Full text of "Significance of Leo Frank lynching 100 years ago" radio podcast

On the Significance of the Lynching of Leo Frank 100 Years Ago

Transcript of The Heretics' Hour radio program of August 17, 2015

By Carolyn Yeager

One hundred years ago today, August 17, 1915, around 7 o'clock in the morning, Leo M. Frank paid with his life for the murder of 13-year old little Mary Phagan.

It was unusual though, in the fact that instead of being hanged by the state of Georgia, as was called for by the jury verdict of Guilty brought against Frank, he was “lynched” by a committee of 28 well-known, responsible male citizens of Cobb County, Georgia. Therein lies a large part of the reason for the continuing unease with this event even 100 years later.

The main interest comes from Jews, but not all Jews see profit in what the more activist Jews are doing with it today … activist Jews being those who run the Anti-Defamation League, The B'nai B'rith International, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish World Congress, the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, Emory University Institute for Jewish Studies, and on and on.

On the other side, interest comes from people like us – you and me – who care about this event that took place 100 years ago because these activist Jews are trying to wipe Leo Frank's very real guilt off the face of history. That is the real objective and is what this program will be about.

In pursuit of this objective, in 1983 the Anti-Defamation League spearheaded a petition for a posthumous pardon for Leo Frank, based on what they called “new evidence.” This new evidence came from the former office boy at the Pencil Company, who had only worked there for three weeks at the time, and it came 69 years later! In 1913 the boy, Alonzo Mann, was 14 years old; in 1982 he announced that he “wanted to clear his conscience” before he died, by clearing the name of Leo Frank. Of course, like with some “holocaust” witnesses, the principals involved in his story are no longer around to verify or counter his claims.

The story he told went like this: He (Alonzo) worked that holiday morning in Frank's office, but left at 11:30 am, with Frank's permission, in order to meet his mother downtown to watch the Memorial Day parade with her. When his mother didn't show up, he eventually got bored and went back to the Pencil Factory. When he walked in the front door, he saw Jim Conley holding a limp female body, standing near the scuttle hole to the basement. Jim pointed a finger at him and said “If you ever tell anybody, I'll kill you!” Alonzo, frightened, ran back out the front door, took the streetcar straight home, and told his mother what had happened. She told him never to mention it, to stay out of it, it was none of his business. When his father came home, he concurred. And so, through all of the next 2 years of trials and appeals, and all the many years after that, Alonzo remained silent about seeing Jim Conley.

I find his story hard to believe – in fact, I don't believe it because it doesn't fit the evidence – but Alonzo Mann passed two lie detector tests. Even so, the Pardon and Parole Board rejected the petition because it did “not prove the innocence of Frank.” The Frank supporters never will be able to, and they know it because, in 1986, they tried again, this time asking for a pardon that didn't address guilt or innocence, but only the fact of the state's culpability in Frank's death for failing to protect him from the vigilantes. This was granted and the ADL and other Jewish groups appeared satisfied with it … since they don't believe they can get anything better.

But now, on this 100^th Anniversary, there is an Atlanta rabbi who has been lobbying for several years to have Frank exonerated of all guilt in the murder of Mary Phagan. Rabbi Steve Lebow, who came to a synagogue in Marietta in 1986 (the year of the last pardon application, coincidentally) from Ft. Lauderdale, FL, has been very involved with having historical markers made to keep alive the memory of the Leo Frank lynching, and he led a “memorial” to Leo Frank in his synagogue yesterday (Sunday) and another was held in an Atlanta synagogue. He makes sure he gets at least one non-Jew as a featured speaker for these affairs. On this occasion, he had former Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court Justice Norman Fletcher on board to speak. But also immigration lawyer Dale Schwartz and Van Pearlberg, another Jewish Georgia politician who talks up the case.

I'll tell you a story about this Dale Schwartz, as he told it to an interviewer.

He was was 11 years old [in 1953] when his parents took over a department store in a small north Georgia town, where they became the only Jewish family. When they hired a black couple, a group of white women confronted his mother.

“Wait, they raise your children and give them milk from their breasts and they can’t sell you a dress?” his mother said. “They stormed out,” Schwartz says, chuckling at the memory.

Selling a dress means being a salesperson. I can tell you that in my hometown in Illinois in 1953, you would never have found a negro given the job as salesperson in a store. But if the people in that Georgia town in 1953 continued to shop in that store after it was “integrated” by Jews, that was their mistake. This is where we go wrong … if we can even believe Schwartz's story. But for our people forgiveness comes easily, naturally. It feels better to say: Let's be kind, let's let bygones be bygones, and this is why Jewish activists eventually get their way.

But this Dale Schwartz, and Rabbi Lebow, and Van Perlberg, are crusading for further “forgiveness” for Leo Frank, and re-evaluation. And that is why it is of concern to us. One reason is that Frank is not the first, or the only, Jew for whom Jewish media and money power has been used to make the public believe in his innocence. Capt. Alfred Dreyfus comes to mind; and the Russian Jew Menahem Beiliss, who was accused in 1911 Kiev of ritual murder of a local boy. I will look at these two a little further in the program. And, of course, they are always portrayed as victims of antisemitism – this has been used since time immemorial, it is not new or “modern.” It is ancient – to blame the “other” for hatred and prejudice against the Jew because he is a Jew, not because the other has a real, genuine, legitimate grievance. I don't need to tell my listeners that, you all know it.

Leo Frank is Guilty

Leo Frank was and IS guilty; there is no doubt about it, the evidence shows it, even without the testimony of Jim Conley. Why am I so sure? I started reading about it, and found myself going to the next thing and the next thing, as has happened to other people. There truly are some wonderful people involved, admirable southern people. Hugh Dorsey, the prosecutor is one. Another is the brilliant Tom Watson, journalist and lawyer who was first approached with $5000 to take up the defense of Frank, but declined, much to his credit. He wrote about the trial in his monthly magazine, The Jeffersonian. The whole spirit of the times and of the people are interesting to me.

After reading generally about the trial, I settled down to read Mary Phagan Kean's book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, which I found interesting from start to finish. She is little Phagan's great niece and didn't learn about that until a teacher asked her if she was related to Little Mary Phagan. That's how quiet the family kept. I then read the entire closing argument, which took three days in court, of Hugh Dorsey, the prosecutor. After that I read five of the quite long installments about the trial by Tom Watson in his monthly magazine. These were really remarkable writing by a very gifted and good man. I was spellbound. Then, along with a number of other writings, I made sure to read the closing arguments of Frank's lead attorneys, Luther Z. Rosser and Reuben R. Arnold, neither of which are Jews. In my opinion, their arguments were based entirely on trying to create doubt in the minds of the jurors by dismissing or belittling the evidence and the prosecution witnesses. They presented no credible theories for how the girl died, except to suggest that Jim Conley was stupid enough to grab her purse as she came down the stairs from Frank's office where Frank, Jim's boss, was sitting and could hear sounds from downstairs. You realize sound rises. And also realize that Conley had been employed there for two years and had never done anything like that before. Whereas it was established that Frank had a reputation with some of showing too much interest in the girls working for him.

* * *

In 1915 in Cobb Country, Ga., the PEOPLE did what needed to be done when the authorities failed to serve the interests of the PEOPLE.

The people's institutions – the Courts of the judicial branch of their government – had found 29-year old Leo M. Frank guilty of the murder of 13-year old Mary Phagan, and deserving of being hanged. As he had wrapped a cord around little Mary's neck while she was unconscious and pulled it tight until her life was snuffed out, so the same would now be done to him. The community, out of which Mary Phagan had come, were satisfied. They had followed the evidence presented at the trial carefully, and believed that Frank was justly convicted.

But a man, the governor of the state, intervened. He had the ability to commute a sentence of death to life imprisonment, and he used it at the behest of the powerful friends and legal team of Leo Frank. This action by the governor was felt by the people as a shock, a betrayal, and a denial of justice. It had been two years since the murder and the case had been appealed through the courts of Georgia to it's Supreme Court, and then even to the nation's highest court, the United States Supreme Court. No legal case could go beyond that. And in every review by a higher court, with Frank's expensive lawyers (the best money could buy) arguing with all the skill and energy they possessed, the original trial record in Atlanta, Georgia was sustained. No fault, no lapse , no prejudice, no outside interference, no anti-semitism was found by these impartial, higher judges. The verdict stood all tests.

Thus the only option left was to convince the Governor to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, giving opportunity for the Frank supporters to continue to seek ways to undo the verdict of the people of Fulton County, Ga.

In the other two cases I mentioned -Dreyfus and Beiliss – the Jews achieved their goal of total innocence being declared, with the cause of the accusations against them attributed to anti-semitism. In the Frank case, a declaration of innocence has not yet happened. They have come a long way with the public consciousness, that is, people saying they “believe” Frank is innocent. Based on what? … newspaper endorsements of his innocence, but not with the legal documents. The trial was fair and did not leave all the loose threads the Jews would have you believe. Most of the people in Marietta still say Frank was guilty.

* * *

I want to go through some facts about the trial testimony that made an impression on me. This is not a comprehensive account at all, but just what stuck with me in my reading.

• Leo Frank was the last person to see Mary Phagan alive. She came to him between 12 and 12:15 for her pay on Saturday, April 26, a state holiday. Jim Conley was sitting under the stairs … ON A HOLIDAY.... because of a special request from Frank to watch who came and left by the front door. Another woman saw him sitting there when she entered.

  ----No one ever saw her alive again after she entered that building a little after 12 noon.

  ----The murder occurred around that time, according to the blood and hair, and stomach contents evidence (plus the stage of rigor mortis when the body was found 15 hours later), in the back area of the 2^nd floor. Frank was the only other person on the 2nd floor, except for 14-year old Monteen Stover who came up to the office looking to get her pay from Leo Frank and stayed for 5 minutes before leaving.

• Frank lied about knowing Mary Phagan when asked about her by police on Sunday morning. But witnesses testified during the trial to seeing him speaking to her and calling her “Mary.” She also worked on the 2^nd floor on the way to the bathroom that Frank used. He passed her regularly. And she had worked there for a year!

• Frank changed his story twice about the time Mary Phagan came into his office to get her pay. He first said she arrived at 12:03. The next day, in a formal statement to police, he said it was between 12:05 and 12:10. A week later, Monteen Stover's mother said she was in his office during that exact time and he was not there. Frank had insisted he was in his office the whole time between 12 noon and 12:30 on that day. At the inquest, Frank said he thought Mary arrived between 12:10 and 12;15 (because of Stover's testimony).

  --- When he made his long statement to the jury, he said he may have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom without remembering it. But of course, he then put himself back in the bathroom, in the metal room, where the murder took place, at the time it took place!!

  --- None of this is ever brought up by the “Frank is innocent” crowd who say he was convicted on Jim Conley's evidence alone.

• The hair on machinist R.H. Barrett's machine was Mary's, according to everyone who worked on that floor. It was on Barret's machine that the prosecution said Mary hit her head after being knocked in the eye by her assailant. The defense disputed it, so the body was exhumed and hair removed from her corpse, and given to Dr. Harris to compare the two.

This is what Dr. Harris said—

“Affiant further says that the two specimens (of hair) were so much alike that it was impossible for him to form any definite and absolute opinion as to whether they were from the head of the same person or not.”

What a statement! What was he afraid of? Or whom?

• No one came forth to say they knew how the blood spots came to be in the same area where the hair was … that were not there on Friday at closing, everyone was sure of that, and were first seen on Monday morning.

• The time card of the night watchman Newt Lee was tampered with by Frank. On Sunday Frank showed it to detectives as being correctly punched every half-hour. But on Monday, he said he had made a mistake and it was missing 3 punches (giving Lee time to murder the girl and go home to change his clothes). He produced it. Frank had decided to try to frame Lee for the murder.

• The Defense claims that Conley threw Mary Phagan down the scuttle hole from the first floor, on his own, while Conley claimed he and Frank took it down in the elevator from the 2nd floor. Sergeant Dobbs of the police swore that the trail of the body dragged over the floor in the basement led back to the elevator. His exact words were, “It began immediately in front of the elevator, at the bottom of the shaft.” (supporting Conley's story)

• Frank's rich relative hastened to hire lawyers for Frank before he had been accused of a crime. Rosser showed up at the police station on Monday when they were questioning Frank, who says he was surprised to see him. Did they want to make sure Frank didn't screw up in talking to the police? They knew he could be guilty, so wanted to make sure he did not talk and give himself away? Probably also wanted to make sure he was not FOUND guilty, even if he was.

• Frank made a long statement but did not allow himself to be cross-examined. He answered no questions from anyone. The law gave him that right, but is that the behavior of a man who believes himself innocent?

• Neither Frank nor his lawyers questioned (cross examined) the girls who accused him of bad or lascivious behavior. Why? they were afraid it would bring out more details about what Frank said and did by opening to more questioning by the prosecution.

• Rosser took the then Governor-elect Slaton into his firm in May, 1913, right after Mary Phagan was killed, Frank was arrested, and Rosser became his lead attorney.

To fully comprehend the infamous betrayal of the State of Georgia, by Governor Slaton, you must keep in your mind the astounding fact that he joined Rosser’s firm after that firm had been employed to defend Frank and had publicly taken part in his case.

A Governor cannot practice law openly; and in June, 1913, John M. Slaton was to be inaugurated for a term of two years.

Why, then, did he, in May, join a firm with which he could not openly act until after June 1915?

And why did Rosser, in May, 1913, take in a partner whom he could not openly use during the next two years? These are good questions that were asked by Tom Watson.

• His wife refused to go see him for 3 weeks after he was held in the Tower. They say he didn't want to put her through such a visit, but … if he really loved her, and she him, they would have needed to see each other. Theirs was a cold marriage of convenience, which gives credibility to Frank's kinky lust for young girls and prostitutes.

  She also refused to be buried next to him, was cremated and asked that her ashes be scattered in an Atlanta park in order to avoid the problem of burial. Since that proved illegal, nothing was done with her ashes for years until the family secretly buried them between her mother and father in Atlanta, far away from Leo in Queens, New York.

• Governor Slaton falsely stated and repeated over and over that Judge Roan requested a commutation of Frank’s sentence. Judge Roan had continued to say, notably to his pastor and his daughter, that the evidence unquestionably demonstrated Frank’s guilt; and it was not until Judge Roan had been dead more than two months (he died shortly after the end of the trial, of cancer), was a forged letter presented, which set aside Judge Roan’s record, and contradicted his judicial declarations of record in this case.

• Frank was convicted on the testimony of a negro! All the newspapers repeated that, and all the magazines too. But it's not true, especially because Conley was Frank's accomplice, by his own admission, and the Georgia law does not admit anyone to be convicted upon the testimony of their accomplice!
  

• Judge Roan allowed the audience in the courtroom to intimidate the jury by shouting their threats to the jury, while the trial was in progress. This was also said to come through the open windows of the courtroom from the crowd outside. Patently false. Frank's lawyers would have been able to move for a mistrial, and gotten it.

• Forged time-slips against Newt Lee! Forged bloody shirt against Lee! Forged affidavits against the girls! Forged letter of the dead Judge Roan! Forged letters of a couple of negroes! The whole case of the defense reeked with fraud, bribery, perjury, and forgery.

* * *

Now I want to compare the case of Leo Frank with two other cases of Jews being accused of serious crimes and being let off because of international effort organized on their behalf. Organized by whom? Their Jewish Brethren, of course.

If Leo Frank had not been lynched by those heroes, the group of respectable, responsible men of Cobb County Georgia, he also would have eventually been set free by the huge national effort on his behalf. The people of Georgia were stronger than most people elsewhere in standing up for their truth and the rightness of their way of life, and in resisting the Jewish pressure against them, which was enormous.

Thomas Watson has described some of it in his magazine articles, which are really gems. Audio books have been made of them, read by Vannessa Neubauer, who does a great job, they are a pleasure to listen to … and I recommend them highly. It's even better, though, to read them for yourself. They are available at www.leofrank.org and also at www.nationalvanguard.org Watson quotes some of the outrageous things that were said in Northern and Southern newspapers, and of course are still being said today!

So I'm going to myself quote from one of Tom Watson's issues about these other crime cases involving Jews that got international attention.

Have the children of Moses the right to break the Sinai tables? (10 commandments)

Do they deserve death when they slay Hebrews, only?

Is there some unwritten law, which absolves them, when their victim is a Gentile?

They are taught in their Talmud that, “As man is superior to other animals, so are the Jews superior to all other men.”

Do the Hebrews of today hold to that, in their heart of hearts?

They are taught by their great teacher, Rabbana Ashi, that “Those who are not Jews, are dogs and asses.”

Are the Hebrews true to Talmud, and to their learned Rabbana?

Was Mary Phagan—the Irish girl—legitimate spoil for the descendant of those who divided among themselves the daughters of the Midianite?

Is there a secret tenet of their religion, which compels the entire race to combine to save the neck of such a loathsome degenerate as Leo Frank?

They did not waste a dollar, nor a day, on the Jews who were electrocuted for shooting Rosenthal; was it because Rosenthal was a Jew?

If the victim in that case had been an Irishman, would there have been a Haas Finance Committee? a nation-wide distribution of lying circulars? a flying column of mendacious detectives? a constantly increasing supply of political lawyers? the muzzling of daily papers? an attempt to enlist the Northern school-children, Peace Societies, and Anti-Capital-Punishment leagues?

Money talks; and in this Frank case, money talked as loudly, and as resourcefully, as though Baron Hirsch’s $45,000,000 Hebrew Fund had been copiously poured into the campaign.

It is a peculiar and portentous thing, that one race of men—and one, only—should be able to convulse the world, by a system of newspaper agitation and suppression, when a member of that race is convicted of a capital crime against another race.

We all know the answers to these questions. But complaining and “griping” about Jewish power is not enough … in fact, it helps the Jews because they use it to bolster their charges of “antisemitism.”

It is this very concept of “antisemitism” that has to be done away with. The Jews must be deprived of it! Dislike of Jewish criminality is not a sin, not an insanity, not a mistake or error, not a cruelty, not a “hate”. Aversion toward Jews is natural, normal, healthy for White Europeans. We must not apologize for wanting a Jew-free society. But this is why “anti-Racism” was established.

Does anybody in this country know what was the truth about Dreyfus, the French officer who was convicted of treason, and, at first, sentenced to death? [Dreyfus arrested in 1894; pardoned in 1899; almost contemporary with Frank.]

Nobody does. All we know is what the newspapers told us; and it leaked out afterwards, that the wife of Dreyfus abandoned him, as soon as he was turned loose.

Presumably, she was a Jewess; but, like the other Hebrew champions of Dreyfus, she dropped him, as soon as she had accomplished her purpose.

One of the Rothschild banking houses exerts a powerful influence over French finances; another in Frankfort, another in Vienna, and another in London, have often stood together to control the policies of European governments; if they insisted upon the liberation of Dreyfus, the French Republic—beset by royalists, socialists, and clericals—was in no condition to resist the demand.

The peculiar thing, and the sinister thing, is that some secret organization existed which could permeate the whole European world, and the United States, also, with the literature which clamored for Dreyfus.

The father of Dreyfus was an Alsatian banker—a Jew, of course—and a subject of the Kaiser. He was a cog in the wheel of the German spy-system; and he used his son, the French officer, to secure for the Berlin Government, the military secrets of the French War Office.

France had not then formed her defensive alliance with Great Britain, and was not strong enough to fully expose Dreyfus, and the Kaiser—thus precipitating a war. The French officer, Ricard, who was the stanch champion of Dreyfus in every one of the investigations, turned against the Jew, after he himself was given a position in the War Office, and learned the truth from indubitable documentary evidence.

The Human Rights League (Ligue des droits de l’homme or LDH) was founded on 4 June 1898 by the republican Ludovic Trarieux to defend captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew convicted for treason. The League was dissolved during World War II under the National Socialist occupation, but it was clandestinely reconstituted in 1943 and re-established after the “liberation.”

I did a radio program on the Dreyfus Affair with Margaret Huffstickler, on Jan. 19 of this year. You can find it by searching “Dreyfus Affair, Heretics Hour” on carolynyeager.net.

The Beiliss case, in Russia, was equally remarkable, in its progress and its end.

A Gentile boy was found dead, with more than forty small incisions in his veins and arteries, from which practically every drop of his blood had been drawn—and the blood had left no marks, anywhere.

That much trickled through the newspapers to the American people, and they realized, of course, that here was a novelty in deliberate and atrocious crime.

Beiliss, a Russian Jew, was accused of kidnapping the little boy, and emptying his blood-vessels of their contents, in order that it might be used in “a religious sacrifice.”

The Russian court found Beiliss guilty; but, apparently, the same mighty engine of agitation, and suppression, that had worked for Dreyfus, was put in motion for Beiliss.

Mankind was told that there was no such thing as “blood sacrifice” among Russian Jews; and that Beiliss was the victim of jungle fury, race hatred, lynch law, &c., &c.

In the meanwhile, the hysterical public lost sight of the pallid corpse of the Gentile boy, whose veins presented the pale lips of forty-five cuts, made by a sharp instrument.

Somebody had killed the lad—most deliberately, most cruelly—and the Russian courts, in full possession of the facts, declared that Beiliss had done it.

But the American people—not knowing the facts, and totally in the dark as to who did get the blood out of the boy’s veins—were excitedly certain that Beiliss didn’t.

Consequently, a pressure of the same peculiar and irresistible sort that had saved Dreyfus, caused Russia to stay her uplifted hand, and spare Beiliss.

To this day, the Americans who blindly, hysterically helped to put the pressure on the Czar’s Government, have no idea who made the forty-five slits in the blood-vessesl of the little boy; and, what’s more, they don’t care.

They accomplished their emotional purpose, blew off their psychological steam, and then forgot all about Beiliss, and the boy.

Likewise, Americans do not know (or care) who killed Mary Phagan … they just know that Leo Frank didn't. Amazing, yes?

Beiliss, though said to be a modest working man, was represented by the most able counsels of the Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev bars: Vasily Maklakov, Oscar Gruzenberg, N. Karabchevsky, A. Zarudny, and D. Grigorovitch-Barsky. Two prominent Russian professors, Troitsky and Kokovtzov, spoke on behalf of the defense in praise of Jewish values and exposed the falsehood of the accusations, while professor of Kiev Theological Seminary Orthodox Christian philosopher Alexander Glagolev affirmed that "the Law of Moses forbids spilling human blood and using any blood in general in food." But, you see, this has nothing to do with what individual Jews and fundamentalist sects would do.

Beiliss is today called a victim of anti-semitism, just the same as Alfred Dreyfus and Leo Frank. Beiliss became a cause celebre in America, yet it was proven that the ritual blood-taking which led to the death of the boy was carried out in Beiliss' own brick factory! He was the superintendent, just as Frank was superintendent of the pencil factory. How could he not be involved when the ritual murder took longer than one day to carry out. What is written about it on Wikipedia is a twisted up lie, mainly by omitting anything that is not favorable to Beiliss' innocence.

Addendum: In the March 2006 issue (No. 9/160) of the Ukrainian Personnel Plus magazine by the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (commonly abbreviated MAUP), an article "Murder Is Unveiled, the Murderer Is Unknown?" revives accusations from the Beilis Trial, stating that the jury recognized the case as ritual murder by persons unknown, even though it found Beilis himself not guilty.

So here we have 3 cases occurring around the same time, of guilty Jews being the recipients of big money campaigns to find them innocent. In all three, the victim is forgotten in the cry and hue of “the Jewish victim” who is victimized by Gentiles for being a Jew! This becomes the crime. The actual crime fades into the background and disappears.

This is the exact method used by Jews to “get out of trouble” in the Gentile world in which they've lived for centuries. It's a fixed equation. Yet we don't seem to know how it works! Our people fall for it time and time again. That's why the Leo Frank case is such a teachable vehicle for us. It contains so many great lessons. And it aligns with so many others, as I've mentioned just two others in this program. We have to remind ourselves that Jews are NOT good people. They may be good to each other, and I think they are, but they are not good to us! Leo Frank was doing his best to have either one of two non-Jews take the blame for what he knew was his own crime. Alfred Dreyfus did the same.

So today, 100 years after the Frank lynching, we are being flooded with Jewish-sponsored news stories about Leo Frank's innocence, and reminders that the state of Georgia still hasn't done enough to right that terrible wrong that occurred then. As always, Jewry is not satisfied except with total victory.

* * *

I'd like to end this part of the program with some statements from Frank's lawyers that reveal that it was they who brought up the Jewish question in the original trial, not the people of Georgia. It is in the Jew's interest to make it appear as if anti-semitism is at work; in fact, this is their Modus operandi, their very best ammunition, so they ALWAYS use it!

Excerpts from Reuben Arnold's closing argument:

I’ll tell you right now, if Frank hadn’t been a Jew there would never have been any prosecution against him. I’m asking my own people to turn him loose, asking them to do justice to a Jew, and I’m not a Jew, but I would rather die before doing injustice to a Jew. ….Reuben Arnold

He is saying a Christian has to be extra nice to Jews, more so than to other Christians! That's his personal belief. And he would rather die than do an injustice to a Jew! In other words, Jews are special, and you had better recognize that.

This crime is the hideous act of a negro who would ravish a ten-year-old girl the same as he would ravish a woman of years. It isn’t a white man’s crime. It’s the crime of a beast-a low, savage beast!

Yet Jim Conley had never gotten in trouble because of anything to do with White people. All his brushes with the law were over altercations with other negroes.

He said that he heard Frank and Mary Phagan walking upstairs, and that he heard Mary Phagan scream, and that immediately after hearing the scream he let Monteen Stover into the building. The man that wrote those murder notes is the man who killed that girl. Prove that man was there and that he wrote the notes and you know who killed the girl. Well, Conley acknowledges he wrote the notes and witnesses have proved he was there and he admits that, too. That negro was in the building near the elevator shaft; it took but two steps for him to grab that little girl’s mesh bag. She probably held on to it and struggled with him.

She would have cried out and yelled in that case. I know what a girl or woman automatically does when her purse with money and other valuables in it is grabbed by someone. She yells “Help” at the top of her lungs, for anyone nearby to come to her aid. If Leo Frank was the man his lawyers said he was, he would have heard such a cry and come out of his office, which was just up the stairs, to investigate. Arnold's invented scenario doesn't make the grade.

A moment later he had struck her in the eye and she had fallen. It is the work of a moment for Conley to throw her down the elevator shaft.

Now, I don’t believe the little Stover girl ever went into the inner office. She was a sweet, innocent, timid little girl, and she just peeped into the office from the outer one, and if Frank was in there, the safe door hid him from her view, or if he was not there, he might have stepped out for just a moment.

Another total invention! I saw a picture from the newspaper of Monteen Stover and she looked real confident and mature, not at all a timid little girl. And she said she went into the inner office and looked around. No one was there.

If he had killed her he would have just slipped her pay envelope back in the safe and declared that he never saw her that day at all, and then no one could have ever explained how she got into that basement.

Not true, because she told both her mother and the boy friend she met on the trolley that she was going to the pencil factory to get her pay before going to watch the Confederate Day parade. That information would have been forthcoming in the investigation.

But Frank couldn’t know that there was hatred enough left in this country against his race to

bring such a hideous charge against him.

This case has been made up of just two things - prejudice and perjury. I’ve never seen such malice, such personal hatred in all my life, and I don’t think anyone ever has.

But, above all, gentlemen, let’s follow the law in this matter. In circumstantial cases you can’t convict a man as long as there’s any other possible theory for the crime of which he is accused, and you can’t find Frank guilty if there’s a chance that Conley is the murderer. The state has nothing on which to base their case but Conley, and we’ve shown Conley a liar. Write your verdict of not guilty and your consciences will give your approval.

Frank was not convicted on the testimony of Jim Conley, since the law in Georgia holds that a defendant cannot be convicted on the testimony of his accomplice, and Jim Conley, by his own admission, was an accomplice to Leo Frank in the murder of Mary Phagan. Plus there was plenty of other evidence with which to convict Frank.

Frank's lead attorney Luther Z. Rosser

In the investigation, it was live leaked that Luther Z. Rosser was retained for a handsome unheard-of-sum, $12,500 to $15,000. To put things into context, $12,500 to $15,000 was enough money back in the 1910s to buy an absolutely fabulous estate outside of greater Atlanta. The Federal Reserve was born in 1913; American money has devalued about 100% since then. So Rosser's fee would be a million and a half dollars today.

If Luther’s $12,500 seemed exorbitant, Reuben Arnold later joined the Leo Frank defense dream team for an equally whopping $10,000 (Atlanta Publishing Company, The Frank Case, 1913). Before the trial even started, at least $22,500 (2.25 million in today's money) had been released to the two “top of the top” lawyers in the state of Georgia – not to mention they were the leaders, part of an expensive dream team totaling eight lawyers for the Leo M. Frank defense.

Could it be that Leo Frank himself was worth having that much money spent on him? No. But he was a Jew. And he was President of the Atlanta B'nai B'rith.

The fund on behalf of Leo Frank was to the tune of six figures and hemorrhaging NY Jewish media mogul greenbacks to the likes of Jewish advertising magnate Albert Davis Lasker and New York Times owner Adolph Simon Ochs.

Most observers felt that because Leo Frank had the best legal team money could buy, the fact he was convicted unanimously by the thirteen-man panel of the presiding Judge Leonard Roan and jury of twelve, followed by two years of court reviews rendering majority decisions he had a fair trial, meant he was likely guilty. This is especially true in light of the 1986 decision where Leo Frank received a highly political pardon without disturbing the verdict of the jury and without exonerating him of the crime of which he was convicted. But the Jews would have you believe otherwise, that Frank was innocent but was convicted because of the anti-semitism of the people of Georgia.

Well, by the time August 1915 rolled around, quite a few Atlantans could very well have been feeling “anti-semitic” due to all the attacks on their characters by Jews from all around the nation. There was very little positive feeling coming to Georgia from the rest of the world … and those in Georgia knew who was responsible. Thomas Watson let them know.

* * *

It was the most prominent men in Cobb County, where Marietta was situated, who organized themselves in what they called the “Knights of Mary Phagan” and openly planned to kidnap Frank from the State Prison Farm in Milledgeville where he had a cushy private room with a carpet and desk. The last letter he wrote to his wife was downright cheerful. He was certainly expecting the “big money” Northern Jews and their legal brains to continue working on his behalf.

The Knights of Mary Phagan were 28 men, who, apart from the leaders, were selected for their various skills: an electrician, a automobile mechanic, a locksmith, a medic, a preacher, a telephone man and of course a hangman. They didn't wear masks. But their names were known only locally until the year 2000 when a librarian posted on the Internet a list compiled by Mary Phagan Kean, little Mary Phagan's great-niece.

These men deserve our praise. As I've already said, but I want to say it again because it is my position on Leo Frank's lynching ... if they hadn't done what they did, Leo Frank would have eventually been released from prison, just as Dreyfus was, and as Beiluss was, and even as the despicable Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard is soon to be released. If only we had men who could get hold of Pollard and do to him what those men did to Leo Frank. They had it well-planned and they carried it out almost to perfection. The entire Atlanta and surrounding community were mostly behind their action because of what Governor Slaton had done. Certainly, we wish we had men like that today. But in today's world, they would never get away with it. More's the pity.

* * *

Now I want to give you a rundown of the commemorative events that took place yesterday, today and tomorrow, found on the “American Jewish Committee” website. First they describe Frank's trial with the usual lies, which is what you're going to hear at all the events, too. They write:

Convicted on circumstantial evidence following a shoddy investigation, amid a sea of anti-Semitic rhetoric, Frank was sentenced to die. Gov. John Slaton commuted his sentence after thoroughly reviewing the case, so enraging some Georgians that the governor was hanged in effigy and had to declare martial law for a time.

“Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited,” an exhibition of original artifacts and photography on display Aug. 17-Nov. 29 at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, in partnership with the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and the Museum of History and Holocaust Education.

The same group hosts a commemorative event at 2 p.m. Aug. 17 at Congregation Ner Tamid. Scheduled speakers include Rabbi Tom Liebschutz, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, Kristine Goldstein and Dr. Catherine Lewis. Barnes is a real politician.

Remembering Leo Frank. Oakland Cemetery will host two tours on Aug. 16: “Fear & Accusation: The Leo Frank Story” at 5 p.m. followed by “The Jewish Grounds of Oakland” at 6:30 p.m. Admission: adults, $20 for both tours, $12 for individual tour.

Leo Frank Memorial Service. 2 p.m. Sunday at Temple Kol Emeth, 1415 Old Canton Road, Marietta.Among those expected to attend are Otis Brumby III, the publisher of the Marietta Daily Journal, and Allison Barnes Salter, principal of the Barnes Law Group, both descended from men involved in the lynching.

These descendents of the original 28 are going to listen to Frank described as an innocent man! Their ancestors wouldn't! This is how far we have fallen in the past 100 years.

Rabbi Lebow said, “All we are trying to do with the service this day and in weeks and months to come is to clear an innocent man’s name. No more. But no less will do.”

He knows children and grandchildren of members of the lynching party and said almost all of them are “the nicest, sweetest, not racist or anti-Semitic group of people.”

Rabbi Lebow would like the Board of Pardons and Paroles to issue a pardon that “will acknowledge one simple fact, just four words long: Leo Frank was innocent.” Failing that, he would welcome a proclamation from the governor, the Cobb County Board of Commissioners or the Marietta City Council. And he links to them so that people can send email messages to them, requesting a proclamation. Jews succeed by applying pressure. They are writing to these government entities, and YOU SHOULD TOO. I'll put the links on the program post.

Rabbi Shalom Lewis acknowledged his own learning curve about the Leo Frank case. “I do not recall when I first became aware of the Frank case. I suspect that I stumbled across it in my study of modern American history or a reference in a documentary on anti-Semitism, but not until I moved to Marietta and saw the TV movie with Jack Lemmon did I really understand what happened here and the panic and migration north of many within the Jewish community.”

Commemorative program and tree planting. 2 p.m. Sunday at Congregation Etz Chaim, 1190 Indian Hills Parkway Marietta. I guess they're going to plant a tree for Leo.

“An Evening With History: From the Dark Side — The Leo Frank Case.” Historian and former Marietta City Councilman Van Pearlberg presents a lecture about the Frank case on Aug. 18 at the Marietta Museum of History. Admission is $10 for members and $20 for nonmembers.

“Leo Frank: 100 Years in the Media.” 7 p.m. Sept. 21 at the Museum of History and Holocaust Education in the Kennesaw State University Center, north of Atlanta.

You see how active they are? How tireless? Not so, us.

Well, 100 year anniversaries don't come around very often so one needs to make the most of it. I leave you with a question. How will the Leo Frank murder case look 100 years from now, on it's 200 year anniversary? Will there even be such a thing? You and I won't be around then, but what we do now will make a difference in what it will be like then. ~