Leo Frank

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, August 19, 2005

Last summer and fall, in honor of the 350th anniversary of Jewish communal life in America, I gave a lot of sermons on American Jewish History. Since then I’ve been more restrained, but this week, having discovered that Jeremy doesn’t know who Leo Frank is, I’d like to take a few minutes to mark a historic anniversary.

This week was the 90th anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank, which took place on August 17th 1915. Identified by some historians, as “the single most famous lynching in American history,” it was certainly a pivotal moment in American Jewish history. Leo Frank was a Brooklyn born Cornell educated engineer who came down to Atlanta to run a pencil factory for his uncle. He married a local girl and became a part of Atlanta’s prosperous and assimilated German Jewish community, made famous much later by the movie ”Driving Miss Daisy”. When a 13 year old female white factory worker was found dead and possibly raped, suspicion first fell on the black factory sweep Jim Conley. Then prejudice against African Americans gave way to “the oldest hatred” anti-Semitism, and Leo Frank, the last one to see Mary Phagan alive, was convicted in a case that rested heavily on testimony from Jim Conley, the first suspect, and on the community’s prejudices and resentments. The prosecution was able to build on stereotypes at the time of Jews as sexual predators and on the community’s response to rumors spread by the prosecuting attorneys that Frank was habitually harassing his female employees. At the time there was a great deal of resentment against the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who were arriving in great number and anti-Semitic stereotypes were rampant. Even government reports of the time described the Jews as being heavily involved in the while slave trade. Contemporary historians recognize that the evidence was either circumstantial or coerced, but at the time the jury needed less than two hours of deliberation before finding Frank guilty. The next day the judge imposed the death penalty.

Prominent Jews of the time spoke out including Adolphe Ochs, of the New York Times, which spoke out passionately for Frank’s innocence and Louis Marshall, a leader of the American Jewish community and a well known constitutional lawyer . Unfortunately even Marshall’s money, contacts and legal expertise, could not get the United States Supreme Court to accept Frank’s request for a new trial. Recognizing the injustice of the case, the governor of Georgia commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment, but a mob intervened to end Frank’s life. A group of prominent citizens, including a former governor of Georgia, a prominent judge and several state legislators, recruited volunteers for a lynching which ended with the desecration of Frank’s body.

Recently the American Jewish Archives, which is on the campus of the Hebrew Union College, acquired eighteen letters that Leo Frank wrote during his time in jail. Through these letters we see a man struggling to preserve his belief that reason would win out over intolerance. As Gary Zola, director of the Archives, said in an interview: “He knows he is innocent and that it is as obvious as the nose on his face, yet the whole world seems to have gone crazy.” We are reminded through the letters of what a young man Leo Frank was, just 29 at the time of the murder, and how involved he was in his own defense. He writes to C.P. Connelly, a journalist who had taken up his case: “I feel with you my ultimate vindication must come, although I confess that it is hard for me at this time to see just in which way it will come about. However, I know I have very many faithful friends working and an unjust thing cannot prevail.” In another letter he compares Connelly to Emile Zola who championed the case of Alfred Dreyfus a French Jew falsely accused of treason who was ultimately released.

Though Frank’s fate was less fortunate than Alfred Dreyfus’s, there are similarities that can be drawn in terms of the significance of each case. The Dreyfus case influenced Theodore Herzl a young assimilated journalist who went on to found the Zionist Congress which 50 years later succeeded in establishing the state of Israel. Frank’s case also had important repercussions, not all of them positive. It was in the midst of the Frank case that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, an organization that has promoted tolerance and respect for almost a century, was founded. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ unsuccessful dissent in the Frank case eventually became a majority opinion on the Supreme Court protecting the rights of defendants whose trials were hurried to a conclusion by the presence of a mob. On the more negative side, many in the Jewish community concluded that Jewish outspokenness of Oches and Marshall had hurt Frank’s cause, and the Jewish community in the south adopted a policy of silence that would last into the 1960’s. Tom Watson, formerly a racial moderate and populist, used the case to build up his newspaper’s circulation and to re-enter politics playing on the resentment of poor white Southerners against rich Northern businessmen, especially Jews and Negro lovers. Most significantly, the Frank case contributed to Watson’s call for a revival of the Klu Klux Klan and just three months later, perhaps also under the influence of the movie The Birth of a Nation, an enormous cross was burnt on the top of Atlanta’s Stone Mountain.

A lot has changed over the last 90 years but some things remain the same. A lot has changed such that 90 years after Leo Frank’s murder we have seen the perpetrators of other lynchings brought to justice this summer. We also see a Jewish community much more willing to speak out loudly and forcefully. But some things remain the same, and I would say, that the battle between reason and intolerance continues to rage.