Why Leo Frank Still Matters

One hundred years ago, on the night of August 16, a group of about twenty-five men stormed the Georgia State Penitentiary at Milledgeville and carried away thirty-one year-old Leo Frank.  By the next morning, Frank dangled from a tree outside Marietta, almost 200 miles away.  Among those who carried out the killing were a former governor of Georgia and a superior court judge, as well as tradesmen selected for their ability to help in the jailbreak.

Frank, who was Jewish, had come to Atlanta in 1908 to work in his uncle’s pencil factory.  In 1913, he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of 13 year-old Mary Phagan, an employee of his, in a trial with crude sexual and anti-Semitic overtones, a verdict most who have studied the case consider a miscarriage of justice. 

His case became a cause célèbre of sorts, with editorials nationwide, even in other Southern states, condemning the conviction.  After unsuccessful appeals to overturn the conviction that reached the Supreme Court, his sentence was commuted to life in prison a day before his scheduled execution.  It was anger over this commutation that led to his lynching.

Opinion on Frank showed the fractures emerging in Georgia, and in Atlanta, fractures between labor and management, between elites and non-elites, between urban and rural.  It showed the lengths to which some--people whom the historian Nancy MacLean calls “reactionary populists,” groups in which anti-elitist populism runs hand-in-glove with the desire to preserve racial and religious domination—were willing to go in order to protect their prerogatives.

   

These reactionary populists were people who felt left behind by changes sweeping the South.  They were factory workers who felt exploited by bosses, they were farmers whose prestige had eroded, they were men who felt they had lost control over their women working in the factories.  Since the law seemed to have failed them, they struck out through extralegal means, encouraged in their wrath by the editorials of future Senator Thomas Watson.  The lynching was the ultimate expression of their frustrations, and an attempt to show they still had power.

Their cry, and the echoes of the Frank case, still be heard.

Leo Frank had been president of Atlanta’s chapter of B’nai B’rith, the society founded in 1843 and dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and their legacy.  Following Frank’s conviction, National B’nai B’rith formed the Anti-Defamation League, which to this day champions the cause of human rights.  Adolf Kraus, one of the founders of the ADL, specifically cited the Frank case as a reason for its formation.  That’s one of the traces.

Another could be seen in November of 1915, when a small group, likely including at least one of the Knights of Mary Phagan, joined Walter Simmons in the burning of a cross on Stone Mountain, inaugurating the second Ku Klux Klan.  They were, perhaps, emboldened by the successful lynching.  Their sentiment had almost certainly been whipped up by Watson who had suggested in the lynching’s wake that “another Ku Klux Klan may be organized to restore HOME RULE!”

The legacy of both the ADL and the Klan stretch through the twentieth century, with the former advocating the cause of human rights while the latter worked to deny them to large segments of the populace.

And now we find ourselves at a similar moment, with a new set of reactionary populists.  They find their world upended by a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic society. Many are appalled that a black man is President.  They feel the country turning into something they don’t recognize.  Further, they feel betrayed by members of the political and economic elite they feel have enabled this turn of events.

We see the same old twinned responses in the calls for the removal of Confederate symbols and in the vitriolic resistance to their removal in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, itself perhaps a Leo Frank moment for the 21^st century, an act of racist vigilantism that stirs the best and the worst in us.

What was the recent demonstration at Stone Mountain, with its brazenly armed protesters carrying the flag that for so many symbolizes oppression, to site awash in the symbolism of racial subjugation with its huge images of Confederate heroes and its KKK connection, if not an outpouring of reactionary populism? 

What else is the Tea Party?  The outpouring of support for Donald Trump?

We’ve seen this movie before.  It was Birth of a Nation, the D.W. Griffith film that in 1915 provided much of the symbolism used by the reborn Klan. 

You’d think we’d have learned something in the intervening century.  Perhaps we should consider a new script.