Reverberations of a Trial and Its Shocking Aftermath
“This case has it all,” someone will often say about a particularly gruesome or scandalous court proceeding — the O. J. Simpson trial, for instance, or anything involving John Gotti Jr. But you won’t find a case with more “all” than the one nearly a century ago surrounding an Atlanta pencil factory superintendent named Leo Frank. It is mesmerizingly recreated and explored Monday on PBS in “The People v. Leo Frank,” a film by Ben Loeterman that even those already familiar with this ugly piece of history are likely to find unsettling.
The case began with the murder of a 13-year-old worker at Frank’s factory, Mary Phagan, in 1913, but it was not destined to remain a simple homicide. The authorities eventually focused on Frank, who was part of a Jewish middle class that was beginning to find life uncomfortable in Atlanta as a new wave of immigration heightened fears and prejudices.
Also implicated was a black janitor named Jim Conley, and Frank’s murder trial essentially came down to whether the white male jury was going to take the word of a black man or a Jew from Brooklyn. There were lurid accusations that Frank took sexual liberties with his young employees, and there were sensationalist headlines that raised the already high temperature. Frank was convicted, but the tale still had a long way to run.
“Leo’s death sentence would ignite a form of hatred not seen before in the United States,” the film’s narrator says.
Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, took up the question, giving the unfolding story prominent play and sending reporters to Georgia who concluded that Frank had been wrongly convicted. The South’s reaction to meddling from the North was just what you would expect. What would today be called a media frenzy took hold, and the tone couldn’t have been more vicious.
Even so, what happened after a courageous governor commuted Frank’s sentence in 1915 from death to life in prison seems shocking beyond modern-day belief. If you don’t know the dénouement (the story has been dramatized before, including in the 1998 Broadway musical “Parade” that is now in revival in Los Angeles), it’s worth tuning in to see just how thin our veneer of civility really is. If you do know it, the presentation here will still make an impression, thanks to Mr. Loeterman’s use of comments from descendants of the people involved...
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The case began with the murder of a 13-year-old worker at Frank’s factory, Mary Phagan, in 1913, but it was not destined to remain a simple homicide. The authorities eventually focused on Frank, who was part of a Jewish middle class that was beginning to find life uncomfortable in Atlanta as a new wave of immigration heightened fears and prejudices.
Also implicated was a black janitor named Jim Conley, and Frank’s murder trial essentially came down to whether the white male jury was going to take the word of a black man or a Jew from Brooklyn. There were lurid accusations that Frank took sexual liberties with his young employees, and there were sensationalist headlines that raised the already high temperature. Frank was convicted, but the tale still had a long way to run.
“Leo’s death sentence would ignite a form of hatred not seen before in the United States,” the film’s narrator says.
Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, took up the question, giving the unfolding story prominent play and sending reporters to Georgia who concluded that Frank had been wrongly convicted. The South’s reaction to meddling from the North was just what you would expect. What would today be called a media frenzy took hold, and the tone couldn’t have been more vicious.
Even so, what happened after a courageous governor commuted Frank’s sentence in 1915 from death to life in prison seems shocking beyond modern-day belief. If you don’t know the dénouement (the story has been dramatized before, including in the 1998 Broadway musical “Parade” that is now in revival in Los Angeles), it’s worth tuning in to see just how thin our veneer of civility really is. If you do know it, the presentation here will still make an impression, thanks to Mr. Loeterman’s use of comments from descendants of the people involved...