Book Review : Dark Side of America’s Heritage

The Silent and the Damned: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank by Robert Seitz Frey and Nancy Thompson-Frey (Madison Books: $15.95, 250 pages)

The 20th Century was heralded by at least three notorious outbursts of Jew-hatred directed against innocent Jewish men.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason and sent to Devil’s Island amid a frenzy of French anti-Semitism--Capt. Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. In 1911, a hapless Jew named Menahem Mendel Beilis was falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy in Kiev to obtain blood for ritual purposes--Beilis was not acquitted until 1913. And then there was the ordeal of Leo Frank, who was falsely accused of killing a white girl in Atlanta in 1913.

Lynched by Mob

Alone among these three victims of resurgent medieval anti-Semitism in the modern era, Leo Frank was martyred--he died at the hands of a lynch mob even after his death sentence had been commuted by a courageous Georgia governor after worldwide expression of outrage over his conviction. Not until 1986 was Frank posthumously pardoned by Georgia authorities. By then, as we learn in “The Silent and the Damned,” America was forced to confront the darkest side of its heritage--the blight of bigotry, the impulse toward violence, the power of demagogues, the cowardice of right-thinking men and women who are too fearful to speak out, and the ultimate frailty of our cherished constitutional liberties in the face of a bloodthirsty lynch mob.

In researching and recounting the historical record of the Leo Frank case, the authors have chosen a story that is rich with irony, haunted by tragedy and redeemed in the end by an excruciating act of symbolic justice. The bookish and bespectacled Frank, manager of an Atlanta pencil factory, was accused by one of the factory’s night watchmen, a black man named Jim Conley, of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white girl who also worked in the factory.

Victim of Many Failings

Frank was tried before an ineffectual judge and an intimidated jury, convicted of Phagan’s murder on equivocal evidence and perjured testimony, then condemned to death. But the authors allow us to understand that Frank was actually condemned and executed by the mob that crowded the courthouse to watch the proceedings, and later took him from a prison hospital at gunpoint after the commutation of Frank’s death sentence.

The authors demonstrate that Frank was the victim of many failings, many tragedies. His lawyers were arrogant, complacent and overconfident--they did not bother to demand a change of venue, despite the lynch-mob atmosphere of Atlanta and the sensational coverage by the local press, because “no court in the South had ever convicted a white man on the testimony of a black.” Both the Christian clergy and the Jewish community of Atlanta were timorous in their response to the threat of mob violence--Frank’s rabbi, an acculturated German Jew, blamed the anti-Semitic passions on the unsavory impression made by newly arrived Eastern European Jews who “ghettoized” themselves in a downtown neighborhood. The trial judge was apparently convinced of Frank’s innocence, but declined to grant a new trial on the reasoning that a few years of court appeals would allow passions to cool and new evidence to come to light.

Cowed Into Silence

The greatest irony is that the judge was right. Alonzo Mann, a young office boy at the pencil factory, had seen Jim Conley--alone--carrying the body of Mary Phagan. But Mann was cowed into silence by the threats of the real murderer and the lynch-mob atmosphere of the town. Not until the late 1970s, when Mann was preparing to meet his Maker with a clean conscience, did Mann come forward with the testimony that might have saved Leo Frank’s life.

But the authors, wisely, do not overplay the exquisite irony of the witness who condemns by his silence; they do not overemphasize the fundamental flaws of the criminal justice system in the Frank case. Rather, they force us to stare into the face of the lynch mob, the face of one authentic but little-seen facet of the American experience, where we see not only Jew-hatred but also race hatred and class hatred, profound social and sexual anxieties, and a readiness to act on those terrible fears with a rope draped over a tree limb.

Mary Phagan was turned into a vivid and volatile symbol of “Southern womanhood” violated by a brutish outsider. (Frank was vaguely accused of sexual perversion, although no evidence of rape or sexual molestation was ever found, and no crime of sexual violence was ever charged against him.) In a curious way, the authors reveal, Frank became an even more appealing scapegoat in the eyes of the lynch mob than the man who probably did kill Mary Phagan.

“My own feelings, upon the arrest of the old Negro night watchman, were to the effect that this one old Negro would be poor atonement for the life of this girl,” wrote one Atlanta pastor. “But when, on the next day, the police arrested a Jew, and a Yankee Jew at that, all of the inborn prejudice against the Jews rose up in a feeling of satisfaction, that here would be a victim worthy to pay for the crime.”

Although the authors do not flinch from the most vivid details of the crime against Mary Phagan or the crime against Leo Frank, “The Silent and the Damned” does not pander at all to the inevitable horror of its tale. The authors tell their story in a restrained, plain-spoken, matter-of-fact tone, although their terror and revulsion cannot always be contained: “After the lynch mob had fled the scene at about 8 o’clock that morning, the first curious onlookers had found Frank still alive,” they report. “His body was warm, and there was the faint throb of a pulse. But no one cut him down then.” The prose heats up momentarily as their passion erupts: “He hung there,” the authors write, “and died!”

Mercifully, the authors do not “novelize” the saga of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank--but, then, the story is so gripping that no such trifling with the historical record is really necessary. I literally could not put the book down. We are given one chilling moment after another, one telling detail after another. Amid the moral squalor of their story, the authors even find an occasional moment of light--one anonymous member of the lynch mob appeared at the door of an Atlanta reporter after Frank’s death, and silently handed the reporter an envelope. Inside the envelope, he found a gold ring and a typewritten note:

“Frank’s dying request was that his wedding ring be given to his wife,” the note read. “Would you not see that this request was carried out?”