A changing era

April 25, 2017

The Frank case represents a changing era of American history, especially in the South which still held onto the cleavages of the Civil War. It details a clash between the North and the South, a growing anti-Semitism, and the possibilities of mob mentality.

The years after the Civil War, Atlanta became the unofficial capital of the “New South,” with trade, business, and manufacturing. As the city transitioned from agrarian to industrial, it attracted low-wage workers moving to the city from their previous tenement farmlands, including Phagan’s parents. Atlanta, though sitting in the South’s bible belt, boasted a rich and vibrant street scene. Tobacco, gambling, and cabarets thrived, providing a large market for alcohol before prohibition began in 1920.

Due to the racial segregation intertwined with Southern culture, little anti-Semitism existed in the city, so it presented a great opportunity for Jewish families. Jews gained significant traction in the city, opening large businesses and becoming involved in education, politics, media, and law. The harmony came from an era where business owners, no matter the religion, needed to work together to profit.

In his clemency decision in 1915, Governor Slaton touched on the accusations of racial prejudice against Jewish families, claiming them baseless.

“A conspicuous [(read: prominent)] Jewish family in Georgia is descended from one of the original colonial families of the State. Jews have been presidents of our Boards of Education, principals of our schools, Mayors of our cities, and conspicuous in all our commercial enterprises,” Slaton said.

Frank’s wife, Lucille Selig, came from a prominent Jewish family in Atlanta. Her cousin Simon Selig founded the Selig Chemical Company, another relative, Levi Cohen, helped create Atlanta’s first synagogue, and the family garnered the reputation for their extreme dedication to Jewish culture.

Other than marrying into the Seligs, Frank factored into Atlanta’s Jewish scene starting in October 1907, after his uncle Moses Frank sought to invest in pencil manufacturing and invited Leo, an engineering student, to participate. Frank spent nine months studying pencil manufacturing in Germany and returned to America at Ellis Island on August 1, 1908, stopped in to visit his family in Brooklyn, and then moved permanently to Atlanta. Frank quickly moved up the corporate ladder in the Pencil Company, becoming superintendent, accountant, part owner, and treasurer.

Frank’s quick overtaking of the business reflected that of many other Jews in the area, and sparked outrage with southerners who felt Northern “carpetbaggers,” businessmen who came to the South for cheap entrepreneurship opportunities, threatened their economic sanctity and security.

While the South’s anti-Semitism did grow, the Frank case did not result wholly from a hate for Jews, but from a hate for Northerners as a whole. The South’s ire against the North hit such a high level that, for the first time in the country’s legal history, the court believed the testimony of a black man, Jim Conley, over that of a white man, Leo Frank.

The murder also fell on a holiday deepening the divide between the North and the South: Confederate Memorial Day. The holiday memorialized the men who fought for the South in the Civil War and included a large parade and other festivities. Overflowing sentiment from the Civil War permeated the South and added to the continued divide between north and south.

Courtesy of the Marietta Museum of History.
Marietta citizens celebrate Confederate Memorial Day downtown in 1915.

“This is post-Progressive era politics, and the South, particularly during the 1890s to the early 1900s, goes through a period of vehement, intransigent ‘not sorry for the Civil War-ness,’” AP Comparative Government teacher Carolyn Galloway said. “At that point, we are like forty to fifty years separate from the Civil War, so we have people who are remembering the past who were not part of the trauma of the Civil War. These people, who didn’t actually fight in the war, are building the social stigma into law and culture in the South.”

Tom Watson, the Georgian leader of the Populist Party, only fueled the fire further. Through his publishing company, Watson published his newspaper The Weekly Jeffersonian which, after the turn of the century, set out to attack African-Americans, Catholics, and Jews. Watson published editorials on the Frank case, inflaming public opinion through charged diction and spreading unsubstantiated information. Dorsey, with the goal to run for governor of Georgia, purportedly teamed up with Watson for the political support and reputation.

Watson initially blamed the case initially on the sexual impurity of Atlanta, attacking the Red Light District and the people themselves.

“The horrible fate of Mary Phagan appalls everybody. Here was a pure little girl, hideously outraged, in the centre of a great city, in earshot of the churches, in the midst of a Christian population… all surface eruptions are the evidences of impure blood: get the blood purified, and the sores disappear,” Watson’s Jeffersonian published on May 8, 1913.

Other media of the time heightened social cleavages as well, spreading sensationalized news and interviews to draw in readers. Three newspapers ran the media industry in Atlanta at the time: the Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Georgian, and Atlanta Constitution. Nineteen-year-old Atlanta Constitution reporter Britt Craig grabbed the scoop first after overhearing Lee call the police in the Atlanta police station. Craig himself used the case as a reputation-improving job and set out to vilify Frank in the papers. After the lynching, the lynch mob and the media promoted the event by selling postcards of a picture taken at the lynching, and selling pieces of the tree and rope as souvenirs.

In the years following the turn of the century, news outlets operated with significantly less journalistic integrity than today. Sources derived from local gossip, promoted partisan rhetoric, and yellow journalism used to sell papers led to sensationalism on almost every news stand.

“Most major cities had two big papers at the time,” Galloway said. “One came out in the morning and one came out in the afternoon, and one was often more conservative while one was pretty liberal. Depending on the paper you got, you got almost radically different stories, but both of those still tended to be pro-White and sensationalize events dealing with other populations.”

Underage labor also characterized the era, with widespread poverty meaning that

Courtesy of the Georgia Encyclopedia.
The National Pencil Company, located at 37 to 41 Forsyth Street in Atlanta, GA.

children worked at ages as young as eight to support their families. The National Pencil Company’s work day began at 6:30 a.m. and ended exactly 12 hours later, with one thirty minute lunch break and another thirty minutes over the course of the day for bathroom breaks. The company employed over 170 workers in 1913, the year of Phagan’s death; preteens and teenagers made up the majority of the laborers, with an average age range of eleven to sixteen. Atlanta tended to look the other way at the young workers as long as they brought in money to a struggling class.

Factories offered higher wages than working on rural farms, even though the conditions in the mills barely met health standards. In the city, poor families found more opportunities and a better quality of life, as well as stability; weather may ruin one batch of crops, but factories always need workers.

“You’re coming out of the Civil War and what you have going on is an undercurrent of racial strife in the very segregated society with the severe poverty lines,” Dale Hughes, legal consultant and organizer of the Leo Frank exhibit at Kennesaw’s Southern Museum, said. “You had three different groups: wealthy whites, poor whites, and poor blacks. On top of that you have two very contrasting political parties, one that is very agrarian and one that is more business conservative. Little Mary Phagan, beyond being a victim of a horrific crime, was also a victim of the economic times, and basically a child laborer in extreme conditions.”

Her death also spurred on numerous civil society organizations, including the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) — started by the lynch mob, who dubbed themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan — and the creation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The KKK, revitalized in 1917 in a cross burning ceremony at the top of Stone Mountain, grew with Tom Watson’s help, staying large in the town of Marietta through the Civil Rights Movement.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the ADL, created by the B’nai B’rith Jewish service organization of which Frank had served as Atlanta chapter president, strives to protect Jews from prejudice.

“The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience and, if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens,” the ADL’s initial 1913 charter said.

 
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