“I Would Rather Be Ploughing In A Field…”
The instructions to A.B. McDonald (1871-1942), a veteran reporter for The Kansas City Star, were direct and simple: “Find out what made Atlanta crazy and how.”
The New Brunswick, Canada native emigrated to the U.S. in 1890 and enjoyed a distinguished career with Kansas City dailies, earning a Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1931 for “his work in connection with a murder in Amarillo, Texas” that ultimately “solved a murder mystery… and brought a guilty man to justice.”
Unfortunately, McDonald was late entering the 1915 scrum in Atlanta, where his reporting focused more on mob violence and exposing the lies of The Atlanta Georgian.
The backstory remains somewhat illusive.
But illustrative.
William Randolph Hearts acquired The Atlanta Georgian in 1912, a year before thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker at the National Pencil Company was strangled on the night of April 26. Her job, operating a knurling machine that inserted rubber erasers onto the metal tips of pencils, paid ten cents an hour. Her body and two notes made to look as though she had written them were found in the factory’s cellar the following morning. One note, with a mention of a “night witch,” implicated the night watchman, Newt Lee. Lee and janitor Jim Conley were arrested and interrogated, along with factory manager Leo Max Frank.
Jewish-American Leo Max Frank was born in Texas and reared in New York; he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University before moving to Atlanta, where he married in 1910, involved himself in the Jewish community and was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith.
Frank was indicted on a charge of murder on May 24 – a month after Mary Phagan was killed, and the trial began on July 28, with the prosecutor relying heavily on the testimony of janitor Conley, who admitted that he was an accomplice – after the fact -and, ultimately received a one-year jail sentence. For Frank, a guilty verdict and death sentence, less than a month later, resulted in an unsuccessful series of appeals. After an appeal to the United States Supreme Court failed in April 1915, Governor John M. Slaton, who had reviewed evidence not available at trial, commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment on June 21, 1915. In his statement to the press, the governor declared:
“Feeling as I do about this case, I would be a murderer if I allowed that man to hang. I would rather be ploughing in a field than to feel for the rest of my life that I had that man's blood on my hands.”
Reporters from across the country deemed the verdict (and the commutation) a travesty and, in 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles officially extended a posthumous pardon to Leo Max Frank – but did not official absolve him of any wrong doing.
The murder produced not a feeding frenzy so much as a media conflagration; together Atlanta’s Constitution, Journal and Georgian released forty extra editions the day the murder was reported, including a doctored Guardian morgue photo in which Mary Phagan’s head was spliced onto the body of another girl.
But the governor’s commutation did not end the saga of Leo Max Henry.
Calling on poor whites and poor Blacks to unite against elites and elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Georgia populist in1890, Thomas E. Watson was a “nativist” – attacking Blacks, Catholics and (after 1914) Jews. Watson responded to the commutation, writing in his publications The Jeffersonian and Watson’s Magazine:
"This country has nothing to fear from its rural communities. Lynch law is a good sign; it shows that a sense of justice lives among the people."
Watson, truly only a bit player in the feeding frenzy, would have his way.
A group of twenty-eight men of various backgrounds and skills – anonymous until June 2000 but including a medic, a lay preacher; former governor Joseph Mackey Brown, and Eugene Herbert Clay, former mayor of Marietta – arrived at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary, where, at about 10:00 p.m., they cut all but one of the prison’s phone lines – to avoid prison officials alerting state police forces. They drained the gas tanks of the prison’s automobiles, handcuffed the warden, seized Frank and drove to just outside Marietta – a 175-mle roundtrip. At approximately 7:00 a.m. and at a site close to the grave of Mary Phagan, Frank was handcuffed, his legs were tied at the ankles, and he was hanged from a tree limb - facing the house where Mary Phagan had lived.
Within hours crowds of the curious and souvenir hunters had torn away Frank’s clothing and clamored to mutilate his body. When the body was cut down, members of the crowd began stomping on his face and chest. Press reports indicated that thousands besieged the undertaker’s parlor, demanding to see the body before it was transported to New York for burial.
Enter veteran reporter A.B. McDonald on Saturday, July 17, 1915. McDonald’s findings were summarized by Carl Sandburg in The Day Book: An Adless Newspaper, Daily Except Sunday. [Yes. That Carl Sandburg!] The Chicago-based Day Book was an experimental newspaper owned by E.W. Scripps and the Scripps-McRae League of Newspapers between 1911 and 1919 – a penny press dedicated to championing labor rights.
Sandburg noted that McDonald:
“…after talking with hundreds of men and women of all classes in Atlanta, has written about ten columns for his paper. All through, he points to one man and one man alone as responsible for the wild mob spirit that wanted to see a hanging of Leo Frank. The one man guilty above all, according to McDonald, is William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the Atlanta Georgian.
“Hearst’s Georgian, new to Atlanta, jumped at the Frank case as a chance to build circulation… Hearst’s Georgian on Monday [after the body was found] ran extras all day ‘fanning the public mind into a condition of delirium’…
“The two older newspapers, Journal and Constitution, proved the story a lie. Hearst’s Georgian admitted two days afterward it was a lie – in small type on an inside page...
“Hearst stories said Frank was a rich Jew running after Gentile girls; his wife was ready for divorce, sore at her husband didn’t go to see him after his arrest for one week. All these proven lies at trial…
Recounting a string of other Hearst publication lies, The Day Book account reported:
“’Damn the Jew’ became a regular street chorus. Other papers showed the story a fake. Hearst’s Georgian corrected it – in small type, inside page…”
After citing a series of “scoops” claimed by the Georgian regarding what always proved to be false claims of “evidence, Sandburg noted:
“Atlanta was getting wild. The chorus of ‘Damn the Jew’ was rising. They were ready to believe anything about the pencil manufacturer…
“During 30-day trial of Frank, Hearst had extras out every day. Each day an editor ‘analyzed’ testimony and shot it full of bitterness against Frank…
“[On the day the verdict came down] Hearst’s Georgian put out 14 extra editions. They were eaten up. It was like feeding a fire with gasoline
“Frank was convicted, sentenced to be hanged. Judge Roan stated from the bench he was ‘not convinced’ of Frank’s guilt. Atlanta Journal called it legal murder and asked new trial. All the time that a wild clamor was on for fair play for Frank, Hearst’s Georgian stood pat for ‘hanging the Jew.’
“Foster Coates, managing editor for Hearst, dropped dead on the street one day. Why? Newspaper men say when it looked as if Frank would swing Coates conscience began to gnaw. He wanted the Georgian to come out editorially for a new trial. Hearst refused…
“Staff for Georgian, from managing editor to police reporter, said privately all along Frank never had a fair trial and to hang him would be legal murder. Hearst and Hearst alone, Hearst personally, by letter and telegraphic order stopped the Georgian from saying anything for Frank…”
Sandburg’s and The Day Book commentary ended with words that still hang heavy as a caution against modern day antisemitism:
“Willie Hearst is a friend of Jews. Yes, children, Willie the Hearst is a great, great friend of Jews. He wanted Leo Frank chocked dead by a rope around the neck for a murder not proven in fair trial.”
By definition, a “lynching” is an extrajudicial murder by a mob. The murder of Samuel Bierfield, owner of a dry goods store in Franklin, Tennessee, and his Black clerk Lawrence Bowman in 1868 was the first lynching of an American Jew. Chased from his store and through the streets of Franklin, Bierfield was downed by a bullet that pierced his hip and four that entered through the front of his head. The pistols were fired from such close range that gunpowder burned his clothes and skin.
On August 16, 1868, an inquest jury recorded that shots were fired by “a person or persons to the jury unknown,” adding “from the evidence the jury are unable to say whether the deed was done maliciously or feloniously.” The last words were subsequently crossed out - but still visible - on the record.
Now recognized as the first Jew lynched in the U.S and the first lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, Bierfield was accused of being a carpetbagger during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and known for treating Blacks – and everyone else - with dignity and respect. On August 17, 1868 in a two-inch column, The New York Times reported:
“Last night, at 12 o’clock, a party of about 15 masked horsemen rode into Franklin, Willimson County and broke open the store of an Israelite named Bierfield. The latter attempted to escape by flight and was fired upon. He fell dead, pierced by five bullets. A colored clerk, Lawrence Bowman, was also shot, but he ran off, and was found, during the night, mortally wounded, in a lot where he had taken refuge. He died this morning. Bierfield’s body has been brought here for burial. The maskers are unknown….”
[William Randolph Hearst’s strong attacks on President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, as well as his pre-World War II isolationism were highlighted bv a 1934 meeting with Hitler, his sympathetic remarks about Nazi Germany’s policies through the mid-1930s and his publication of articles by Hitler and Mussolini. He might have been a closet antisemite. Kristallnacht – “the Night of the Broken glass,” November 9-10, 1938, when Nazi sympathizers destroyed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and sometimes referred to as the beginning of the Holocaust – marked a decided turn against National Socialism for Hearst and his publications.]
The blind antisemitism that killed Samuel Bierfield in 1868 and Leo Max Frank in 1915 is alive and thriving - on full display in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017 or in Washington on Sunday, May 14, 2023 when members of the Patriot Front marched – resplendent in their black polos, [out-of-style] tan cargo pants and their cowardly, face-hiding balaclavas.
Murderous antisemitism finds its expression in small words: “the Jew” or “Jews,” “George Soros” and even “communists” and “socialists.”
The next time you hear someone use these words on a cable network, a podcast, or read them in a hate-filled screed, remember:
Antisemitism is a sin.
And it kills.
Even today.
Remember Leo Max Frank and Samuel Bierfield.