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...should be implemented. We were called upon to assist in the organization of half a dozen boards and bureaus. Law firms in Atlanta and New York filed suits contesting the constitutionality of almost every new statute, and it was our responsibility to defend the suits. It was “double drill and no canteen.”
The sensational Leo M. Frank murder case had been tried in Atlanta about a year before the convention met. Frank had been convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair.* An appeal had been pending in the Supreme Court of Georgia for months. Although the highlights of the trial and the mob-stirring evidence of the State’s witnesses had brought international repercussions, rivaling the famous Dreyfus Case tried in the sleepy little town of Rennes, France in 1894, the Frank case was yet to make the a tremendous impact on politics which, when it did come, blasted political dynasties to bits in Georgia.
Repercussions of the political contest of that summer, and of the hectic convention, had scarcely died away when this sleeping dog—the Frank case—bounded fully alert into the quietude of the State Capital; the Supreme Court announced its decision affirming the conviction. That set the press in motion, rehashing the weird stories carried during the trial. And the witches’ cauldron of passion commenced to boil and bubble all over again. An application to the Prison Commission for a reduction of Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment brought more editorials, calculated to reopen old sores. ‘That application was denied and Frank’s family, his lawyers, and his friends appealed to the Governor, who had power under the Constitution to modify the sentence. That was Frank’s last resort.
But the Frank case demands a chapter all its own.
Transcriber NOTE:
*Actually, Leo Frank was sentenced to hang, not the electric chair.
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CHAPTER 7
THE LEO M. FRANK CASE
It was not for the sizzling campaign of the summer of 1915 to determine the fortunes of the men who at that time strode giant-like across a political stage so charged with
drama nor yet was it the nominating convention of the Party, which followed in September, that decided their fate. The tragic events which attended the Leo M. Frank case moved in to govern these fortunes, and to change the political complexion of the State. ‘These events were to drive Governor John M. Slaton from public life, place Frank’s prosecutor at the helm of State, transfer the fiery ‘Thomas E. Watson from limbo to the United States Senate, and, for good measure, cause me to commit treason.
On April twenty-six, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day, Mary Phagan, a teen-age girl who worked at a pencil factory in Atlanta, was brutally murdered. The plant was closed because of the holiday but she had come to the office for the pay she had earned during the previous week. Her body was found in the basement at the foot of the elevator shaft, the victim of a sex maniac. Leo M. Frank, a young Jew who was manager of the plant and who, with a Negro watchman, was in the plant that day, was charged with the crime.
Public sentiment against Frank ran high. Judge Leonard S. Roan, who was to preside in the trial of the case, moved slowly in calling it for trial, in the hope that the excitement would abate. But delay served only to fan the fury. Events which followed Frank’s arrest, and the sensational evidence given at the trial, were dramatized by feature writers and
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were colored to such an extent that race prejudice and religious intolerance rocked the State and loosed forces which revived the Klu Klux Klan of the Reconstruction era.
Frank had been convicted in the trial court and sentenced to death before I came to the Attorney General’s Office. A motion for a new trial had been denied and the case was before the Supreme Court of Georgia on appeal. It was the duty of the Attorney General to represent the State as leading counsel in criminal cases when they had reached the Appellate Courts. ‘That duty was assigned to me. The Frank case was unusual. I joined the Prosecuting Attorney and his staff in the preparation of briefs for the trials in the U. S. District Court and in the Supreme Court of the United States. This involved reading and analyzing every line of testimony given at the trial. But I had not been a member of the Bar of my State long enough to be eligible for enrollment as a member of the Bar of that court, and my name, therefore, does not appear with counsel in the official reports of the case.
‘The circumstances which were to set the stage ea me to learn who killed Mary Phagan, and the motive and the manner of the killing, began to take shape in March of 1864 amid the smoke of Joseph E. Johnston’s little parrot guns at Resaca as he opposed Sherman’s march on Atlanta. My grandfather was seventy when that battle took place.
He crossed the mountain from his cabin in Rock Creek Valley, leading a blind horse upon which my grandmother rode. They reached the scene of this fight as the Federal troops moved on toward Calhoun. My grandmother had with her such cloth for bandages and such medicines as she could find, and it was their purpose to do what they could for the wounded. This kindly old couple carried a casualty of that fight back to their home across the mountain and there nursed him back to life. He later joined his command and surrendered at Milledgeville, Georgia, following Appomattox. This young soldier in gray was Frederick C. Foster, an
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inseparable companion of Leonard S. Roan (who had presided at the trial).
Roan and Foster had been reared on adjoining farms in middle Georgia and had studied under the same private tutor before the days of common schools. After the war they were roommates at the University of Georgia, and after graduation they practiced law together until Roan moved to Atlanta, where he became Judge of the Superior Court of Fulton County.
I had many delightful visits with Judge Foster during the last years of his life. He told me, of course, about the weeks he had spent with my grandparents on the mountain farm where I was reared; and how they nursed him through his illness, hidden a great deal of the time in the loft of their cabin to keep from capture by marauders of Federal cavalry. I paid my last visit to him soon after I moved to Atlanta. His death occurred within the following week.
Knowing that I had become connected with the State’s legal department, Judge Foster had told me what he knew of the Frank case. Together with what I had learned from others, from the record, and from my own observations, this enabled me to piece together the facts of that tragic happening in their entirety.
This is the story, substantially as Judge Foster told it to me: A few days before the motion for a new trial was to be heard, Judge Foster received a penciled note from Judge Roan, addressed to him at Madison, asking him to come to Atlanta. The note gave no details, and its brevity was unusual, judging by the letters they had exchanged over the years; the unsteady penmanship lent a color of urgency. When Judge Foster came to Atlanta next morning, he found his friend in the state of mind the note had indicated.
The interview took place in Judge Roan’s chambers. “It’s this Frank case, Fred,” Judge Roan said, and proceeded to tell Judge Foster that he was not at all satisfied with the verdict. ‘The atmosphere surrounding the trial, and the
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prejudicial publicity which had preceded it, had unduly influenced the jury.
“I did not read the news stories because I wished to be guided only by the evidence,” the Judge continued.
“Yes,” Judge Foster observed, “the Judge, under our practice, is the thirteenth juror.”
“I had made up my mind to grant a new trial,” Judge Roan continued. “Yesterday, just before I wrote you, William Smith came to see me. Smith has represented Jim Conley in connection with this matter. Conley was the first man arrested as a suspect. He sullenly refused to talk to the officers about it, and so far as I know, Smith is the only
- man he has talked to.”
“Did you get any help from Smith?”
“You know, Smith is an ethical lawyer and a fine lawyer. He is as much troubled about Frank’s conviction as I am. Smith is in a ticklish position. His first duty is to his client, but the turn of events makes it impossible for the State to further implicate Conley. He is convinced that Conley, not Leo Frank, is the murderer of Mary Phagan.”
“Did he get that impression from statements made to him by Conley?”
“Ves, he did.”
“About the firmest rule in criminal procedure is that no court in the land may receive confidential communications between attorney and client, even if the attorney is willing to divulge them.”
“That’s what is troubling Smith. But he told me he had observed the threatening crowds milling about during the trial, the inflammatory news stories and wild rumors which had incited people all over the state, the disorder in the presence of the jury, the threats communicated by menacing gestures within the courtroom during the trial, the show of hostility to Frank’s lawyers outside the courtroom, and the ovation for the State’s Attorney wherever he appeared.
“Judge, that verdict was only the echo of an angry
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mob!’ Smith told me. ‘I can’t reveal my client’s secrets, yet I can’t live with them!”
“Did he tell you?”
“Yes, he did. He left with me Conley’s story as he had pieced it together, and told me he would be guided by my conception of the ethics involved and what ought to be done under the unusual circumstances.
“Conley’s story as related to me by Smith was substantially this:
“Conley got to the pencil factory on the morning of April twenty-sixth just after Mr. Frank. At least Mr. Frank was in his office, but not at his desk. Conley was to watch that day until Newt Lee came on duty as watchman along about six o'clock. By the time Conley had gotten to the basement, he heard two men, maybe three, come in and go up to the top floor. ‘Then he heard noise up there which sounded like sawing and hammering. He didn’t think it necessary to go up there where they were working. Later on, he heard some people go into Mr. Frank’s office, and heard them talking.
“Conley expected to be in the building alone that day— certainly the greater part of it—and arranged for a man to bring him some corn whiskey. He was afraid the man would come before Mr. Frank left—which he did. He knocked on the door to the alley, and Conley took the whiskey and gave the man three dollars. He did not drink any of it, for fear that Mr. Frank would call him and learn that he was drinking. He walked around ever so long—he couldn't tell just how long—and he heard the people in Mr. Frank’s office walking around. He came up the steps just far enough to see, and saw them leave. One of them was Mr. Frank, and one was a woman.
“Then Conley took a big drink from his bottle of corn whiskey. After a while he heard another man leave, but the men working on the upper floors were still there. He commenced to feel his whiskey, took two or three more drinks, and never heard the workmen when they left. He drained his bottle and walked over to the elevator shaft, where he
Page 64 (some interesting comments in the footer area of 64, that the author calls tactical errors)
could toss it into the debris in the basement. Then he sat in a chair near the elevator shaft.
“In a little while he saw a girl come in and walk toward the door to Frank’s office. His mind was clouded by that time, he said, but he went in the office behind her. She had something in her hand that looked like a letter (envelope) . When he approached her she commenced to scream and to fight him. He stated he didn’t know how long the struggle lasted but that he remembered fighting back. Then, he said, his mind went blank, and he didn’t remember anything until he came to himself down in the basement, slumped in a sitting position and leaning against the bottom of the elevator shaft.
“He looked around and there was the girl, lying still, with a cord around her neck. He looked at her a long time, and decided she was dead. He was scared. He didn’t wait for Newt Lee, the night watchman, but hid the body the best he could, and left by the alley entrance.*
“Conley’s testimony at the trial was, of course, in sharp contrast to the story he had told Smith before Frank had
* Frank, in his unsworn statement to the jury, said: “Miss Hall [a secretary] left my office on her way home at this time. There were then in the building: Arthur White, Harry Denham, and Mrs. White. It must have been from ten to fifteen minutes after that that this little girl, whom I afterwards found to be Mary Phagan, came in. She asked for her pay. I got my cash box, referred to the number, and gave her the envelope. As she went out, she stopped near my outer office door and said, ‘Has the metal come?’
“The safe door was open and I could not see her, but I answered ‘No.’ The last I heard was the sound of her footsteps going down the hall.
“The little girl had hardly left the office when Lemmie Quinn came in. A few minutes before one o’clock, I called my wife and told her I was coming to lunch at one-fifteen. I asked Mr. White if his wife was going to stay with him. She said, ‘No’—and I got my hat and left, locking the outer door.”
If Frank’s counsel permitted him to take the stand for his statement to the jury without knowing what he would say, they took a dangerous risk. To have permitted him to say that the girl left the pencil factory before he did, without evidence in reserve to show that she returned later in the day, was a grave tactical error.
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been charged and while he (Conley) was a suspect, groping for a defense for himself. When Frank was charged, Conley pinned his hopes on the Prosecuting Attorney, and would be expected to support the case against Frank. Conley had been in the Criminal Courts most of his adult life. He knew better than to talk to anyone except his lawyer when the heat was on him, and was wise enough to go to any length to unload on someone else.
“Smith and I evaluated Conley’s statement in the light of these circumstances and in the light of the whole factual situation as it appeared in the trial of Frank.
“We concluded that Conley had told Smith the truth.
“That,” concluded Judge Roan, “has confirmed my determination to grant this motion for a new trial. But when I do, the Governor does not have enough troops to control the mob which is certain to gather as my decision becomes known. They’ve been literally maddened by the news stories and the wild rumors which such stories start.”
The two men began to analyze the situation from that angle.
“Roan,” Judge Foster said, “if you grant this motion, you may save Frank’s life, but the chances are that you would not. You would preserve the integrity of the courts, but at awful cost—not that any price is too high. Exactly what happened at the pencil factory that day is known only to Conley. Smith was his lawyer. He was talking to Smith as such. No court in the land would permit Smith to divulge confidential communications made to him by his client, even if Smith were willing to do so. So a new trial would serve only to postpone the danger and to augment it. The apostle Paul recognized the law of expediency. There is a forum in our judicial structure presided over by the Governor which may receive the facts from Smith, if he is willing to divulge them. That forum is the Court of Pardons. The pardoning power is the equity of criminal law, and the Governor alone may exercise it.”
“What do you mean?” inquired Roan.
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“Simply this: deny the motion and let the case run its course through the courts. That will give time for this excitement to subside, if it is to subside at all. The case will finally wind up in the Governor’s lap. If Smith is unwilling to give the Governor the facts, you can do it.”
“But I got the facts from Smith under such confidential relationship that I could not speak of them, even to the Governor. It would literally ruin Smith if people thought he had violated his client’s trust.”
“Smith trusted you, and I believe he will trust the Governor.”
In the course of this conversation the name of Judge Arthur Powell had been mentioned many times. During the trial, Judge Roan had relied upon him in tough spots. In fact, Judge Powell had sat on the Bench with him while he charged the jury. Now Roan and Foster called Judge Powell, and he joined them. The three went over to the | Kimball House for a late lunch, and there talked over the plan Judge Foster had suggested, until it was time for his train to leave the old Union Station for Madison. All three saw no other way out. Only Judge Roan ever spoke to Smith about it. Whether Smith ever talked to the Governor about it, I do not know. I presume he did.
In the spring of 1936, Judge Powell and I spent most of the night on a Pullman car between Augusta and Atlanta, rehashing the famous case. He confirmed Judge Foster’s story as I have related it here. I never mentioned it to anyone else and would not have discussed it with him had I not known from Judge Foster that he already had the facts from sources more direct than my own.
While the case was pending in the Appellate courts, Jim Conley had been convicted of robbery and was serving time in prison. Before the motion for a new trial was heard, other witnesses had repudiated the testimony which they had given at the trial. Judge Roan overruled the motion and left for Rochester, Minnesota, where he entered Mayo Clinic as a patient. The case had affected his health considerably.
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While convalescing from nervous strain, he made an affidavit in which he expressed the opinion that Leo M. Frank was perfectly innocent of the murder of Mary Phagan, and that an awful miscarriage of justice would result unless a pardon be granted. An unfriendly press, particularly a newspaper called the Columbia Sentinel, published by ‘Thomas E. Watson, declared that the Judge had been overreached; that the statement had been obtained from him at a moment when he was without mental capacity to make any statement; and that his signature to the affidavit had been secured by fraud.
On November fourteenth, 1914, the Supreme Court of Georgia, two justices dissenting, sustained the overruling of the motion for a new trial. Nationwide effort to influence the Governor’s action on an application for pardon followed. Letters and petitions came from every section of the country, and some from foreign countries, in such numbers that it was quite impossible for the Governor’s clerical staff to read them, not to speak of acknowledging them. I read dozens of them. They were piled high in the huge reception room, like windrows in a haymow. Most of them were appealing, but some were demanding and others threaten- ing. Most of them were typewritten, but handwriting experts would have been charmed by the ones penned in variegated styles, which expressed a wide gamut of moods and passions. Societies and groups expressed themselves in petitions, some of which carried more than a thousand signatures. The envelopes bore the postmarks of hundreds of small towns and every large city in the United States.
Some really vicious messages were found on the grounds of the Governor’s private residence at suburban Buckhead. Servants found them sticking under the doors, in the mailbox, and in various other places, voicing dire threats to the Governor and his wife if he should interfere with the verdict of the jury.
The Governor well knew the political implications: to deny the application for pardon would raise him to the
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crest of public favor; to grant it, or even to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, would remove him from public life forever.
The time came for him to make a decision. Many years after the terrible affair was over Governor Slaton told Judge Arthur G. Powell about the moment when he finally reached that decision. It was on Friday, June eighteenth, 1915. “When I had the commutation of Frank’s sentence under consideration,” Judge Powell quoted him as saying, “I received thousands, and my wife hundreds, of letters saying that one or both of us would be killed and our home de- stroyed if I commuted the sentence. I worked downstairs in my library until two o’clock in the morning, preparing a statement and drawing the order. When I went upstairs, Sallie was waiting for me. She asked me, ‘Have you reached a decision?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it may mean my death, or worse, but I have ordered the sentence commuted.’ She kissed me and said, ‘I would rather be the widow of a brave and honorable man than the wife of a coward!’”’
Late in the afternoon of the following day, Saturday, a half-holiday, the Governor handed the order to Jesse Perry, his executive secretary. The Capitol was empty of employees; there was no one in the executive suite except the Governor, Mr. Perry, and myself. Perry had probably anticipated the order, as had other close friends of the Governor. They had arranged to take him out of the State on the excuse that he needed a respite from the arduous work of the past several weeks. But the Governor would have none of it. In their effort to persuade him to make the trip, they hinted of demonstrations—possibly violence. ‘That settled the question; Jack Slaton was not a man to run from a mob.
When the Governor handed the order to Perry, he telephoned to Sheriff C. Wheeler Mangum. ‘The Sheriff came quickly. He knew the importance of getting Frank out of the city before the press should discover what had happened.
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He knew what the excited voices of newsboys shouting that announcement would mean.
Perry and the Sheriff were determined to get Frank out of Atlanta on the Central of Georgia, leaving at ten o’clock that night, to the State Farm and safety. Their first concern was to bypass Brit Craig, energetic reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, who had made a wide reputation covering the Frank case. ‘The Sheriff deputized three men who had never been connected with the Sheriff's office, to carry the prisoner to the State prison farm.
But Brit’s sixth sense was operating. When the special deputies reached the forbidding old Fulton Tower, there was Brit, flanked by reporters from other news agencies.
The jailer knew Brit’s weakness for a series of “short snorts’ and a good yarn. Officers in charge of the jail lured the news hawks and a few others back to the consultation room, where they began to imbibe and to swap yarns. The Sheriff's deputies grasped this opportunity to leave with Frank, unnoticed by the newsmen.
The train conductor evidently recognized Frank from the photos which had been published so often in the newspapers. At any rate, when the officers got off the train at Macon with their famous prisoner, they found themselves surrounded by the newspaper fraternity of that town. There were George S. Griffin, news editor of the Associated Press, the late George M. Sparks,* reporter for the Macon Telegraph, and half a dozen others. One of the trainmen had telegraphed Macon papers from a wayside station en route, and the cat was out of the bag. The story had only to be verified.
Before the deputies and their prisoner had covered the remaining thirty-odd miles to the State Farm by high-powered automobile, Sparks had extras flying throughout
* Dr. Sparks founded the Georgia University Evening School, Atlanta, and was President Emeritus at the time of his death.
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the city, and Griffin had plastered the story about the commutation of the death sentence and Frank’s removal on the front pages of the nation. It was past midnight then. Brit and his friends had finally emerged from the consultation room at the tower and were on their way across town, when they heard the newsboys shouting and saw the “scoop” under a Macon dateline, snatched from under their very noses.
I read the stories next morning. They were written in such manner as to deliberately invite intervention on the part of the mob. Frank was pictured as well fed and housed, doing light work until a future Governor should pardon him. The sensational testimony at the trial was re-hashed. I was tired and did not leave my apartment during the day. I was depressed, too. But for the pleasure of my association with Mr. Grice and the Governor and others who were my friends at the Capitol, I might have been tempted to rue the day I left my country law practice only to plunge into a maelstrom which had tossed lives, reputations, and fortunes about upon an ungovernable, unpredictable wheel.
I planned to get to my office early the next morning. The Attorney General and I were soon to be succeeded, and I wished to finish some work I had started. On my way, I heard the newsboys yelling “Frank practically free!” I read the news stories that were printed under streamer headlines, as the street car made its way through the traffic.
As we approached the downtown area, the streets and sidewalks were crowded—unusually so for early Monday morning. The nearer we got to the State Capitol building, the denser became the crowd. More than a block from the plaza, where stands Georgia’s monument to her immortal Gordon, the progress of the car was impeded by the throng of men and boys. They had ceased to notice the clanging of the gong as the motorman stomped upon it frantically. I left the car to make my way to the Capitol building
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through the huge crowd which surrounded it and over-flowed into the square.
I finally worked my way through the frenzied people crowded about the Hunter Street entrance. State officials and employees evidently took a look at that sea of angry faces, and left. I did not see any of them among the crowds milling about the corridors. We had spent so much time after office hours working on the case that the Governor’s executive secretary furnished me with a key to a side door of the executive suite. In the excitement I managed to slip this key into the lock and enter unnoticed. I thought I would find Jesse Perry, but no one was there. I sat down and looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes of ten. I glanced outside the window, and there was a sea of humanity milling about, crowding around this exhorter and that. I could hear their high-pitched voices whetting the ugly temper of the crowd. Some were holding forth in the corridors. I heard the speakers demand a full pardon for Creen, and each time they hurled epithets at the Governor, they received the applause of the crowd. (Creen was a de- generate life-termer housed at the prison farm with Frank, who, a few days before, had slashed Frank’s throat with a butcher knife.)
As I watched the wild emotion of this crowd, I thought of a mob under the same sort of frenzy demanding the release of Barabbas. I watched them but a few moments before the full import of the ugly situation dawned upon me.
The last order the Governor had given was under no circumstances to employ the State Militia. He alone, as its Commander-in-Chief, was authorized to set the militia in motion. Notwithstanding, I picked up the telephone from Perry’s desk, but there was no response from the switchboard. It occurred to me that the operator would not have been able to reach her post even if she had been bold enough to try. The Governor’s order kept running through
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my mind as plans as to what I ought to do blurred in my thinking like events in a troubled dream.
‘The crowd seemed to be thinning. I feared that it would reassemble near the suburban Buckhead mansion where the Governor lived. Without stopping to argue further with myself, I picked up a telephone with a direct line from the uptown exchange and called Major John Grice, commanding officer of the Governor’s Horse Guard, and transmitted to him what purported to be an Executive Order calling the squadron to riot duty about the Governor’s house.
That was treason and I knew it!
I had levied arms against the constituted authority of my State, illegally assumed command of troops, and violated the orders of the Commander-in-Chief. But I was not hanged, as the law dictates in such cases, since I did avert a tragedy too awful to contemplate.
Other friends of the Governor had become alarmed. Late in the afternoon of the preceding day (Sunday), a rumor had spread that a mob was being organized to lynch the Governor and burn his home. Logan Bleckley, Clerk of the Supreme Court, and Judge Arthur G. Powell, constituted themselves a counter force. Armed with a Springfield rifle and a shotgun, they had set out for the Governor’s house. They arrived after dark and, unannounced, took up their position on the broad piazza facing the entrance to the grounds. Soon after they had arrived, Justice Beck of the Supreme Court came puffing down the walk to join them, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and pockets full of shells loaded with buckshot. The Governor was astounded the next morning to find them standing ground, weary from excitement and loss of sleep.
The cavalrymen whom I had activated by my false order swept in. By a swift encircling movement, they en- trapped twenty-five or thirty men who had hidden themselves about the buildings on the Governor’s property. Some were armed with firearms, some with black jacks and some
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with dynamite. They were disarmed and corralled into a carriage house at the rear of the premises. The guardsmen beat the main body of that heavily armed mob by minutes.
Whether the Governor ever knew how the troops got there, I am yet to learn. I knew the Governor well until his death in 1955, tried many lawsuits with him as opposing counsel. ‘The Frank case was never again mentioned at any time during the pleasant associations I had with him.
Events proved the wisdom of my caution. On August sixteenth following, a motorized mob, presumably led by the men who had precipitated the ugly demonstration at the Capitol, assailed the hospital ward at the prisoners’ barracks at the State Farm at Milledgeville and seized Leo M. Frank. ‘The movement was planned and executed with the skill of a commando raid. Telephone and telegraph lines leading from Milledgeville were severed. ‘The mob divided, one section moving in the direction of Sparta, arousing the countryside with the noise of their firearms. They riddled a telephone pole near Sparta with rifle and pistol fire to divert attention from the group which moved silently with the prisoner in the direction of Atlanta. ‘They brought the hapless Frank to a cemetery near Marietta, where Mary Phagan had lived, and the gray dawn of the morning saw his lifeless body swinging from a tree near the grave of the little girl who they fancied or chose to fancy had been his victim.
Mine was a minor role in the tragic affair. I was many years junior to the principals involved. Everyone seemed anxious to get it relegated to the limbo of history with the least damage to those who survived. They awaited an opportune time. It was not for me to jump the gun.
But the case and its tragic outcome was packed with politics for more than two decades. Mr. Dorsey was a candidate for Governor in the summer of 1916. While he did not himself exploit the animosities engendered by the Frank case for political purposes, ‘Thomas E. Watson did. It was
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Watson’s vitriolic editorials in the Columbia Sentinel in support of Dorsey's candidacy that kept alive the storms of passion.
Dorsey was elected, and served two terms. In 1920 he tried for a seat in the United States Senate. One of his opponents was his erstwhile political mentor, Thomas E. Wat- son. Another was the incumbent, Senator Hoke Smith. Wat- son’s overwhelming victory made it clear that the prejudice and passion of the Frank case, like Banquo’s ghost, would not down.
‘Twelve years later, Slaton’s friends, probably to test the then political potency of the Frank case, entered him as a candidate for the United States Senate against William G. Harris, the incumbent. In this two-man race, Slaton’s vote was negligible.
Judge Powell, in his book I Can Go Home Again, published in 1942, says he was one of the few people who knew that Leo M. Frank was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and lynched. “I know who killed Mary Pha- gan,” the Judge said, “but I know it in such a way that I can never make the information public so long as certain people are living.
“I expect to write down what I know and why I know it,’ he continued, “‘and seal it up and put it away with instructions that it not be opened until certain people are dead. I owe this much to Jack Slaton and to the memory of an innocent man who died an awful death.”
The Judge’s death occurred August 5, 1951. If he left any such statement it has not come to light.
I was one of the few people to whom Judge Powell referred. I have reason to believe that the others were ex-governor John M. Slaton, who reduced Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment, and William Smith, who had represented Conley. (Judge Roan and Judge Foster died long before the political tumult of the case had subsided, and many years before Judge Powell’s book was published) .
At the time Judge Powell’s book was issued, Dorsey
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was serving as Judge of the Superior Court of Fulton County, a post which he held at the time of his death in 1948. Smith, after a few years’ residence in New York, where he made a fortune in real estate, was living in the little mountain town of Dahlonega, Georgia, famed as the site of the nation’s first gold rush, as well as the first mint to be established by the United States Government. His death occurred in 1956. Slaton was engaged in the active practice of law in Atlanta. His death occurred in 1954.
Judge Dorsey’s duties on the bench were exacting. The spring of 1947 found him on the brink of nervous exhaustion. He planned a vacation in Florida to rest. The day before he left, I went to his office in the courthouse in response to his telephone call. For the first time since he, Warren Grice, Basil Stockbridge, and I had worked together in the State Library at the Capitol, on the briefs for the U. S. Supreme Court, he mentioned the Frank case to me. He told me he had just finished reading Red Galluses (a story of Georgia politics), a book which I had written and which had been published a short while before.
“I have been looking for someone to write a story of this case,” he said. “Red Galluses is a splendid portrayal of the colorful personalities which have figured in our stormy politics, and I would sooner risk your doing justice to the Frank case than anyone else I know.
‘“‘Magazines all over the country keep on distorting the facts. Not a single year has passed but that some publisher has sent people down here to write about it. None of them has been fair to me or to the State.
“It is high time someone with knowledge of the facts write objectively about the case from authentic records.”
He rose from his desk and showed me a large cabinet in the corner, concealed by a screen. It was packed with documents of every character, ranging from scribbled notes made at the counsel table during the progress of the trial, to bound volumes containing the official reports of decisions of the courts of last resort.
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“There,” he said, “is every scratch of the pen, including my notes and memoranda, made during the trial, as well as the substance of every conference I had with officers and witnesses before or since the trial. I want you to take all this, and put in a story what the others have left out. I will see that it is published.”
The Judge was stirred with emotion. I talked with him for more than an hour. I did not once mention what I had learned from Judge Foster or anyone else. In fact, I said nothing about the case at all. I just listened to him.
We agreed to go into the matter more fully when he got back, and we left the matter in that indecisive shape.
I was convinced that he was unaware of the talk and planning of Judge Foster, Judge Roan, and Judge Powell when it was decided to overrule the motion for a new trial and head the case toward the Governor, sitting as a Court of Pardon. I was confirmed in the belief, in which Judge Powell shared, that Hugh Dorsey had conscientiously followed his duty as he saw it. Because of factors too often present in such cases, he never knew the truth about the Frank case. |
He left the next day, but he never recovered from the nervous exhaustion we had hoped would be relieved by his stay in Florida. He never again resumed his duties on the bench.
I am the sole survivor of the “few people” to whom Judge Powell referred. Every reason which he had for not including this story in his book has disappeared. My conscience has impelled me to pay the debt which he felt that society owed to Jack Slaton and “to the memory of an innocent man who died an awful death.”