HIUS 131 Chapter Notes - Chapter Article Notes: List Of Civilisations In The Culture Series, Confederate Memorial Day, Operations Management
HIUS 131 – Article Notes – The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered
• Jewish, northern-born factory supervisor
• Accused 1913 for murdering Mary Phagan, 13-year-old white employee
• Evidence pointing to factory janitor, Jim Conley, was ignored
o Black man with a record
• "The prosecutor, the jury, and much of the public not only absolved a black suspect
but in fact relied on his testimony to condemn a wealthy white man"
• Trial took 4 months, sentenced to death
• Appealed to SC, but rejected
• Appealed to governor to get sentence to life in prison shortly before Frank was to be hanged
o Crowds so angry that he had to declare martial law for own protection
• Two months after death sentence gotten rid of, group of people from Phagan's hometown
kidnapped Frank from state prison farm, drove him back to hometown, and lynched him
• Why?
o White supremacy and lynchings already prevalent in the south
o Anti-Semitism
o Tensions due to growth of industry
o Populist leader Tom Watson vs. urban Progressives (behind Frank)
o Rumors that she was raped, even though there was no evidence -> "Their staunch insistence
that Phagan died to preserve her chastity evinced profound concern about changing
relations between the sexes and generations about shifting sexual mores among wage-
earning women"
• Case led to establishment of 2nd KKK
o New KKK created 2 months after lynching included members of the lynching party
o Reactionary just like Frank case
• Against big capital and WC radicalism
• Racism
• Nationalism
• Religion
• Militant sexual conservatism
• Why use term 'reactionary populism' to describe case?
o Distinction between elites of conventional conservatism and Frank's opposition of farmers,
small-town merchants and professionals, urban workers, anyone against large-capital
o Seeking solutions not in change, but in anti-Semitism and murder
• Late 19th century Atlanta growing and become more industrial, employing many young women in
its factories
• Tensions between growing WC and elites as WC expanded and vied for political power/rights ->
WC seeing Frank's innocence as more evidence of ruling class vs. democracy & elites seeing WC
support for execution as unruliness of WC and reason to control them
• Tensions between rural and urban people as urban population expanded -> rural people anti-
Frank, urban people pro-Frank
• Appeal of Mary Phagan
o Pretty
o Came from farm family that lost their land and had to resort to wage labor
• Just like rural Georgians experiencing
o Working in factories from young age
• Just like urban WC
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