This year, as I’m hardly the first blogger
to point out, has seen the centenary of the Leo Frank Affair. For anyone unfamiliar with that grim episode
in American history, let’s have a brief recap of events. Leo Frank was the Texas-born (1884)
Brooklyn-raised son of German Jewish parents.
A graduate of Cornell University, he lived in Georgia from 1908 and
married a girl from a prominent Atlanta Jewish family. He was president of the local B’nai B’rith
branch.
By occupation, Frank was superintendent of
his uncle’s pencil-manufacturing factory, where on 26 April 1915 a
fourteen-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, was found strangled in the
basement. Many recent attacks on females
in Atlanta, including eighteen murders, sat unresolved in police files, and
with this latest outrage there was mounting pressure on police to make an early
arrest. The black nightwatchman who
found Mary’s body having been cleared of suspicion, attention then turned to
Frank, whose manner at the best of times was inclined to be tense and shifty
and whose conduct under questioning gave the impression of guilt. He had been one of the few people in the
factory on that fatal Saturday when Mary had come to collect her wages, and was
unable to supply a convincing alibi for himself in relation to the surmised
time of her death.
Standing trial amid a climate of mob
hostility, he was found guilty in August 1915 on the unsafe, well-rehearsed
evidence of the man who was almost certainly the actual killer – a black
sweeper at the factory who was a convicted thief – and sentenced to hang. A lengthy appeals procedure ensued, and
although Leonard Roan, the judge in the case, rejected a request for a new
trial Georgia’s governor, convinced that there had been serious overlooked
discrepancies in the prosecution testimony, signed a commutation order for the
death sentence. For this the governor
was widely reviled. An angry crowd that
attacked his residence had to be repelled by state troopers. And not long
afterwards, on 17 August 1915, vigilantes abducted Leo Frank from gaol and
hanged him from a tree near Mary’s home.
Very early on in the case Atlanta Jews
requested the president of the American Jewish Committee, distinguished
constitutional lawyer Louis B. Marshall, to intervene in the ‘American
“Dreyfus” case’ that had emerged in their city.
Other Jewish leaders in the North were similarly approached. All moved cautiously, reluctant to be thought
to support the cause of Jews convicted of felonies. And when, during the appeals procedure, they
did get involved and a fund to meet Frank’s legal costs were involved, many
Georgians furiously assumed that wealthy northern Jews were attempting to buy a
guilty man’s acquittal. Nevertheless,
Judge Leonard Roan’s denial of a fresh trial prompted tens – indeed hundreds –
of thousands of people in and outside Georgia to sign petitions pleading for
the death sentence to be commuted. Among
the local petitioners were members of the prosecution’s legal team, as well as
noted legal authorities in Georgia uneasy about the evidence on which Frank was
convicted, some bluntly stating their belief in his innocence. A New York petition garnered 800, 000
signatures; a Chicago one 600,000. Among
the many celebrated and public figures across America demanding a retrial was,
curiously, Henry Ford, later to be infamous for propagating antisemitism in his
Dearborn Independent. Pleas for Frank’s life rang out from
newspaper editorials, correspondence columns, professional associations,
women’s groups, and Christian pulpits, as well as from eleven state governors
to their Georgian counterpart. At a
number of public rallies non-Jewish speakers claimed antisemitism as a factor
in Frank’s conviction: “The outcries of the mob … were not against Frank – it
was a cry against the Jew” thundered one ever-reliable philosemitic crusader,
Madison Peters.
While it was extraordinary for a court in
the South to convict a white person, Jew or non-Jew, on the testimony of a
black person, the role of antisemitism in the Affair should probably not be
exaggerated – at any rate in the early stages.
Jews had been long-established in Georgia; five Jews sat on the grand
jury that indicted Frank; although there were rumblings about East European
immigration to Atlanta and its impact on blue collar workers’ wages, the
rumblings were not specifically about Jews.
Frank’s status as an employer and industrialist from the North, and as a
perceived exploiter of cheap female labour, seems to have been a more
significant element in prejudice about him than his Jewishness. True, “damned Jew” was a term bandied around
during the case, but had he been Italian the term “damned Guinney” would, as
one observer noted, probably have substituted.
Yet the Leo Frank Affair occurred at a time of heightened social
antisemitism in the United States – indeed, at a time when, as with the Dreyfus
(1899-1907) and Beilis (1913) Affairs, Social Darwinist assumptions about the
inequality of races had gained ground, even in the United States, as evidenced
by Madison Grant’s The Passing of the
Great Race (1916) – and aroused a great deal of fear among American Jews.
Defending Leo Frank, the socialist New York Call explained: ‘It is not
because this man is a Jew … that we interest ourselves in his behalf, but
because of the dubious character of the “justice” meted out to him’. Socialists were likely to hold ambivalent
feelings towards Jews, all too often exhibiting what has been dubbed, by one
historian, “rich Jew antisemitism” with their depiction of Jews as plutocrats
or their perception of all Jews as rich.
I strongly suspect that this attitude is alive and well in some of
today’s Corbynistas in Britain. Indeed,
even at best, leftist support for Jews seems predicated on the proviso that
Jews must be victims to merit sympathy rather than to be admired for any traits
in their ethos and culture which may be deemed worthy. I will return to, and enlarge upon, this
theme in a subsequent post on the typology of philosemitism and won’t discuss
it further here, except to say that it’s reflected in a description that the
British nineteenth-century Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone wrote in
1896 about himself, declaring that he was “strongly anti-anti-Semitism”.
Alas, these days, we are apt to find that
some elements seem not even that.
Witness the reluctance of leftist elements within the British Labour
Party unequivocally to distance themselves from Israel’s existential enemies
and from Holocaust Deniers. Witness the
current decision of New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione not to
prosecute for racist vilification under the terms of the NSW
Anti-Discrimination Act Ismail al-Wahwah, head of the Caliphate-seeking Hizb ut
Tahrir Australia, who on videos offered in evidence reportedly described the
Jew as “the most evil creature of Allah” and declared “Moral corruption is
linked to the Jews… the ember of Jihad against the Jews will continue to
burn. Judgment Day will not come until
the Muslims fight the Jews … tomorrow you Jews will see what will become of you
– an eye for an eye, blood for blood, destruction for destruction. There is only one solution for this cancerous
tumour: it must be uprooted and thrown back to where it came from.” (Apparently – despite the phrasing! – the
speaker claims he was speaking only of the State of Israel, and Scipione
believes that there is insufficient evidence to mount a case against him!).