. Freedman, a choice fruit from the hothouse of Harvard University, refused to state under oath whether or not he was a Mattachine, but appeared on behalf of the hoary old American Civil Liberties Union to argue that associated perverts have a right to pose as a “charitable” organization and solicit contributions from the public to disseminate propaganda for perversion. It was that impudent solicitation in the District of Columbia that brought the matter before the Congressional Committee of which the Honorable John Dowdy of Texas was chairman, and so led to the published hearings on House Resolution 5990 in August, 1963, and January, 1964. Congressman Dowdy is a Democrat, but I need not add that the Democratic Administration in Washington used every resource of the United States Treasury to prevent his re-election in November, 1964.

The perverts became even bolder when, on May 29, June 26, and July 31, 1965, they threw a line of pickets around the White House, the Pentagon, and the Civil Service Commission to “protest” against “discrimination.” Most of the pickets, including clergymen, [18] wore trousers; a few wore skirts. There was no medical examination to determine to what sex, if any, they belonged. Their banners claimed that — despite the discreaminashion of which they complained — there were a quarter of a million of them ensconced in the Federal government’s bureaucracy, another quarter of a million snugged down in the Armed Services, and a total of 15,000,000 of them in the United States, all, presumably, ready to vote for their heart’s desire. The first figure is probably correct; the second probably counts former members of the Armed Services, including the many direct commissions directly ordered by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; and the third is undoubtedly an exaggeration for purposes of political blackmail, since the organized perverts, who have long maintained secret slush funds to elect secret perverts to high political office, especially in California, came partly into the open in 1965 with the establishment of a “Society for Individual Rights” (more commonly designated as SIR — fawncy that!) for the avowed purpose of establishing “a homosexual voting bloc as a political factor to be reckoned with.”

“Fifteen million” is certainly an exaggeration, but there seems to be no way of determining how gross an exaggeration it is. [19] If, for example, we deducted ninety percent for enthusiasm and political purposes, would the figure of 1,500,000 be too high or too low? Perhaps the latter, but one can only guess. We certainly must not underestimate the efficiency of the perverts in their “missionary activities.” [20] Many of them carry on such activities compulsively, and many of them in comparatively high positions take risks that no sane man would take — and do so for no conceivable reason other than an urge to make converts. When, for example, the rector of the wealthiest church in a large town was finally arrested because, after repeated warnings, he persisted in hanging around the gates of an Air Force training school to accost young recruits and offer them homosexual fun, we cannot suppose that His Reverence was just lonely. He belonged to a club or circle of fellow perverts, and the only explanation is that he felt a call to spread a gospel that he found much more attractive than the New Testament, a Book which he was accustomed to mention on Sundays. When the managing editor of a daily newspaper, long known as a leader in a little clique of his kind, tried to drug and rape a young plain-clothes policeman, we can only suppose that he felt an overwhelming urge to recruit for his cult, although he, of all people, should have been aware of the risk he was taking. Most incidents of this kind are “hushed up” by political and other pressures so that they are seldom known outside the community in which they occur and provide a subject for amused comment, but occasionally, since “Liberal” censorship of our press is not yet complete, some typical episodes become more widely known. For example, the United Press in a dispatch from Philadelphia on October 21, 1965, noted that the Professor of Sociology (and head of the department) in a well-known college had overplayed his luck in his avocation of riding street cars to pick up young boys and entice them to an apartment in which, after plying them with alcohol, he could help them overcome their inhibitions. Of course, the Big Brain could have found plenty of partners — including juveniles — without the slightest risk of arrest, had he been so minded. In England, according to a Reuters dispatch from London, April 30, 1965, a slight stir was occasioned when Baron Moynihan, who had been chairman of Britain’s Liberal Party, was arrested by the police while he, in the capacity of a “male” prostitute, was accosting men on the streets of London and soliciting business at bargain rates. [21] His Lordship, we may be sure, lacked neither money (he had amassed a fortune as a stockbroker) nor safe opportunities. What sent him into the streets was the same compulsion that led to the several arrests of a far more powerful and influential individual, Walter Jenkins, who was Lyndon Johnson’s closest assistant until Abe Fortas, now Justice of the Supreme Court, failed in a strenuous attempt to keep news of the arrest entirely out of the press. [22] So far as I know, however, the really significant detail in that affair was noted only by American Opinion (July-August, 1965, p. 79), which commented:

The degenerate’s strange urge to practice perversion in public . . . should not be overlooked in forming an estimate of the creatures. Like Jenkins, many of the perverts in the highest levels of our government have been arrested several times for such offenses. They draw some of the largest salaries paid in this country, and no one can argue that they cannot afford a dollar for a cab-ride home or three dollars for a room in a cheap hotel, where, under the laws of the District of Columbia, they would be immune to arrest. Instead, some strange compulsion drives these creatures to practice their perversions in public parks and in public buildings, such as the Y.M.C.A., where they are subject to arrest when caught in the act.

Walter W. Jenkins resigned on October 14, 1964, as a special assistant to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson after it became known that he had been arrested the week before on a charge of disorderly conduct involving “indecent gestures” in a men’s restroom, where, it was eventually revealed, he had been arrested on similar charges in 1959.

Part of that compulsion, no doubt, is missionary zeal.

The assiduous “missionary activities” of the perverts would be much less successful, if the way for them had not been prepared by concerted propaganda designed to benumb the normal American’s abhorrence of perverts and to prepare adolescents for degrading debauchery. In recent years this propaganda has increasingly included an open apology for, and laudation of, homosexuality, but the most effective form is still the “panel discussion” or sham controversy carefully rigged so that the audience or readers will be left with the impression that they must be “open minded” and “tolerant.” The propagandists need not be perverts themselves, and it is likely that many or most of them are not. It is a basic axiom of subversives, formulated by Adam Weishaupt when he organized the conspiracy of the Illuminati in 1776 and reaffirmed by his successors, including Lenin, that the best way to destroy a nation is to undermine its morality. And that, of course, is what the secret and implacable enemies of our civilization have been doing for centuries.

The propaganda comes over every medium of communication. If you are one of the few who read the testimony taken by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, you will not be astonished that the radio stations operated by the Communist-infested Pacifica Foundation try to “educate” the American public on the joys of Bolshevism, addiction to marijuana, and homosexuality. [23] Given the power of homosexuals in the cinema and television, as stated in the article in Human Events from which I quoted above, one may be sure that few opportunities for subtle propaganda, including, no doubt, the devices that Vance Packard described in The Hidden Persuaders, are overlooked. In some parts of the United States, at least, that hoary old bulwark of subversion, the American Civil Liberties Union, sponsors public lectures on the delights of perversion to “promote understanding.” The mumbo-jumbo of our fashionable witch-doctors is accepted as “scientific” by those who know nothing about scientific method. For example, Dr. Albert Ellis, formerly director of the New Jersey State Hospital and now one of the brightest blossoms in the great pansy-bed called the State Department, in his best-known book, The American Sexual Tragedy, opined that all men who are not homosexuals are “fetishistic” and suffer from the delusion that women are more fun — and hence must be treated as “victims of psychiatric illness.” It is quite possible that there are people who believe Doc Ellis — he’s got a college degree, hasn’t he? More effective, however, are the many tomes of “sexology” that are not so blatant and merely take it for granted that homosexuality is a “problem” to be solved in terms of what is the most fun, while they tacitly or explicitly ignore as irrelevant such old fashioned considerations as right and wrong, good and evil.

By its cumulative effect over many years, this propaganda has prepared the way for what is, so far as I know, the most shameless attempt to annex the United States to the Sotadic Zone — a book that is almost incredible. Ten years ago, I am sure, and probably even five years ago, the most pessimistic observer of our rotting nation would have refused to believe that such a work could have been published in the United States, much less accorded glowing reviews and widely circulated. It is the work of a college professor, who, as still happens, is also a man of learning: that makes him the less excusable and the more dangerous. Using the pen-name of J.Z. Eglinton and the insidious title, Greek Love, he has written and published (New York, Oliver Layton Press, 1964) a five-hundred-page panegyric of paederasty, extolling its delights in perfervid and even eloquent terms, condemning such pervert-cliques as the Mattachine Society as timorous and reactionary, and boldly claiming that all men, being created equal, have a perfect right to seduce male children. Professor “Eglinton” believes that boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen provide the most fun, and he proves his point by recounting, in the style of a romantic novelist, the wondrous fun thus had by university professors, scout masters, graduate students, rabbis, and the like. It would be supererogatory to argue with Professor Eglinton. If you are an American and have children for whom you care, or if you are under seventy and hope that the United States will last your time, it will be obvious to you that his species and ours cannot long coexist in the same territory.

The total effects of homosexuality on our society are really incalculable. The power and activity of the filthy mass of perverts and traitors in Washington is too well-known to require comment here, but there are other effects of which we know so little quantitatively that we can do no more than speculate about their social importance. Consider, for example, the distinguished clergyman (and fervent apostle of “racial equality”) whose tastes are described by the experienced police-investigator, Hubert J. Badeaux, in his authoritative book, The Underworld of Sex (New Orleans, privately printed and distributed only to responsible subscribers to the Civic Review, 1959). This Shepherd of Souls is a pervert and has, what is extremely common among his species, a passionate predilection for Negro “husbands.” He also maintains, as do many perverts, a wife as protective covering. [24] He is thus able to enjoy not only the services of his black “lover,” but also the added titillation of watching and participating, while his legal wife serves as a whore for his Congoid “husband.” The reverend animal whose delectations are described by Mr. Badeaux is by no means unique. Some observers think it probable that similar amusements account for otherwise inexplicable enthusiasm for the “Civil Rights” movement in clerical circles, and this view is to some extent supported by the behavior of the vermin that the Communist Conspiracy sent into Selma, Alabama, last year. [25] It must be emphasized, however, that all such explanations, given the paucity of specific and authenticated data available, can be no more than speculative.

I have commented at some length on homosexuality because that is directly relevant to Mr. Seelig’s report of what he and his beloved children have suffered at the hands of organized degenerates and the vast criminal apparatus of which they are an important part. I do not mean to give the subject undue prominence and I hope that the reader will remember that we are dealing with only one of the components of a complex of subversion, the various parts of which fit into one another as do the pieces of a Chinese puzzle.

There are very significant sexual perversions that are not, strictly speaking, homosexual, but, in contemporary society, at least, combine with it to form part of a larger unit. For example, although most of us do not know it, we American taxpayers maintain a Whore Corps to entertain Communists and Cannibals whenever they come to Washington to haul another load of our money out of our Treasury. That, of course, is merely the kind of service to “underdeveloped nations” that everyone takes for granted, but what is significant is that there are real difficulties in maintaining morale in the Whore Corps. Some of the distinguished internationalists who come to promote “world law” by taking our gold do prefer women, but only when they have been suitably prepared with a buggy-whip so that their bodies are covered with the blood that oozes or gushes from welts and wounds thus inflicted. Now although it is doubtless deplorable from a One-Worlder’s point of view, it is, I think, understandable that even females who have been thoroughly emancipated from “bourgeois prejudices” and imbued with a desire for “international understanding” quail when the lash bites into their flesh. In fact, it was in consequence of such weakness that many Americans received their first notice of that form of recreation. A woman, sent by “our” State Department to entertain one of our parasites in the suite we had provided for him, lost her nerve when the whip was produced as soon as she stripped for the occasion; she ran nude through the corridors of the hotel, thus attracting some attention, although the establishment was one frequented by the creme de la creme of our governing ochlocracy. The incident was therefore reported in the press.

The press, however, has not thus far seen fit to comment on the very expensive establishments in Washington and Florida in which the more masculine members of our elite begin by selecting from a rack the jewel-handled whip that will make the female of their choice sexually attractive. Now the great-hearted humanitarians who share the “Marquis” de Sade’s passion for “human equality” and related matters are not, in that aspect of their activity, homosexuals, but Americans who have not yet attained “mental health” will regard them as perverts.

Perversion, in turn, is but one phase of the erotic mania that has been cunningly induced in our country, largely through the public schools, and is now being whetted to exasperation by the flood of pornography which, under the patronage of Earl Warren and his acolytes, is now flooding our newsstands for the instruction of those children and adolescents who do not have it forcibly administered to them in their classrooms. [26] Most of this sewage is not specifically homosexual; it is simply Sotadic, and could have as its motto the remark attributed to a notorious actress of the past generation: “Male sex? Female sex? What do I care, so long as it is sex?” In this connection, of course, one thinks of the ferret-faced Ralph Ginzberg, who edited the lush pornographic periodical called Eros and now edits a possibly more pernicious thing called Fact while he, having been sentenced to seven years in prison for his lewd publications, is out on bond and waiting for Comrade Earl to think up a pretext for turning him loose. It must be admitted that Ginzberg’s excretions, both in themselves and because they were somewhat expensive, were probably not so poisonous as the incredibly filthy novel, The Awakening of Cindy, which was spread over the newsstands as a “paper-back” for the instruction of every schoolchild who had seventy-five cents.

According to Newsweek (April 12, 1965), the author of that printed orgy of homosexuality and promiscuity was, by chance, discovered to be the Reverend Dr. Arthur Edwin Shelton, pastor of the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church of Norfolk, Virginia. Readers of that report must have wondered whether the Man of God was merely trying to spread degeneracy for a fast buck or found some deeper satisfaction in his labors for his Lord.

It would require a volume, however, to treat pornography and erotic mania in our time, and that, in turn, would be merely one phase of the universal sabotage of our culture and our nation by our enemies. To discuss that, we should have to try to trace the dark history of the Communist Conspiracy.

Whether Americans have, by blind optimism and gross negligence, permitted that crafty and subtle sabotage to go too far for the nation to be preserved is a question both difficult and painful. It will be answered by the events of the next two or three years, at most. For the purposes of this commentary, however, let us assume that the completion of the Bolshevik capture of our country is averted by divine intervention or an almost equally miraculous arousal of our long dormant instinct for self-preservation.

On that assumption, what shall we be able to do about the epidemic of homosexuality? It seems to me that four conclusions emerge from the foregoing discussion, viz.:

• We cannot prevent by legislation the practice of homosexuality. Laws are obviously ineffectual when violations of them can be discovered only by rare accidents or in very unusual circumstances.
• By simply enforcing the penalties now provided by law in most states, we can inhibit and hold to a minimum the perverts’ compulsive “missionary activities.” Furthermore, if existing laws were enforced, the control of our Federal government and deep penetration of many state governments by the combined Homosexual International and International Communist Conspiracy could be completely broken. While it would probably be impossible completely to eliminate secret perverts, they could be rendered powerless.
• We can stop the present use of the public schools as a vast machine of demoralization designed to create the population of fellahin, brutalized and stultified beings that live without hope and without self-respect, needed as livestock in the Socialist State of which our “Liberals” dream — and which they have almost created.
• All our efforts will be futile, unless we succeed in doing what no nation before us has ever done — succeed in reversing the process of demoralization and decay and in recreating a national morality and morale — standards of personal conduct and self-discipline that will be accepted without debate by all Americans, except, of course, the underworld of human refuse that seems biologically inevitable, but which healthy societies know how to quarantine and render socially and politically powerless. And we must accept these standards of conduct and self-discipline with enthusiasm and pride, recognizing them as part of the superiority that is evinced by our physical power.

Is it possible that we, men of the West, members of the only race that has had the intelligence and discipline to master many of the powers of nature, are too stupid to preserve our own civilization? Is it not fantastic that we, who alone can create such intricate mechanisms as electronic computers and automatic factories, should so demean ourselves as to grovel among savages in the filthy hole called the “United Nations”? That we, who have mastered the atom and hold in our hands the lightnings of nuclear power, should cower before the brutish hordes of Genghis Khan — cower in the insane act of handing our weapons to our eternal enemies? That we, who alone of all races can look far into the infinite universe and can now measure with precision the vast quasi-stars (quasars) that lie at the unimaginable distance of six billion light-years, should enslave ourselves to creatures whose rudimentary minds can never truly comprehend the simple principles that we learn in childhood?

Those are the questions that every man must answer for himself now.

It may be, of course, that Poland’s greatest poet, Zygmunt Krasinski, who lived on the frontiers of Europe more than a century ago, was prescient and prophetic when he composed an epitaph for the Christian West:

To the errors accumulated by their forefathers they added yet others which their forefathers knew not: hesitation and timidity. And so it came to pass that they vanished from the face of the earth, and ever since their vanishing there has been a great silence.

–Revilo P. Oliver, January, 1966, Urbana, Illinois

Notes

1 – The fake “Sedition Case” is a blot on our national history, and the details, which I do not have room to mention here, deserve careful study. The most concise and lucid account is The Sedition Case, compiled by the Lutheran Research Society and first published in 1953. The book is now out of print, and although two thousand copies were said to be in the hands of various dealers when I mentioned the book in American Opinion for September, 1964, the stocks have been exhausted and I do not know where a copy may now be obtained. A Trial on Trial, by Maximilian St. George (one of the attorneys) and Lawrence Dennis (one of the defendants), was published in Chicago in 1946, before the defendants succeeded in having the case finally adjudicated, and was therefore written with a certain circumspection. I understand that some booksellers still have copies in stock. I Testify, by Robert Edward Edmondson (another defendant), contains a personal account of the trial, but the greater part of the book is devoted to recapitulation of the author’s criticisms of the Roosevelt Administration for which the “Justice Department” sought to take vengeance. The book, which is not well organized, was published by the author in 1953 and twice reprinted, but it is now extremely rare.

2 – Since General Walker survived, the attempt at character-assassination is apt to prove expensive. Impartial juries have already returned verdicts of $3,800,000 (reduced by the courts to $2,750,000) against the Associated Press and newspapers that published the malicious fiction. Many other suits are pending. For the details see The American Mercury, September, 1965, pp. 13-15.

3 – Since all federal employees are personally responsible for acts committed ultra vires, this has the interesting consequence that the persons primarily responsible for the kidnapping would be subject to the death penalty if the Federal statutes were enforced.

4 – This is not to be construed as an indictment of all psychiatrists. There are many who are both sane and honest, including the one who, although paid by the Federal government, later testified in court that General Walker was “functioning at the superior level of intelligence” (as, of course, everybody concerned knew throughout the affair). On the “mental health” hoax, currently being promoted by the Communist Conspiracy as a weapon of terrorism and conquest, see the excellent book by Ellen McClay, Bats in the Belfry (Los Angeles, Rosewood Publishing Co., 1964; $1.75).

5 – The foregoing account is based on the summary, certified by General Walker as “a factual, accurate account,” published by the American Eagle Publishing Co., Box 1560, Dallas 21, Texas (15 cents; eight copies for $1.00), and General Walker’s article in The American Mercury, March, 1965, pp. 17-19. See also the article by Judge Robert Morris in The Greater Nebraskan, Christmas, 1962, pp. 9, 19-20. It may be coincidence that the next attempt to silence the General was made by a Communist assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, who missed because his intended victim happened to turn his head at the very instant the shot was fired. Oswald was assisted or supervised by a person who has not been officially identified, although it is widely believed in Dallas that there is evidence to show that this person was the Jakob Rubenstein, alias Jack Ruby, who silenced Oswald after the assassination of President Kennedy.

6 – For a fuller account, see Clark Mollenhoff, Despoilers of Democracy (New York, Doubleday, 1965), a book which deals with the comparatively few activities of our master-thugs that, through various accidents, have come to light. Mr. Mollenhoff concludes, with careful understatement, that “we are in real danger of losing the enlightened concern needed to save ourselves.”

7 – For example, the Arthacastra, a political treatise composed in India sometime before 300 A.D., proposes a rather drastic solution — that an army of detectives, disguised as teachers, heretical priests, gamblers, mendicants, bandits, and the like, should act as agents provocateurs and try to induce the morally weak to commit crimes, such as burglary, in which they could be easily apprehended and for which they would be speedily executed.

8 – Since Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Perfumed Garden by the Shaykh Muhammad ibn Umar an-Nafzawi has been reprinted by several vendors of pornography, the reader of that version or of the anonymous French translation should be warned not to draw conclusions ex silentio. The Arabic original contains a long and enthusiastic section on homosexuality, including the abuse of young boys, that the translators thought it best to overlook. There were, of course, thoughtful Moslems who understood the consequences of such customs. The greatest of the Arabian historians, Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddama (most easily accessible in the French translation by MacGuckin de Slane, Prolegomenes, Paris, 1863-68) held that homosexuality was one of the principal causes of the decline and fall of civilizations.

9 – We can list a number of coincidences between homosexuality and treason but we cannot show that one was a cause, or even a factor, in the other. And to be fair, we must record on the other side of the ledger a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon: it seems certain that in the Greek world there were homosexuals who were men — even men of honor. We are assured (cf. Plutarch, Vit. Pelop., 18) that in the Fourth Century the flower of the Theban army was, for an odd religious reason, composed of homosexuals. With his superior forces and superior strategy, Philip of Macedon finally won at Chaeronea, but when he did, the Sacred Regiment lay dead to a man in their unbroken ranks. That is true greatness. If the story of their customs is true, there must have been in one respect a fundamental difference between their world and our own, in which perversion and treason are almost synonymous. The Honorable John Dowdy of Texas, who is in a position to be very well informed, stated bluntly, “As far as I know, all of the security risks that have deserted the United States and gone over to the Communists have been homosexuals.” (See the hearings on House Resolution 5990, August 8, 1964, p. 17). There have been many such cases in Western nations. A typical instance in the United States is that of two “geniuses, ” Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin, who, trained at the Universities of Washington and Illinois and Stanford, where they were known to be degenerates, ensconced themselves in positions of strategic importance in “our” National Security Agency (which, for vital reasons, should be our most secret intelligence agency) while the Director of Personnel was a scabrous alien named Maurice Klein, who had falsified his own record through perjury and forgery. Mitchell and Martin high-tailed it for Mother Russia in 1960, and it is rumored that the damage done by their treason has not yet been repaired. For a comparable incident in Britain’s Military Intelligence, see Burgess and Maclean by Anthony Purdy and Douglas Sutherland (New York, Doubleday, 1963); the book makes it clear that those “intellectuals” were known perverts and traitors when they were installed in Military Intelligence by degenerates in higher governmental positions who protected them for twelve years, enabled them to escape when exposure was imminent, and remained in power in the highest offices of the government of the Britain that once was Great.

10 – That much seems certain. I cannot here examine the long-debated and intricate question of the extent to which the Templars, before they were suppressed by the Pope and the Kings of France, England, Aragon, and other countries in 1307-12, were a political conspiracy, possibly derived from, or affiliated with, the Assassins.

11 – A conveniently accessible biography of Crowley is Daniel P. Mannix’ The Beast (New York, Ballantine, 1959).

12 – For some case-histories, see Dr. James M. Reinhardt’s Sex Perversion and Sex Crimes, a monograph in the Police Science Series published for the use of police officers by Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois (1957).

13 – For example, many Americans are only now becoming aware of the only object of the agitation for “Civil Rights,” although that should have been obvious fifty years ago — or, at least, thirty years ago, when everyone knew that the agitation was led by such “do-gooders” as William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Felix Frankfurter.

14 – Quoted by Dr. Reinhardt, op cit., pp. 232 f.

15 – Some of our contemporaries, I know, deprecate or deride a “conspiratorial theory of history,” and insist that all that is wrong is that our “Liberal intellectuals,” who presumably are dominant just because they are the best we have, are ignorant and stupid. The only thing that is astonishing is that the persons who hold that pessimistic view argue and write so much to defend it, for if they are right, concern for the future of the West is as futile as concern for the future of a rotting apple.

16 – Here is a specimen, c. 1944:

Assistant Secretary of State: We mustn’t appoint X to that post; he’s a queer.

Secretary of State: A queer? Are you sure?

Assistant Secretary of State: Of course! Why, everyone knows that he has sexual relations with his wife.

17 – The name is probably an Anglicization of the Italian mattaccino, which means both ‘a jester’ (similar to a harlequin) and ‘a gay ball.’ In the argot of perverts in the United States, gay means homosexual. In Italian card-games, a matta is a ‘joker’ or ‘wild’ card, which can have any value at the option of the person who plays it. The ‘gay bars’ or ‘gay clubs’ that are found in every sizable city in our country are places of rendezvous for perverts, but many local citizens are unaware of what the term really means.

18 – A detail oddly omitted in the daily press; see the photograph on the cover of The Ladder, A Lesbian Review, October, 1965.

19 – The figures for Washington, if correct, cannot be taken as representing a national percentage, since our capital has been for decades a cesspool into which vice and crime naturally drain from all over the country. Next to Washington, the highest incidence will probably be found in the very large cities, in which large masses of human refuse are nurtured and subsidized for voting purposes, and in college towns, which are apt to contain a concentration of internationalists and other advanced thinkers.

20 – This is the term used in police circles, where, of course, the perverts’ strange compulsion has long been recognized; cf. Reinhardt, op. cit., p. 43. That is why our local police, although their work has been greatly hampered by corrupt courts, criminals in positions of political power, and nincompoops who snivel over “underprivileged” dregs of society, keep an eye on known perverts: the first concern of the police is to prevent the “homos” from corrupting other people, especially the young. It is a great pity that so many Americans try so hard to avoid learning anything about the many kinds of human garbage with which their police must deal constantly; if our citizens were not so resolutely ignorant, they would know what to do whenever a “Liberal” begins his usual spiel about “equality” and “brotherhood.”

21 – This choice flower of Britain’s new aristocracy is now defunct, but has left a worthy heir. According to the press, the present Baron Moynihan is usually to be found in what are euphemistically termed “hot spots,” where His Lordship, if sober, bangs the bongo drums while Lady Moynihan, a female of Malaysian extraction, does a belly-dance.

22 – At latest reports, dear old Walt was flourishing in plush offices in Austin, Texas, where he was believed to be supervising the training of young thugs in the “Job Corps.” He was regarded as politically the most powerful individual in Texas, since it was believed that he could (if so minded) get anything for anyone with just one telephone call to Washington, D.C.

23 – The hearings, held on January 10, 11, and 25, 1963, were published in three parts under the title “Pacifica Foundation.” More significant, perhaps, than the antics of the Comrats who dodged behind the Fifth Amendment and insolently played peek-a-boo with the Committee was the testimony of the leading director of the Foundation, one Dr. Peter Odegard, Professor of Political Science in the University of California, formerly President of Reed College in Oregon, and before that Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington, when that office was held by Morgenthau and controlled by the Bolshevik agent who called himself Harry Dexter White. Professor Odegard swore that he had no faintest suspicion that there was Communist influence in the operations of Pacifica Foundation, and if you choose to believe him, you will have before you a measure of the amount of intelligence now needed to hold a quite important office in the Federal government, the presidency of a fairly well-known college, and the headship of the Department of “Political Science” in one of the largest universities in the nation. You will then conclude that the prediction made by Lothrop Stoddard a quarter of a century ago, that our civilization would collapse for sheer lack of brains, has already been fulfilled.

24 – This is extremely common. The self-advertised homosexual, Donald W. Cory, in The Homosexual in America, says that for members of the species “marriage is looked upon as a ‘front,’ an artificial facade … the almost perfect silencer of talk which is slanderous, although truthful.” Cory demands legalization of marriage between persons of his/its sex. He is modest. Earl Warren, by applying the logic of his infamous “Black Monday” decision, could simply forbid marriage between a man and a woman on the grounds that such a marriage would make perverts unhappy and make them feel inferior. Lawrence Lipton of the University of California in Los Angeles in The Erotic Revolution (Los Angeles, Sherbourne Press, 1965) is principally interested in showing that he has mastered the vocabulary seen on the walls of latrines in the slums, in yelling that all morality is “obsolescent,” in whooping it up for universal promiscuity (with wife-swapping clubs for those who are so ultra-conservative as to marry at all), and a general return to the standards of savages. In passing, however, he does recommend a household in which two “male” homosexuals and two “Lesbians” form a foursome, so that joy may be unconfined.

25 – On the behavior of the mangey rats that descended on Selma to promote the Great Society, see Albert C. Persons’ booklet, The True Selma Story (Birmingham, Alabama, Esco Publishers, $1.00). The animals, by the way, were hired at a hundred dollars a head; see the pay-check with authenticating affidavit reproduced in The Birmingham Independent, September 15, 1965.

26 – Pornography is a business which now grosses more than two billion dollars a year in the United States (see United Press dispatch from Washington, April 18, 1965); it appears to be largely in the hands of aliens. Many of the vermin engaged in it are notorious Communists and Communist-fronters; see the articles by John Benedict in the American Mercury, January, 1960, pp. 3-15, and February, 1960, pp. 3-21. The vermin retaliated by driving the Mercury from the newsstands throughout the nation. See also the bulletin, “Communism and Pornography,” by Captain Robert A. Winston of the U.S. Navy, author of The Pentagon Case.

Read more by Revilo P. Oliver

(Click the play button above for our audio book version of Hooper’s closing arguments.)

(Click the play button above for our audio book version of Arnold’s closing arguments, part 1.)

(Click the play button above for our audio book version of Arnold’s closing arguments, part 2.)

(Click the play button above for our audio book version of Rosser’s closing arguments, part 1.)

(Click the play button above for our audio book version of Rosser’s closing arguments, part 2.)

by Bradford L. Huie

IT’S A LONG READ — but an essential one for everyone who wants to consider himself well-informed on the Leo Frank case: the closing arguments from indefatigable Fulton County Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey and his assistant Frank Hooper, and from Leo Frank’s brilliantly skilled defense attorneys Reuben Arnold and Luther Rosser.

Here we present their final arguments in full — practically the length of a sizable novel — because of their great importance (the conventional literature on the subject today hardly even excerpts them) and also because of their general unavailability. Several courageous scholars collaborated recently to scan and use  Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to put the arguments into digital form on archive.org, but not until the Mercury joined the fray have they been presented on a popular Web site in correctly formatted, easy-to-read type with OCR errors removed. Today we will present the arguments of Frank Hooper for the State of Georgia and Reuben Arnold and Luther Rosser for Leo Frank. In our next article we will have the concluding arguments of Solicitor Hugh Dorsey for the state. (For background on this case, read our introductory article, our coverage of Week One,  Week Two, Week Three and Week Four of the trial, and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.)

_____

State’s Prosecutor Frank Arthur Hooper for the State of Georgia vs. Leo M. Frank

The Final Speech to the Jury by Mr. Frank Arthur Hooper for the State of Georgia delivered on August 21, 1913 in the Fulton County Superior Court.

Mr. Frank Arthur Hooper:

Gentlemen of the Jury, the object of this trial, as well as all other trials, is the ascertainment of truth and the attainment of justice. In the beginning, I want to have it understood that we are not seeking a verdict of guilty against the defendant unless he is guilty. The burden of guilt is upon our shoulders- we confront the undertaking-of putting it upon his. We recognize that it must be done beyond a reasonable doubt, and that it must be done purely by the evidence which we have produced before you. We have cheerfully assumed this burden. We have cheerfully undertaken the task, but, there is not a single man on the prosecution who would harm a hair of the defendant’s head wrongfully. We want him given the same measure of justice that should be meted to all classes of defendants. He is entitled, though, to the same degree of law as any other prisoner. But, he is not entitled to any more because of his wealth or social position. The arm of the law is strong enough to reach to the highest pinnacle of position and drag down the guilty, and strong enough to probe into the gutter and drag up the lowest. There is not a case in the history of Georgia that has been as long and as important as this. With this importance, there arises a great degree of responsibility that rests upon your shoulders. I call your attention to the facts and law as they will be given you in the charge-your only instructions, the orders by which you will be guided in the end. There is one thing I want to say, and that is this: This man should not be convicted purely because the law is seeking a victim. The law doesn’t demand it. It demands only that you seek the truth, the absolute truth, the showing of which is required by us, the prosecution. We are not looking for blood indiscriminately. We are only seeking the slayer of Mary Phagan, and in seeking him, I try as much as possible to feel as though I were one of you twelve. Now, let’s see what was the situation on April 26 in the pencil factory. This factory was being run by Sig Montag as its boss, Frank as its superintendent, assisted by the handsome Mr. Darley and the able Mr. Schiff.

As a citizen of Atlanta, I am not proud of conditions that existed in that factory! What was its moral atmosphere? The character of it appeals wonderfully to us as we seek the truth. The defense has produced numbers of girl workers who told us of his character. They say it is good. That is only negative because he has never harmed them. They do not know him. But, while we are considering their stories, there are the stories of others-girls who left his factory because of his character and his conduct toward them. They say his character is bad. You have from the two your choice of either. Those who still are there-those who have never been harmed-and those who have left because of him and his character.

The law is a peculiar thing.

We named over our plans with the first witnesses put on the stand. We showed at first just exactly what we had in view, exposed our hand, so to speak, and even went so far as to put the stories before you in so far as they were allowed to be told. They could have gone into detail were we permitted to have allowed them. They could have told of incidents that would have been convincing. We have adopted the only legal manner in which the matter could be sifted. It’s on this principle: If fifty men were asked of the character of a certain place or man, and twenty-five or more say it is good, while as few as ten say it’s bad, what is the character of this place or person, considering, of course, that all have an equal opportunity to observe ? Would you say it was good? This question of character was one into which we were not permitted to go. But the defense, on the other hand, were allowed to let down the bars and walk in. That pencil factory was a great place for a man without a conscience. It was a great place for Frank, his handsome assistant, Mr. Darley, and the able Mr. Schiff.

We find that Frank had coupled himself up for nightly meeting with Dalton, who now has, it seems, turned respectable. My friends, no doubt, will argue that it was strange a man of such business and social position should consort with such a character. It will be a good argument, likely, but probe a little deeper and see if Dalton was not the kind of man required by a dual personality such as possessed by Frank! We all have dual personalities. There is not a man so good without evil, and no man so bad without good. But when the evil is predominant the man is bad. Vice versa with the good. A man may mingle with his varnished class by day, but when the shades of night are falling and the evil dominate, he doesn’t go and get good men who can tell of his good character. He goes for his Dalton.

We all are Dr. Jekylls and Mr. Hydes.

There are two sides to each of us. Dalton seems to have overcome this evil. He is apparently making good, as many substantial folks have told us on the witness stand. You can’t blame Dalton so much. This factory was under the control of this man [Leo] Frank. It is a house of bad reputation. You find other acts of this sort committed therein. It is unsavory. [Leo] Frank is its head. He contends he did not know Mary Phagan. Why, every day as he — walked through the floor on which his office was situated, he passed by her at her machine. You find, gentlemen, that he often stopped at her place of duty to show her this or to show her that, to help her in her work. Not only that, but he followed her out of her beaten path-following like some wild animal, telling her of his superiority, coaxing, persuading, all the while she strove to return to her work at her machine. You will notice on this diagram that every time he crossed the floor he passed this beautiful girl, looking upon her with the eye of lust. The first indication of his attitude toward his victim is in the tall, good-natured Jim Gantt, friend of Mary [Phagan]. [Leo] Frank asks Gantt: “You’re pretty thick with Mary, aren’t you?” It shows that he knew her and that he had his eye on her.

What next? He wants to get rid of Gantt. How does he go about it? You have seen that previously he was bragging on Gantt, on Gantt’s ability as a workman. But, just as soon as his eye is set upon the pretty little friend of Gantt, he sets plans to get rid of him. And, it comes up about a dollar. He says it was something about money, hoping to lead you, gentlemen, to believe that Gantt was a thief. He would not let Gantt go into the building because he was a thief. Didn’t he know that this long-legged mountaineer was coming back at him? Sure, he knew it. And, they parted company at once. Gantt was fired. What was he accomplishing by this? He was getting rid of the only man on either floor-in the whole factory-who knew Mary Phagan, and who would raise a hand to protect her. Then he sets about laying plans. And those plans! You will notice that the defense has pitched its every effort entirely on [James] Jim Conley. I don’t blame them. He was like Stone Mountain is to some highways in its vicinity. They couldn’t get by him. We could have left him out and have had an excellent chain of circumstantial evidence.

Without Jim [Conley], though, the defense couldn’t move—they couldn’t budge. You have sat and seen the biggest legal battle ever fought in a court house between skillful intellect and a witness negro. You have seen brainy eloquence pitted against the slow, incomprehensible dialect of a negro. You have seen a trained and speedy mind battling with blunt ignorance. And, what was the result? At the end of three and a half days it came. That negro was asked questions about everything Rosser could conceive. His answers were hurried from the stenographer’s notes and transcribed on typewriter. Then, they were hurled back into Conley’s face. But, it was like water poured onto a mill wheel. They received the same answers, the same story. It was because, gentlemen, the negro was telling the truth. Truth is stronger than all the brains and ingenuity that can be collected in this whole town-this state, the world.

How they did hate to give up the fight.

They lost, and with the loss went the loss of their theory in whole.

When all was through, they were forced to sit and leave Jim’s truth unscathed. How unfortunate!

All they could say was that Jim had been a big liar. That is true. In his first two stories, he lied. But, if I had any comment on Jim Conley, it would be that if they had bored me as they bored him at police headquarters, they could have muddied me even more.

Suppose Frank’s conduct in this case is shown as it has been. He is a smart man. There is no disputing that fact. He needn’t have told you all the details on the stand of the amount of work he did that day. You can tell that he is smart, clever, ingenious.

Now, Jim [Conley], he comes back that Saturday morning by order of the brilliant [Leo] Frank, his boss. There’s no denial of this, so far. Other people tell you they have seen women enter the factory with men at suspicious hours. Jim [Conley] tells you of watching for these folks. And there is this to reckon with: Providence has a way of revealing the truth at the final minute. At the eleventh hour we found two men yesterday who had been to the pencil factory at the noon Mary Phagan was murdered. They saw Jim Conley just as he tells you, sitting on the first floor, near the door where he watched for [Leo] Frank. Mrs. White saw him, although she doesn’t identify him perfectly. One thing true, she saw a negro in the position Jim tells us he was in. Now, for what purpose was he there? Waiting to do the same thing he had done before-to watch for his boss. They say he was drunk. Very well. But, did you notice how clearly he recited incidents and told the names of people he saw at the times they claim he was so drunk? We are brought up to the time of the tragedy. Jim Conley is still there. Everybody has gone, leaving him and Frank in the building. Frank knew that Mary Phagan was coming that day, and he knew the hour. On the previous afternoon little Helen Ferguson, Mary’s chum, had called for Mary’s pay, and Frank had told her that Mary Phagan should come and get her own pay, breaking a rule of the plant in doing so. He arranges with Jim to hang around and make himself convenient. Jim [Conley] takes his accustomed seat in the hallway.

Parties come and go.

Jim observes all that happens, he says nothing.

Finally, Mary Phagan arrives, beautiful, innocent, coming in her blue frock and new hat and a ribbon around her hair. Without any thought of evil or foreboding of tragedy, she tripped into the building and up the stairs, going for $1.20.

No explanation can come from Mary.

The dead have no stories to tell.

She went in a little after 12. She found Frank. He tells us that much from his own lips. He was there from 12:00 to 1:00. It’s his own statement. What a statement!

There was Mary [Phagan].

Then, there was another little girl, Monteen Stover. He [Leo Frank] never knew Monteen [Stover] was there, and he said he stayed in his office from 12:00 until after 1:00 – never left.

Monteen [Stover] waited around for five minutes. Then she left. The result?

(Here Frank Arthur Hooper sums up Leo Frank’s virtual murder confession in one sentence)

There comes for the first time from the lips of [Leo] Frank, the defendant, the admission that he might have gone to some other part of the building during this time-he didn’t remember clearly.

Jim Conley, sitting faithfully downstairs, heard footsteps going toward the metal room. Then there came the sound of other footsteps, footsteps that pursued. There was no return of the first footsteps, and the footsteps that pursued tiptoed back from the metal room.

Then Leo stamped a signal on the office floor.

I will be fair with [Leo] Frank. When he followed the child back into the metal room, he didn’t know that it would necessitate force to accomplish his purpose. I don’t believe he originally had murder in his heart.

There was a scream.

Jim Conley heard it.

Just for the sake of knowing how harrowing it was, I wish you jurymen could hear a similar scream.

It was poorly described by the negro. He said it sounded as if a laugh was broken off into a shriek. He heard it break through the stillness of the hushed building. It was uncanny, but he sat faithfully on. He was under orders. He was to come on signal. That scream was no signal.

Later, Frank would stamp on the the office floor. This negro tells you that the white man killed the little girl. But, no! Frank was in his office, busy with his wonderful financial sheet. I will show you how he could have sat at his desk and heard this negro attack the, little child who had come to draw her pay.

[Mr. Hooper turned to the diagram, showing the jury the nearness of the metal room to Frank’s office, explaining his theory that nothing could have happened on the floor without being heard or seen by Frank.]

Mr. Frank, I will give you the benefit of all you deserve. ‘When all is summed up, you were sitting only a few feet from the spot ‘where a murder was committed, and you never raised a finger. Let me show you something else. When this thing was over there were two men and a woman upstairs who had to get out the building before the body was moved. It would be dangerous to leave it lying back in the metal room, staring hideously from unseeing eyes.

Frank went upstairs and told the trio up there that if they were going, it was time for them to leave, as he was going to lock up the factory. He [Leo Frank] was in a hurry and told them so. Mrs. Arthur White, perceiving his evident hurry, hastened downstairs. When she reached the office, Frank, the man-in-a-hurry, was in his shirt sleeves, writing at his desk.

Why should I hang? What does that show?

In the first place, his appreciation of a little girl of 14. Did it hurt him to knot the rope of cord around her neck, did it hurt him as he drew it tighter and tighter around the tender throat until the dim spark of life was choked extinct?

To the contrary.

It only excited him enough to ask himself the question “Why should I hang?” There come times when we all speak our true thoughts and sentiments. That was such a time. Now, which is the more probable-that Jim heard this expression, or that he imagined the story?

Did Jim know Frank had relatives in Brooklyn? Did Jim know there was such a thing as Brooklyn? Did he know they were rich? And Jim says, with the typical soul of Africa: “What’s goin’ to become of me?”

Frank says, “I’ll take care of you, for I’ll write my mother a letter, so that she can help you.” He asks Jim if he can write, and Jim tells him a little bit. He wasn’t on his guard. He should have detected Frank’s purpose. Frank was smart, Jim was dull. Frank dictated, Jim wrote.

Now, gentlemen, I suppose most of you are southern men, men who know the characteristics of the negro. Will you please tell me what idea this negro would have had to write these notes accusing a negro, and, just the same as saying, this was done by a negro who is a fool and who cannot write? It was foolish enough for the mighty brain of Frank to put the notes beside the body. The truth of the business is, that this looks like the only time the brainy Frank ever lost his head.

Then, next comes the money. Frank pulls out his roll of bills, and says, “Jim, here’s that $200.” Jim is so overwhelmed that he doesn’t notice the amount, but puts the roll in his pocket. Frank reflects. He need not waste the $200. Jim is as deep in the mire as he is in the mud. He recovers the money.

“Let’s see, Jim, if everything comes out all right, I’ll return this money.”

He tells Jim that Jim has the goods to deliver. The body must be disposed of. That will be left to Jim. He depends on Jim’s lust for the $200 to bring him back to the factory to burn the corpse of little Mary, the victim! Nobody else was expected by him that afternoon but Jim Conley and Newt Lee.

It makes no difference to me about how long it took Frank to go to lunch, the minute he put in here and the minute he put in there, about which there has been such a squabble in the evidence. That is aside from the point.

The fact remains that at or about 3 o’clock he came back to the pencil factory to await the arrival of Jim Conley to burn that body! He was expecting Jim Conley, and he also knew that Newt Lee was coming. Aye, there was the rub! He expected them both, and it depended upon which one arrived first as to how things would go. If Jim got there first and disposed of that body, all right; but suppose Newt Lee got there first! Then was the defendant in the position of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, when he wondered which army would arrive first, and knew that upon this question depended victory or defeat. The wrong army arrived, and Napoleon went down! Newt Lee arrived at the pencil factory that afternoon, but where was Jim Conley? Yes, that’s what the defendant asked himself, “Where is Jim Conley?” Jim Conley was getting that much-needed sleep after the exciting events he had gone through with. That’s where Jim Conley was.

Then was the defendant lost.

He [Leo] sent Newt Lee away, with the last hope that Jim might yet turn up and burn the body as had been agreed upon.

“Go out and have a good time, Newt,”

that’s what the defendant told good old honest Newt Lee. He said, “It is not Newt Lee I want, it is Jim Conley. Go away, Newt, and stay until 6 o’clock. Give me two hours more.” Two hours passed, and Jim Conley did not show up. He was taking that much-needed nap.

Newt came back, and the game was up. He talked to Newt Lee about the night’s work and started home.

Now, gentlemen of the jury, I want to call your attention to a very peculiar thing: As the defendant passed out of the factory door, he met Gantt, old long-legged Gantt, who was looking for his shoes.

Witnesses testified that the defendant jumped back startled.

Why? Think why? He wasn’t afraid of Gantt. Gantt wouldn’t hurt a flee. That wasn’t the reason. He knew that Gantt knew Mary Phagan and had lived close to the family, and Frank thought that Gantt was looking for little Mary, who was missing from home and should have been back long ago. That’s why he jumped back when he saw Gantt. He had called Gantt down about “setting up” to Mary, and had fired him over an argument about who was going to pay a dollar or so. He didn’t think that Gantt stole that paltry dollar. He expected him to ask where Mary Phagan was. That, gentlemen of the jury, is why he jumped back when he saw Gantt. But Gantt spoke to the defendant. He just said, “Howdy,’ Mr. Frank,” The defendant felt relieved then. Gantt told him that he had left a pair of shoes in the factory and wanted to get them. But it won’t do to let him go in that building now, thought the defendant. Suppose he should find out? He must not go in there.

So the defendant said that he thought he had seen a nigger sweeping Gantt’s shoes out of the building. Then Gantt said he had two pairs of shoes in there, and that maybe the other pair -wasn’t swept out. This was the last hope. ‘What could he say to that? He had said that he saw the nigger sweeping out only one pair.

In a few days this murder must be out, anyway. To keep Gantt out would arouse his suspicions. And this is what went on in the defendant’s mind: “I’ll let him in, but I’ll guard him like a thief.” And he said, “Newt, go With him.” Strange to say, Gantt found both pairs of shoes, just where he said he had left them.

Gentlemen, does that look like the defendant had seen a nigger sweeping them out? Does that look like the truth? After he had let Gantt in the factory, what did he do? He called up the factory by phone, a thing that he never had done before. Why? Why did he do that thing? Gantt! Gantt! That’s why! He wanted to know if Gantt had gone, and whether he was any the wiser. He couldn’t rest until he knew this. This Banquo’s ghost of a Gantt was haunting him. But when he knew that Gantt was safely gone and everything was all right, he was in a fine humor then. He could laugh and talk He could sit down in the house with his wife and read baseball in the newspaper. He could laugh and try playfully to break up a card game. He felt fine and relieved. As glad and free as a school boy! Old long-legged Gantt was gone, and everything was all right!

Now, about Newt Lee. I don’t want to thresh out all the details in this respect. You remember the evidence about honest old Newt Lee’s finding the body. That’s all we need to know about him.

No suspicion attaches to Newt. He notified the police, and tried to notify Frank.

The police came and took the body of little Mary Phagan to the undertakers. The police called up Frank then and told him they wanted him. Detective Starnes got mixed up when he told about this on the stand, but he never forgot that when he called Frank up, Frank did not ask him what the trouble was. He didn’t ask him whether anybody had been killed at the factory. He didn’t ask them if everything at the factory was all right. They took Frank to the undertaker’s. He was nervous then. But have you seen a quiver of a muscle since he has been these weeks in the court room’? He is facing the fight now, and his nerves are set. But that morning he was as nervous as a cat.

He said, “I think it’s a girl I paid off yesterday. I’ll have to look at my books and see.” That’s what he said about the body of the girl he saw every day and talked to. He offered no consolation, or anything. He got away from there. Another thing, when they carried him to the basement and brought him back upstairs, what was going on in his mind then’? He thought he must look at that time slip. So he got the key and unlocked the clock and took out the slip. He examined it while others were looking over his shoulder, and said it was correctly punched, that it was all right, and others agreed to it. “Here’s the slip.” He said, “That’s all right. That clears you, Newt.” — What next occurred to him’? He saw he was getting into a fix, and he had better take a shot at Newt. What happens? Another slip turns up. He says he was mistaken at first. There were lapses in the punches on the slip, showing time enough unaccounted for to allow Newt to go home.

Policeman Black had suspicions. He goes to Newt Lee’s home. He unlocks the door with his keys, and looks in the house and on the trash pile, and in the bottom of the barrel, with a lot of things piled on top of it, he found a bloody shirt! How did it get there? Newt Lee accounts for his time Sunday. No suspicion attaches to Newt Lee. He is a free man. How did that bloody shirt get there? It had to be planted. Gentlemen, it was planted!

Here are the two propositions, gentlemen. If Newt Lee was to be made the scapegoat, suspicion had to be directed to him. Somebody had to plant that suspicion. He [Leo Frank] would sacrifice Newt Lee that he might live! The Bible says, “What will not a man give for his life?” He was willing to give the life of Newt Lee that his own life might be spared. He was willing to give the life of Gantt that he might live. Was not Gantt arrested a few days after? But not once at that time did he think of giving the life of Jim Conley. But somebody found Jim Conley washing a shirt to go to the trial, and there was where Jim got into trouble. But Frank didn’t try to fix it on Jim then. He waited until Newt had failed, and all else had failed, except the suspicion which rested upon himself. Then he turned on Jim Conley.

I call your attention, gentlemen of the jury, to another peculiar thing: Weeks after the murder, and after the factory had been searched, a big, bloody stick was found by shrewd Pinkerton detectives, who can find anything-even an elephant, if it gets in the way. They also found a piece of envelope. But, fortunately, they showed this to Mr. Coleman, who said that Mary had received but $1.20 and that the figure “5″ on the envelope had no business there. And so, it was rubbed out. Besides the shirt, then, we find the club and the pay envelope.

Another very peculiar thing is about this man named Mincey. Conley was asked, “Didn’t you confess to Mincey that you were the man that killed the girl?” Conley said, “No.” That question was asked, gentlemen, as a foundation upon which to introduce Mincey. Where is Mincey? He is the man who could clear it all up. He is the man about whom it appeared that the whole fight would center. If he could convince you that Jim confessed the murder to him, that would let Frank out! Yet where is Mincey?

Gentlemen, this has been a long testimony which you have had to sit through, and I do not wish to take up any more of your time than necessary. Gentlemen, the only belief required of you is the same sort of belief that you would have upon the street, at your places of business, or in your homes, and on this belief you are to act.

Simply use your common sense in the jury box.

I thank you.

_____

MR. ARNOLD, FOR THE PRISONER.

Mr. Arnold:

Gentlemen of the Jury: We are all to be congratulated that this case is drawing to a close. We have all suffered here from trying a long and complicated case at the heated term of the year. It has been a case that has taken so much effort and so much concentration and so much time, and the quarters here are so poor, that it has been particularly hard on you members of the jury who are practically in custody while the case is going on. I know it’s hard on a jury, to be kept confined this way, but it is necessary that they be segregated and set apart where they will get no impression at home nor on the street. The members of the jury are in a sense set apart on a mountain, where, far removed from the. passion and heat of the plain, calmness roles them and they can judge a case on its merits.

My friend Hooper said a funny thing here a while ago. I don’t think he meant what he said, however. Mr. Hooper said that the men in the jury box are not different from the men on the street. Your Honor, I’m learning something every day, and I certainly learned something today, if that’s true.

Mr. Hooper:

Mr. Arnold evidently mistakes my meaning, which I thought I made clear. I stated that the men in the jury box were like they would be on the street in the fact that in making up their minds about the guilt or innocence of the accused they must use the same common sense that they would if they were not part of the court.

Mr. Arnold:

[Mr. Arnold next described the horrible crime that had been committed that afternoon or night in the National Pencil Company’s dark basement He dwelt on the effect of the crime upon the people of Atlanta and of how high feeling ran and still runs, and of the omnipresent desire for the death of the man who committed the crime.]

There are fellows like that street car man, Kendley, the one who vilified this defendant here and cried for him to be lynched, and shouted that he was guilty until he made himself a nuisance on the cars he ran. Why, I can hardly realize that a man holding a position as responsible as that of a motorman and a man with certain police powers and the discretion necessary to guide a car through the crowded city streets would give way to passion and prejudice like that. It was a type of man like Kendley who said he did not know for sure whether those negroes hanged in Decatur for the shooting of the street car men were guilty, but he was glad they were hung, as some negroes ought to be hanged for the crime. He’s the same sort of a man who believes that there ought to be a hanging because that innocent little girl was murdered, and who would like to see this Jew here hang because somebody ought to hang for it. I’ll tell you right now, if Frank hadn’t been a Jew there would never have been any prosecution against him.

I’m asking my own people to turn him loose, asking them to do justice to a Jew, and I’m not a Jew, but I would rather die before doing injustice to a Jew. This case has just been built up by degrees; they have a monstrous perjurer here in the form of this Jim Conley against Frank. You know what sort of a man Conley is, and you know that up to the time the murder was committed no one ever heard a word against Frank. Villainy like this charged to him does not crop out in a day. There are long mutterings of it for years before. There are only a few who have ever said anything against Frank. I want to call your attention later to the class of their witnesses and the class of ours.

A few floaters around the factory, out of the hundreds who have worked there in the plant three or four years, have been induced to come up here and swear that Frank has not a good character, but the decent employees down there have sworn to his good character. Look at the jail birds they brought up here, the very dregs of humanity, men and women who have disgraced themselves and who now have come and tried to swear away the life of an innocent man. I know that you members of the jury are impartial. That’s the only reason why you are here, and I’m going to strip the state’s case bare for you, if I have the strength to last to do it. They have got to show Frank guilty of one thing before you can convict him; they’ve got to show that he is guilty of the murder, no matter what else they show about him. You are trying him solely for the murder, and there must be no chance that anyone else could just as likely be guilty.

If the jury sees that there is just as good a chance that Conley can be guilty, then they must turn Frank loose. Now, you can see how in this case the detectives were put to it to lay the crime on somebody. First, it was Lee, and then it was Gantt, and various people came in and declared they had seen the girl alive late Saturday night and at other times, and no one knew what to do. Well, suspicion turned away from Gantt, and in a little while it turned away from Lee.

Now, I don’t believe that Lee is guilty of the crime, but I do believe that he knows a lot more about the crime than he told. He knows about those letters and he found that body a lot sooner than he said he did. Oh, well, the whole case is a mystery, a deep mystery, but there is one thing pretty plain, and that is that whoever wrote those notes committed the crime. Those notes certainly had some connection with the murder, and whoever wrote those notes committed the crime. Well, they put Newt Lee through the third degree and the fourth degree, and maybe a few others. That’s the way, you know, they got this affidavit from the poor negro woman, Minola McKnight.

Why, just the other day the supreme court handed down a decision in which it referred to the third degree methods of the police and detectives in words that burned. Well, they used those methods with Jim Conley. My friend, Hooper, said nothing held Conley to the witness chair here but the truth, but I tell you that the fear of a broken neck held him there. I think this decision about the third degree was handed down with Conley ‘s case in mind. I’m going to show this Conley business up before I get through. I’m going to show that this entire case is the greatest frameup in the history of the state.

My friend Hooper remarked something about circumstantial evidence, and how powerful it frequently was. He forgot to say that the circumstances, in every case, must invariably be proved by witnesses. History contains a long record of circumstantial evidence, and I once had a book on the subject which dwelt on such cases, most all of which sickens the man who reads them. Horrible mistakes have been made by circumstantial evidence–more so than by any other kind.

[1 Here Mr. Arnold cited the Durant case in San Francisco, the Hampton case in England, and the Dreyfus case in France as instances of mistakes of circumstantial evidence. In the Dreyfus case he declared it was purely persecution of the Jew. The hideousness of the murder itself was not as savage, he asserted, as the feeling to convict this man. But the savagery and venom is there just the same, and it is a case very much on the order of Dreyfus.]

Hooper says, “Suppose Frank didn’t kill the girl, and Jim Conley did, wasn’t it Frank’s duty to protect her.” He was taking the position that if Jim went back there and killed her, Frank could not help but know about the murder. Which position, I think, is quite absurd. Take this hypothesis, then, of Mr. Hooper’s. If Jim saw the girl go up and went back and killed her, would he have taken the body down the elevator at that time? Wouldn’t he have waited until Frank and White and Denham, and Mrs. White and all others were out of the building? I think so. But there’s not a possibility of the girl having been killed on the second floor. Hooper smells a plot, and says Frank has his eye on the little girl who was killed.

The crime isn’t an act of a civilized man–it’s the crime of a cannibal, a man-eater. Hooper is hard-pressed and wants to get up a plot–he sees he has to get up something. He forms his plot from Jim Conley’s story. They say that on Friday, Frank knew he was going to make an attack of some sort on Mary Phagan. The plot thickens. Of all the wild things I have ever heard, that is the wildest. It is ridiculous. Mary Phagan worked in the pencil factory for months, and all the evidence they have produced that Frank ever associated with her–ever knew her–is the story of weasley little Willie Turner, who can’t even describe the little girl who was killed. A little further on in his story, Jim is beginning the plot. They used him to corroborate everything as they advised. Jim is laying the foundation for the plot. What is it–this plot? Only that on Friday Frank was planning to commit some kind of assault upon Mary Phagan.

Jim was their tool. Even Scott swears that when he told Jim that Jim’s story didn’t fit, Jim very obligingly adapted it to suit his defense. He was scrupulous about things like that. He was quite considerate. Certainly. He had his own neck to save. Jim undertook to show that Frank had an engagement with some woman at the pencil factory that Saturday morning. There is no pretense that another woman is mixed up in the case. No one would argue that he planned to meet and assault this innocent little girl who was killed. Who but God would know whether she was coming for her pay that Friday afternoon or the next Saturday? Are we stark idiots? Can’t we divine some things?

They’ve got a girl named Ferguson, who says she went for Mary Phagan’s pay on the Friday before she was killed, and that Frank wouldn’t give it to her. It is the wildest theory on earth, and it fits nothing. It is a strained conspiracy. Frank, to show you I am correct, had nothing whatever to do with paying off on Friday. Schiff did it all. And little Magnolia Kennedy, Helen Ferguson’s best friend, says she was with Helen when Helen went to draw her pay, and that Helen never said a word about Mary’s envelope. There’s your conspiracy, with Jim Conley’s story as its foundation. It’s too thin. It ‘s preposterous.

Then my friend Hooper says Frank discharged Gantt because he saw Gantt talking to Mary Phagan. If you convict men on such distorted evidence as this, why you’d be hanging men perpetually. Gantt, in the first place, doesn’t come into this case in any good light. It is ridiculously absurd to bring his discharge into this plot of the defense. Why, even Grace Hicks, who worked with Mary Phagan, and who is a sister-in-law of Boots Rogers, says that Frank did not know the little girl. Hooper also says that bad things are going on in the pencil factory, and that it is natural for men to cast about for girls in such environments. We are not trying this case on whether you or I or Frank had been perfect in the past. This is a case of murder. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

I say this much, and that is that there has been as little evidence of such conditions in this plant as any other of its kind you can find in the city. They have produced some, of course, but it is an easy matter to locate some ten or twelve disgruntled ex-employees who are vengeful enough to swear against their former superintendent, even though they don’t know him except by sight. I want to ask this much : Could Frank have remained at the head of this concern if he had been as loose morally as the state has striven to show? If he had carried on with the girls of the place as my friend alleged, wouldn’t the entire working force have been demoralized, ruined? He may have looked into this dressing room, as the little Jackson girl says, but, if he did, it was done to see that the girls weren’t loitering. There were no lavatories, no toilets, no baths in these dressing rooms. The girls only changed their top garments. He wouldn’t have seen much if he had peered into the place. You can go to Piedmont park any day and see girls and women with a whole lot less on their persons. And to the shows any night you can see the actresses with almost nothing on.

Everything brought against Frank was some act he did openly and in broad daylight, and an act against which no kick was made. The trouble with Hooper is that he sees a bear in every bush. He sees a plot in this because Frank told Jim Conley to come back Saturday morning. The office that day was filled with persons throughout the day. How could he know when Mary Phagan was coming or how many persons would be in the place when she arrived?

This crime is the hideous act of a negro who would ravish a ten-year-old girl the same as he would ravish a woman of years. It isn’t a white man’s crime. It’s the crime of a beast–a low, savage beast!

Now, back to the case. There is an explorer in the pencil factory by the name of Barrett–I call him Christopher Columbus Barrett purely for his penchant for finding things. Mr. Barrett discovered the blood spots in the place where Chief Beavers, Chief Lanford and Mr. Black and Mr. Starnes had searched on the Sunday of the discovery. They found nothing of the sort. Barrett discovered the stains after he had proclaimed to the whole second floor that he was going to get the $4,000 reward if Mr. Frank was convicted. Now, you talk about plants! If this doesn’t look mighty funny that a man expecting a reward would find blood spots in a place that has been scoured by detectives, I don’t know what does. Four chips of this flooring were chiseled from this flooring where these spots were found. The floor was an inch deep in dirt and grease. Victims of accidents had passed by the spot with bleeding fingers and hands. If a drop of blood had ever fallen there, a chemist could find it four years later. Their contention is that all the big spots were undiluted blood. Yet, let’s see how much blood Dr. Claude Smith found on the chips. Probably five corpuscles, that’s all, and that’s what he testified here at the trial. My recollection is that one single drop of blood contains 8,000 corpuscles. And, he found these corpuscles on only one chip. I say that half of the blood had been on the floor two or three years.

The stain on all chips but one were not blood. Dorsey’s own doctors have put him where he can’t wriggle–his own evidence hampers him! They found blood spots on a certain spot and then had Jim adapt his story accordingly. They had him put the finding of the body near the blood spots, and had him drop it right where the spots were found. It stands to reason that if a girl had been wounded on the lathing machine, there would have been blood in the vicinity of the machine. Yet, there was no blood in that place, and neither was there any where the body was said to have been found by Conley. The case doesn’t fit. It’s flimsy. And, this white machine oil that they’ve raised such a rumpus over. It was put on the floor as a cheap, common plant to make it appear as though someone had put it there in an effort to hide the blood spots. The two spots of blood and the strands of hair are the only evidence that the prosecution has that the girl was killed on the second floor.

Now, about these strands of hair. Barrett, the explorer, says he found four or five strands on the lathing machine. I don’t know whether he did or not. They’ve never been produced. I’ve never seen them. But, it’s probable, for just beyond the lathing machine, right in the path of a draft that blows in from the window, is a gas jet used by the girls in curling and primping their hair. It’s very probable that strands of hair have been blown from this jet to the lathing machine.

The detectives say that Frank is a crafty, cunning criminal, when deep down in their heart of hearts they know good and well that their case is built against him purely because he was honest enough to admit having seen her that day. Had he been a criminal, he never would have told about seeing her and would have replaced her envelope in the desk, saying she had never called for her pay.

I believe that a majority of women are good. The state jumped on poor Daisy Hopkins. I don’t contend, now, mind you, that she is a paragon of virtue. But there are men who were put up by the state who are no better than she. For instance, this Dalton, who says openly that he went into the basement with Daisy. I don’t believe he ever did, but, in such a case, he slipped in. There are some fallen women who can tell the truth. They have characteristics like all other types. We put her on the stand to prove Dalton a liar, and she did it.

Now, gentlemen, don’t you think the prosecution is hard pressed when they put up such a character as Dalton? They say he has reformed. A man with thievery in his soul never reforms. Drunkards do, and men with bad habits, but thieves! No. Would you convict a man like Frank on the word of a perjurer like Dalton?

Now, I’m coming back to Jim Conley. The whole case centers around him. Mr. Hooper argues well on that part. At the outset of the case, the suspicion pointed to Frank merely because he was the only man in the building. It never cropped out for weeks that anyone else was on the first floor. The detectives put their efforts on Frank because he admitted having seen the girl. They have let their zeal run away with them in this case, and it is tragic. They are proud whenever they get a prisoner who will tell something. The humbler the victim the worse is the case. Such evidence comes with the stamp of untruth on its face.

Jim Conley was telling his story to save his neck, and the detectives were happy listeners. If there is one thing for which a negro is capable it is for telling a story in detail. It is the same with children. Both have vivid imaginations. And a negro is also the best mimic in the world. He can imitate anybody. Jim Conley, as he lay in his cell and read the papers and talked with the detectives, conjured up his wonderful story, and laid the crime on Frank, because the detectives had laid it there and were helping him do the same.

Now, Brother Hooper waves the bloody shirt in our face. It was found, Monday or Tuesday, in Newt Lee’s house, while Detectives Black and Scott were giving Cain to poor old man Newt Lee. I don’t doubt for a minute that they knew it was out there when they started out after it. I can’t say they planted it, but it does look suspicious. Don’t ask us about a planted shirt. Ask Scott and Black.

The first thing that points to Conley ‘s guilt is his original denial that he could write. Why did he deny it? Why? I don’t suppose much was thought of it when Jim said he couldn’t write, because there are plenty of negroes who are in the same fix. But later, when they found he could, and found that his script compared perfectly with the murder notes, they went right on accusing Frank. Not in criminal annals was there a better chance to lay at the door of another man a crime than Jim Conley had. You see, there is a reason to all things. The detective department had many reasons to push the case against Frank. He was a man of position and culture. They were afraid that someone, unless they pushed the case to the jumping off place, would accuse them of trying to shield him. They are afraid of public and sentiment, and do not want to combat it, so, in such cases, they invariably follow the line of least resistance.

[Reading Conley’s statement, Mr. Arnold pointed out the use of words, which he declared no negro would naturally have used.] These were long words with many syllables in them. They said that Conley used so much detail in his statements that he could not have been lying! [He then read parts of statements which Conley had repudiated as willful lies and pointed out the wealth of detail with which they were filled.] And yet they say he couldn’t fabricate so much detail! Oh, he is smart! [He then read the statement of May 24, in which Conley admitted writing the notes. In this he shows three different times at which Conley stated he wrote the notes, these being early in the morning, at 12:04 and at 3 p.m.] The statements were not genuinely Conley’s. Take the word “negro.” The first word that a nigger learns to spell correctly is negro, and he always takes particular pains to spell it n-e-g-r-o. He knows how to spell it. Listen to the statement. He says that at first he spelled the word “negros,” but that Frank did not want the “s” on it and told him to rub it out, which he did. Then he says that he wrote the word over.

Look at the notes. He was treed about those notes, and he had to tell a lie and put upon someone the burden of instructing him to write them. The first statement about them was a blunt lie–a lie in its incipiency. He said he wrote the notes on Friday. This was untrue, and unreasonable and he saw it. Frank could not have known anything of an intended murder on Friday from any viewpoint you might take, and therefore he could not have made Conley write them on Friday.

Ah, gentlemen of the jury, I tell you these people had a great find when they got this admission from Conley ! If Conley had stayed over there in the Tower with Uncle Wheeler Mangum he would have told the truth long ago. There’s where he should have stayed, with Wheeler Mangum. My good friend, Dorsey, is all right. I like him. But he should not have walked hand in glove with the detectives. There’s where he went wrong. My good old friend, Charlie Hill would not have done that. He would have let the nigger stay in the jail with Uncle Wheeler.

I like Dorsey. He simply made a mistake by joining in the hunt, in becoming a part of the chase. The solicitor should be little short of as fair as the judge himself. But he’s young and lacks the experience. He will probably know better in the future. Dorsey did this : He went to the judge and got the nigger moved from the jail to the police station. The judge simply said, “Whatever you say is all right.”

Now, I’m going to show you how John Black got the statement of Conley changed. I am going to give you a demonstration. I have learned some things in this case about getting evidence . They say that Frank cut Conley loose and he decided to tell the truth. Conley is a wretch with a long criminal record. Gentlemen, how can they expect what he says to be believed against the statement of Leo M. Frank? They say Conley can’t lie about detail. Here are four pages, all of which he himself admits are lies. They are about every saloon on Peters Street, saloons to which he went, his shooting craps, his buying beer and all the ways in which he spent a morning. There is detail enough, and he admits that they are lies. Now, in his third statement, that of May 28, he changes the time of writing the letters from Friday to Saturday. Here are two pages of what he said, all of which he afterwards said were lies. He says that he made the statement that he wrote the notes on Friday in order to divert suspicion from his being connected with the murder which happened on Saturday. He also says that this is his final and true statement. God only knows how many statements he will make. He said he made the statement voluntarily and truthfully without promise of reward, and that he is telling the truth and the whole truth. He said in his statement that he never went to the building on Saturday. Yet we know that he was lurking in the building all the morning on the day of the murder. We know that he watched every girl that walked into that building so closely that he could tell you the spots on their dresses. We know that he was drunk, or had enough liquor in him to fire his blood. I know why he wouldn’t admit being in that building on Saturday. He had guilt on his soul, and he didn’t want it to be known that he was here on Saturday.

That’s why when they pinned him down, what did he do? He says that he was watching for Frank. My God, wasn’t he a watchman! He said that he heard Frank and Mary Phagan walking upstairs, and that he heard Mary Phagan scream, and that immediately after hearing the scream he let Monteen Stover into the building. Why, they even have him saying that he watched for Frank, when another concern was using the very floor space in which Frank’s office was located, and you know they wouldn’t submit to anything like that.

Look again! He says that Mr. Frank said, “Jim, can you write?” What a lie ! He admitted that he had been writing for Frank for two years. It’s awful to have to argue about a thing like this, gentlemen ! You will remember Hooper said, “How foolish of Conley to write these notes ! ” How much more foolish, I say, of Frank to do it!

I don’t think that Newt killed the girl, but I believe he discovered the body some time before he notified the police. Newt’s a good nigger. Scott said that it took Conley six minutes to write a part of one note. Conley said that he wrote the notes three times.

They say that nigger couldn’t lie. Gentlemen, if there is any one thing that nigger can do, it is to lie. As my good old friend, Charlie Hill, would say, “Put him in a hopper and hell drip lye!”

He was trying to prove an alibi for himself when he said that he was not in the factory on Saturday and told all the things that he did elsewhere on that day. But we know that the wretch was lurking in the factory all of Saturday morning. Further, he swore that while he was in Frank’s office he heard someone approaching, and Mr. Frank cried out, “Gee! Here come Corinthia Hall and Emma Clarke!” and that Frank shut him up in a wardrobe until they left. According to Conley, they came into the factory between 12 and 1 o’clock, when as a matter of fact, we know that they came between 11 and 12.

And as for his being able to fabricate the details of his statement–why, he knew every inch of that building from top to bottom! Hadn’t he been sweeping and cleaning it for a long time? With this knowledge of the building, he naturally had no trouble in his pantomime after he had formed his story. The miserable wretch has Frank hiding him in the wardrobe when Emma Clarke came in after the murder, when it has been proved that she came there and left before Mary Phagan ever entered the building on that day. They saw where they were wrong in that statement, and they made Conley change it on the stand. They made him say, “I thought it was them.” They knew that that story wouldn’t fit.

Do you remember, how eagerly Conley took the papers from the girls at the factory? And do you remember how for four or five days the papers were full of the fact that Frank’s home was in Brooklyn, and that his relatives were reported to be wealthy? Conley didn’t have to go far to get material for that statement he put in Frank’s mouth. It so happened, though, that Frank really did not have rich relatives in Brooklyn. His mother testified that his father was in ill health, and had but moderate means and that his sister worked in New York for her living.

Gentlemen, am I living or dreaming, that I have to argue such points as these? This is what you’ve got to do: You’ve got to swallow every word that Conley has said–feathers and all, or you’ve got to believe none of it. How are you going to pick out of such a pack of lies as these what you will believe and what you will not? Yet, this is what the prosecution has based the case upon. If this fails, all fails. And do you remember about the watch, where Conley said that Frank asked him, “Why do you want to buy a watch for your wife? My big, fat wife wanted me to buy her an automobile, but I wouldn’t do it!” Do you believe that, gentlemen of the jury? I tell you that they have mistreated this poor woman terribly. They have insinuated that she would not come to the tower to see Frank–had deserted him. When we know that she stayed away from the jail at Frank’s own request because he did not want to submit her to the humiliation of seeing him locked up and to the vulgar gaze of the morbid and to the cameras of the newspaper men. The most awful thing in the whole case is the way this family has been mistreated!

The way they invaded Frank’s home and manipulated his servants. I deny that the people who did this are representative of the 175,000 people of Fulton county. We are a fair people, and we are a chivalrous people. Such acts as these are not in our natures.

Conley next changes the time of the writing of the notes to Saturday, but denies knowledge of the murder. That, of course, did not satisfy these gentlemen, and they went back to him. They knew he was dodging incrimination. So they had him to change the statement again. Scott and other detectives spent six hours at the time with Conley on occasions and used profanity and worried him to get a confession. Hooper thinks that we have to break down Conley’s testimony on the stand, but there is no such ruling. You can’t tell when to believe him, he has lied so much. Scott says the detectives went over the testimony with Dorsey. There is where my friend got into it. They grilled Conley for six hours, trying to impress on him the fact that Frank would not have written the notes on Friday. They wanted another statement. He insisted that he had no other statement to make, but he did change the time of the writing of the notes from Friday to Saturday. This shows, gentlemen, as clearly as anything can show, how they got Conley ‘s statements.

In the statement of May 29, they had nothing from Jim Conley about his knowledge of the killing of the little girl, and the negro merely said that Frank had told him something about the girl having received a fall and about his helping Frank to hide the body. Oh, Conley, we are going to have you tell enough to have you convict Frank and yet keep yourself clear. That’s a smart negro, that Conley. And you notice how the state bragged on him because he stood up under the cross-examination of Colonel Rosser. Well, that negro’s been well versed in law. Scott and Black and Starnes drilled him; they gave him the broad hints.

We came here to go to trial, and knew nothing of the negro’s claim to seeing the cord around the little girl’s neck, or of his claim of seeing Lemmie Quinn go into the factory, or of a score of other things. Yet, Conley was then telling the truth, he said, and he had thrown Frank aside. Oh, he was no longer shielding Frank, and yet he didn’t tell it all when he said he was telling the whole truth. Well, Conley had a revelation, you know. My friend Dorsey visited with him seven times. And my friend, Jim Starnes, and my Irish friend, Patrick Campbell, they visited him, and on each visit Conley saw new light. Well, I guess they showed him things and other things. Does Jim tell a thing because it’s the truth, gentlemen of the jury, or because it fits into something that another witness has told?

Scott says they told him thing that fitted. And Conley changed things every time he had a visit from Dorsey and the detectives. Are you going to hang a man on that?

Gentlemen, it’s foolish for me to have to argue such a thing. The man that wrote those murder notes is the man who killed that girl. Prove that man was there and that he wrote the notes and you know who killed the girl. Well, Conley acknowledges he wrote the notes and witnesses have proved he was there and he admits that, too. That negro was in the building near the elevator shaft; it took but two steps for him to grab that little girl’s mesh bag. She probably held on to it and struggled with him. A moment later he had struck her in the eye and she had fallen. It is the work of a moment for Conley to throw her down the elevator shaft. Isn’t it more probable that the story I have outlined is true than the one that Conley tells on Frank?

Suppose Conley were now under indictment and Frank out, how long would such a story against Frank stand the pressure? In the statement of May 29 there are any number of things that are not told of which later were told on the stand. In the May 29 statement Conley never told of seeing Mary Phagan enter; he never told of seeing Monteen Stover enter, nor of seeing Lemmie Quinn enter; now he tells of having seen all of them enter. Don’t you see how they just made it to fit witnesses and what the witnesses would swear? It was, “Here, Conley, swear that Quinn came up, swear that the dead girl came up, and swear that Miss Stover came up ; they all did, and it’s true, swear to it !” And Conley would say, “All right, boss, Ah reckon they did.” And it was “Conley, how did you fail to hear that girl go into the metal room? We know she went there, because by our blood and hair we have proved she was killed there,” and the poor negro thought a minute, and then he said, “Yes, boss, I heard her go in.” The state’s representatives had put it into the negro’s head to swear he heard Frank go in with her, and that he heard Frank come tiptoeing out later, and that by that method they made Conley swear that Frank was a moral pervert.

Now, I don’t know that they told Conley to swear to this and to swear to that, but they made the suggestions, and Conley knew whom he had to please. He knew that when he pleased the detectives that the rope knot around his neck grew looser. In the same way they made Conley swear about Dalton, and in the same way about Daisy Hopkins. They didn’t ask him about the mesh bag. They forgot that until Conley got on the stand. That mesh bag and that pay envelope furnish the true motive for this crime, too, and if the girl was ravished, Conley did it after he had robbed her and thrown her body into the basement.

Well, they got Conley on the stand, and my friend Dorsey here asked Conley about the mesh bag, and he said, yes, Frank had put it in his safe. That was the crowning lie of all! Well, they’ve gone on this way, adding one thing and another, thing. They wouldn’t let Conley out of jail; they had their own reasons for that, and yet I never heard that old man over there (pointing to the sheriff) called dishonest. He runs his jail in a way to protect the innocent and not to convict them in this jail.

Gentlemen, right here a little girl was murdered, and it’s a terrible crime. The Phagan tragedy, the crime that stirred Atlanta as none other ever did. We have already got in court the man who wrote those notes, and the man who by his own confession was there; the man who robbed her, and, gentlemen, why go further in seeking the murderer than the black brute who sat there by the elevator shaft?

The man who sat by that elevator shaft is the man who committed the crime. He was full of passion and lust ; he had drunk of mean whiskey, and he wanted money at first to buy more whiskey. [Mr. Arnold asked the sheriff to unwrap a chart which had previously been brought into court. It proved to be a chronological chart of Frank’s alleged movements on Saturday, April 26, the day of the crime, and Mr. Arnold announced to the jury that he would prove by the chart that it was a physical impossibility for Frank to have committed the crime.]

Every word on that chart is taken from the evidence, and it will show you that Frank did not have time to commit the crime charged to him. The state has wriggled a lot in this affair; they put up little George Epps, and he swore that he and Mary Phagan got to town about seven after twelve, and then they used other witnesses, and my friend Dorsey tried to boot the Epps boy’s evidence aside as though it were nothing. The two street car men, Hollis and Mathews, say that Mary Phagan got to Forsyth and Marietta at five or six minutes after twelve, and they stuck to it, despite every attempt to bulldoze them, and then Mathews, who rode on the car to Whitehall and Mitchell, says that Mary Phagan rode around with him to Broad and Hunter streets before she got off.

Well, the state put up McCoy, the man who never got his watch out of soak until about the time he was called as a witness, and they had him swear that he looked at his watch at Walton and Forsyth (and he never had any watch), and it was 12 o’clock exactly, and then he walked down the street and saw Mary Phagan on her way to the factory. Now, I don’t believe McCoy ever saw Mary Phagan. Epps may have seen her, but the State apparently calls him a liar, when they introduce other testimony to show a change of time to what he swore to. It’s certain those two street car men who knew the girl, saw her, but the state comes in with the watchless McCoy and Kendley, the Jew-hater, and try to advance new theories about the time and different ones from what their own witness had sworn to. Well, we have enough to prove the time, all right; we have the street car schedule, the statement of Hollis and Mathews and of George Epps, the state’s own witness.

The next thing is, how long did it take Conley to go through with what he claims happened from the time he went into Frank’s office and was told to get the body until he left the factory. According to Conley’s own statement, he started at four minutes to 1 o’clock and got through at 1:30 o’clock, making 34 minutes in all Harlee Branch says that he was there when the detectives made Conley go through with what he claimed took place, and that he started then at 12 :17, and by Mr. Branch’s figures, it took Conley 50 minutes to complete the motions. Well, the state has attacked nearly everybody we have brought into this case, but they didn’t attack Dr. William Owen, and he showed by his experiments that Conley could not have gone through those motions in 34 minutes. Jim Conley declared that he started at 4 minutes to 1 o’clock to get the body, and that he and Frank left at 1 :30. If we ever pinned the negro down to anything, we did to that, and we have shown that he could not have done all that in 34 minutes.

Away with your filth and your dirty, shameful evidence of perversion; your low street gossip, and come back to the time–the time-element in the case. Now, I don’t believe the little Stover girl ever went into the inner office. She was a sweet, innocent, timid little girl, and she just peeped into the office from the outer one, and if Frank was in there, the safe door hid him from her view, or if he was not there, he might have stepped out for just a moment. Oh, my friend, Dorsey, he stops clocks and he changes schedules, and he even changes a man’s whole physical make-up, and he’s almost changed the course of time in an effort to get Frank convicted. Oh, I hate to think of little Mary Phagan in this. I hate to think that such a sweet, pure, good little girl as she was, with never a breath of anything wrong whispered against her, should have her memory polluted with such rotten evidence against an innocent man.

Well, Mary Phagan entered the factory at approximately 12 minutes after 12, and did you ever stop to think that it was Frank who told them that the girl entered the office when she entered it? If he had killed her he would have just slipped her pay envelope back in the safe and declared that he never saw her that day at all, and then no one could have ever explained how she got into that basement. But Frank couldn’t know that there was hatred enough left in this country against his race to bring such a hideous charge against him.

Well, the little girl entered, and she got her pay and asked about the metal and then she left, but, there was a black spider waiting down there near the elevator shaft, a great passionate, lustful animal, full of mean whiskey and wanting money with which to buy more whiskey. He was as full of vile lust as he was of the passion for more whiskey, and the negro (and there are a thousand of them in Atlanta who would assault a white woman if they had the chance and knew they wouldn’t get caught) robbed her and struck her and threw her body down the shaft, and later he carried it back, and maybe, if she was alive, when he came back, he committed a worse crime, and then he put the cord around her neck and left the body there.

Do you suppose Frank would have gone out at 1 :20 o’clock and left that body in the basement and those two men, White and Denham, at work upstairs? Do you suppose an intelligent man like Frank would have risked running that elevator, like Conley says he did, with the rest of the machinery of the factory shut off and nothing to prevent those men up there hearing him? Well, Frank says he left the factory at 1 o’clock, and Conley says he left there at 1 :30. Now, there’s a little girl, who tried the week before to get a job as stenographer in Frank’s office, who was standing at Whitehall and Alabama streets, and saw Frank at ten minutes after 1. Did she lie? Well, Dorsey didn’t try to show it, and according to Dorsey, everybody lied except Conley and Dalton and Albert McKnight. This little girl says she knows it was Frank, because Professor Briscoe had introduced her to him the week before, and she knows the time of day because she had looked at a clock, as she had an engagement to meet another little girl. That stamps your Conley story a lie blacker than hell!

Then, Mrs. Levy, she’s a Jew, but she’s telling the truth; she was looking for her son to come home, and she saw Frank get off the car at his home corner, and she looked at her clock and saw it was 1 :20. Then, Mrs. Selig and Mr. Selig swore on the stand that they knew he came in at 1 :20. Oh, of course, Dorsey says they are Frank’s parents and wretched liars when they say they saw him come in at 1 :20. There’s no one in this case that can tell the truth but Conley, Dalton and Albert McKnight. They are the lowest dregs and jail-birds, and all that, but they are the only ones who know how to tell the truth! Well, now Albert says he was there at the Selig home when Frank came in; of course he is lying, for his wife and the Seligs prove that, but he’s the state’s witness and he says Frank got there at 1 :30, and thus he brands Conley’s story about Frank’s leaving the factory at 1:30 a lie. Well, along the same lines, Albert says Frank didn’t eat and that he was nervous, and Albert says he learned all this by looking into a mirror in the dining room, and seeing Frank’s reflection. Then Albert caps the climax to his series of lies by having Frank board the car for town at Pulliam street and Glenn.

Now as to the affidavit signed by Minola McKnight, the cook for Mr. and Mrs. Emil Selig. How would you feel, gentlemen of the jury, if your cook, who had done no wrong and for whom no warrant had been issued, and from whom the solicitor had already got a statement, was to be locked up? Well, they got that wretched husband of Minola ‘s by means of Graven and Pickett, two men seeking a reward, and then they got Minola, and they said to her, “Oh, Minola, why don’t you tell the truth like Albert’s telling it?” They had no warrant when they locked this woman up. Starnes was guilty of a crime when he locked that woman up without a warrant, and Dorsey was, too, if he had anything to do with it. Now, George Gordon, Minola’s lawyer, says that he asked Dorsey about getting the woman out, and Dorsey replied, “I’m afraid to give my consent to turning her loose; I might get in bad with the detective department.” That’s the way you men got evidence, was it?

Miss Rebecca Carson, a forewoman of the National Pencil factory, swore Frank had a good character. The state had introduced witnesses who swore that the woman and Frank had gone into the woman’s dressing room when no one was around. I brand it a culmination of all lies when this woman was attacked. Frank had declared her to be a perfect lady with no shadow of suspicion against her. Well, Frank went on back to the factory that afternoon when he had eaten his lunch, and he started in and made out the financial sheet. I don’t reckon he could have done that if he had just committed a murder, particularly when the state says he was so nervous the next morning that he shook and trembled. Then, the state says Frank wouldn’t look at the corpse. But who said he didn’t t Nobody. Why, Gheesling and Black didn’t swear to that. Now, gentlemen, I’ve about finished this chapter, and I know it’s been long and hard on you and I know it’s been hard on me, too; I’m almost broken down, but it means a lot to that man over there. It means a lot to him, and don’t forget that.

This case has been made up of just two things – prejudice and perjury. I’ve never seen such malice, such personal hatred in all my life, and I don’t think anyone ever has. The crime itself is dreadful, too horrible to talk about, and God grant that the murderer may be found out, and I think he has. I think we can point to Jim Conley and say there is the man. But, above all, gentlemen, let’s follow the law in this matter. In circumstantial cases you can’t convict a man as long as there’s any other possible theory for the crime of which he is accused, and you can’t find Frank guilty if there’s a chance that Conley is the murderer. The state has nothing on which to base their case but Conley, and we’ve shown Conley a liar. Write your verdict of not guilty and your consciences will give your approval.

_____

MR. ROSSER, FOR THE PRISONER.

Mr. Rosser:

Gentlemen of the jury. All things come to an end. With the end of this case has almost come the end of the speakers, and but for the masterly effort of my brother, Arnold, I almost wish it had ended with no speaking. My condition is such that I can say but little ; my voice is husky and my throat almost gone. But for my interest in this case and my profound conviction of the innocence of this man, I would not undertake to speak at all. I want to repeat what my friend, Arnold, said so simply. He said this jury is no mob. The attitude of the juror’s mind is not that of the mind of the man who carelessly walks the streets. My friend, Hooper, must have brought that doctrine with.him when he came to Atlanta. We walk the street carelessly and we meet our friends and do not recognize them; we are too much absorbed in our own interests. Our minds wander in flights of fancy or in fits of reverence ; we may mean no harm to ourselves, nor to our friends, but we are careless. No oath binds us when we walk the streets.

Men, you are different; you are set aside; you ceased when you took your juror’s oath to be one of the rollicking men of the streets; you were purged by your oath. In old pagan Rome the women laughed and chattered on the streets as they went to and fro, but there were a few – the Vestal Virgins – they cared not for the gladiatorial games, nor the strife of the day. So it is with you men, set apart; you care not for the chatter and laughter of the rabble; you are unprejudiced and it is your duty to pass on a man’s life with no passion and no cruelty, but as men purged by an oath from the careless people of the streets. You are to decide from the evidence, with no fear of a hostile mob and no thought of favor to anyone.

What suggestion comes into a man’s mind when he thinks of a crime like this? And what crime could be more horrible than this one? What punishment too great for the brute in human form who committed it and who excited this community to a high pitch? Since 1908 the National Pencil factory has employed hundreds of girls and women, and also men, and not all of the girls and women, not all of the men have been perfect, but you can find good men and women in all strata of life, and yet the detectives, working with microscopes and with the aid of my friend, Dorsey, excited almost beyond peradventure, found only two to swear against Frank. They found Dalton and they found Conley.

Well, I’ll take up Conley at a more fitting time, but Dalton, who is Dalton? God Almighty writes on a man’s face and he don’t always write a pretty hand, but he writes a legible one. When you see Dalton you put your hand on your pocketbook. When Dalton took the stand Mr. Arnold and I had never had the pleasure of seeing his sweet countenance before, but Mr. Arnold leaned over and whispered in my ear, “There’s a thief if there ever was one.” I smelt about him the odor of the chain gang, and I began to feel him out. I asked him if he had ever been away from home for any length of time, and he knew at once what I meant and he began to dodge and to wriggle, and before he left the stand I was sure he was a thief. Dalton was on, three times in Walton county and then in another county where he probably went to escape further trouble in Walton, he got into trouble again. It wasn’t just the going wrong of a young man who falls once and tries to get over it, but it was the steady thievery of a man at heart a thief. Of course, Dalton comes here to Atlanta and reforms. Yes, he joined a Godly congregation and persuaded them that he had quit his evil ways. That’s an old trick of thieves and they use it to help their trade along. I believe in the divine power of regeneration; I believe that you can reform, that there’s always time to turn back and do right, but there’s one kind of man whom I don’t believe can ever reform. Once a thief, always a thief.

Our Master knew it. He recognized the qualities of a thief. You remember when they crucified Him and He hung on the cross there on the hill. Well, He had a thief hanging beside Him, and He said to that thief, “This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.” He didn’t dare say tomorrow. He knew He’d better say today, because by tomorrow that thief would be stealing again in Jerusalem.

Dalton disgraced the name of his race, and he was a thief and worse, if there can be, and yet he joined the church. He joined the church and he’s now a decent, believable man. Well, you remember how brazenly he sat here on the stand and bragged of his “peach,” how indecently he bragged of his fall; how he gloated over his vice. He was asked if he ever went to that miserable, dirty factory basement with a woman for immoral purposes, and he was proud to say that he had. Gentlemen, it was the first time Dalton had ever been in the limelight; it was the first time decent, respectable white men and women had ever listened to him with respect, let alone attention. When he was asked about that, if he was guilty, if he had fallen, he might have declined to answer, he might have hung his head in shame, as any decent, respectable man would have done, but instead, he bragged and boasted of it.

When Dalton was asked what sort of a woman Frank had, he brazenly and braggingly said he did not know, that he himself had such a peach there that he could not take his eyes off her to look at Frank’s woman. Well, you have seen Dalton ‘s peach; you all have seen Daisy. Conley tells a different story. He says Frank took the peach (that lemon) for himself and that Dalton had to get him another woman. I’m not saying that we are all free of passion, that we are all moral and perfect, but at least the decent man don’t brag of having a peach.

Well, if you believe Dalton ‘s story, and let’s presume it true now. If you believe it he went into that scuttle hole there at the factory with Daisy. Dalton took that woman into the factory, into a dirty, nasty, fetid hole where the slime oozed and where no decent dog or cat would go, and there he satisfied his passion. That’s what he told us. Well, Dalton told us he went there about 2 o’clock one Saturday afternoon last year, and of course, at that time the Clarke Wooden Ware company occupied the lower floor and used the same entrance that the National Pencil Company did, and Frank was at lunch and knew nothing of Dalton’s visit Of course, Dalton left an oozy trail behind him; wherever he went he did that. You can still feel it in this court room. Of course, too, Dalton may have gone into the pencil factory that day and left his oozy, slimy trail there, but otherwise there’s nothing against the factory, and you know there’s not, for our great quartet – Starnes and Campbell and Black (oh, how I love Black ; I always want to put my arms around him whenever I think of him), and Scott, for he was with that crowd; they tried their very best to find something that would show that factory up as a vile hole.

Well, there’s another reason that proves conclusively that it was not the assignation place Dalton and Conley name it. It has always been wrong for men and women to commit fornication and adultery, but it’s always been done and the world, as long as it was done decently and quietly and not bragged about and blazoned forth in public places, has rather allowed it to go unchecked, but it’s not so now. You know, I know the working people of this state and this city. I’ve always worked with my head and it’s never been my good fortune to be one of the working people, but there are no silken ladies in my ancestry, nor are there any dudish men. I know the working men and the working women, because that blood runs in my veins, and if any man in Atlanta knows them I do, and I tell you that there are no 100 working girls and women in Atlanta who could be got together by raking with a fine-tooth comb who’d stay there at that factory with conditions as bad as they have been painted, and there are no 100 working men here so thin blooded as to allow such conditions there.

Frank’s statement to the jury, it was Frank’s handiwork only, and neither he nor Mr. Arnold knew what Frank was going to say when he got on the stand. Look at the statement this man made to you, and it was his statement, not mine. I can prove that by the simple reason that I haven’t got brains enough to have made it up, and Mr. Arnold (though he’s got far more brains than I), he could not have made it. Mr. Arnold might have given it the same weight and thickness, but not the living ring of truth. Now, another thing. We didn’t have to put Frank’s character up. If we hadn’t the judge would have told yon Frank must be presumed to have a good character, and that you did not have the right to ask that question about him, but we thought you were, and we put it up and see what a character the man has. There’s not a man in the sound of my voice who could prove a better character. Of course, I mean from the credible evidence, not that stuff of Conley’s and Dalton’s.

But you say, some people, some former employes swore he had a bad character. You know that when you want to, you can always get someone to swear against anybody’s character. Put me in his place and let my friend, Arnold, be foolish enough to put my character up and there ‘d be plenty of those I have maybe hurt or offended as I have gone through life, would swear it was wrong, and I believe I’ve got an ordinarily good character. Why, you could bring twenty men here in Fulton county to swear that Judge Roan, there on the bench, has a bad character. You know that he’s had to judge men and sometimes to be what they thought was severe on them, and he’s naturally made men hate him and they’d gladly come and swear his character away. But if the men and women who live near him, the good and decent men and women, who lived near him and knew, came up and said his character was good, you’d believe them, wouldn’t you?

Well, gentlemen, the older I get the gentler I get and I wouldn’t think or say anything wrong about those misleading little girls who swore Frank was a bad man. I guess they thought they were telling the truth. Well, did Miss Maggie Griffin really think Frank was a vicious man and yet work there three years with him! Don’t you think she heard things against him after the crime was committed and that when she got up here and looked through the heated atmosphere of this trial, she did not see the real truth! And Miss Maggie Griffin, she was there two months. I wonder what she could know about Frank in that time. There was Mrs. Donegan and Miss Johnson and another girl there about two months, and Nellie Potts, who never worked there at all, and Mary Wallace, there three days, and Estelle Wallace, there a week and Carrie Smith, who like Miss Cato, worked there three years. These are the only ones in the hundreds who have worked there since 1908 who will say that Frank has a had character. Why, you could find more people to say that the Bishop of Atlanta, I believe, had a bad character, than have been brought against Frank.

You noticed they were not able to get any men to come from the factory and swear against Frank. Men are harder to wheedle than are little girls. Does anybody doubt that if that factory had been the bed of vice that they call it, that the long-legged Gantt would have know of it? They had Gantt on the stand twice, and, well, you know Gantt was discharged from the factory, of course you weren’t told why in plain words, but you all know why. Well, Frank is not liked by Gantt and Gantt would have loved to tell something against his former employer, but he couldn’t. If they have any further suspicions against this man, they haven’t given them, either because they are afraid or are unable to prove their suspicions, if they have such suspicions, though, and are doing you a worse injustice.

What are these suspicions that they have advanced thus far? First, Miss Robinson is said to have said that she saw Frank teaching Mary Phagan how to work. Dorsey reached for it on the instant, scenting something improper as is quite characteristic of him. But Miss Robinson denies it. There’s nothing in it, absolutely nothing. Then they say he called her Mary. Well, what about it? What if he did! We all have bad memories. If you met me on the street six months ago, can you recall right now whether you called me Luther or Rosser?

The next is Willie Turner – poor little Willie! I have nothing against Willie. He seems to be a right clever sort of a boy. But just think of the methods the detectives used against him – think of the way they handled him, and think of the way Dorsey treated him on the witness stand. He says – Willie does – that he saw Frank talking to Mary Phagan in the metal room. What does it show if he did see such a scene? I can’t see for the life of me where it indicates any sign of lascivious lust. Does what Willie Turner saw, taking for granted he saw it, show that Frank was planning to ruin little Mary Phagan? Does it uphold this plot my friend Hooper had so much to say about? Even with that, considering Willie Turner did see such a thing, there’s one fact that takes the sting out of it. He saw it in broad daylight. Frank was with the little girl right in front of Lemmie Quinn’s office in an open factory where there were a lot of people and where the girls were quitting their work and getting ready to go home to dinner. It wasn’t so, though, and Frank never made any improper advances to this little girl. Let me tell you why. Mary Phagan was a good girl, as pure as God makes them and as innocent. She was all that, and more. But, she would have known a lascivious advance or an ogling eye the minute she saw it, and the minute this man made any sort of a move to her, she would have fled instantly to home to tell this good father and mother of hers.

Then next, they bring Dewey Hewell, who says she saw Frank with his hand on Mary’s shoulder. That’s all right, but there is Grace Hix and Helen Ferguson and Magnolia Kennedy who contradict her and say Frank never knew Mary Phagan. You can say all you please about such as that, but there is one fact that stands out indisputable. If that little girl had ever received mistreatment at the pencil factory, no deer would have bounded more quickly from the brush at the bay of dogs than she would have fled home to tell her father and mother.

Now, my friend from the Wiregrass says Gantt was a victim of his “plot” by Frank against Mary Phagan. I don’t doubt that this “plot” has been framed in the hearing of every detective in the sound of my voice. Hooper says Frank plotted to get the girl there on the Saturday she was killed – says he plotted with Jim Conley. Jim says Frank told him at four o’clock Friday afternoon to return on the next morning. How could Frank have known she was coming back Saturday? He couldn’t have known. He’s no seer, no mind-reader, although he’s a mighty bright man. It is true that some of the pay envelopes were left over on Friday, but he didn’t know whose they were.

Helen Ferguson says that on Friday she asked for Mary Phagan’s pay and that Frank refused to give it to her, saying Mary would come next day and get it herself. Magnolia Kennedy swears to the contrary. You have one or the other to believe. Consider, though, that this be true! How would Frank know who would be in the factory when Mary Phagan came? How did he know she was coming Saturday! Some envelopes went over to Monday and Tuesday. How would he know whether she would come on Saturday or either of these latter days?

Now, what else have they put up against this man! They say he was nervous. We admit he was. Black says it, Darley says it, Sig. Montag says it – others say it! The handsome Mr. Darley was nervous and our friend Schiff was nervous. Why not hang them if you’re hanging men for nervousness! Isaac Haas – old man Isaac – openly admits he was nervous. The girls – why don’t you hang them, these sweet little girls in the factory – all of whom were so nervous they couldn’t work on the following day! If you had seen this little child, crushed, mangled, mutilated, with the sawdust crumbled in her eyes and her tongue protruding; staring up from that stinking, smelling basement, you’d have been nervous, too, every mother’s son of you. Gentlemen, I don’t profess to be chicken-hearted. I can see grown men hurt and suffering and I can stand a lot of things without growing hysterical, but I never walked along the street and heard the pitiful cry of a girl or woman without becoming nervous. God grant I will always be so. Frank looked at the mangled form and crushed virginity of Mary Phagan and his nerves fluttered. Hang him! Hang him!

Another suspicious circumstance. He didn’t wake up when they telephoned him that morning the body was found. That might depend on what he ate that night; it might depend on a lot of other things. Some of us wake with the birds, while others slumber even through the tempting call of the breakfast bell. Would you hang us for that!

Then, they say he hired a lawyer, and they call it suspicious – mighty suspicious. They wouldn’t have kicked if he had hired Rube Arnold, because Rube has a good character. But they hired me and they kicked and yelled “suspicious” so loudly you could hear it all the way from here to Jesup’s cut. I don’t know that I had ever met Frank before that morning, but I had represented the pencil factory previously. And as to their employing me, it’s this way: There’s no telling what was floating around in John Black’s head that morning. They sent men after Frank and there was no telling what was likely to happen to him. They were forced to do something in his own defense. And, as a result, the state’s worst suspicion is the fact that they employed me and Herbert Haas. Now, gentlemen, let’s see what there is in it; I have told you that twice on that Sunday he had been to police headquarters without counsel, without friends. The next day they adopted new methods of getting him there and sent two detectives for him. Black had said he had been watching Frank, and woe to him who is haunted by the eagle eye of dear old John. They took him to police station Monday – took him I say. The police idea was to show their fangs. He was under arrest, that’s an undisputed fact. They had him at police station, Lanford, in his wonted dignity, sitting around doing nothing, letting Frank soak. Beavers, the handsome one, was doing the same. Frank didn’t call for friends or lawyer. He didn’t call for anything. If he had known what he was up against, though, in this police department of ours, he’d probably have called for two lawyers – or even more. But old man Sig Montag, who has been here a long time, knew this old police crowd and he knew their tactics. He was well on to their curves. He knew what danger there was to Frank. He called up Haas. Haas didn’t want to come to the police station – he had a good reason. Sig went to the police station and was refused permission to see Frank.

Now, I want you to get that in your mind. A citizen – not under arrest, as they say – held without the privilege of seeing friends, relatives or counsel. It was a deplorable state of affairs. What happened? Haas went to the phone and called an older and more experienced head to battle with this police iniquity; Why shouldn’t he? Dorsey sees in this harmless message a chance. He snaps at it like a snake. Dorsey is a good man – in his way. He’ll he a better man, though, when he gets older and loses some of his present spirit and venom. There are things he has done in this trial that will never be done again. Gentlemen, I assure you of that.

Did Frank do anything else suspicious? Just two others, according to Hooper from the Wiregrass. One of which was the employment of a detective agency to ferret out this horrible murder that had been committed in his factory building. Why? Under what circumstances? I’ll tell you. Frank had been to the police station and had given his statement. Haas was the man who telephoned me and who employed me – not Frank. I went to police headquarters and was very much unwelcomed. There was a frigid atmosphere as I walked in. I saw Frank for the first time in my life. I said: “What’s the matter, boys?” Somebody answered that Mr. Frank was under arrest. Black was there, Lanford was there. Neither took the pains to deny that he was under arrest. Somebody said they wanted Mr. Frank to make a statement, and I advised him to go ahead and make it. When he went into the office, I followed. They said: “We don’t want you.” I replied that whether they wanted me or not, I was coming, anyhow. I had a good reason, too, for coming. I wanted to hear what he said so they couldn’t distort his words.

While we were in the room a peculiar thing happened. Frank exposed his person. There were no marks. I said that it was preposterous to think that a man could commit such a crime and not bear some marks. Lanford’s face fell. Why didn’t Lanford get on the stand and deny it? Was it because he didn’t want to get into a loving conflict with me? Or did he want to keep from reopening the dark and nasty history of the Conley story and the Minola McKnight story that are hidden in the still darker recesses of police headquarters? Frank makes his statement and is released. He goes back to the pencil factory, assuming that suspicion has been diverted from him. He thinks of the horrible murder that has been committed in his plant. He telephones Sig Montag about hiring a detective agency to solve the crime. Sig advises him to do it. I don’t believe there is any detective living who can consort with crooks and criminals and felons, scheme with them, mingle with them and spy on the homes of good people and bad who can then exalt his character as a result. He absorbs some of the atmosphere and the traits. It is logical that he should. But, even at that they’ve got some good men in the detective and police department.

Old man Sig Montag said hire a detective and Frank hired the Pinkertons. Scott came and took Frank’s statement and said: “We work in co-operation with the city police department.” Now, isn’t that a horrible situation – going hand in glove with the police department? But, it’s a fact. Just as soon as Scott left Frank, he walked down, arm in arm with John Black, to the nasty, smelly basement of the pencil factory. What did that mean? It meant a complete line-up with the police. It meant if the police turn you loose, I turn you loose. If the police hang you, I hang you! Gentlemen, take a look at this spectacle, if you can. Here is a Jewish boy from the north. He is unacquainted with the south. He came here alone and without friends and he stood alone. This murder happened in his place of business. He told the Pinkertons to find the man, trusting to them entirely, no matter where or what they found might strike. He is defenseless and helpless. He knows his innocence and is willing to find the murderer. They try to place the murder on him. God, all merciful and all powerful, look upon a scene like this!

Anything else? Yes. Look at this. I do not believe my friend who preceded me intended to do this. I refer to the incident about the time slip. I have to use harsh words here, but I don’t want to. This seems to me the most unkindest exit of all. They say that that time slip was planted. They say the shirt was planted. Gentlemen, is there any evidence of this? Let’s see about this statement. Black and somebody else, I believe, went out to Newt’s house on Tuesday morning and found the shirt in the bottom of a barrel. They brought the shirt back to the police station and Newt said the shirt was his – or it looked like his shirt. Newt Lee had been hired at the factory but three weeks, yet they want you to believe that they found a shirt like the old man had and went out to his house and put it in a barrel.

One thing is wrong. The newspapers and others, I am afraid, think this is a contest between lawyers. It is not. God forbid that I should let any such thing enter into this case when this boy’s life is at stake.

There are several things I don’t understand about this case, and never will. Why old man Lee didn’t find the body sooner; why he found it lying on its face ; how he saw it from a place he could not have seen it from.

I was raised with niggers and know something about them. I do not know them as well as the police, perhaps, for they know them like no one else. But I know something about them. There must have been a nigger in the crime who knew about it before Newt or anyone else. I am afraid Newt knew.

Yet, if he did, he is one of the most remarkable niggers I ever saw and I wish I had his nerve. There were things you detectives did to him for which you will never be forgiven. You persecuted the old nigger, and all you got was “Fo’ God I don’t know.” I don’t believe he killed her, but I believe he knows more than he told.

But they say now that he jumped back. Suppose he did jump back. Look at the boy (Frank). If you put a girl the size of Mary Phagan in a room with him she could make him jump out of the window. Suddenly this boy stepped out in front of this giant of a Gantt, and he jumped back. Dorsey would have done the same thing; Newt Lee would; Jim Conley would, and I would, as big as I am.

Here is another suspicious thing. Newt Lee came to the factory at four o’clock and Frank sent the old man away. It was suggested that he was afraid the nigger would find the body, yet when he came back at six, Frank let him stay at the factory when he knew that in 30 minutes Newt was on the job he must go into the basement where they say Frank knew the body was.

They say he was laughing at his home. If he had known of the crime of which he would be accused, that laugh would have been the laugh of a maniac to be ended by the discovery of the body.

Another suspicious thing. You know that he was in the factory, but it turns out that he was not the only one. If the corpse was found in the basement and he was the only one in the building, then there might be some basis. But he was in an open room and there were workmen upstairs. My friend tried to dispute that. That wasn’t all. Conley was also there, and it came out yesterday that there was also another nigger – a lighter nigger than Conley – there. What scoundrels in white skin were in the building and had opportunity to commit the crime, God only knows.

The thing that arises in this case to fatigue my indignation is that men born of such parents should believe the statement of Conley against the statement of Frank. Who is Conley? Who was Conley as he used to be and as you have seen him? He was a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger. Black knows that. Starnes knows that. Chief Beavers knows it.

Who was it that made this dirty nigger come up here looking so slick? Why didn’t they let you see him as he was? They shaved him, washed him and dressed him up.

Gentlemen of the jury, the charge of moral perversion against a man is a terrible thing for him, but it is even more so when that man has a wife and mother to be affected by it. Dalton, even Dalton did not say this against Frank. It was just Conley. Dalton, you remember, did not even say that Frank was guilty of wrong-doing as far as he knew. There never was any proof of Frank’s alleged moral perversion, unless you call Jim Conley proof.

None of these niggers ever came up and said Conley was there and that they were with him. Starnes – and Starnes could find a needle in a haystack, but the Lord only knows what he’d do in an acre – he could not find any of these niggers.

Then there was that old negro drayman, old McCrary, the old peg-leg negro drayman, and thank God he was an oldtimer, ‘fo de war nigger.

You know Conley, wishing to add a few finishing trimmings to his lines, said that old McCrary sent him down in the basement that Saturday morning and when the old darkey was put on the stand he said simply, “No, boss, I never sent him down thar.” Everywhere you go you find that Conley lied. He says he watched there one Saturday last year between 2 and 3 o’clock. Well, Schiff says he didn’t and so does Darley and Holloway, the latter guaranteed by the state, and the little office boys, nice looking little chaps from nice families, they all say he didn’t. Cut out Conley and you strip the case to nothing. Did you hear the way Conley told his story? Have you ever heard an actor, who knew his Shakespearean plays, his “Merchant of Venice” or his “Hamlet”? He can wake up at any time of the night and say those lines, but he can’t say any lines of a play he has never learned. So it was with Conley. He could tell the story of the disposition of the girl’s body, and he knew it so well he could reel it off backward or forward, any old way, but when you got to asking him about other things, he always had one phrase, “Boss, ah can’t ‘member dat.”

They say Conley could not have made up that story. Well, I don’t know about that. There is something queer in the whole thing, you know. I conldn’t climb that post over there, gentlemen. I mean I couldn’t go very far up it, but if I had Professor Starnes, and Professor Black, and Professor Campbell, and Professor Rosser, and then Dean Lanford to help me, I’d go quite a way up. Well, they took a notion Mrs. White had seen the negro, and they carried Mrs. White there to see him, and he twisted up his features so that she couldn’t recognize him. Next, they learned Conley could write. Frank told them that, you know. Well, I don’t mean to be severe, but they took that negro and they gave him the third degree. Black and Scott cursed him. “You black scoundrel,” they yelled at him. “You know that man never had you come there and write those notes on Friday!” And the poor negro, understanding and trying to please, said, “Yes, boss, zat’s right, ah was dere on Saturday.”

And so they went on and got first one affidavit and then another out of him. Well, Scott and Black had him there, and Conley was only in high school. I don’t know whether to call Scott and Black “professors” or not. Scott says, “We told him what would fit and what would not.” And it was “stand up, James Conley and recite, when did you fix those notes, James?” and James would answer that he fixed them on Friday, and then the teachers would tell James it was surely wrong, that he must have fixed them on Saturday, and James would know what was wanted and would acknowledge his error. Then it would be, “That’s a good lesson, James, you are excused, James.” I’m not guessing in this thing. Scott told it on the stand, only in not so plain words. So it was that when this negro had told the whole truth they had another recitation.

Was it fair for two skilled white men to train that negro by the hour and by the day and to teach him and then get a statement from him and call it the truth? Well, Professors Black and Scott finished with him, and they thought Conley’s education was through, but that nigger had to have a university course!

Scott, you and Black milked him dry; you thought you did, anyhow, but you got no moral perversion and no watching. In the university they gave a slightly different course. It was given by Professors Starnes and Campbell. Oh, I wish I could look as pious as Starnes does. And Professor Dorsey helped out, I suppose. I don’t know what Professor Dorsey did, only he gave him several lessons, and they must have been just sort of finishing touches before he got his degree. Well, in the university course they didn’t dare put the steps in writing, as they had done in the high school; it would have been too easy to trace from step to step, the suggestions made, the additions and subtractions here and there. Professor Dorsey had him seven times, I know that, but God alone knows how many times the detectives had him.

Was it fair to take this weak, pliable negro and have these white men teach him, one after another? Who knows what is the final story that Conley will tell? He added the mesh bag when he was on the stand.

Mary Phagan had reached the factory at approximately twelve minutes after 12, and it must have been after Monteen Stover had gone. See the statements of W. M. Mathews and W. T. Hollis, street car men called by the defense, and George Epps, the little newsie, called by the state, and also the street car schedule. But, supposing that she was there at 12:05, as I believe the state claims, then Monteen Stover must have seen her. I don’t see how they could have helped meeting. But suppose she got there a moment after Monteen Stover left, then Lemmie Quinn was there at 12:20, and he found Frank at work. Could Frank have murdered a girl and hid her body and then got back to work with no blood stains on him in less than fifteen minutes? If Frank is guilty, he must have, according to Conley, disposed of the body in the time between four minutes to 1 and 1 :30. There can be no dispute about this; it’s Conley ‘s last revelation. If Frank is guilty, he was at his office between four minutes to 1 and 1:30, but who believes that story? Little Miss Kerns saw him at Alabama and Whitehall at 1 :10, and at 1 :20 Mrs. Levy, honest woman that she is, saw him get off the car at his home corner, and his wife’s parents saw, and they all swear he was there at 1 :20, and then, if you are going to call them all perjurers and believe Jim Conley, think what you must do; think what a horrible thing you must do–you must make Minola’s husband a perjurer, and that would be terrible.

You know about that Minola McKnight affair. It is the blackest of all. A negro woman locked up from the solicitor’s office, not because she wouldn’t talk – she’s given a statement – but because she would not talk to suit Starnes and Campbell, and two white men, and shame to them, got her into it. Where was Chief Beavers? What was he doing that he became a party to this crime? Beavers, who would enforce the law; Beavers, the immaculate!

Believe Frank was in the factory if you can at 1 :30 ; throw aside all the respectable people and swear by Conley. Well, I know the American jury is supreme, that it is the sovereign over lives; that sometimes you can sway it by passion and prejudice, but you can’t make it believe anything like this. Neither prejudice, nor passion, wrought by monsters so vile they ought not to be in the court room, could make them believe it. They said that there was a certain man, named Mincey, whom we called as a witness but did not use. Well, the only use we would have had for Mincey was to contradict Conley, and as soon as Conley got on the stand he contradicted himself enough without our having to go to the trouble of calling on witnesses to do it. If we had put Mincey up there would have been a day’s row about his probity, and what would have been the use – Conley said time and again that he had lied time and again.

Gentlemen, I want only the straight truth here, and I have yet to believe that the truth has to be watched and cultivated by these detectives and by seven visits of the solicitor general I don’t believe any man, no matter what his rate, ought to be tried under such testimony. If I was raising sheep and feared for my lambs, I might hang a yellow dog on it. I might do it in the daytime, but when things got quiet at night and I got to thinking, I’d be ashamed of myself. You have been overly kind to me, gentlemen. True, you have been up against a situation like that old Sol Russell used to describe when he would say, “Well, I’ve lectured off and on for forty years, and the benches always stuck it out, but they was screwed to the floor.” You gentlemen have been practically in that fix, but I feel, nevertheless, that you have been peculiarly kind, and I thank you.

* * *

In our next article in this series, we will present the closing argument of Solicitor Hugh Dorsey, for the prosecution. As always, paragraph divisions and emphasis are mine.

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

For further study we recommend the following resources:

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Full archive of Atlanta Georgian newspapers relating to the murder and subsequent trial

The Leo Frank case as reported in the Atlanta Constitution

The Leo Frank Case (Mary Phagan) Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery 1913

The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean

American State Trials, volume X (1918) by John Lawson

Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey in the Trial of Leo Frank

Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913, Brief of Evidence

The American Mercury is following these events of 100 years ago, the month-long trial of Leo M. Frank for the brutal murder of Miss Mary Phagan, in capsule form on a regular basis on this, the 100th anniversary of the case. Follow along with us and experience the trial as Atlantans of a century ago did, and come to your own conclusions.

Read also the Mercury’s coverage of Week One of the Leo Frank trial, Week Two,  Week Three and Week Four and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.

A fearless scholar, dedicated to the truth about this case, has obtained, scanned, and uploaded every single relevant issue of the major Atlanta daily newspapers and they now can be accessed through archive.org as follows:

Atlanta Constitution Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution/

Atlanta Georgian Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-georgian/

Atlanta Journal Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-journal/

More background on the case may be found in my article here at the Mercury, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty.

(Click the play button for our audio book version of this article.)

by Bradford L. Huie

ON THE HEELS of Leo Frank’s astounding unsworn statement to the court, the defense called a number of women who stated that they had never experienced any improper sexual advances on the part of Frank. But the prosecution rebutted that testimony with several rather persuasive female witnesses of its own. These rebuttal witnesses also addressed Frank’s claims that he was so unfamiliar with Mary Phagan that he did not even know her by name. (For background on this case, read our introductory article, our coverage of Week One,  Week Two, and Week Three of the trial, and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.)

Here are the witnesses’ statements, direct from the Brief of Evidence, interspersed with my commentary. The emphasis and paragraphing (for clarity) is mine. The defense recommenced with a large contingent of Frank’s friends, business associates, and employees who would say that Leo Frank was of good character and had not, to their knowledge, made any improper sexual approaches to the girls and women who worked under him:

MISS EMILY MAYFIELD, sworn for the Defendant.

I worked at the pencil factory last year during the summer of 1912. I have never been in the dressing room when Mr. Frank would come in and look at anybody that was undressing.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I work at Jacobs’ Pharmacy. My sister used to work at the pencil factory. I don’t remember any occasion when Mr. Frank came in the dressing room door while Miss Irene Jackson and her sister were there.

MISSES ANNIE OSBORNE, REBECCA CARSON, MAUDE WRIGHT, and MRS. ELLA THOMAS, all sworn for the Defendant, testified that they were employees of the National Pencil Company; that Mr. Frank’s general character was good; that Conley’s general character for truth and veracity was bad and that they would not believe him on oath.

Mrs. B.D. Smith

MISSES MOLLIE BLAIR, ETHEL STEWART, CORA COWAN, B. D. SMITH, LIZZIE WORD, BESSIE WHITE, GRACE ATHERTON, and MRS. BARNES, all sworn for the Defendant, testified that they were employees of the National Pencil Company, and work on the fourth floor of the factory; that the general character of Leo. M. Frank was good; that they have never gone with him at any time or place for any immoral purpose, and that they have never heard of his doing anything wrong.

MISSES CORINTHIA HALL, ANNIE HOWELL, LILLIE M. GOODMAN, VELMA HAYES, JENNIE MAYFIELD, IDA HOLMES, WILLIE HATCHETT, MARY HATCHETT, MINNIE SMITH, MARJORIE McCORD, LENA McMURTY, MRS. W. R. JOHNSON, MRS. S. A. WILSON, MRS. GEORGIA DENHAM, MRS. O. JONES, MISS ZILLA SPIVEY, CHARLES LEE, N. V. DARLEY, F. ZIGANKI, and A. C. HOLLOWAY, MINNIE FOSTER, all sworn for the Defendant, testified that they were employees of the National Pencil Company and knew Leo M. Frank, and that his general character was good.

Numerous current employees of the National Pencil Company testified that Leo Frank had never made any sexual overtures to them.

D. I. MacINTYRE, B. WILDAUER, MRS. DAN KLEIN, ALEX DITTLER, DR. J.E. SOMMERFIELD, F. G. SCHIFF, AL. GUTHMAN, JOSEPH GERSHON, P.D. McCARLEY, MRS. M. W. MEYER, MRS. DAVID MARX, MRS. A. I. HARRIS, M. S. RICE, L. H. MOSS, MRS. L.H. MOSS, MRS. JOSEPH BROWN, E.E. FITZPATRICK, EMIL DITTLER, WM. BAUER, MISS HELEN LOEB, AL. FOX, MRS. MARTIN MAY, JULIAN V. BOEHM, MRS. MOLLIE ROSENBERG, M.H. SILVERMAN, MRS. L. STERNE, CHAS. ADLER, MRS. R.A. SONN, MISS RAY KLEIN, A.J. JONES, L. EINSTEIN, J. BERNARD, J. FOX, MARCUS LOEB, FRED HEILBRON, MILTON KLEIN, NATHAN COPLAN, MRS. J. E. SOMMERFIELD, all sworn for the Defendant, testified that they were residents of the city of Atlanta, and have known Leo M. Frank ever since he has lived in Atlanta; that his general character is good.

MRS. M. W. CARSON, MARY PIRK, MRS. DORA SMALL, MISS JULIA FUSS, R.P. BUTLER, JOE STELKER, all sworn for the Defendant, testified that they were employees of the National Pencil Com- pany; that they knew Leo M. Frank and that his general character is good.

The character issue having been broached by the defense, the door was opened to the prosecution to bring forth witnesses on the same subject:

MISS MYRTIE CATO, MAGGIE GRIFFIN, MRS. C.D. DONEGAN, MRS. H. R. JOHNSON, MISS MARIE CARST, MISS NELLIE PETTIS, MARY DAVIS, MRS. MARY E. WALLACE, ESTELLE WINKLE, CARRIE SMITH, all sworn for the Defendant [sic — This is a typographical error; these witnesses were sworn for the State. — Ed.], testified that they were formerly employed at the National Pencil Company and worked at the factory for a period varying from three days to three and a half years; that Leo M. Frank’s character for lasciviousness was bad.

Misses Myrtice Cato and Maggie Griffin

The defense — ominously — chose not to cross-examine any of these witnesses. This restricted the prosecution to the mere statements that Frank had a “bad character for lasciviousness”: Under the rules of the court, Dorsey could only ask for particulars — could only inquire into why Frank had such a bad character — if the defense opened the door with cross-examination. This the defense refused to do — with any of the ten women who said that Frank was badly lascivious. The jury was thus left with the impression that the defense dared not do so — a point that would be hammered home in the prosecution’s closing statement.

Two of these witnesses had made far more extensive statements at the Coroner’s Inquest, where the rules of evidence permit wider latitude in questioning. As I reported in an earlier article:

Several young women and girls testified at the inquest that Frank had made improper advances toward them, in one instance touching a girl’s breast and in another appearing to offer money for compliance with his desires.

The Atlanta Georgian reported: “Girls and women were called to the stand to testify that they had been employed at the factory or had had occasion to go there, and that Frank had attempted familiarities with them. Nellie Pettis, of 9 Oliver Street, declared that Frank had made improper advances to her.

Miss Nellie Pettis

“She was asked if she had ever been employed at the pencil factory. No, she answered.

“Q: Do you know Leo Frank? A: I have seen him once or twice.

“Q: When and where did you see him? A: In his office at the factory whenever I went to draw my sister-in-law’s pay.

“Q: What did he say to you that might have been improper on any of these visits? A: He didn’t exactly say – he made gestures. I went to get sister’s pay about four weeks ago and when I went into the office of Mr. Frank I asked for her. He told me I couldn’t see her unless ‘I saw him first.’ I told him I didn’t want to ‘see him.’ He pulled a box from his desk. It had a lot of money in it. He looked at it significantly and then looked at me. When he looked at me, he winked. As he winked he said: ‘How about it?’ I instantly told him I was a nice girl.

“Here the witness stopped her statement. Coroner Donehoo asked her sharply: ‘Didn’t you say anything else?’ ‘Yes, I did! I told him to go to h—l! and walked out of his office.'” (Atlanta Georgian, May 9, 1913, “Phagan Case to be Rushed to Grand Jury by Dorsey”)

If true, this was shocking behavior on Frank’s part. Not only was he importuning a young woman for illicit relations in exchange for money, but it was a woman he’d only seen once or twice. If he would act in such a way with an absolute stranger, what wouldn’t he do? In the same article, another young girl testified to Frank’s pattern of improper familiarities:

“Nellie Wood, a young girl, testified as follows:

“Q: Do you know Leo Frank? A: I worked for him two days.

“Q: Did you observe any misconduct on his part?

“A: Well, his actions didn’t suit me. He’d come around and put his hands on me when such conduct was entirely uncalled for.

“Q: Is that all he did? A: No. He asked me one day to come into his office, saying that he wanted to talk to me. He tried to close the door but I wouldn’t let him. He got too familiar by getting so close to me. He also put his hands on me.

“Q: Where did he put his hands? He barely touched my breast. He was subtle in his approaches, and tried to pretend that he was joking. But I was too wary for such as that.

“Q: Did he try further familiarities? A: Yes.”

The trial testimony continued:

MISS MAMIE KITCHENS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I have worked at the National Pencil Company two years. I am on the fourth floor. I have not been called by the defense. Miss Jones and Miss Howard have also not been called by the defense to testify. I was in the dressing room with Miss Irene Jackson when she was undressed. Mr. Frank opened the door, stuck his head inside. He did not knock. He just stood there and laughed. Miss Jackson said, “Well, we are dressing, blame it,” and then he shut the door.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

Yes, he asked us if we didn’t have any work to do. It was during business hours. We didn’t have any work to do. We were going to leave. I have never met Mr. Frank anywhere, or any time for any immoral purposes.

MISS RUTH ROBINSON, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I have seen Leo M. Frank talking to Mary Phagan. He was talking to her about her work, not very often. He would just tell her, while she was at work, about her work. He would stand just close enough to her to tell her about her work. He would show her how to put rubbers in the pencils. He would just take up the pencil and show her how to do it. That’s all I saw him do. I heard him speak to her; he called her Mary. That was last summer.

MISS DEWEY HEWELL, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I stay in the Home of the Good Shepherd in Cincinnati. I worked at the pencil factory four months. I quit in March, 1913. I have seen Mr. Frank talk to Mary Phagan two or three times a day in the metal department. I have seen him hold his hand on her shoulder. He called her Mary. He would stand pretty close to her. He would lean over in her face.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

All the rest of the girls were there when he talked to her. I don’t know what he was talking to her about.

MISS REBECCA CARSON, re-called by the State in rebuttal.

I have never gone into the dressing room on the fourth floor with Leo M. Frank.

MISS MYRTICE CATO, MISS MAGGIE GRIFFIN, both sworn for the State, testified that they had seen Miss Rebecca Carson go into the ladies’ dressing room on the fourth floor with Leo M. Frank two or three times during working hours; that there were other ladies working on the fourth floor at the time this happened.

Myrtice Cato and Marie Carst

J. E. DUFFY, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I worked at the National Pencil Company. I was hurt there in the metal department. I was cut on my forefingers on the left hand. That is the cut right around there (indicating). It never cut off any of my fingers. I went to the office to have it dressed. It was bleeding pretty freely. A few drops of blood dropped on the floor at the machine where I was hurt. The blood did not drop anywhere else except at that machine. None of it dropped near the ladies’ dressing room, or the water cooler. I had a large piece of cotton wrapped around my finger. When I was first cut I just slapped a piece of cotton waste on my hand.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I never saw any blood anywhere except at the machine. I went from the office to the Atlanta Hospital to have my finger attended to.

W. E. TURNER, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I worked at the National Pencil Company during March of this year. I saw Leo Frank talking to Mary Phagan on the second floor, about the middle of March. It was just before dinner. There was nobody else in the room then. She was going to work and he stopped to talk to her. She told him she had to go to work. He told her that he was the superintendent of the factory, and that he wanted to talk to her, and she said she had to go to work. She backed off and he went on towards her talking to her. The last thing I heard him say was he wanted to talk to her. That is all I saw or heard.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

That was just before dinner. The girls were up there getting ready for dinner. Mary was going in the direction where she worked, and Mr. Frank was going the other way. I don’t know whether any of the girls were still at work or not. I didn’t look for them. Some of the girls came in there while this was going on and told me where to put the pencils. Lemmie Quinn’s office is right there. I don’t know whether the girls saw him talking to Mary or not, they were in there. It was just before the whistle blew at noon. Mr. Frank told her he wanted to speak to her and she said she had to go to work, and the girls came in there while this conversation was going on. I can’t describe Mary Phagan. I don’t know any of the other little girls in there. I don’t remember who called her Mary Phagan, a young man on the fourth floor told me her name was Mary Phagan. I don’t know who he was. I didn’t know anybody in the factory. I can’t describe any of the girls. I don’t know a single one in the factory.

The defense had made an impression with their parade of young female pencil factory workers who not only had never been on the receiving end of any importunities by Leo Frank, but who had never seen Frank speaking to Mary Phagan. Almost all of these were still employed by the firm, which was supporting Frank — and had motive to protect their source of income, of course. But, financial motives aside, it still would be quite surprising for even the most lecherous boss imaginable, in charge of dozens and dozens of young women and girls, to have attempted to seduce every single one! So finding a large number who had never been approached sexually by Frank could hardly be seen as definitive proof that he had never done so. Nor would it seem likely, assuming that Leo Frank had talked to Mary Phagan on a number of occasions, that every single employee, or even a majority of them, would have seen such conversations. So finding quite a number who had never witnessed such conversations meant little.

But finding some who had witnessed questionable forays by Frank into the ladies’ dressing room — and who had been sexually approached by Frank or witnessed his approaches to others — and who had seen Frank talk to Mary Phagan, addressing her by name — was enough to almost entirely destroy the character edifice built up by the  defense of a Leo Frank who didn’t know Mary Phagan and whose behavior toward his female employees was above reproach. Most damaging of all was what it did to Leo Frank’s reputation for truthfulness.

After a motorman named Merk testified that defense witness Daisy Hopkins had a reputation as a liar, George Gordon, Minola McKnight’s attorney, testified as to the events of the night that Minola McKnight made her sensational affidavit claiming that Leo Frank had admitted to his wife that he wanted to die because he had killed a girl that day. McKnight, who worked for the Franks as a cook, had since repudiated the affidavit and was claiming it was obtained from her by force.

GEORGE GORDON, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a practicing lawyer. I was at police station part of the time when Minola McKnight was making her statement. I was outside of the door most of the time. I went down there with habeas corpus proceedings to have her sign the affidavit and when I got there the detectives informed me that she was in the room, and I sat down and waited outside for her two hours, and people went in and out of the door, and after I had waited there I saw the stenographer of the recorder’s court going into the room and I decided I had better make a demand to go into the room, which I did, and I was then allowed to go into the room and I found Mr. Febuary reading over to her some stenographic statement he had taken.

There were two other men from Beck & Gregg Hardware store and Pat Campbell and Mr. Starnes and Albert McKnight. After that was read Mr. Febuary went out to write it off on the typewriter and while he was out Mr. Starnes said, “Now this must be kept very quiet and nobody be told anything about this.” I thought it was agreed that we would say nothing about it. I was surprised when I saw it in the newspapers two or three days afterwards.

I said to Starnes: “There is no reason why you should hold this woman, you should let her go.” He said he would do nothing without consulting Mr. Dorsey and he suggested that I had better go to Mr. Dorsey’s office. I went to his office and he called up Mr. Starnes and then I went back to the police station and told Starnes to call Mr. Dorsey and I presume that Mr. Dorsey told him to let her go. Anyway he said she could go. You (Mr. Dorsey) said you would let her go also. That morning you had said you would not unless I took out a habeas corpus. In the morning after Chief Beavers told me he would not let her go on bond and unless you (Mr. Dorsey) would let her go, I went to your office and told you that she was being held illegally and you admitted it to me and I said we would give bond in any sum that you might ask. You said you would not let her go because you would get in bad with the detectives, and you advised me to take out a habeas corpus, which I did. The detectives said they couldn’t let her got without your consent. You said you didn’t have anything to do with locking her up.

The fragile remains of Albert McKnight’s 1913 affidavit. It ends “‘I can tell Mr. Frank has done something as they act strange. Mrs. Frank tells Magnolia [ = Minola] every day not to forget what to say if they come for her to go to court again. Mrs. Frank had a quarrel with Mr. Frank on the morning of the murder. She asked Mr. Frank to kiss her but then she said he was saving his kisses for ____ and would not kiss her. Magnolia said she heard Mrs. Frank say she would never live with him again, for she knew he had killed that girl, and they had the right man and ought to break his neck.’ Signed: Albert McKnight & witnessed by R.L. Craven & A. Morrison”

As to whether Minola McKnight did not sign this paper freely and voluntarily (State’s Exhibit J), it was signed in my absence while I was at [the] police station. When I came back this paper was lying on the table signed. That paper is substantially the notes that Mr. Febuary read over to her. As they read it over to her, she said it was about that way.

Minola McKnight’s affidavit

Yes, you agreed with me that you had no right to lock her up. I don’t know that you said you didn’t do it. I don’t remember that we discussed that. You told me that you would not direct her to be let loose, because you would get in bad with the detectives. I had told you that the detectives told me they would not release her unless you said so. I took out a habeas corpus immediately afterwards and went down there to get her released, and she was released.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I heard that they had had her in Mr. Dorsey ‘s office and she went away screaming and was locked up. I knew that Mr. Dorsey was letting this be done. She was locked in a cell at the police station when I saw her. They admitted that they did not have any warrant for her arrest. Beavers said he would not let her out on bond unless Mr. Dorsey said so. He said the charge against her was suspicion. They put her in a cell and kept her until four o’clock the next day before they let her go. When I went down to see her in the cell, she was crying and going on and almost hysterical. When I asked Mr. Dorsey to let her go out on bond, he said he wouldn’t do it because he would get in bad with the detectives, but that if I would let her stay down there with Starnes and Campbell for a day, he would let her loose without any bond, and I said I wouldn’t do it. I said that I considered it a very reprehensible thing to lock up somebody because they knew something, and he said, “Well, it is sometimes necessary to get information,” and I said, “Certainly our liberty is more necessary than any information, and I consider it a trampling on our Anglo-Saxon liberties.” They did not tell me that they already had a statement that she had made, and which she declared to be the truth.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

You (Mr. Dorsey) did not tell me that you had no right to lock anybody up. I told you that, and you agreed to it, but you would not let her go. I told you that Chief Beavers said he would do what you said and then I asked you to give me an order. You said you wouldn’t give me an order. When I told Starnes that I thought I ought to be in that room while Minola was making the statement, he knocked on the door, and it was unlocked on the inside and they let me in. They let me into the room at once after I had been sitting there two hours. I was present when she made the statement about the payment of the cook. I don’t remember what questions I asked her at that time. I was her attorney. I didn’t go down there to examine her; I went there to get her out. Starnes and Campbell were in and out of the room during the time. Mr. Starnes stayed on the outside of the door part of the time. I don’t know who was in the room and who was not while I was outside.

Next on the stand was Albert McKnight, Minola’s husband, whose testimony about the lunch hour at the Franks on the day of the murder had been attacked by the defense. Frank’s lawyers had used a diagram of the household to show that he could not have seen what he claimed to have seen. McKnight testified that the diagram was inaccurate and did not show the furniture in its true positions on April 26.

Following Albert McKnight were his employers, who also shed some light on Minola’s statement. They had been present while she was being held, and had even gotten her to make statements to them while detectives were not present. These statements were consistent with her affidavit, and not consistent with her later denial of it:

R. L. CRAVEN, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am connected with the Beck and Gregg Hardware Co. Albert McKnight also works for the same company. He asked me to go down and see if I could get Minola McKnight out when she was arrested. I went there for that purpose. I was present when she signed that affidavit (State’s Exhibit J).

I went out with Mr. Pickett to Minola McKnight ‘s home the latter part of May. Albert McKnight was there. On the 3rd day of June, we were down at the station house and they brought Minola McKnight in and we questioned her first as to the statements Albert had given me; at first she would not talk, she said she didn’t know anything about it.

I told her that Albert made the statement that he was there Saturday when Mr. Frank came home, and he said Mr. Frank came in the dining room and stayed about ten minutes and went to the sideboard and caught a car in about ten minutes after he first arrived there, and I went on and told her that Albert had said that Minola had overheard Mrs. Frank tell Mrs. Selig that Mr. Frank didn’t rest well and he came home drinking and made Mrs. Frank get out of bed and sleep on a rug by the side of the bed and wanted her to give him his pistol to shoot his head off and that he had murdered somebody, or something like that. Minola at first hesitated, but finally she told everything that was in that affidavit. When she did that Mr. Starnes, Mr. Campbell, Mr. Febuary, Albert McKnight, Mr. Pickett, and Mr. Gordon were there. When we were questioning her, I don’t remember whether anybody but Mr. Pickett and myself and Albert McKnight were there.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

We went down there about 11:30 o’clock. I didn’t know that she had been in jail twelve hours then. I suppose she was in jail because they needed her as a witness. I was in Mr. Dorsey’s office only one time about this matter, the same morning I started out to see if I could get her and I went to see Mr. Dorsey about getting her out. Her husband wanted her out of jail and I went to see Mr. Dorsey about getting her out.

At first she denied it. I questioned her for something like two hours. I didn’t know she had already made a statement about the truth of the transaction. Mr. Dorsey didn’t read it to me. He said she was hysterical and wouldn’t talk at all. I went down to get her to make some kind of a statement; I wanted her to tell the truth in the matter. I wanted to see whether her husband was telling the truth or whether she was telling a falsehood.

Yes, she finally made a statement that agreed with her husband, and I left after awhile.

As to why I didn’t stay and get her out, because I didn’t want to. I went after we got her statement. No, I didn’t get her out of jail. I did not look after her any further than that. I don’t think Mr. Dorsey told me to question her. He wanted me to go out to see her. He said Mr. Starnes and Mr. Campbell would be up there and they would let us know about it, and we went up there and Mr. Starnes and Mr. Campbell brought her in. They let us see her all right. I did not ask Campbell or Starnes to turn her out. I didn’t ask anybody to turn her out. I never made any suggestion to anybody about turning her out. Nobody cursed, mistreated or threatened this woman while I was there. I don’t know what took place before I got there.

E. H. PICKETT, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I work at Beck & Gregg Hdw. Co. I was present when that paper was signed (State’s Exhibit J) by Minola McKnight. Albert McKnight, Starnes, Campbell, Mr. Craven, Mr. Gordon was present when she made that statement.

We questioned her about the statement Albert had made and she denied it all at first. She said she had been cautioned not to talk about this affair by Mrs. Frank or Mrs. Selig. She stated that Albert had lied in what he told us. She finally began to weaken on one or two points and admitted that she had been paid a little more money than was ordinarily due her.

There was a good many things in that statement that she did not tell us, though, at first. She didn’t tell us all of that when she went at it. She seemed hysterical at the beginning. We told her that we weren’t there to get her into trouble, but came down there to get her out, and then she agreed to talk to us but would not talk to the detectives. The detectives then retired from the room.

Albert told her that she knew she told him those things. She denied it, but finally acknowledged that she said a few of those things, and among the things I remember is that she was cautioned not to repeat anything that she heard. We asked her a thousand questions perhaps. I don’t know how many. I called the detectives and told them we had gotten all the admissions we could. We didn’t have any stenographer and Mr. Craven began writing it out, and Mr. Craven had written only a small portion when the stenographer came.

She did not make all of that statement in the first talk she had with us. She didn’t say anything with reference to Mrs. Frank having stated anything to her mother on Sunday morning.

The affidavit does not contain anything that she did not state there that day. Before she made that affidavit, she said he did eat dinner that day. She finally said he didn’t eat any. At first she said he remained at home at dinner time about half an hour or more. She finally said he only remained about ten minutes. At first she said Albert McKnight was not there that day. She finally said he was there. She said she was instructed not to talk at first. At first she said her wages hadn’t been changed, finally said her wages had been raised by the Seligs. As to what, if anything, she said about a hat being given her by Mrs. Selig, the only statement she made about the hat at all was when she made the affidavit. We didn’t know anything about the hat before. Nobody threatened her when she was there. When the first questioning was going on Campbell and Starnes were not in there. They came in when we called them and told them we were ready. Her attorney, Mr. Gordon, came in with the detectives.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

As to why we didn’t take her statement when she denied saying all those things, because we didn’t believe them. We were down there about three hours. We went down there to try and get Minola McKnight out, if we could. We asked Mr. Dorsey to get her out. He said he would let us stand her bond, and he referred us to the detectives to make arrangements. As to why we didn’t get her out then, we wanted a statement from her if we could get it. No, I didn’t know that whenever the detectives got the story they wanted, they would let her out. As to my going to get her out and then grilling her for three hours, I didn’t tell her I was going to get her out; I went down there to get her out, but she left there before I did. She went out of the room. The detectives treated her very nice. They let her go after she made the statement. I knew they were holding her because she did not make a statement confirming her husband. It was not my object to make her statement agree with her husband’s statement, but it was my duty as a good citizen to make her tell the truth.

Dr. S.C. Benedict testified that one of the defense medical experts had a grudge against Dr. Harris, the prosecution’s main medical expert. This was followed by several streetcar motormen who stated that the streetcars often arrived ahead of schedule, which tended to minimize the effect of the testimony of the motormen called by the defense, who had claimed that since the streetcar schedule  was rigorously adhered to, Mary Phagan must have arrived later than Leo Frank’s original estimate of five to ten minutes after noon. There was a great deal of testimony later regarding the timing of Mary Phagan’s arrival — and the amount of time which had passed since her late breakfast.

Ultimately, no one really doubted that Mary Phagan had arrived at Leo Frank’s office  just a few minutes after noon on April 26 — and had met her death a very few minutes after that.

J. H. HENDRICKS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a motorman for the Georgia Railway & Electric Company. On April 26th I was running a street car on the Marietta line to the Stock Yards on Decatur Street. I couldn’t say what time we got to town on April 26th, about noon. I have no cause to remember that day. The English Avenue car, with Matthews and Hollis has gotten to town prior to April 26th, ahead of time. I couldn’t say how much ahead of time. I have seen them come in two or three minutes ahead of time; that day they came about 12:06. Hollis would usually leave Broad and Marietta Streets on my car. I couldn’t swear positively what time I got to Broad and Marietta Streets on April 26th. I couldn’t swear what time Hollis and Matthews got there that day. I don’t know anything about that. Often they get there ahead of time. Sometimes they are punished for it.

J. C. McEWING, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a street car motorman. I ran on Marietta and Decatur Street April 26th. My car was due in town at ten minutes after the hour on April 26th. Hollis’ and Matthews ‘ car was due there 7 minutes after the hour. Hendricks car was due there 5 minutes after the hour. The English Avenue frequently cut off the White City car due in town at 12:05. The White City car is due there before the English Avenue. It is due 5 minutes after the hour and the Cooper Street is due 7 minutes after. The English Avenue would have to be ahead of time to cut off the Cooper Street car. That happens quite often. I have come in ahead of time very often. I have known the English Avenue car to be 4 or 5 minutes ahead of time.

A portion of Leo Frank’s original statement to the police is shown here. Note that he flatly states that Mary Phagan arrived between 12:05 and 12;10. Ironically, a huge amount of his defense team’s efforts went into challenging Frank’s own statement as to the time Mary Phagan had appeared in his office. They were trying to edge Frank’s meeting with the murdered girl later and later, and therefore further from the time that Monteeen Stover had found Frank’s office empty. Frank himself changed the time of her arrival several times during the course of the investigation.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I don’t know when that happened or who ran the car. I don’t know whether they ran on schedule time on April 26th, or not. When one car is cut off, one might be ahead of time, and one might be behind time. It’s reasonable to suppose that the five minutes after car ought to come in ahead of the one due seven minutes after. If it was behind it would be cut off, just as easy as the other one would be cut off by being ahead.

M. E. McCOY, sworn for the State, in rebuttal.

I knew Mary Phagan. I saw her on April 26th, in front of Cooledge’s place at 12 Forsyth Street. She was going towards pencil company, south on Forsyth Street on right hand side. It was near twelve o’clock. I left the corner of Walton and Forsyth Street exactly twelve o’clock and came straight on down there. It took me three or four minutes to go there.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I know what time it was because I looked at my watch. First time I told it was a week ago last Saturday, when I told an officer. I didn’t tell it because I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I didn’t consider it as a matter of importance until I saw the statement of the motorman of the car she came in on, and I knew that was wrong. She was dressed in blue, a low, chunky girl. Her hair was not very dark. She had on a blue hat.

GEORGE KENDLEY, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am with the Georgia Railway & Power Co. I saw Mary Phagan about noon on April 26th. She was going to the pencil factory from Marietta Street. When I saw her she stepped off of the viaduct.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I was on the front end of the Hapeville car when I saw her. It is due in town at 12 o’clock. I don’t know if it was on time that day. I told several people about seeing her the next day. If Mary Phagan left home at 10 minutes to 12, she ought to have got to town about 10 minutes after 12, somewhere in that neighborhood. She could not have gotten in much earlier. The time that I saw her is simply an estimate. That was the time my car was due in town. I remember seeing her by reading of the tragedy the next day. I didn’t testify at the Coroner’s inquest because nobody came to ask me. No, I have not abused and villified Frank since this tragedy. No, I have not made myself a nuisance on the cars by talking of him. I know Mr. Brent. I didn’t tell him that Mr. Frank’s children said he was guilty. Mr. Brent asked me what I thought about it several times on the car. He has always been the aggressor. As to whether I abused and villified him in the presence of Miss Haas and other passengers, there has been so much talk that I don’t know what has been said. I don’t think I said if he was released I would join a party to lynch him. Somebody said if he got out there might be some trouble. I don’t remem- ber saying that I would join a party to help lynch him if he got out. I talked to Mr. Leach about it. I don’t remember what I told him. I told him I saw her over there about 12 o’clock. That was the time the car was due in town. I know I saw her before 12:05. My car was on schedule time. I couldn’t swear it was exactly on the minute.

HENRY HOFFMAN, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am inspector of the street car company. Matthews is under me a certain part of the day. On April 26th he was under me from 11:30 to 12:07. His car was due at Broad and Marietta at 12:07. There is no such schedule as 12:07 and half. I have been on his car when we cut off the Fair Street car. Fair Street car is due at 12:05. I have compared watches with him. They vary from 20 to 40 seconds. We are supposed to carry the right time. I have called Matthews attention to running ahead of schedule once or twice. They come in ahead of time on relief time for supper and dinner.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I don’t know anything about his coming on April 26th. We found out he was ahead of time way along last March. He was a minute and a half ahead. I have caught him as much as three minutes ahead of time last spring, on the trip due in town 12:07. I didn’t report him, I just talked to him. I have known him to be ahead of time twice in five years while he was under my supervision.

N. KELLY, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a motorman of the Georgia Railway & Power Co. On April 26th, I was standing at the corner of Forsyth and Marietta Street about three minutes after 12. I was going to catch the College Park car home about 12:10. I saw the English Avenue car of Matthews and Mr. Hollis arrive at Forsyth and Marietta about 12:03. I knew Mary Phagan. She was not on that car. She might have gotten off there, but she didn’t come around. I got on that car at Broad and Marietta and went around Hunter Street. She was not on there.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I didn’t say anything about this because I didn’t want to get mixed up in it. I told Mr. Starnes about it this morning. I have never said anything about it before. That car was due in town at 12:07. The Fair Street car was behind it.

W. B. OWENS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I rode on the White City line of the Georgia Railway & Electric Co. It is due at 12:05. Two minutes ahead of the English Avenue car. We got to town on April 26th, at 12:05. I don’t remember seeing the English Avenue car that day. I have known that car to come in a minute ahead of us, sometimes two minutes ahead. That was after April 26th. I don’t recall whether it occurred before April 26th.

LOUIS INGRAM, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a conductor on the English Avenue line. I came to town on that car on April 26th. I don’t know what time we came to town. I have seen that car come in ahead of time several times, sometimes as much as four minutes ahead. I know Matthews, the motorman. I have ridden in with him when he was ahead of time several times.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

It is against the rules to come in ahead of time, and also to come in behind time. They punish you for either one.

W. M. MATTHEWS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I have talked with this man Dobbs (W. C.) but I don’t know what I talked about. I have never told him or anybody that I saw Mary Phagan get off the car with George Epps at the corner of Marietta and Broad. It has been two years since I have been tried for an offense in this court.

Defense witness W.M. Matthews at center

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I was acquitted by the jury. I had to kill a man on my car who assaulted me.

W. C. DOBBS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

Motorman Matthews told me two or three days after the murder that Mary Phagan and George Epps got on his car together and left at Marietta and Broad Streets.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

Sergeant Dobbs is my father.

W. W. ROGERS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

On Sunday morning after the murder, I tried to go up the stairs leading from the basement up to the next floor. The door was fastened down. The staircase was very dusty, like it had been some little time since it had been swept. There was a little mound of shavings right where the chute came down on the basement floor. The bin was about a foot and a half from the chute.

W.W. “Boots” Rogers

SERGEANT L. S. DOBBS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I saw Mr. Rogers on Sunday try to get in that back door leading up from basement in rear of factory. There were cobwebs and dust there. The door was closed.

O. TILLANDER, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

Mr. Graham and I went to the pencil factory on April 26th, about 20 minutes to 12. We went in from the street and looked around and I found a negro coming from a dark alley way, and I asked him for the office and he told me to go to the second floor and turn to the right. I saw Conley this morning. I am not positive that he is the man. He looked to be about the same size. When I went to the office the stenographer was in the outer office. Mr. Frank was in the inner office sitting at his desk. I went there to get my step-son’s money.

E. K. GRAHAM, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I was at the pencil factory April 26th, with Mr. Tillander, about 20 minutes to 12. We met a negro on the ground floor. Mr. Tillander asked him where the office was, and he told him to go up the steps. I don’t know whether it was Jim Conley or not. He was about the same size, but he was a little brighter than Conley. If he was drunk I couldn’t notice it, I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

Mr. Frank and his stenographer were upstairs. He was at his desk. I didn’t see any lady when I came out.

J. W. COLEMAN, sworn for the State in rebuttal. [Mary Phagan’s stepfather. — Ed.]

I remember a conversation I had with detective McWorth. [McWorth was the Pinkerton man, later dismissed, who claimed to have discovered a “bloody club” and part of Mary Phagan’s pay envelope on the first floor, long after other detectives had thoroughly searched the area. –Ed.] He exhibited an envelope to me with a figure “5” on the right of it.

Mary Phagan’s stepfather, J.W. Coleman

CROSS EXAMINATION.

This does not seem to be the envelope he showed me. (Defendant’s Exhibit 47). The figure “5” was on it. I don’t see it now. I told him at the time that Mary was due $1.20, and that “5” on the right would not suit for that.

J. M. GANTT, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I have seen Leo Frank make up the financial sheet. It would take him an hour and a half after I gave him the data. [This in contrast to the repeated claim by Frank that he needed all afternoon. — Ed.]

J.M. Gantt

IVY JONES (c[olered]), sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I saw Jim Conley at the corner of Hunter and Forsyth Streets on April 26th. He came in the saloon while I was there, between one and two o’clock. He was not drunk when I saw him. The saloon is on the opposite corner from the factory. We went on towards Conley’s home. I left him at the corner of Hunter and Davis Street a little after two o’clock.

HARRY SCOTT, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I picked up cord in the basement when I went through there with Mr. Frank. Lee’s shirt had no color on it, excepting that of blood. I got the information as to Conley’s being able to write from McWorth when I returned to Atlanta. As to the conversation Black and I had, with Mr. Frank about Darley, Mr. Frank said Darley was the soul of honor and that we had the wrong man; that there was no use in inquiring about Darley and he knew Darley could not be responsible for such an act. I told him that we had good information to the effect that Darley had been associating with other girls in the factory; that he was a married man and had a family. Mr. Frank didn’t seem to know anything about that. He said it was a peculiar thing for a man in Mr. Darley’s position to be associating with factory employees, if he was doing it.

Pinkerton Detective Harry Scott

CROSS EXAMINATION.

We left after about two hours interview.

L. T. KENDRICK, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I was night watchman at the pencil factory for something like two years. I punched the clocks for a whole night’s work in two or three minutes. The clock at the factory needed setting about every 24 hours. It varied from three to five minutes. That is the clock slip I punched (State’s Exhibit P). I don’t think you could have heard the elevator on the top floor if the machinery was running or anyone was knocking on any of the floors. The back stairway was very dusty and showed that they had not been used lately after the murder. I have seen Jim Conley at the factory Saturday afternoons when I went there to get my money.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I generally got to the factory about a quarter of two to two-thirty. The clock was usually corrected every morning. The clock would run slow sometimes and sometimes fast.

VERA EPPS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

My brother George was in the house when Mr. Minar was asking us about the last time we saw Mary Phagan. I don’t know if he heard the questions asked. George didn’t tell him that he didn’t see Mary that Saturday. I told him I had seen Mary Phagan Thursday.

C. J. MAYNARD, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I have seen Brutus Dalton go in the factory with a woman in June or July, 1912. She weighed about 125 pounds. It was between 1:30 and 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I was ten feet from the woman. I didn’t notice her very particularly. I did not speak to them.

W. T. HOLLIS, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

Mr. Reed rides out with me every morning. I don’t remember talking to J. D. Reed on Monday, April 29th, and telling him that George Epps and Mary Phagan were on my car together. I didn’t tell that to anybody. I say like I have always said, that if he was on the car I did not see him.

J. D. REED, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

Mr. Hollis told me on Monday, April 28th, that Epps had gotten on the car and taken his seat next to Mary, and that the two talked to each other all the way as though they were little sweethearts.

J. N. STARNES, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

There were no spots around the scuttle hole where the ladder is immediately after the murder. Campbell and I arrested Minola McKnight, to get a statement from her. We turned her over to the patrol wagon and we never saw her any more until the following day, when we called Mr. Craven and Mr. Pickett to come down and interview her. We stayed on the outside while she was on the inside with Craven and Pickett. They called us back and I said to her, “Minola, the truth is all we want, and if this is not the truth, don’t you state it.” And she started to put the statement down. Mr. Gordon, her attorney, was on the outside, and I told him we could go inside without his making any demand on me, and he went in with me, and Mr. Febuary had already taken down part of the statement and I stopped him and made him read over what he had already taken down, and after she had finished the statement, Attorney Gordon went to Mr. Dorsey’s office and then he came back to the police station. After he returned the affidavit was read over in the presence of Mr. Pickett, Craven, Campbell, Albert McKnight and Attorney Gordon and she signed it in our presence. You (Mr. Dorsey) had nothing to do with holding her. You told me over the phone that you couldn’t say what I could do, but that I could do what I pleased about it.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

No, I did not lock her up because she didn’t give us the right kind of statement; as to the authority I had to lock her up, it was reasonable and right that she should be locked up. I did that for the best interest of the case I was working on. No, I didn’t have any warrant for her arrest. She was brought to Mr. Dorsey’s office by a bailiff by a subpoena. I took her away from Dorsey’s office and put her in a patrol wagon. I expect Mr. Dorsey knew we were going to lock her up, but he did not tell us to do it. No, he didn’t disapprove of it. I didn’t know anything about her having made a previous statement to Mr. Dorsey. I think Mr. Dorsey said she had made such a statement. I saw her the next day in the station house. She didn’t scream after leaving Dorsey’s office until she reached the sidewalk. And then she commenced hollering and carrying on that she was going to jail; that she didn’t know anything about it, or something like that. No, I had no warrant for her arrest. She had committed no crime. I held her to get the truth. Mr. Dorsey told me I could turn her loose as I pleased. That was after she made the statement. I told him as to what had occurred and that her attorney, Gordon, was coming up there to see him. I told Col. Gordon that if it was agreeable with Col. Dorsey, that Minola could go as far as we were concerned. Well, Mr. Dorsey had more or less to do with the case that I was working on and I wanted to act on his advice and consent. He called me on the telephone and told me that if the chief thought it best or if we thought it best after conferring, to just let her go.

DR. CLARENCE JOHNSON, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am a specialist on diseases of the stomach and intestines. I am a physiologist. A physiologist makes his searches on the living body; the pathologist makes his on a dead body.

If you give any one who has drunk a chocolate milk at about eight o’clock in the morning, cabbage at 12 o’clock and 30 or 40 minutes thereafter you take the cabbage out and it is shown to be dark like chocolate and milk, that much contents of any kind vomited up three and a half hours afterwards would show an abnormal stomach. It doesn’t show a normal digestion.

If a little girl who eats a dinner of cabbage and bread at 11:30 is found the next morning dead at 3 a. m., with a rope around her neck, indented and the flesh sticking up, bruised on the eye, blood on the back of her head, the tongue sticking out, blue skin, every indication that she came to her death from strangulation, her head down, rigor mortis had been on her twenty hours, the blood had settled in her where the gravity would naturally take it in the face, she is embalmed, formaldehyde is used and injected in the various cavities of the body, including the stomach, a pathologist takes her stomach a week or ten days after, finds cabbage of that size (State’s Ex- hibit G) in the stomach, finds starch granules undigested, and finds in the stomach that the pyloris is still closed, that there is nothing in the first six feet of the small intestines; that there is every indication that digestion had been progressing favorably, and finds thirty-two degrees hydrochloric acid, and if the pathologist is capable and finds that there was only combined hydrochloric acid and that there was no abnormal condition of the stomach, the six feet of the intestines was empty, I would say that the digestion of bread and cabbage was stopped within an hour after they were eaten. That would not be a wild guess in my opinion.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

The bruises on the head, the evidence of strangulation and other injuries about the head are other possible factors which must be taken into consideration. Anything which disturbs the circulation of the blood, or hinders the action of the nerves controlling the stomach, especially the secretion, prevents the development of the characteristics found in normal digestion one hour after a meal. I mean by mechanical condition of the stomach, no change in the size or thickness, or opening into the intestines, or size or thickness of intestines. The test should be made with absolute accuracy with these acids. The color test is generally accepted. A man’s eye has to be absolutely correct to make the color test.

The degree of acidity in a normal stomach varies from 30 to 45 degrees, according to the stomach and what is in it. The formaldehyde would make no change on the physical property on the pancreatic juice found in the small intestine after death. There would be hardly any change on its chemical property. When it comes in contact with the formaldehyde it is supposed to be preserved. It has some neutralizing effect on the alkali present. That decomposes in time after death, unless hindered by some preservative. The hydrochloric acids in the stomach also disappear if the stomach has disintegrated and the preservative has disappeared. It disappears like the other fluids and tissues of the body unless hindered by some preservative agent. Sometimes digestion is delayed a good deal even in a normal stomach by insufficient mastication, too much diluting of the juices, or anything that hinders the operation of the mechanical effect. Insufficient mastication is one of the commonest causes, also the taking of too much liquid. Fatigue occasioned by extensive walking would hinder it. If the walking was not too extensive to produce fatigue, it would help digestion in a normal stomach. Insufficient mastication is the worst cause of delayed digestion. My estimate was that the cabbage was found an hour after the process of digestion had begun. I did not undertake to say when the digestion began. You can’t tell by looking at food in a bottle how much the failure to masticate it delayed digestion in hours and minutes. It would be just an estimate.

The physical appearance of that cabbage (Defendant’s Exhibit 88) shows indigestion by the layer, character and size, and area of separation between, and the character and arrangement of the layers below. The mere fact that it was vomited up would be proof positive that no scientific opinion could be made about it. To make a scientific test I would have to test the mechanism of the stomach, the time it was in there and the degree and presence of the different acids. The chocolate milk would not naturally stay in a normal stomach five or six hours. The cabbage would stay in a normal empty stomach where there was a tomato also three or four hours. I never made any test of Mary Phagan’s stomach and examined the contents of it.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

160 cubic cc. of liquid in the stomach taken out nine days afterwards would be a little in excess of what I would consider normal under the conditions already named.

DR. GEORGE M. NILES, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I confine my work to diseases of digestion. Every healthy stomach has a certain definite and orderly relation to every other healthy stomach. Assuming a young lady between thirteen and fourteen years of age at 11:30 April 26, 1913, eats a meal of cabbage and bread, that the next morning about three o’clock her dead body is found. That there are indentations in her neck where a cord had been around her throat, indicating that she died of strangulation, her nails blue, her face blue, a slight injury on the back of the head, a contused bruise on one of her eyes, the body is found with the face down, rigor mortis had been on from sixteen to twenty hours, that the blood in the body has settled in the part where gravity would naturally carry it, that the body is embalmed immediately with a fluid consisting chiefly of formaldehyde, which is injected in the veins and cavities of the body; that she is disinterred nine days thereafter; that cabbage of this texture (State’s Exhibit G) is found in her stomach; that the position of the stomach is normal; that no inflammation of the stomach is found by microscopic investigation; that no mucous is found, and that the glands found under this microscope are found to be normal, that there is no obstruction to the flow of the contents of the stomach to the small intestine; that the pyloris is closed; that there is every indication that digestion was progressing favorably; that in the gastric juices there is found starch granules that are shown by the color test to have been undigested, and that in that stomach you also find thirty-two degrees of hydrochloric acid, no maltose, no dextrin, no free hydrochloric acid (there would be more or less free hydrochloric acid in the course of an hour or more in the orderly progress of digestion of a healthy stomach where the contents are carbohydrates), I would say that indicated that digestion had been progressing less than an hour.

The starch digestion should have progressed beyond the state erythrodextrin in course of an hour. There should have been enough free acid to have stimulated the pyloris to relax to a certain extent, and there should have been some contents in the duodenum. I am assuming, of course, that it is a healthy stomach and that the digestion was not disturbed by any psychic cause which would disturb the mind or any severe physical exercise. I am not going so much on the physical appearance of the cabbage. Any severe physical exercise or mental stress has quite an influence on digestion. Death does not change the composition of the gastric juices when combined with hydrochloric acid for quite awhile. The gastric juices combined with the hydrochloric acid are an antiseptic or preservative. There is a wide variation in diseased stomachs as to digestion.

CROSS EXAMINATION

There are idiosyncracies in a normal stomach, but where they are too marked I would not consider that a normal stomach. I wouldn’t say that there is a mechanical rule where you can measure the digestive power of every stomach for every kind of food. There is a set time for every stomach to digest every kind of food within fairly regular limits, that is, a healthy stomach. There is a fairly mixed standard. There is no great amount of variation between healthy stomachs. I can’t answer for how long it takes cabbage to digest. I have taken cabbage out of a cancerous stomach that had been in there twenty-four hours, but there was no obstruction. The longest time that I have taken cabbage out of a fairly normal stomach was between four and five hours. That was where it was in the stomach along with another meal. I found the cabbage among the remains of the meal four or five hours after it had been eaten.

Mastication is a very important function of digestion. Failure to masticate delays the starch digestion. Starch and cabbage are both carbohydrates. I would say that if cabbage went into a healthy stomach not well masticated, the starch digestion would not get on so well, but the stomach would get busy at once. Of course, it would not be prepared as well. The digestion would be delayed, of course. That cabbage is not as well digested as it should have been (State’s exhibit G), but the very fact of your anticipating a good meal, smelling it, starts your saliva going and forms the first stage of digestion, and digestion is begun right there in the mouth, even if you haven’t chewed it a single time. Any deviation from good mastication retards digestion.

I couldn’t presume to say how long that cabbage lay in Mary Phagan’s stomach. I believe if it had been a live, healthy stomach and the process of digestion was going on orderly, it would be pulverized in four or five hours. It would be more broken up and tricturated than it is. I wouldn’t consider that a wild guess. I think it would have been fairly well pulverized in three hours. Chewing amounts to a great deal, but there should be an amount of saliva in her stomach even if she hadn’t masticated it thoroughly. Chewing is a temperamental matter to a great extent. One man chews his meal quicker than another. If it isn’t chewed at all, the stomach gets busy and helps out all it can and digests it after awhile. It takes more effort, of course, but not necessarily more time. What the teeth fail to do the stomach does to a great extent. The stomach has an extra amount of work if it is not masticated. You can’t tell by looking at the cabbage how long it had been undergoing the process of digestion. If that was a healthy stomach with combined acid of 32 degrees, and nothing happened either physical or mental to interfere with digestion, those laboratory findings indicated that digestion had been progressing less than an hour. I never made an autopsy or examination of the contents of Mary Phagan’s stomach.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

The first stage of digestion is starch digestion. This progresses in the stomach until the contents become acid in all its parts. Then the starch digestion stops until the contents get out in the intestines and become alkaline in reaction; then the starch digestion is continued on beyond. The olfactories act as a stimulant to the salivary glands.

DR. JOHN FUNK, sworn for the State in rebuttal.

I am professor of pathology and bacteriologist. I was shown by Dr. Harris sections from the vaginal wall of Mary Phagan, sections taken near the skin surface. I didn’t see sections from the stomach or the contents. These sections showed that the epithelium wall was torn off at points immediately beneath that covering in the tissues below, and there was infiltrated pressure of blood. They were, you might say, engorged, and the white blood cells in those blood vessels were more numerous than you will find in a normal blood vessel. The blood vessels at some distance from the torn point were not so engorged to the same extent as those blood vessels immediately in the vicinity of the hemorrhage. Those blood vessels were larger than they should be under normal circumstances, as compared with the blood vessels in the vicinity of the tear. You couldn’t tell about any discoloration, but there was blood there. It is reasonable to suppose that there was swelling there because of the infiltrated pressure of the blood in the tissues. Those conditions must have been produced prior to death, because the blood could not invade the tissues after death.

If a young lady, between thirteen and fourteen years old eats at eleven thirty a. m. a normal meal of bread and cabbage on a Saturday and at three a. m. Sunday morning she is found with a cord around her neck, the skin indented, the nails and flesh cyanotic, the tongue out and swollen, blue nails, everything indicating that she had been strangled to death, that rigor mortis had set in, and according to the best authorities had probably progressed from sixteen to twenty hours, and she was laying face down when found, and gravity had forced the blood into that part of the body next to the ground, that it had discolored her features, that immediately thereafter, between ten and two o’clock she was embalmed with a fluid containing usual amount of formaldehyde, this being injected into the veins in the large cavities, she is interred thereafter and in about a week or ten days she is disinterred, and you find in her stomach cabbage like that (State’s Exhibit G) and you find granules of starch undigested, and those starch granules are developed by the usual color tests, and you also find in that stomach thirty-two degrees of combined hydrochloric acid, the pyloris closed, and the duodenum, and six feet of the small intestines empty, no free hydrochloric acid being present at all, nor dextrin, or erythrodextrin being found in any degree, and the uterus was somewhat enlarged, and the walls of the vagina show dilation and swelling, I would say that under those conditions that the epithelium was torn off before death, because of the changes in the blood vessels and tissues below the epithelium covering, and because of the presence of blood.

I would not express an opinion as to how long cabbage had been in the stomach, from the appearance of the cabbage itself, taking into consideration the combined hydrochloric acid of thirty-two degrees, the emptiness of the small intestine, the presence of starch granules, and the absence of free hydrochloric acid, one can’t say positively, but it is reasonable to assume that the digestion had pro- gressed probably an hour, maybe a little more, maybe a little less.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

Dr. Dorsey asked me to examine the sections of the vaginal wall last Saturday. The sections I examined were about a quarter of an inch wide and three-quarters of an inch long. It was about nine twenty-five thousandths of an inch thick, that is, much thinner than tissue paper. I examined thirty or forty little strips. That was after this trial began. I was not present at the autopsy. As soon as a tissue receives an injury, it reacts in a very short time. The reaction shows up in the changes of the blood vessels. You can tell by the appearance of the blood vessels whether the injury was before death or not, and you can give an approximate idea as to the length of time before death. I do not know from what body the sections were taken. I know that it was from a human vagina.

THE STATE CLOSES.

EVIDENCE FOR DEFENDANT IN SUR-REBUTTAL.

T. Y. BRENT, sworn for the Defendant in sur-rebuttal.

I have heard George Kendley on several occasions express himself very bitterly towards Leo Frank. He said he felt in this case just as he did about a couple of negroes hung down in Decatur; that he didn’t know whether they had been guilty or not, but somebody had to be hung for killing those street car men and it was just as good to hang one nigger as another, and that Frank was nothing but an old Jew and they ought to take him out and hang him anyhow.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I have been employed by the defense to assist in subpoenaing witnesses. I took the part of Jim Conley in the experiment conducted by Dr. Win. Owens at the factory on Sunday.

M. E. STAHL, sworn for the Defendant, in sur-rebuttal.

I have heard George Kendley, the conductor, express his feelings toward Leo Frank. I was standing on the rear platform, and he said that Frank was as guilty as a snake, and should be hung, and that if the court didn’t convict him that he would be one of five or seven that would get him.

MISS C. S. HAAS, sworn for the Defendant, in sur-rebuttal.

I heard Kendley two weeks ago talk about the Frank case so loud that the entire street car heard it. He said that circumstantial evidence was the best kind of evidence to convict a man on and if there was any doubt, the State should be given the benefit of it, and that 90 per cent. of the best people in the city, including himself, thought that Frank was guilty and ought to hang.

N. SINKOVITZ, sworn for the Defendant, in sur-rebuttal.

I am a pawnbroker. I know M.E. McCoy. He has pawned his watch to me lately. The last time was January 11, 1913. It was in my place of business on the 26th of April, 1913. He paid up his loan on August 16th, last Saturday, during this trial. This is the same watch I have been handling for him during the last two years.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

My records here show that he took it out Saturday.

S. L. ASHER, sworn for the Defendant in sur-rebuttal.

About two weeks ago I was coming to town between 5 and 10 minutes to 1 on the car and there was a man who was talking very loud about the Frank case, and all of a sudden he said: “They ought to take that damn Jew out and hang him anyway.” I took his number down to report him.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I have not had a chance to report since it happened.

It is most interesting that a single man, expressing his opinion that Leo Frank was a “damn Jew” and ought to hang, was something that a public-spirited citizen in 1913 Atlanta thought he ought to report to the authorities. This hardly corresponds with the atmosphere of “pervasive Southern anti-Semitism” that modern Frank supporters say existed. On the contrary, it speaks of an atmosphere in which such sentiments were strongly deplored, and even considered beyond the pale of socially acceptable behavior and expression.

In this rare photograph from his days at Cornell University, Leo Frank stares wide-eyed at the camera, a characteristic expression for him.

During the final moments of the trial itself, and before closing arguments were made, Leo Max Frank asked to address the court once again. He was permitted to do so. As before, he was unsworn and not under oath and not subject to cross-examination, just as in his initial statement. No matter what Frank told the jury, Dorsey was forbidden to question him about it, or make it the basis for questioning anyone else.

ADDITIONAL STATEMENT MADE BY DEFENDANT, LEO M. FRANK.

In reply to the statement of the boy that he saw me talking to Mary Phagan when she backed away from me, that is absolutely false, that never occurred. In reply to the two girls, Robinson and Hewel, that they saw me talking to Mary Phagan and that I called her” Mary,” I wish to say that they are mistaken. It is very possible that I have talked to the little girl in going through the factory and examining the work, but I never knew her name, either to call her “Mary Phagan,” “Miss Phagan,” or “Mary.”

In reference to the statements of the two women who say that they saw me going into the dressing room with Miss Rebecca Carson, I wish to state that that is utterly false. It is a slander on the young lady, and I wish to state that as far as my knowledge of Miss Rebecca Carson goes, she is a lady of unblemished character.

DEFENDANT CLOSES.

So to the very end, Leo Frank maintained that all the witnesses who heard him calling Mary Phagan by name were liars — or mistaken. Interestingly, he did not take even a moment at the end of the trial to repeat his claim that he never made lascivious advances toward the young ladies under his supervision — as several of them had so recently testified. Most likely he was warned off the topic by his counsel.

In our next article, we will present the powerful, yet completely contradictory, closing arguments of both the prosecution and defense in the trial of Leo M. Frank.

* * *

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

For further study we recommend the following resources:

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Full archive of Atlanta Georgian newspapers relating to the murder and subsequent trial

The Leo Frank case as reported in the Atlanta Constitution

The Leo Frank Case (Mary Phagan) Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery 1913

The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean

American State Trials, volume X (1918) by John Lawson

Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey in the Trial of Leo Frank

Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913, Brief of Evidence

The American Mercury is following these events of 100 years ago, the month-long trial of Leo M. Frank for the brutal murder of Miss Mary Phagan, in capsule form on a regular basis through August 26, the 100th anniversary of the reading of the verdict. Follow along with us and experience the trial as Atlantans of a century ago did, and come to your own conclusions.

Read also the Mercury’s coverage of Week One of the Leo Frank trial, Week Two, and Week Three and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.

A fearless scholar, dedicated to the truth about this case, has obtained, scanned, and uploaded every single relevant issue of the major Atlanta daily newspapers and they now can be accessed through archive.org as follows:

Atlanta Constitution Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution/

Atlanta Georgian Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-georgian/

Atlanta Journal Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-journal/

More background on the case may be found in my article here at the Mercury, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty.

(Click the play buttons for our audio book version of this article; the first recording deals with week three of the trial exclusive of Frank’s testimony, the second with Frank’s unsworn statement itself.)

by Bradford L. Huie

AS THE THIRD WEEK of the trial dawned, the prosecution had just made its case that National Pencil Company Superintendent Leo Max Frank had murdered 13-year-old laborer Mary Phagan — and a powerful case it was. Now it was the defense’s turn — and the defense team was a formidable one, the best that money could buy in 1913 Atlanta, led by Reuben Arnold and Luther Rosser. And many would argue that the city’s well-known promoter and attorney Thomas B. Felder was also secretly working for Frank and his friends, along with the two biggest detective agencies in the United States, the Burns agency — sub rosa, under the direction of Felder — and the Pinkertons — openly, cooperating with the police, and under the direction of the National Pencil Company. (For background on this case, read our introductory article, our coverage of Week One and Week Two of the trial, and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.)

As the defense began its parade of witnesses, few suspected that the defendant himself, Leo Frank, would soon take the stand and make an admission so astonishing that it strained belief.

The testimony of Jim Conley for the prosecution was still fresh in every spectator’s and juror’s mind. Conley, an African-American sweeper for the pencil company, had admitted to helping Leo Frank move the lifeless body of Mary Phagan from the pencil factory’s Metal Room bathroom on the second floor to a spot in the basement just in front of the gaping maw of the furnace, adding that Frank had asked him to come back later and burn the body in return for a promised payment of $200 — an appointment that was never kept. He also told a rapt courtroom how he had written the black-dialect “death notes” at Frank’s instruction.

Jim Conley on the witness stand; prosecutor Hugh Dorsey; ladies in the audience

Conley said that Frank had admitted to striking the girl, when she refused his advances, and accidentally killing her. (Conley evidently missed seeing the marks of strangulation, probably being deceived by a ripped piece of lace underwear that the killer had placed around Mary’s neck to conceal the deep lacerations made by the cord.)

Not only had Conley stood up to one of the most intense cross-examinations imaginable, but, before the trial, he had led investigators on an on-location step-by-step re-enactment of his part in the crime that was so detailed and factual that it convinced almost all observers that he was telling the truth. The Atlanta Georgian‘s James B. Nevin, whose paper was beginning to show sympathy for Frank, nevertheless expressed the popular view when he wrote:

If the story Conley tells IS a lie, then it is the most inhumanly devilish, the most cunningly clever, and the most amazingly sustained lie ever told in Georgia!

With the final confession of Conley, police believed they had fully solved the case.

W.W. Matthews, a motorman for the Georgia Railway & Electric Co., was sworn for the defense and stated that Mary Phagan got off his car at 12:10, meaning that if the motorman’s watch and memory were accurate she must have arrived shortly after Monteen Stover, not before her as other witnesses had testified. W.T. Hollis, a streetcar conductor, was called to confirm Matthews’ timing. Here is their testimony:

W.W. MATTHEWS, sworn for the Defendant.

I work for the Georgia Railway & Electric Co. as a motorman. On the 26th day of April I was running on English Avenue. Mary Phagan got on my car at Lindsey Street at 11:50. Our route was from Bellwood to English Avenue, down English Avenue to Kennedy, down Kennedy to Gray, Gray to Jones Avenue, Jones Avenue to Marietta, Marietta to Broad, and out Broad Street. From Lindsey Street to Broad Street is about a mile and a half or two miles. We make frequent stops. We were scheduled to arrive at Marietta and Broad at 12:07(1/2). We were on schedule. We stayed on time all day. Our car turned up Broad St.

Atlanta circa 1913, as viewed from Hunter Street

Mary Phagan got off at Hunter and Broad. It takes generally from two and a half to three minutes to go from Broad and Marietta to Broad and Hunter. That is a very congested street and you must go slow. I was relieved at Broad and Marietta by another motorman, but sat down in the same car one seat behind Mary Phagan. Another little girl was sitting in the seat with her. We got to Broad and Hunter about 12:10. Mary and the other little girl both got off and walked to the sidewalk and they wheeled like they were going to turn around on Hunter Street, both of them together. The pencil factory is about a block and a half from where they got off at Hunter and Broad. Nobody got on with Mary at Lindsey Street. There wasn’t any little boy with her. The first time I noticed the little girl sitting with Mary was when we left Broad and Marietta Streets and I went back into the car and saw this little girl sitting with her. I know the little Epps boy. I have seen him riding on my car. He did not get on the car with her at Lindsey Street. I saw Mary’s body at the undertaker’s. It was the same girl that got on my car.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I did not tell one of the detectives that we might have been running three or four minutes ahead of schedule that day. I remember that Mary did not get off the car at Broad and Marietta because there was a street car conductor sitting behind me, an ex-conductor and he had a badge on his coat and I looked at it and it had a little girl’s picture and I reached over to where Mary was and said, “Little girl, here is your picture,” and she said, “No, it is not.” I don’t know who the other little girl was sitting with her. The other little girl was dressed something like Mary. I didn’t pay much attention to their dresses, but they looked sort of alike. Mary’s dress wasn’t black. It was light colored. I know Epps since this case came up. I could identify him. I never paid much attention to her hat. It was light colored I reckon but I am not sure. It just seemed that way.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

I identified Mary’s body Sunday afternoon after the murder at the undertaker’s. There was no doubt about her being the same girl. I knew her well by sight. She rode on my car lots.

RE-CROSS EXAMINATION.

I can’t tell you whether that is the hat or not she wore.

W. T. HOLLIS, sworn for the Defendant.

I am a street car conductor. On the 26th of April I was on the English Avenue line. We ran on schedule that day. Mary Phagan got on at Lindsey Street at about 11:50. She is the same girl I identified at the undertaker’s. She had been on my car frequently and I knew her well. No one else got on with her at Lindsey Street. Epps did not get on with her. I took up her fare on English Avenue, several blocks from where she got on. And no one was sitting with her then. I do not recollect Epps getting on the car at all that morning. Don’t know whether anybody else afterwards sat with Mary or not. We got to Broad and Marietta seven and a half minutes after twelve, schedule time. I was relieved at Forsyth and Marietta Streets, where I got off. Mary was still on the car when I got off. It takes two and a half minutes to run from Broad and Marietta to Broad and Hunter. I have timed the car again and again since then. I identified the little girl at the undertaker’s Sunday afternoon. Didn’t notice the color of her clothes.

Defense witnesses Hollis, Matthews, and Kaufman: Ira Kauffman testified that Mary Phagan’s body could have been pushed down the scuttle hole to the basement, an idea essential to the defense’s theory that Jim Conley was the killer.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

Mary rode with us two or three times a week. So did Epps. I don’t know where he got off or where he got on. We are not supposed to come in ahead of time. We never come in two or three minutes ahead of time. We are a little late sometimes. I never noticed anybody sitting with Mary. She was sitting by herself when I got her fare. There wasn’t but two or three passengers on the car and I know there wasn’t anybody sitting with her. If Epps was on the car I don’t recollect it. I don’t re- call the name of any other passengers except Mary Phagan. As to what attracted my attention to Mary getting on the front end of the car, as a general rule when she would catch our car Mr. Matthews would say to her “You are late to-day,” and sometimes she would come in and remark that she was mad; that she was late to-day and when she came that morning Mr. Matthews said to her, “Are you mad to-day?” and she said, “Yes, I am late.” And sort of laughed and came on in the car and sat down. She usually caught our car when she came in the morning, the one due in town at 7:07. I didn’t know Mary’s name, I just recognized Mary’s face as the little girl who traveled with us.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

I heard of the murder the next day. Newspaper reporters asked us to go down and identify the girl. There was no doubt about her being the little girl who was on our car. Oliver Street is the next street to Lindsey. I did not see Epps get on at Oliver Street. It is against the rule of the company to get to the city ahead of time.

RE-GROSS EXAMINATION.

It is not against the rules to get in behind time. Sometimes we might get there a few minutes ahead of time, but hardly ever. We always look at our watches at the main destination, just at Broad and Marietta. We are supposed to do that.

But — and this issue dogs both sides of this case — how accurate were watches and clocks in 1913? (Even in 2013, my quartz watch is sometimes off by a few minutes, especially when the battery is over a year old, and my remaining spring-wound watch is, to put it charitably, just approximate even when freshly-wound.) And, if Mary really didn’t get off the car until 12:10, why didn’t Monteen Stover meet her, then? And a later-arriving Mary Phagan still doesn’t explain Leo Frank’s empty office while the factory clock ticked off every second from 12:05 to 12:10 in Monteen Stover’s presence.

Herbert Schiff

Herbert G. Schiff, the factory’s assistant superintendent directly under Leo Frank, then testified, stating that he’d never seen women brought to the office as the prosecution had alleged, nor had he seen Conley “watching” for Frank. He stated that he, not Frank, had paid off Helen Ferguson the Friday before the murder, and that Ferguson has not asked for Mary Phagan’s pay. He also went into excruciating detail — thousands of words’ worth — about how the books were kept at the factory, with the unstated implication being that Frank would have simply been too busy calculating sums and making entries to have entertained young ladies — or killed them. This “too busy” line of reasoning would be returned to again and again by the defense, and would form the larger part of Leo Frank’s own statement in his own defense. It was reinforced by the next witness, public accountant Joel Hunter, and yet another accountant, C.E. Pollard.

Hattie Hall, the plant stenographer, confirmed that she had worked with Frank until about noon, and had punched out at 12:02, seeing no one come in as she went out. Interestingly, Hall said of the important financial sheet that supposedly took up so much time every Saturday that “I didn’t see Mr. Frank working on any of these books that day, that I was in the outer office and he was in the inner office. There wasn’t any such looking sheet as the financial on his desk. When I was in there he was at work on a pile of letters and things like that.”

Corinthia Hall: Why would Conley have had to hide when she and a friend visited Leo Frank’s office?

Emma Clarke Freeman and Corinthia Hall then testified that they had come briefly to the factory at 11:45, contradicting Jim Conley’s testimony that they had arrived at 12:45 when he had gone into Leo Frank’s wardrobe to hide from them while they talked to Frank. If the women spoke the truth, and it’s hard to imagine a reason for them not to do so, it does appear that Conley was mistaken about the time, but why would he deliberately lie about it? The timing of their visit isn’t crucial in any way — even its complete absence would just have given Frank and Conley a few more minutes to move Mary Phagan’s body and write the death notes. But it is interesting that, according to Conley’s testimony, Frank obviously didn’t want to be seen with Conley that day, which is odd and suspicious in itself — what’s wrong with being seen talking with the factory sweeper? Maybe a lot is wrong with it, if you’re planning to use him to facilitate a secret sexual tryst with an underage girl.

Pinkerton detective Harry Scott was recalled by the defense, mainly to show that Jim Conley had changed his story and contradicted himself thereby many times. But there wasn’t too much sting in that for the prosecution, since Conley himself had freely admitted as much.

Miss Magnolia Kennedy challenged the idea that Helen Ferguson had asked for Mary’s pay, but confirmed that the hair found on the lathe in the Metal Room looked like Mary’s, and that she had never seen blood on the floor there until after the murder:

Misses McMurtrey, Kennedy, and Johnson said they had never experienced inappropriate behavior from Leo Frank.

MISS MAGNOLIA KENNEDY, sworn for the Defendant.

I have been working for the pencil factory for about four years, in the metal department. I drew my pay on Friday, April 25th, from Mr. Schiff at the pay window. Helen Ferguson was there when I went up there. I was behind her and had my hand on her shoulder. Mr. Frank was not there, Mr. Schiff gave Helen Ferguson her pay envelope. Helen Ferguson did not ask Mr. Schiff for Mary Phagan’s money. I came out right behind Helen Ferguson. We waited for Grace Hicks and then went down stairs. Helen didn’t say anything about Mr. Frank at all. We went down stairs about five minutes to six. We saw Helen Ferguson start up Forsyth Street.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

On Monday, April 28th, Mr. Barrett called my attention to the hair which he found on the machine. It looked like Mary’s hair. My machine was right next to Mary’s. There is a good deal of water over there by Mr. Quinn’s room. Mary’s hair was a light brown, kind of sandy color. You could plainly see the dark spots and white spot over it ten or twelve feet away. [The smear of Haskoline or other white substance, apparently placed over the blood spots. — Ed.] Helen and Mary were the best of friends and were neighbors. Helen made mention that Mary was not there when we were paid off. I have never noticed any spots around the metal room. That’s the first time I had ever seen anything like that.

Machinist R.P. Barrett

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

I have never looked for spots before. It’s a dirty floor, full of oil dirt. I don’t know whose hair that was. Helen did not ask Mr. Schiff for Mary’s money. She did not have any business going to Mr. Frank when Mr. Schiff was there paying off. She did not go in and ask Mr. Frank for Mary’s money. I left with her. I went one way and she went another.

RE-CROSS EXAMINATION.

Mr. Frank paid off sometimes. If there is any trouble about the amount of our money, we would go to anybody that was in the office. Mr. Frank was not paying off that day.

Pencil factory employee Wade Campbell was then sworn and told of his interactions on the day of the murder. The defense hoped he could cast doubt on the blood spot evidence and Frank’s interactions with Conley, but note well his testimony about how cheerful and playful Frank was before noon:

WADE CAMPBELL, sworn for the Defendant.

I have been working for the pencil factory for about a year and a half. I had a conversation with my sister, Mrs. Arthur White, on Monday, April 28th. She told me that she had seen a negro sitting at the elevator shaft when she went in the factory at twelve o’clock on Saturday and that she came out at 12:30, she heard low voices, but couldn’t see anybody. On April 26th, I got to the factory about 9:30. Mr. Frank was in his outer office. He was laughing and joking with people there, and joked with me. He thought I wanted to borrow some money. I stayed about five or ten minutes and left the factory. That was about 9:40. I have never seen Mr. Frank talk to Mary Phagan. On Tuesday after the murder I went up on the fourth floor with Mr. Frank. I did not see the negro Conley talk to him at all that time.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

My sister said she saw the negro when she went in the factory. When she heard the voices coming out, she was coming down the steps from the second floor. I saw the spots where they claim was blood, close to the girls’ dressing room on second floor. I couldn’t say whether it was blood or not. I deny that I ever said that my sister said she saw the negro on the box when she came out of the factory. He was sitting on a box between the elevator shaft and the staircase. That looks like my signature. I don’t know whether it is or not. Yes, I corrected certain statements in that paper.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

I went to Mr. Dorsey’s office because he subpoenaed me. I thought I had to obey it. Mr. Starnes and Mr. Campbell and the stenographer were there. All of them asked me questions. I signed a statement about twenty-one pages long. I have seen Jim Conley reading newspapers up on the fourth floor, twice since the murder. It is not unusual to see spots all over the metal room floor.

RE-CROSS EXAMINATION.

Conley was sitting by the elevator when he was reading those papers, during working hours. The other time he was reading down at the rear end of the building. It was an extra, but I don’t know what paper it was. I knew that he could write because I had seen him do it several times, with pen and ink. I don’t know whether he was making up his report of boxes, but I have seen him writing. Yes, I have seen spots along the route from the ladies’ closet to the elevator ever since I have been there. They have red varnish and red paint and such things like that that look like blood. I am sure there are spots all around in the metal room, but I won’t say they look like the spots near the ladies’ dressing room.

How jocular and playful Leo Max Frank was in the forenoon of April 26, 1913, apparently a man without a care in the world. Was he possibly even a man with the anticipated pleasure of a sexual tryst in mind? Contrast this with his nervousness and trembling and startling inability to perform everyday tasks when Newt Lee arrived at four in the afternoon — a time when, according to his story, he didn’t have any idea that Mary Phagan was dead and had nothing but a possible rain shower to worry about.

Factory employee Lemmie Quinn testified that he had been to the factory and glimpsed Frank in his office about 12:20, though he hadn’t mentioned that visit to anyone until days had passed — and even Frank failed to mention it until Quinn came forward. Quinn admitted that he had told Frank he “didn’t want to be brought into it,” but that he would mention the visit “if it would help.” He also confirmed the time of Miss Hall’s and Mrs. Freeman’s visit to the factory, but only indirectly, saying that he saw them in a nearby eatery, The Busy Bee, at around 12:30. He also claimed that “we have blood spots quite frequently” in the Metal Room.

Harry Denham, who was working on the fourth floor of the pencil factory the day of the killing, said that he saw Leo Frank around three and he did not appear especially anxious or nervous. If Jim Conley’s account is accurate, this would have been a time when Frank still might have been expecting Conley to return to “finish the job” — that is, burn the body. An hour later, when Newt Lee arrived, Frank would probably have realized that Conley had skipped out.

These 12 jurors listened attentively as the witnesses testified

Minola McKnight, the Frank’s African-American cook, had earlier signed a statement saying that she had overheard a conversation between Frank and his wife in which Frank admitted to killing a girl earlier that day. Her statement was brought to the attention of the police by her husband. But she later denied her former statement, said her husband was lying, and that she had only signed the statement (even though her lawyer was present) because of a fear of jail and the detective’s “third degree” methods. Amid allegations that Mrs. Frank had suddenly started to give her money, both she and her husband stuck to their respective stories. If Minola McKnight was telling the truth the second time around and not the first, the Atlanta police were engaged in the crudest kind of abuse and subornation of perjury. Here is her testimony — the reader may assign whatever credibility he thinks it deserves:

MINOLA McKNIGHT (c[olored]), sworn for the Defendant.

I work for Mrs. Selig. I cook for her. Mr. and Mrs. Frank live with Mr. and Mrs. Selig. His wife is Mrs. Selig’s daughter. I cooked breakfast for the family on April 26th. Mr. Frank finished breakfast a little after seven o’clock. Mr. Frank came to dinner about 20 minutes after one that day. That was not the dinner hour, but Mrs. Frank and Mrs. Selig were going off on the two o’clock car. They were already eating when Mr. Frank came in. My husband, Albert McKnight, wasn’t in the kitchen that day between one and two o’clock at all. Standing in the kitchen door you can not see the mirror in the dining room. If you move up to the north end of the kitchen where you can see the mirror, you can’t see the dining room table. My husband wasn’t there all that day.

Mr. Frank left that day sometime after two o’clock. I next saw him at half past six at supper. I left about eight o’clock. Mr. Frank was still at home when I left. He took supper with the rest of the family. After this happened the detectives came out and arrested me and took me to Mr. Dorsey’s office, where Mr. Dorsey, my husband and another man were there. I was working at the Selig’s when they come and got me. They tried to get me to say that Mr. Frank would not allow his wife to sleep that night and that he told her to get up and get his gun and let him kill himself, and that he made her get out of bed. They had my husband there to bulldoze me, claiming that I had told him that. I had never told him anything of the kind. I told them right there in Mr. Dorsey’s office that it was a lie. Then they carried me down to the station house in the patrol wagon. They came to me for another statement about half past eleven or twelve o’clock that night and made me sign something before they turned me loose, but it wasn’t true. I signed it to get out of jail, because they said they would not let me out. It was all written out for me before they made me sign it.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I signed that statement (State’s Exhibit ” J “), but I didn’t tell you some of the things you got in there. I didn’t say he left home about three o’clock. I said somewhere about two. I did not say he was not there at one o’clock. Mr. Graves and Mr. Pickett, of Beck & Gregg Hardware Co., came down to see me. A detective took me to your (Mr. Dorsey’s) office. My husband was there and told me that I had told him certain things. Yes, I denied it. Yes, I wept and cried and stuck to it. When they first brought me out of jail, they said they did not want anything else but the truth, then they said I had to tell a lot of lies and I told them I would not do it. That man sitting right there (pointing to Mr. Campbell) and a whole lot of men wanted me to tell lies. They wanted me to witness to what my husband was saying. My husband tried to get me to tell lies. They made me sign that statement, but it was a lie. If Mr. Frank didn’t eat any dinner that day I ain’t sitting in this chair. Mrs. Selig never gave me no money. The statement that I signed is not the truth. They told me if I didn’t sign it they were going to keep me locked up. That man there (indicating) and that man made me sign it. Mr. Graves and Mr. Pickett made me sign it. They did not give me any more money after this thing happened. One week I was paid two weeks’ wages.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

None of the things in that statement is true. It’s all a lie. My wages never have been raised since this thing happened. They did not tell me to keep quiet. They always told me to tell the truth and it couldn’t hurt.

Mr. and Mrs. Selig, Frank’s in-laws. testified that Frank had acted normally on the day of the murder and the next day. A number of other witnesses, many of them Jewish, testified that they had seen Frank going to or coming back from lunch on April 26, a few adding that they saw no signs of nervousness as he made his way via the streetcar system.

Several workers at the factory, testifying for the defense, said they’d never seen Leo Frank talking to Mary Phagan, that they’d never seen him with women in his office after hours, and that Conley’s reputation for veracity was bad. One of them, Iora Small, went further, volunteering for the benefit of the all-white jury that “I don’t know of any nigger on earth that I would believe on oath.” Miss Small, on cross-examination, stated that she and several of her co-workers had seen blood spots in the metal room the following Monday, near where the samples had been chipped up, “two or three spots, some the size of a nickle and some the size of a quarter.”

Several of Frank’s friends and family members said they dined or talked with Leo Frank the afternoon and evening the day after the murder, and that Frank hadn’t displayed any unusual nervousness then.

Frank’s lawyers showed audacity by bringing to the stand W.D. McWorth, the (later dismissed) Pinkerton man who had “discovered” what was insinuated to be a fragment of Mary Phagan’s pay envelope (showing the initials “M.P.”) and a “bloody club” on the first floor where Conley said he’d been stationed. The only hitch in this tale was that these “finds” were made almost three weeks after police and other Pinkerton agents had made a thorough search of the entire building.

The defense then brought numerous physicians to the stand who cast doubt on the time element of the case by claiming that Dr. Henry F. Harris’s autopsy analysis of the contents of Mary Phagan’s stomach was flawed, since it was difficult to gauge the degree of digestion of cabbage. Harris had said that Mary Phagan had met her death around 12:05 — about the same time Mary Phagan had come to collect her pay from Leo Frank and that Monteen Stover had found Leo Frank’s office — on the same floor as the Metal Room — utterly empty. But the jurors knew there was more than just cabbage in Mary Phagan’s last meal, and there was no trace of a living Mary anywhere in any witness’s testimony after her visit with Frank.

A number of friends and acquaintances of Frank were brought in to testify to Frank’s general good character. (Many consider this to be a tactical error on the defense’s part, since it opened the door for the prosecution to address Frank’s character — and several prosecution witnesses testified that Frank had made inappropriate sexual advances to girls and young women — an opportunity the prosecution would not otherwise have had. And the defense also chose not to cross-examine any of the young women who so testified, leaving an impression with the jurors that they dared not do so.)

One of the character witnesses for the defense had a surprise in store:

MISS IRENE JACKSON, sworn for the Defendant.

I worked at the pencil factory for three years. So far as I know Mr. Frank’s character was very well. I don’t know anything about him. He never said anything to me. I have never met Mr. Frank at any time for any immoral purpose.

Irene Jackson: a witness for Frank, her testimony under cross-examination was very surprising to the defense.

CROSS EXAMINATION.

I am the daughter of County Policeman Jackson. I never heard the girls say anything about him, except that they seemed to be afraid of him. They never would notice him at all. They would go to work when they saw him coming.

Miss Emily Mayfield and I were undressing in the dressing room once when Mr. Frank came to the door. He looked, turned around and walked out. He just came to the door and pushed it open. He smiled or made some kind of face. Miss Mayfield had her top dress off and had her old dress in her hand to put it on.

I told Mr. Darley I would not quit unless my father made me, and he said if the girls would stick to Frank they won’t lose anything.

I heard some remarks two or three times about Mr. Frank going to the dressing room on different occasions, but I don’t remember anything about it. The second time I heard of his going to the dressing room was when my sister was laying down there. She had her feet on a stool. She was dressed. I was in there at the time. He just walked in, and turned and walked out. Mr. Frank walked in the dressing room on Miss Mamie Kitchens, when I was in there. He never said anything the three times he walked in when I was there. The dressing room has a mirror and a few lockers for the foreladies. That’s the only thing that I have ever seen Mr. Frank do, go in the dressing room and stare at the girls. I have heard them speak of other times when I was not there.

RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION.

My father made me quit, after the murder. There are two windows in the dressing room opening on Forsyth Street. I think there had been some complaints of the girls flirting through the windows. I have heard of some of the girls flirting through the windows. The orders were against the girls flirting through the windows. Mr. Frank never came into the room at all, he pushed the door open and just looked. My sister and I were both dressed when Mr. Frank looked in the door. The other time he came in I was fixing to put on my street dress. I was not undressed.

RE-CROSS EXAMINATION.

I don’t know if Mr. Frank knew the girls were in there before he opened the door or not. It was the usual hour for them to be in there. He could have seen the girls register from the outer office, but not from the inner office. I have never heard any talk about Mr. Frank going around putting his hands on girls. I have never heard of his going out with any of the girls. My sister quit at the factory before Christmas. I have never flirted with anybody out of the window. I have heard them say that they didn’t want the girls to flirt around the factory. I have heard Mr. Frank say that to Miss McClellan, after she told him that she knew of some of the girls flirting.

 Miss Jackson’s story lent credence, though not full corroboration, to the stories of Frank being very forward with the girls who worked under him. What ordinary male factory manager would fling open the door of a women’s dressing room, well knowing that it was, or might be, occupied?

___

The most long-awaited moment of the entire trial had now arrived. On August 18, 1913 at 2:14 PM, the accused, Leo Max Frank, mounted the stand to speak to the jury in his own defense. And what a strange, amazing speech it was.

Leo Frank, lower right, Vice President in 1906 of the H. Morse Stephens Debate Club (click for high resolution)

Under Georgia law, the defendant has a choice: he may remain silent, he may testify under oath in the customary way and be cross-examined by opposing counsel, or he may make an unsworn statement about which he may not be cross-examined. Amazingly, Leo Frank chose the last of these options. Here was Frank, proclaiming his innocence — Leo Frank, a skilled debater who had been a member of an Ivy League debate team — Leo Frank, with some of the best and toughest legal minds in the state on his side — here was this same Leo Frank quailing before a county prosecutor, refusing to be sworn, and refusing to be cross-examined. It gave the definite appearance of a man who dared not be cross-examined. Despite the near-certainty that such a choice would be a black mark in the eyes of the jury, Frank made that choice — and his platinum-plated legal team either agreed or acquiesced in his decision.

Leo Frank addresses the court

Weeks in preparation, Leo Frank’s unsworn speech was a mind-numbing nearly four hours long — and an astounding three of those four hours were devoted to recounting the minutiae of his office work on the day of the murder, mainly his financial entries and accounting book calculations, in excruciating detail. Frank even presented the original pages of the accounting book to the jury.

All this was Frank’s way of telling the jury that he simply hadn’t any time to spare that Saturday to ravish any 13-year-olds, or kill them, or cover up the crime. But how credible is that? At a little after noon, when Leo Frank was the last known person to have seen Mary Phagan alive, he had had three and a half hours to do his office work.

Leo M. Frank tells his own story, pictures from the Atlanta Georgian: The claim that “the accused man urged his lawyers to let the Solicitor and his aides cross-question him freely” is disingenuous theatre, though — Frank could have accomplished that easily by making a sworn statement. Dorsey was not permitted by law to cross examine him on the unsworn statement he did make. Amazingly, when the Georgian and Constitution published Frank’s statement on August 19, they completely omitted his admission that he may have used the toilet shortly after noon on the day of the murder. (click for high resolution)

Both defense and prosecution agree that — guilty or innocent, whatever he may have done between noon and 1PM — he came back after lunch that day and had another three hours, from roughly 3PM to 6PM, to do whatever work needed to be done. Was his prolonged monologue supposed to convince his listeners that six and a half hours would not suffice for his calculations and that he definitely needed the noon hour too? If that were true, why had he originally planned to leave two entire hours early, at 4PM, to see a holiday baseball game with his brother-in-law? Wouldn’t that have made his accounting work impossible, too? And, if Leo Frank can do his accounting and other work in an average time of seven or eight hours, is it beyond belief that he could, if necessary, work 15% faster and give himself an hour or more to spare? In fact, who would ever know if he had just made up any missed work a day or two later?

Eventually, Frank would address issues more germane to the case in his statement:

Miss Hall left my office on her way home at this time, and to the best of my information there were in the building Arthur White and Harry Denham and Arthur White’s wife on the top floor. To the best of my knowledge, it must have been from ten to fifteen minutes after Miss Hall left my office, when this little girl, whom I afterwards found to be Mary Phagan, entered my office and asked for her pay envelope. I asked for her number and she told me; I went to the cash box and took her envelope out and handed it to her, identifying the envelope by the number.

Again, Frank is here sticking to his story about not knowing Mary Phagan by name. It would have been more believable if he had at long last admitted that fear of being accused of murder and worse had frightened him into a lie. It might have given the jury the impression of a man in difficult circumstances finally coming clean.

Leo Frank, far left, with classmates at Cornell University

The assertion that Frank never knew Mary Phagan’s name approaches the preposterous. Frank controlled the payroll and entered the amounts in his accounting books every week. We know that he wrote, in his own hand, Mary Phagan’s initials “M.P.” next to her employee number and pay amount in these books every week for the full 52 weeks of Mary Phagan’s employment at the National Pencil Company. How would he know her initials if he did not know her name?

Mary Phagan: Is it credible that Leo Frank could enter her initials in the company books some 52 times, and pass within 18 or 20 inches of her nearly a thousand times over the course of a year, and not know her name at all — or even her face with certainty?

We know from the blueprints of the factory that the only bathroom on the second floor, where Frank’s office was located, was the Metal Room bathroom. Mary Phagan worked in the Metal Room. To get to this bathroom, Frank, a regular coffee drinker, had to pass right by Mary Phagan’s work station. The employees worked 11-hour days, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. That’s at least 2,860 hours during the slightly over one year that little Mary had worked for Frank. Even if he only used the bathroom once in every three hours, that’s over 953 times that Leo Frank would have walked right by Mary Phagan. And, considering the testimony of other girls and young women who worked there that he did speak to them on occasion — it seems wildly unlikely that he would know none of them by name. And if he knew any of them by name, it stands to good reason that one that he knew would be Mary Phagan, who worked near his office and not more than three feet — closer than any other employee — from the door to the bathroom that he used multiple times, practically brushing up against her, every day. (One wishes that prosecutor Dorsey had asked every second-floor employee if Leo M. Frank knew him or her by name. Frank, in his statement, does make mention of quite a few female employees by name, and, early in the investigation, he suggested that J.M. Gantt was friendly with Mary — a thing he was hardly likely to know if he didn’t have some acquaintance with her.)

Frank continued his unsworn statement:

She [Mary Phagan — Ed.] left my office and apparently had gotten as far as the door from my office leading to the outer office, when she evidently stopped and asked me if the metal had arrived, and I told her no. She continued on her way out, and I heard the sound of her footsteps as she went away. It was a few moments after she asked me this question that I had an impression of a female voice saying something; I don’t know which way it came from; just passed away and I had that impression.

This was different from what Frank had said shortly after the murder story broke. Then he had said that he heard Mary talking to another girl — a girl who has never turned up, probably because she didn’t exist. Frank had said: “She went out through the outer office and I heard her talking with another girl.” Every person known to be in the vicinity was extensively investigated and interviewed, and no girl  was discovered who spoke to Mary Phagan or met her at that time. Monteen Stover, who thought highly of Frank and had no reason to hurt him, was the only other girl there, and she testified that she saw only an empty office — no Mary Phagan, no Leo Frank.

Frank’s unsworn statement continues:

This little girl had evidently worked in the metal department by her question and had been laid off owing to the fact that some metal that had been ordered had not arrived at the factory; hence, her question. I only recognized this little girl from having seen her around the plant and did not know her name, simply identifying her envelope from her having called her number to me.

Leo Frank actually had the gall to say that Mary Phagan “had evidently worked in the metal department by her question,” implying that not only did he not know the dead girl by name, but did not know her by sight either, at least not enough to know she worked in the metal department, something he only inferred from her question! This is so beyond the bounds of probability that it can hardly be believed, and casts serious doubt on everything Leo Frank said about this case. It’s enough by itself to make one think that Leo Frank is hiding something, something very dark, about his relationship with this girl.

Leo Frank told a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution (published August 20,1913) that he had prepared his statement two weeks ahead of time, with his wife as stenographer, and that his attorneys had not seen it.

In his unsworn statement above, Frank says that when Mary started to leave his office, “she evidently stopped and asked me if the metal had arrived, and I told her no.” [Emphasis mine.]

It was a matter of controversy whether Frank had actually answered “no” or had instead said “I don’t know” — detectives claimed that Frank had admitted to answering “I don’t know” when he was first questioned. If it was indeed “I don’t know,” it might have been an opening for Frank to have invited Mary Phagan to “go and check” and accompany him to the Metal Room to “see if the metal had arrived.” And the Metal Room was precisely where the prosecution, the police — and even the investigators hired by the pencil company — contended the murder had taken place.

And then Leo Frank made the most startling admission of all — possibly, short of a detailed and abject confession, the most startling admission he could possibly make:

Now, gentlemen, to the best of my recollection from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock until after a quarter to one when I went up stairs and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of the inner office; but it is possible that in order to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and cannot tell how many times nor when he does it. Now, sitting in my office at my desk, it is impossible for me to see out into the outer hall when the safe door is open, as it was that morning, and not only is it impossible for me to see out, but it is impossible for people to see in and see me there.

Frank was evidently hoping to blunt the effect of Monteen Stover’s testimony, explaining why she may have found his office empty from 12:05 to 12:10 by saying perhaps he’d gone to use the toilet, or been hidden behind the safe door, when she came in. The “safe door” argument was a weak one, as a young lady earnestly seeking her pay was likely to simply glance around its open door — even if Frank had been precisely positioned behind it. So — after months of denying he’d left his office at all between 12 and 12:45 — he stated that he might have have left it to “unconsciously” visit the bathroom.

The accused, Leo M. Frank

And what bathroom would he have used? The only bathroom on the second floor — where Frank’s office was located — was the Metal Room bathroom. Frank was suggesting that he may have been using the bathroom — the Metal Room bathroom! — when Monteen Stover found his office empty, at the precise time when the evidence indicates Mary Phagan was being murdered in that very location. This was also astounding because a few weeks earlier Leo Frank had emphatically told the coroner’s jury that on the day of the murder he had not used the bathroom all day long, a statement so insistent and so ridiculous that it made more than a few eyebrows rise at the time. What is it about that bathroom that seems to unnerve Leo Frank, and make him stumble and contradict himself so much?

And now this new admission: Frank was admitting that he might have gone to the Metal Room, where strands of hair that looked like Mary Phagan’s had been found on a lathe handle — hair that hadn’t been there the Friday before — and where a five-inch fan-sized blood stain had been found the following Monday. The stain was clumsily concealed with a layer of white Haskoline powder which had soaked the blood up and turned pink — a condition that certainly wouldn’t have endured for even a single week of factory work and traffic, ruling out the defense’s argument that the stain was very old.

Frank was admitting that he might have used the Metal Room bathroom, exactly where Conley said he found the battered, strangled, and lifeless body of Mary Phagan — where he said he wrapped her body in a sack and prepared to carry it, with Leo Frank’s help, to the basement, dropping it at one point in the passageway, where another blood stain was subsequently found.

He was telling the jurors who were to decide his fate that he may indeed have been at the precise location at the precise time when Mary Phagan had been murdered according to the prosecution’s witnesses. And this after maintaining for months that he had never made such a visit, or in fact left his office for even an instant from 12 to 12:45!

Frank went on to say in his statement that, after he returned home for lunch:

I sat down to my dinner and before I had taken anything, I turned in my chair to the telephone, which is right behind me and called up my brother-in-law to tell him that on account of some work I had to do at the factory, I would be unable to go with him, he having invited me to go with him out to the ball game. I succeeded in getting his residence and his cook answered the phone and told me that Mr. Ursenbach had not come back home. I told her to give him a message for me, that I would be unable to go with him.

So, supposedly, Frank could not attend the ball game “on account of some work I had to do at the factory.” In previous statements Frank had said he’d changed his mind because of impending rain — why the change? And why would meticulous Leo Frank, so knowledgeable of how long his endless financial calculations took him, have planned leaving hours early, at 4PM, unless he knew for sure he’d be done by then? And if he wasn’t able to be done by then, necessitating the cancellation, what unforeseen event had intervened and taken up his time?

Frank went on with his courtroom statement:

Then that other insinuation, an insinuation that is dastardly that it is beyond the appreciation of a human being, that is, that my wife didn’t visit me; now the truth of the matter is this, that on April 29th, the date I was taken in custody at police headquarters, my wife was there to see me, she was downstairs on the first floor; I was up on the top floor. She was there almost in hysterics, having been brought there by her two brothers-in-law, and her father. Rabbi Marx was with me at the time. I consulted with him as to the advisability of allowing my dear wife to come up to the top floor to see me in those surroundings with city detectives, reporters and snapshotters; I thought I would save her that humiliation and that harsh sight, because I expected any day to be turned loose and be returned once more to her side at home. Gentlemen, we did all we could do to restrain her in the first days when I was down at the jail from coming on alone down to the jail, but she was perfectly willing to even be locked up with me and share my incarceration.

Mrs. Leo Frank:: Is it conceivable that her 29-year-old husband, surrounded every working day by over 150 young women and teenage girls over which he had absolute authority, was unfaithful?

Mrs. Frank did not visit her husband for 13 days after his arrest — an act that could possibly be explained by her outrage at her husband’s putative infidelity — and Frank’s claim that she had to be “restrained” from actually moving into his cell is too extreme to be credible, especially since no reports are extant of her having attempted to see him again in those first days, to say nothing of taking up residence in his lockup. Remember, Minola McKnight had stated that Leo Frank confessed to killing a girl to his wife the night of the murder — though she later repudiated her statement. Was the box of candy purchased on the way home by Leo Frank that evening an attempt to reassure her of his love despite what he had done? Was her anger so extreme she shunned him for almost two weeks in his hour of need, or did she really have to be forced to stay away just to “save her that humiliation” of seeing him with detectives, reporters, and photographers?

Lucille Selig Frank did eventually become the dutiful wife by the side of her accused husband, and did well in that role. But that didn’t happen immediately.

Upon her death decades later it was discovered that she left explicit instructions — not that she be buried in Queens, New York by her husband’ side — but that she be cremated and her ashes scattered in a public park.

Leo Frank’s grave: his wife left instructions that she was not to be buried beside him

Frank continued his statement:

Gentlemen, I know nothing whatever of the death of little Mary Phagan. I had no part in causing her death nor do I know how she came to her death after she took her money and left my office. I never even saw Conley in the factory or anywhere else on that date, April 26, 1913. The statement of the witness Dalton is utterly false as far as coming to my office and being introduced to me by the woman Daisy Hopkins is concerned. If Dalton was ever in the factory building with any woman, I didn’t know it. I never saw Dalton in my life to know him until this crime.

Leo Frank, debate coach at Cornell

One amazing fact that this reporter has uncovered is that the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Georgian (the Georgian by this time was taking an editorial line favorable to Frank) completely omitted Leo Frank’s “unconscious bathroom visit” admission when they printed Frank’s full statement on August 18, 1913 and August 19, 1913. The Atlanta Journal did include the admission, so it seems unlikely that the words “call of nature” or “urinate” were deemed too shocking for a public reading about a brutal strangulation murder.

We’ll continue with the final installment of The Leo Frank Trial next week right here at The American Mercury, when I’ll be examining the claims that anti-Semitism was the motive for Frank’s prosecution and conviction, and much more.

* * *

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

For further study we recommend the following resources:

_________

Full archive of Atlanta Georgian newspapers relating to the murder and subsequent trial

The Leo Frank case as reported in the Atlanta Constitution

The Leo Frank Case (Mary Phagan) Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery 1913

The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean

American State Trials, volume X (1918) by John Lawson

Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey in the Trial of Leo Frank

Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913, Brief of Evidence

The American Mercury is following these events of 100 years ago, the month-long trial of Leo M. Frank for the brutal murder of Miss Mary Phagan, in capsule form on a regular basis until August 26, the 100th anniversary of the reading of the verdict. Follow along with us and experience the trial as Atlantans of a century ago did, and come to your own conclusions.

Read also the Mercury’s coverage of Week One of the Leo Frank trial and Week Two  and my exclusive summary of the evidence against Frank.

A fearless scholar, dedicated to the truth about this case, has obtained, scanned, and uploaded every single relevant issue of the major Atlanta daily newspapers and they now can be accessed through archive.org as follows:

Atlanta Constitution Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution/

Atlanta Georgian Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-georgian/

Atlanta Journal Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-journal/

More background on the case may be found in my article here at the Mercury, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty.

(Click the play button for our audio book version of this article.)

by Bradford L. Huie

THE JEWISH ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE (ADL) — in great contrast to the American Mercury and other independent media — has given hardly any publicity to the 100th anniversary of the murder of Mary Phagan and the arrest and trial of Leo Frank, despite the fact that these events eventually led to the foundation of the ADL. Probably the League is saving its PR blitz for 2015, not only because that is the centenary of Leo Frank’s death by lynching (an event possibly of much greater interest to the League’s wealthy donors than the death of Mary Phagan, a mere Gentile factory girl), but also because encouraging the public to read about Frank’s trial might not be good for the ADL — it might well lead to doubts about the received narrative, which posits an obviously innocent Frank persecuted by anti-Semitic Southerners looking for a Jewish scapegoat.

For readers not familiar with the case, a good place to start is Scott Aaron’s summary of the crime, from his The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, which states in part:

“ON SATURDAY morning at 11:30, 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….

“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.”

* * *

IN 1913 GEORGIA, it was customary in criminal cases for all of the prosecution and defense witnesses to be sworn before any of their testimony was taken. In the hot and crowded temporary Fulton County courtroom at 10AM on July 28, 1913, Solicitor Hugh Dorsey called his witnesses and they were duly sworn. But the Leo Frank defense team, in the persons of Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold, surprised everyone by asking to have their witnesses sworn at a later time, claiming that — though they had just declared themselves fully ready to go to trial — their witness list was as yet “fragmentary” and would occasion severe delays if it were required to be completed that morning. But presiding Judge Leonard Roan ruled against them, and in all of five minutes the defense was ready to call their list. It turns out that the defense had wanted to conceal for a time their strategy of making Frank’s character a factor in his defense, and revealing the names of their witnesses — numbers of prominent Atlanta Jews, Frank’s former Cornell University classmates, and others — made that strategy obvious, and would give the prosecution time to find rebuttal witnesses on the subject of the character of Leo Frank.

The first witness was Mrs. Fannie Coleman, Mary Phagan’s mother. She described her last moments with her daughter on the morning of the previous April 26. When asked to identify the clothes that 13-year-old Mary had worn that day, she broke down.

Mary Phagan’s aunt, mother, and sister.

The next witness called was 15-year-old George Epps, who said he’s ridden on the trolley car with little Mary from 11:50AM to 12:07PM, when she’d disembarked to go see Superintendent Leo Frank at the National Pencil Company and pick up her pay. The exact timing of Mary’s visit to Frank was to become very important later in the case.

The third prosecution witness — Newt Lee, the pencil company’s night watchman and the man who found Mary Phagan’s bruised body in the factory basement in the wee hours of April 27 — was very damaging to Frank.

Lee stated that he had arrived at work early — at 4PM — on the day of the murder at the explicit instructions of Frank, who had said he was planning to attend a baseball game with a relative. But when Lee came to the factory at 4, Frank appeared very nervous and agitated and said that Lee should leave immediately and come back at 6. When Lee said he’d rather rest for a while at the factory building than go out, Frank insisted that he must go out for two hours.

When Lee did come back, Frank was still acting strangely and became extremely agitated when, around the same time, a friend of Mary Phagan’s and a former worker at the plant, J.M. Gantt, showed up and asked to retrieve some shoes he’d left on the premises. Frank was so nervous that he fumbled the routine task of putting Lee’s slip into the time clock, taking twice as long as usual. After Frank went home, he telephoned Lee to ask him if everything was “all right” — something that Lee said he had never done before.

Lee told the court that, the day after the murder, Frank had told authorities in his presence that Lee’s time slip for the previous night had been punched correctly:

“When did you see Frank?”
“I saw Mr. Frank Sunday morning at about 7:00 or 8:00. He was coming
in the office.”
“How did he look at you?”
“He looked down on the floor and never spoke to me. He dropped his
head down this way.”
“Was any examination made of the time clock?”
“Boots Rogers, Chief Lanford, Darley, Mr. Frank and I were there when
they opened the clock. Mr. Frank opened the clock and said the punches
were all right.”
“What did he mean by all right?”
“Meant that I hadn’t missed any punches.”

This was ominous testimony from Leo Frank’s point of view: As part of an apparent attempt to incriminate Newt Lee, Frank had later told police that Lee had missed several punches — implying that he had had time to be involved in the murder. Around the same time a bloody shirt was planted on Lee’s property. It was detected as a fake when the pattern of stains showed it had not been worn when stained, but had been crumpled up and wiped in blood.

Rosser’s cross-examination of Lee that day could not shake him in any element of his story.

Rosser and Dorsey

* * *

The following is a direct transcription of part of the coverage of the first day of the trial in the Atlanta Constitution (July 29, 1913):

Watchman Tells of Finding Body of Mary Phagan

MOTHER AND THE WIFE
OF PRISONER CHEER HIM
BY PRESENCE AT TRIAL

___

Jury Is Quickly Secured and
Mrs. Coleman, Mother of
the Murdered Girl, Is First
Witness to Take Stand.

Dateline Atlanta, Georgia — July 28, 1913: With a swiftness which was gratifying to counsel for the defense, the solicitor general and a large crowd of interested spectators, the trial of Leo M. Frank, charged with the murder of Mary Phagan on April 26, in the building of the National Pencil factory, was gotten under way Monday.

When the hour of adjournment for the day had arrived, the jury had been selected and three witnesses had been examined. Newt Lee, the night watchman who discovered the dead body of Mary Phagan in the basement of the National Pencil factory, and who gave the first news of the crime to the police, was still on the stand, undergoing a rigid cross examination by Luther Z. Rosser, attorney for Frank.

Lee Sticks To First Story.

When the trial is resumed this morning, Newt Lee will again be placed on the stand. It Is not expected that anything new will be adduced from his testimony. Throughout the gruelling cross-examination of Mr. Rosser Monday afternoon Lee stuck to his original story in minutest detail.

Questions that would have confused or befuddled a man of education failed to budge him from the statement he originally made to the police, and has repeated from time to time to reporters and court officials.

The first day’s proceedings of the Frank trial proved singularly free of the dramatic element or the unexpected in testimony. There were touches of the pathetic, as, for example, when Mrs. J.W. Coleman, mother of the dead child, broke down and cried bitterly when she viewed the clothing of her little daughter; and there were touches of humor when the little Epps boy, who had ridden to town with Mary Phagan on the day of her murder, explained to Luther Rosser his method of telling the time of day by the sun, and of Newt Lee, who amused the courtroom by his quaint allusions and his negro descriptions of a tiny light in the basement of the pencil factory, which he likened to the gleam of a lightning bug, and of his quick retort when Mr. Rosser purposely spoke of this insect as a June bug.

“I didn’t say June bug–I said lightning bug,” contradicted Newt.

Careful Attention to Detail.

This brief excerpt Is given as significant of the careful attention to detail that Lee gave to his story.

When the hour of 9 o’clock arrived, Pryor Street in front of the temporary courthouse building was cluttered with the usual mob of the morbidly curious. They hugged the hot walls of the buildings like lethargic leeches, vainly trying to gain admission to the building, or buzzed about like bees, gossiping idly of the case.

Perfect order was maintained, however, and few not directly interested in the trial were allowed to enter the courtroom. All day long the crowd remained on the sidewalks gazing intently at the window to the courtroom, spewing tobacco juice on the street, eagerly questioning every person who left the building.

Interest naturally centered on the appearance in the court of Leo M. Frank, the accused. If Frank has chafed under his confinement, his physical appearance belies the fact. He looked as fit physically as he did the day he was first arrested. He was dressed with scrupulous neatness in a gray suit of pronounced pattern, which was all the more conspicuous on account of his diminutive form. As he entered the courtroom he smiled cordially at several friends. The first person to whom he spoke was a woman employee of the pencil factory.

Next in interest was Mrs. Leo M. Frank, wife of the accused, who, up to this time, has been seen little in public. Mrs. Frank is an extremely attractive-looking young woman. During progress of the trial she kept her eyes constantly fixed on Solicitor Dorsey. Her gaze was one of calm estimate. She seemed to be attempting to fathom his thoughts and to divine his purposes.

Mrs. Coleman Takes Stand.

Efforts to show Mary Phagan’s attitude toward Leo M. Frank by the state and efforts by the defense to show the dead girl’s attitude toward little George Epps, the 14-year-old newsie who testified to riding down town with her on the morning before she was found dead, were the first important things attempted yesterday when the trial of the state v. Leo M. Frank, charged with the Phagan girl’s murder on April 26, was formally opened.

Both efforts were promptly blocked for the present time by opposing counsel, and the testimony was started in regular form by the introduction of Mrs. J. W. Coleman, mother of Mary Phagan, as the first witness for the state.

During the preliminaries Attorneys Reuben R. Arnold and Luther Z. Rosser, for Frank, tried to conceal the names of their witnesses, but on Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey’s objections, they were overruled by Trial Judge L.S.Roan, and they called and swore their witnesses as the state had done but a few moments previously.

In a come-back for this the defense asked the court to honor their duces tecum which they previously served upon the solicitor, requiring him to bring into court all statements and affidavits made by James Conley, the negro sweeper, who made an affidavit incriminating himself and declaring he had aided Frank in disposing of the girl’s body.

Solicitor Dorsey, after a conference with Frank A. Hooper, a brilliant criminal lawyer aiding him, dictated a statement to the court stenographer in which he agreed to produce these affidavits and statements at the proper time, should they be held material.

Defense Announces Ready.

The case started promptly at 9 o’clock, with the courtroom, thronged with veniremen and spectators, witnesses and lawyers and friends of the principal. Contrary to the persistent rumor that the defense would ask postponement and to their frequent objections to the trial in the heated term, the defense proved ready and willing to go to trial…

You can read the entire Atlanta Constitution for this day by downloading this PDF file. The complete Atlanta Georgian can be downloaded here, and the entire Atlanta Journal can be read by downloading this file.

* * *

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

The American Mercury will be following these events of 100 years ago, the month-long trial of Leo M. Frank for the brutal murder of Miss Mary Phagan. Follow along with us and experience the trial as Atlantans of a century ago did, and come to your own conclusions.

A fearless scholar, dedicated to the truth about this case, has obtained, scanned, and uploaded every single relevant issue of the major Atlanta daily newspapers and they now can be accessed through archive.org as follows:

Atlanta Constitution Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution/

Atlanta Georgian Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-georgian/

Atlanta Journal Newspaper:
http://www.leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-journal/

More background on the case may be found in my article here at the Mercury, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty.

by Philip Devlin

DURING THE PAST DECADE of American involvement in the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, an improvised explosive device, often referred to as an IED, has become a common part of our recent vocabulary. IEDs have accounted for over 50 percent of the nearly 5,900 American deaths so far in those engagements. IEDs can take many forms; basically, they can be thought of as the use of any explosive device in a non-conventional delivery system. For example, an artillery shell, which is normally delivered to its target from the barrel of a gun, can be hidden in a wrecked car or strapped to an animal and then exploded remotely using cellphone technology. Understood in this way, IEDs have a long history that predates their use in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In fact, one can make a compelling case that the first IED used in warfare originated right here in Connecticut as a consequence of Saybrook resident David Bushnell’s invention of the first submarine, the Turtle. I refer more specifically to Bushnell’s attack on the British fleet in Philadelphia on January 6, 1777 – 234 years ago this week.

The Yale-educated Bushnell (pictured above) had made an important discovery in 1775: gunpowder could be exploded underwater. Henry Howe’s book Memoirs of the Most Eminent American Mechanics (1852) described Bushnell’s experiments with exploding gunpowder in this way:

The first experiment was made with about two ounces of gunpowder, to prove to some influential men that powder would burn under water. In the second trial there were two pounds of gunpowder enclosed in a wooden bottle, and fixed under a hogshead, with a two inch oak plank between the hogshead and the powder. The hogshead was loaded with stones as deep as it could swim; a wooden pipe primed with powder descended through the lower head of the hogshead, and thence through the plank into the powder contained in the bottle. A match put to the priming exploded- the powder with a tremendous effect, casting a great body of water with the stones and ruins many feet into the air.*

Furthermore, Bushnell was able to devise a timing device for his underwater explosive device. His plan for the Turtle was to have its operator paddle underwater to an enemy ship, pierce the hull of the ship with a drilling device, and deposit a powder keg with a timing device in it that would blow up the ship after the operator of the sub had safely paddled away.

Well, it didn’t work out quite as planned. The first attack on a British ship occurred in New York harbor in September of 1776. The target was a 64-gun frigate known as the Eagle – Admiral Howe’s flagship. The pilot, Sgt. Ezra Lee of Old Lyme, CT, could not pierce the metal sheathing on the underside of the hull with his drill. With a limited air supply, Lee had to make his escape. While doing so, he released his “torpedo” to lessen the drag on the sub and to hasten his retreat. His IED floated to the surface and drifted in NY harbor. With the timing device engaged by its release, the keg of powder soon exploded in the East River near Governor’s Island “with a report like thunder.”** General Israel Putnam of Connecticut was among those who witnessed the explosion. Though their ships were not harmed, the British were sufficiently frightened to move their fleet.

Though the attack on Howe’s flagship had largely failed, the successful explosion gave rise to another guerrilla tactic. Nearly a year later, in August of 1777, Bushnell attempted to attack the British in a new way. This time the target was the Cerberus, anchored in Niantic Bay next to a schooner it had seized. The intrepid Lee paddled in close to the two ships and released his IED with a tether. Curious British sailors pulled it in and brought it aboard the schooner. In short order, the device exploded, killing several British sailors, causing a fire, and sinking the schooner.  The captain of the Cerberus, J. Simmons, disturbed at such unconventional tactics, wrote to British Admiral Parker about “the mode these villains… have taken…as the ingenuity of these people is singular in their secret modes of mischief.”***

Bushnell’s next attack occurred on January 6, 1778. He rigged a number of IEDs and floated them down the Delaware River, hoping that they would contact ships of the British fleet anchored there. However, the ships had been anchored in such a way as to avoid floating ice, so the attack was largely unsuccessful. One floating IED did contact a British barge and exploded it, killing 4 Brits and wounding several others. So unnerved were the British, that their officers ordered infantrymen to shoot their muskets at anything that floated down the river. This command resulted in Francis Hopkinson penning the very sarcastic ballad, “Battle of the Kegs,” which pokes fun at the “courage” of the British for shooting floating pieces of wood in the Delaware River. Though the attack was largely unsuccessful, it did boost morale and marked a propaganda victory for the rebels, as Hopkinson’s popular ditty was read widely throughout the colonies. Following are several stanzas from Hopkinson’s ballad. They just drip with sarcasm:

“The motley crew, in vessels new,
With Satan for their guide, sir,
Packed up in bags, or wooden kegs,
Come driving down the tide, sir.

“Therefore prepare for bloody war;
These kegs must all be routed,
Or surely we despised shall be,
And British courage doubted.”

….

The kegs, ’tis said, though strongly made,
Of rebel staves and hoops, sir,
Could not oppose their powerful foes,
The conquering British troops, sir.

From morn to night these men of might
Displayed amazing courage;
And when the sun was fairly down,
Retired to sup their porridge.

A hundred men with each a pen,
Or more upon my word, sir,
It is most true would be too few,
Their valor to record, sir.

Such feats did they perform that day,
Against these wicked kegs, sir,
That years to come: if they get home,
They’ll make their boasts and brags, sir.

Impressed with the possibilities of such attacks, several months later General George Washington created a corps of “sappers and miners” for the Continental Army and made David Bushnell of Connecticut its captain. Sappers, essentially combat engineers who often use explosives in demolition work, have remained an important part of the armed forces ever since. Of course, eventually the submarine evolved over time and became an important part of modern warfare, too. Long after the war, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington said of David Bushnell’s submarine: “I then thought and still do that it was an effort of genius.”**** The long-term consequences of Bushnell’s invention – some of them unintended — have proven the truth of Washington’s words.

Notes and Sources

1.      A detailed description of Bushnell’s submarine can be found in “The Transactions of the American Philosophical Society” and in Benjamin Silliman’s 1820 edition of the “American Journal of Science.”

2.    *  “Memoirs of the Most Eminent American Mechanics: Also, Lives of Distinguished European Mechanics : Together with a Collection of Anecdotes … Relating to the Mechanic Arts : Illustrated by Fifty Engravings” By Henry Howe, New York Museum of Science and Industry Library Published by Harper & Brothers, 1852, pgs. 136-146. (Text available at googlebooks.com).

3.      ** and *** and **** “The First Submarine” by Stewart H. Holbrook in The American Mercury August 25,1944. (My grandmother cut this out of the paper, and it eventually found its way to me.) Holbrook’s article relied heavily on Henry Howe’s 1852 book above.

4.      “Sapper” probably has its origins in the French word “sappe,” which means a “trench” in English. The original sappers dug trenches in approaching fortifications such as castles in order to bring forward devices, weapons, and personnel necessary to breach ancient fortifications. Though no longer a common approach in modern warfare, the name has stuck.

5. “Saybrook,” supposed birthplace of David Bushnell, is to be distinguished from “Old Saybrook.” Until 1948 the current town named “Deep River” was known as “Saybrook.” Therefore, Bushnell may actually have been from Deep River, even though Old Saybrook seems to have claimed him as their own.

Read the full article at the Durham Patch

Dr. Jim Hodges has what he calls “a special calling that brings the ethical leadership principles of George Washington to life.” In his career as a public speaker, Dr. Hodges has shared the principles of what he calls “our Patriarch” — blending skilful acting with the moving words of a truly inspirational speaker. James Hodges may seem like an anomaly in an America that is rapidly forgetting the heritage of its founding people, but he holds that Washington’s philosophical principles — which he ranks with those of the Stoics of the Classical world — are exactly what the descendants of the founders need to hear. His site states:

‘As a keynote speaker with breakout sessions, Jim utilizes his experience as a public speaker to inspire his audiences to appreciate and strive to emulate Washington, who was a superlative leader and mentor for all generations. Jim is a compassionate and gifted storyteller, who gives vivid accounts of Colonial history, both serious and amusing, while imparting messages of hope, strength, perseverance and universal faith.

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And his work as Washington in his one-man show is much appreciated:

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It’s worth noting that George Washington was a powerful opponent of foreign entanglements and foreign wars. He would have absolutely opposed America’s current wars in the Middle East, or going to war with Iran — and he certainly would instantly terminate any so-called “special relationship” with any foreign state.

Jim Hodges isn’t afraid to take on controversial issues like the subservience of America to the international bankers. This is from the latest entry on Dr. Hodge’s blog:

‘In 1776, the American patriots declared independence from Great Britain and fought desperately for their freedom. They not only longed for political self-determination, but they also wanted to rid themselves of the financial noose the Bank of England had placed around their necks. Unfortunately, they were not able to permanently rid America of the international bankers who had infested it. Our current banking and economic crisis is, in some respects, a result of some of the same problems with which our Founding Fathers struggled.’

James Hodges also takes to heart George Washington’s belief in kindness to animals — which, considering the way many treat helpless creatures even today, may have been well in advance of even our time:

‘From a life spent with animals, George Washington realized that non-human animals have feelings just like humans, and that they suffer physical and emotional pain if mistreated or abused. As a Stoic, Washington believed that God dwells within everything, and that it is wrong to inflict pain on any living being. Therefore, animals must be treated humanely, even those belonging to the enemy. At the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, a particularly brutal battle with much carnage on both sides, a fox terrier got lost between the lines. The little dog was captured by the Americans, who saw inscribed in his collar: “Property of General Howe.” Washington made sure the little dog was fed, cleaned and treated well. Under a flag of truce, Alexander Hamilton delivered the dog to General Howe, who had suffered great mental anguish thinking his little terrier had been lost to him forever.

‘Washington had been passionately fond of horses from early boyhood, and owned his first horse at 17. His mother, Mary Ball Washington, was a skilled horsewoman who taught young George how to train horses using only the gentlest of methods, and to never resort to any cruelty. Washington learned that harsh training methods were counter-productive, because horses treated with respect are eager to please their riders.’

James Hodges, PhD brings George Washington to life in the 21st century. And he himself seems like the embodiment of something I thought we lost back in the middle of the 20th. I’m glad we never really lost it. Thanks, Jim Hodges.