And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (review)

Philip Roth's latest novel attests to the enduring resonance of the lynching of Leo Frank for American Jews. Roth's tale of the ascendance of a virulent strain of antisemitism in an imaginary World-War-II-era America relies upon the real-life death of the Atlanta businessman as a predicate for the novel's widespread violence against Jews. In 1915, a mob kidnapped Frank from the state penitentiary and hanged him from a tree after Georgia's governor commuted his death sentence for murdering a thirteen-year old girl. As Roth's postscript tersely explains: "Anti-Semitism believed to have played important part in [Frank's] dubious conviction."¹

Indeed it did. Frank's status as a well-to-do Jew in a Southern city struggling with industrialization unquestionably affected his arrest, trial, conviction, sentence, and eventual lynching. But as Steve Oney's admirably exhaustive, if often exhausting, book on Frank's case demonstrates, the precise part that antisemitism played is not clear. The police had plausible reasons for suspecting that Frank murdered the girl. He was the manager of the National Pencil Factory, in which the victim, Mary Phagan, worked, and was the last person known to have seen her alive. Upon being informed of the murder by Atlanta detectives, Frank behaved nervously, if not guiltily. Although the Cornell-educated, B'nai B'rith chapter president may have appeared to be an upstanding citizen, many of his female employees rushed to testify to the contrary. Frank, whatever his religion, would have been a reasonable suspect, as the grand jury that indicted him and included four Jews concluded. Even the Jewish community hesitated before jumping to Frank's defense. Atlanta's Jews soon rallied largely because of his wife's, not his, standing in the community—the Brooklyn-bred Frank was a relative newcomer. But national Jewish figures, including famed lawyer and American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, held back. They doubted that Frank had been indicted solely because he was a Jew, and did not want to be seen as supporting Frank just because he was a Jew. Such perceptions, they feared, might inspire an antisemitic backlash.

Once the trial began, prosecutors, led by Hugh Dorsey, attacked Frank's character mercilessly. Yet Dorsey, whose former law partner was Jewish, didn't refer to Frank's religion or ethnicity in doing so. Unlike the depiction of "Negroes" by lawyers on both sides, Atlanta's prosecutors seemingly steered clear of religious stereotypes. In fact, it was the defense that first raised the issue, prompting a vigorous denial from the prosecution, which no more wanted to be tainted as anti-Jewish than the defense wanted to be saddled with images of greedy, lustful Jews. Given Frank's many supporters among Atlanta's gentile establishment, it is not surprising that the prosecution trod lightly. The town's dominant newspapers, though eager to capitalize on the sensational and salacious charges, didn't presume his guilt; the Hearst-owned Georgian actually crusaded for Frank's acquittal. Even the dubious conviction was not a product of unadulterated antisemitism. The jury likely included a few confirmed antisemites but the evidence presented at trial was massive enough to support a guilty verdict. And the governor's commutation almost averted the ultimate injustice, the death sentence—that is, until the mob imposed it. In the end, of course, antisemitism not only insinuated itself into the case but dominated and defined it. The anti-Jewish fulminations of politician and publisher Tom Watson fueled the frenzy that led to Frank's lynching. Yet, even here the response was mixed; most of Georgia's leaders and major institutions joined the rest of the nation in condemning the vicious deed.

So Frank's conviction and murder...