Honored that the Georgia Historical Society invited me to join you. There is really no place i would rather be on the summer night than in this lovely southern town. Although i now live in california, i grew up in georgia. It is wonderful being back. Seeing old friends, many old friends. , southernersw ones are warm and embracing. Dear, the south is a golden place. , there is al know darker side. In ind locked doors almost every southern town so that has been hidden. 100 years ago tonight, a stones throw from where we are gathered , the best men of marietta were sentence on ast damnable plot. They thought they were carrying out justice, but nothing about their actions would be to that. They wouldnt lynch a man, possibly innocent. They would traumatize a generation of american jews. Particularly atlanta jews. Sowed pain and misunderstanding across the country. Marietta. Came from their names adorn street signs, public buildings, monuments, not just in this town, but across georgia. Tonight here there ghosts are here tonight. If you let yourself believe that you will. They are not alone, farmers and merchants carried out the horrific instructions of these men. If i close my eyes i can see them barreling through their prison. Ards the state fagan, the 13ary euro laborer whose brutal murder marietta sought to a bench. , who gave then final orders. Jewish industrialist who was charged with murdering her. The governor commuted him to life in prison. That set in motion the chain of events that would lead the party of marietta to a duct from the lynch him at dawn. On august 17. Where the streets intersect. Today that has been paved over for interstate 75. A difficulte relationship, a legacy of this man. He gets but a single dismissive mention, frank, nonresident. Leo frank will forever be a resident here. His spirit is hereto. On the 100th anniversary of the leo frank lynching, we have summoned these ghosts to the square. As i thought about what i was going to say, it is they who have summoned us. They have called us here to do a specific job. A powerful job. It is like we summoned those old , that theprophets israelites revere. Also has a more broad and definition. Murder ande lynching. Consider why it all still matters. A couple of preliminaries. And lynching. The past is as different from the present. The people of 1915, their lives and attitudes are not so different than ours. Particularly about sex and race. In franks case it was all about sex and race. Initially they were similar to what we face. Knew what the future held, for them they were turning into the industrial age. The people themselves were exactly like us. They loved and longed, they felt pain and joy. Travesty,e into this i would like to keep an open mind about what georgia was like in 1915. About the people who got caught up in this affair. All one flesh and , that does not mean we have to pull punches. That mean we can that does not mean we cannot be fears. I hope we can be respectful and fair. Frank hasof leo summoned us here because they would like to be understood. I think we can understand them, we may find what it is we may seek. That is peace. Night in this lovely southern town. Suddenly no longer history of itself. History has become frontpage news. Thingk it would be a fine to have a little understanding. Thank you, steve. On behalf of the society, i would like to welcome you all, and thank you all for coming. It is my pleasure to facilitate this discussion tonight. To introduce our guest , he is a grady fellow eddie nieman fellow at harvard. He is the last living witness of leo frank. He is the author of the most definitive account. Originally published in 2003. In his research of writing this book, he did what none of us do now. He spoke to people who actually saw leo franks aday hanging from the tree. To mary fagan, tom is remarkable. Ry he is going to share it with us. Outed you get interested . Tennessee i flew to to interview the Veterans Administration hospital in bellevue. This was an 85yearold man. He had been leo franks office boy, it was christmas time and i interviewed him in the common room where it was filled with the dying. He told me this remarkable story about how much he had seen. First told the story to the national tennessean. Posthumous pardon for leo frank, i thought the story had never been written up in a narrative. Had assigned me to do a piece, i interviewed this clerk looking back through records. Anduld back to los angeles wrote my article. It was a lengthy article, a 10,000 word article which, even for esquire, is quite long. I turned it in, they like it, and they said we are going to hold it until fall, until the issues are bigger. It is even for esquire, that is a lengthy story. I went on with my life, and it so happened i fell in love with a beautiful woman i asked her to marry me. We set our wedding date, and a week before the wedding, i got a call from esquire saying get ready, we are going. I sent them getting married in a week. And they said, get ready we are going. I got married, and went off on my honeymoon, and where most new husband would take poetry or some lingerie, i took the galley proofs of my article for esquire, a bundled loads, and a box of number two ticonderoga pencils. My wife has lasting memories in our honeymoon, communicating back and forth to editors in new york. So i write my book, it takes me 17 agonizing years. Thank you, thats fine. Not having to make a living during this time, writing stories. I finish my book. And my wife hosts the party when i turn in the last pages of the manuscript. We are standing on our back porch in los angeles and a group of people is surrounding us, and she begins to tell them the story that i just told you. Shes a good rock, and i think where she going with this . She told about our honeymoon, and she said thats when i realized i had two husbands. I was the bride of leo frankenstein. [laughter] steve it was a funny line, but sobering way true, as it turned out. Stan were going to talk about the murder of mary fagan in them and the trial of leo frank. Lets talk about who was mary fagan, and today, the murder of a 13yearold girl would be tragic, there have been thousands of 13yearold girls who had been murdered since 1913. We are still talking about this one. Why . Who was mary fagan and why are we talking about this case . Steve she was a 13yearold child labor who did a repetitive task. She inserted rubber erasers into eraser tips at the National Pencil company in downtown atlanta, day after day, hour after hour, she earned pennies an hour. She had no hope of going to high school, forget about college. And the terrible thing was that atlantic capitalists and industrialists thought this was good. They thought it was hygienic to have children working in factories. The mothers and fathers of these children knew it was not good. They knew it was absolutely wrong and they were ashamed and upset that they were so impoverished they had to send their children off to earn pennies an hour in factories. Life was cut off at age 13. We know very little about her. I was very proud of my book that i was able to quote from a postcard she wrote her cousin. That is the only time we hear her voice. As to why we remember this murder, i think even today, this murder would catch our attention. We live in an age in which atrocity after atrocity is just another piece of news. But her murder was particularly brutal. She was found in a pencil factory by nightwatchman making his rounds. She was so badly beat up that the watchmen couldnt determine the race, the pencil factory was filled with pencil grind and coal dust and we and she had been dragged and battered and all that. It was a terribly horrific crime. And then there were these strange notes placed by the body. Im just going to read one of them. If i have any budding linguist students out there, i urge you to write a masters thesis. One of the notes read man maam, that negro new hire did this, a long, tall, slim negro. I writes well play with me. That is absolutely wild, and it was on the front page of the Atlanta Journal the next day. A child labor found dead in the basement of a child labor factory, that was an earthquake going on that set in motion these underlying religious fault, because leo frank was jewish. It didnt help in atlanta was in the midst of a horrific newspaper war, there were three Independent Newspapers in atlanta at the time, the journal, the constitution, and the Atlanta Georgian, owned by William Randolph hearst. We all think we are unique and living in an age in media bombardment, but if you lived in a big city in america in 1913, you would know what it was like. Multiple extras every day, and the hearst paper just one wild with the story. I think we would notice it, if it happened today. Host who was leo frank . Steve leo frank was the exact opposite of mary phagan. He was a quiet, a welleducated mechanical engineer, graduated from cornell university. He went to germany to study pencil making it ever hurt favor, the everhart faber, he was a scientist. He was interested in modern management techniques and when the National Capital pencil family was capitalized, they hired him to run the factory. It was a huge factory, turned out hundreds of thousands of pencils a week. The company was later renamed script oh, but he was a quiet, rational, chess playing strauss loving, cerebral introvert. And a stranger in the south. When he married into one of the best jewish families in atlanta. To give you an idea of the sea legs seligs, one helped put together all the property in downtown atlanta. This is an advantageous marriage that leo frank made. Host another person became centerpiece in this case. And that was jim connolly. Who was jim connolly, and why did he become such a powerful figure . Steve jim connolly was the janitor at the National Pencil company. He was often drunk, he was often arrested, and he passed himself off as illiterates and a fool, and a prankster. Several weeks after the murder of mary phagan, as atlanta had wondered how this crime happened and read all these accounts in the newspaper, leo frank and been arrested. He was the last person to admit having seen leo fagan live. Leo frank would be arrested even today. The early investigation focused on timetables and who arrived at the factory first, the result of mary phagans autopsy, and what time did she die, and what time did the murder occur. It was like french warfare in world war i, neither side was really advancing. Jim connolly came along and through a circuitous number of events, the police determined that he wrote the murder notes that were found in the basement beside mary phagans body. And the rub was, he told the police that leo frank dictated those notes to him, to pin the crime on yet another black man. That leo frank was in the habit of seducing young women at the pencil factory, and that connolly had served as leo franks guard during his assignations. And that one of the assignations, along with mary phagan, got out of hand and leo frank was violent. And mary phagan ended up dead. Thats who jim connolly was. Host i think jim connolly said he couldnt write. Steve he told the police he could not write, and the police found a number of ious the jim conley had written for jewelry. He had terrific teachers, both graduates of the Atlanta University conflict, one of whom would go on to be the legendary librarian of the auburn Avenue Library through the 1930s and 1940s. Explained books to some of atlantas budding young readers. 1940s. He was so ingenuous that everyone had to love him, he said im a liar. And that was fine. Host what happened to making such a central figure . Steve connolly took the stand about two weeks into the trial. The trial was a stalemate. The day he was going to take the stand, the trial was held in a temporary building at the corner of hunter and pryor street downtown across from where the current courthouses. There was a line out the door for blocks to get in when conley testified. He got on the stand, and im going to read you a few sentences that he had to say. I want you to imagine the scene a black man in a packed courtroom with people surrounding the court building, all the eyes of atlanta upon him, a solitary black man in a sea of white faces, and the prosecutor asked him what happened to mary phagan . Connolly said mr. Frank with standard at the head of the stairs, shivering great he was rubbing his hands together and acting funny. He had a little cord in his hands, his eyes was large. They looked funny and wild. He asked me if i saw a little girl pass along their and i told him yes. He says she came up to my office a while ago when i wanted to know something about the work. I went back there to see the little girl had the work had come in. I wanted to be with a little girl and she refused me. And i struck her, and i guess i struck her too hard, and she hit her head against something. Of course, you know, i aint built like other men. The reason he said that was i had seen him in a position i havent seen any other man thats got children. I have seen him in the office two or three times before, and a lady was in his office or at and she was sitting down in a chair, and she had her clothes up to hear, and he was down on his knees. Now, just imagine that. A black man saying that in a white filled courtroom in 1913. Its astonishing. Circumcision, oral sex, subjects that would never be talked about in Polite Company are suddenly introduced into the public conversation. The judge his first reaction was to send all women from the courtroom. So the rest of the trial took place in front of an exclusively male audience. Conley was on the stand three days. The defense submitted to him to one of the most brutal cross examinations you can ever read about, and he withstood that cross examination largely intact. The Atlanta Georgian reporter wrote after conley stepped down from the stand that the story conley tells is a lie, that it is the most amazingly sustained ally ever told in georgia. And then the Atlanta Georgian, one of the headline writers this speaks the different time. The front page headline was the ebony chevaliers of crime, dark towns own hero. That was jim conley. Host much has been made about prosecution, that they were antisemitic. Steve the prosecution was antisemitic, mildly. The solicitor general pointed out franks wealth, but it wasnt overtly antisemitic. The defense was racist. The defense hammered at jim conley. They said things about jim conley that you wouldnt ever repeat. I quote them in my book, but as a textbook case. And quite racist. When the trial ended, and the Closing Arguments, ruben arnold along with Luther Rosser was franks counselor, he made in his Closing Argument the statement that the trial was antisemitic, and when it was over and frank was pronounced guilty, hugh dorsey was lifted, bodily, out of the courtroom and carried like a football hero out to a waiting car, his feet never touch the ground and people were all around the courthouse, waving handkerchiefs and has cheering for dorsey. There was a sense that the entire city of atlanta had turned against leo frank. Was that overt antisemitism . When the verdict was delivered, the prosecutor and the defense lawyers met with the judge. They agreed to the judges suggestion that frank not be present in the courtroom when the verdict was returned because they felt it frank was acquitted, he would be lynched. So the atmosphere, lets just say it was poisonous. Host the charges has been made to the crowd outside the courtroom yelled hang the jew or Something Like that. Did that actually happened . Steve that didnt happen. Later he would be reported that the frank case would be a backandforth propaganda war. That line wouldnt emerge until a couple of years later on. Host which brings us to the second part of this, and that is of course, the case becoming far beyond georgia, becoming a National Cause celebre. How did that happened . Steve there were only two or three National News articles during the trial. But within a few days after frank conviction, david marks, the rabbi at the reform synagogue temple got on the train went to new york and sought out the leaders of americas Jewish Community. He sought out the publisher of the New York Times, he sought out lewis marshall, great constitutional lawyer who was known as an attorney of origin for the jewish people and nissan advertising executive who invented modern advertising. These men were resistant to rabbi marxs plea that frank was a victim of antisemitism. But rabbi marx finally sold them that this was an antisemitic case. They marshaled all the resources of modern media to exonerate leo frank. They had an advertising genius who represented lucky strike cigarettes. Budweiser beer. It was really the New York Times that made this case a national case. In december of 1914, right as the drumbeat is really beginning, one month, the New York Times published 33 articles about the frank case, and five editorials. It was excessive. In fairness to adolph ochs, he thought he understood what had happened here. He was born in the north, but he grew up in tennessee and got his start as a newspaperman in chattanooga. His family still owns the chattanooga times. They were southern sympathizers, this debate about the federal flag, or mother spent most of her girlhood between matches and nashville. When she died, she was buried with the confederate flag. He thought he understood the south. He thought if the south got the facts as he saw them about the leo frank case, leo frank would be exonerated. Host tom watson became a lightning rod of this case. He comes into the story now when this has become a national case. Tell us about him and how he plays into the story. Steve tom watson is one of the most brilliant, frustrating, upsetting people in all of southern history. Simultaneously admire him and terrified by him. He called himself the agrarian rebel. He also called himself the sage of mcduffie. And mcduffie county, if you know your 159 counties. He took it upon himself to rebut the New York Times, week after week in the pages of the jeffersonian. Tom watson was not someone you wanted as enemy. Tom watson was a brilliant writer, a great trial lawyer, a student of napoleon. He identified with the common man. He believed that the forces of