Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South

"Frank on his knees": Capitalism and Perversion in the New South

"FRANK ON His KNEES" Capitalism and Perversion in the New South T he perversion charge merits special attention because it formed the emotional core of the prosecution's case against Frank, and also became the most important constituent in public feeling against him. The issue of Frank's "perversion" also extends an opportunity to explore the often uncomfortable and certainly unacknowledged differences in the ways Jews and African Americans have been objectified. Similarly, it will suggest one approach for understanding the complicated nature ofJewish/African American relatedness at this eminently plausible point of origin. It is with the perversion charges made against Frank that wecan see most clearly how an insistence upon a relationship between an African American and a Jew—perhaps one that itself waspartly imaginary—could be used to marginalize both groups, even as its most direct effect was to criminalizethe Jewish capitalist. Leo Frank washardly the alien Jew who dominates most historical scholarship on the case; rather, even while his precise social role wasobscure and his demeanor inscrutable, Frank wasall too recognizable in his role as factory boss. What needs to be examined critically ishow Frank's familiar enough class position became intertwined with his Jewishness and waschanneled through an accusation that he was a pervert. It is within this very process of naming 47 48 Capitalism and Perversion in the New; South that the central dramaof the Frank case—the encounter ofJew and African American over the body of a dead white woman—was played out. Some accounts of the Frank case have made distinctions between Frank's Jewishness on the one hand and the charges ofperversion on the other (Freshman 52; Lindemann 237-40). Myclaim here will be that the two, along with his status as a "damnyankee" capitalist from New York are of a piece (White, Man 25). The specific form that the perversion charges took, I will assert, were dependent on Frank's imageas a Jewishcapitalist. Frank's position in the economic and moral body of the South was almost completely coded through the attribution of a complicated sexualpersona to him that repelled observers even as it inspired in them an obsessive interest in the particularities of his deviance. Above all, the allegations of perversion made against Frank suggested a determining contrast between this Jewish manager and the African American janitor whoprovided the charges against him. While the comparison profited the latter in the short run—and perhaps saved his life—the broader point to make is that it also posited the public identities of African American and Jew as equally divergent from normative whiteness. The ultimate effect of the perversion charges was to position African Americans and Jews as distorted reflections of each other: the supposedly"instinctual" behaviors of Conley , that is, came to be seen as the relativelyhealthy opposite of the imageof Frank as cultured to the point ofdecay. The centerpiece of the perversion charge, that Frank coerced southern white women to have oral sex performed on them because he wasnot "built like other men," compels a reconsideration of sociological theories of labeling and scapegoating, particularly those that address racism and anti-Semitism. American sociology had a sort of golden age of deviancy studies in the 1950s and 1960s with influential worksby Howard Becker and Kai Erikson, among others, establishing an explanatory model that insisted that the construction of deviancy played a major role in society building. Arguing against the longheld idea that deviance isan inherent quality,Becker noted that socialgroups make deviance and proposed the now-familiar axiom that "deviant behavior is behavior that people so label" (9). Erikson pushed this insight further, arguing that it is "deviancy" that makesgroup life possible: to Erikson the deviant is "a relevant figure in the community's overall division of labor" whose pun- Capitalism and Perversion in the New South 49 ishment gives the rest of society an "orderly sense of their own cultural identity " (4, 9, 13; see also Cohen 193). But how are particular scapegoats chosen? Rene Girard proposes that a fairly free hand can be used in choosing a scapegoat, but that real care must be taken to "cultivate the future victim's supposed potential for evil, to transform him into a monster." If this is successfully done the scapegoat can hold "all the infectious strains in the community": killing the scapegoat means curing the social body at large (Girard, Violence 107). Girard has more recently called attention...