picked up the dead girl’s body and carried it to the elevator. He had
taken it to the basement where it was placed on a trash heap near the
rear of the building. Then, Frank had ordered him to write the two
notes which were eventually found near the corpse. The porter insisted
that the defendant had dictated the notes to him and had promised him
$200.00 for his help in covering up the crime. Frank’s bank balance on
the day before this grandiose offer was exactly sixteen dollars.
After Conley had graphically described the murder itself, Hugh M.
Dorsey, the Solicitor General of Georgia, made him recount what he had
witnessed on other Saturdays when he claimed Frank was entertaining
some of the easier ladies of Atlanta in his upstairs lovenest. He
remembered one girl in particular, a Daisy Hopkins, who had been a
steady visitor to the second-floor playroom. Just before Thanksgiving
of 1912, he had inadvertently wandered into the superintendent’s office
where he saw Daisy “sitting down in a chair and she had her clothes
up to here, and he was down on his knees and she had her hands on Mr.
Frank and I found them in that position.” When the couple left the
office, they found the inquisitive porter waiting in the anteroom.
Q. What was said when they saw you?
A. When Mr. Frank came out of the office, Mr. Frank was hollering,
“Yes, that is right, that is right;” and he said, “That is all right,
it will be easy to fix it that way.”
According to Conley, the defendant was equally at home in other parts
of the factory. “I have seen him another time,” he said, “There in the
packing room with a young lady lying on the table.”
Q. How was the woman on the table?
A. Well, she was on the edge of the table when I saw her.
Before he left the stand, the witness, who proudly described himself,
in Frank’s words, as “the best nigger I ever saw,” had titillated
the spectators with a running account of two years as a peeping Tom
in the pencil factory. What went on during those languorous Saturday
afternoons was enough to shock a satyr. “Why,” Conley said, about
Frank, “I have seen him in a position I haven’t seen any other man that
has got children.”
But Frank wasn’t the only one whom Conley had observed making hay in
what must have been the most sybaritic factory in Georgia--or anywhere
else, for that matter. Once, Frank and his paramour of the moment had
been joined by a Mr. Dalton and another lady. They had told the porter
to “go down and see nobody don’t come up and you will have a chance to
make some money.” Dalton, who was to return to the plant on many future
occasions, usually took his playmates down to the basement. From his
first-floor observation post, Conley was able to watch both the stairs
leading to Frank’s office and the hatchway to the cellar. He evidently
proved to be sharp of eye for, until the death of Mary Phagan, no one
in Atlanta knew that more was being made at National than pencils.
For his services, he received from twenty-five cents to one dollar a
sortie. Although Dalton later testified that he had found the factory a
convenient place in which to make love, he denied that he had ever seen
Frank similarly occupied.
According to Frank, Mary Phagan had arrived in his office at 12:12
p.m. that Saturday. Another metal room worker, Monteen Stover, who had
also gone to the factory to pick up her pay, said that she had been
in the plant from 12:05 to 12:10. Since Conley had sworn that Miss
Stover had entered the building after the dead girl, then Mary must
have entered the plant before 12:05. However, Frank’s stenographer had
taken the last of his dictation at 12:02, at which time she went home.
Thus, it was clear that the only time in which the superintendent could
have been alone with Mary was between 12:02 and 12:05. Lemmie Quinn,
the factory foreman, had seen him in his office at 12:20 when, Quinn
testified, he had exhibited no sign of nervousness.
According to its schedule, the English Avenue car on which Mary had
taken her last ride was due to arrive at the corner of Broad and
Marietta Streets at 12:07½ p.m. Mathas, its motorman, was certain that
“we were on schedule.” He also believed that “we got to Broad and
Hunter about 12:10.” It was at the latter crossing that Mary had left
the street car and gone directly to the factory which was only a block
away.
Hollis, the conductor, was just as definite. “We ran on schedule that
day,” he testified. “We got to Broad and Marietta 7½ minutes after 12,
schedule time ... it takes 2½ minutes to run from Broad and Marietta
to Broad and Hunter. I have timed the car again and again since then.”
Occasionally, a car would run ahead of schedule but “hardly ever.” He
insisted that it was “against the rules of the company to get to the
city ahead of time.”
The division superintendent backed up the motorman and the conductor
as far as the schedules went. However, he remembered that the men
frequently came in ahead of time. Just a week before the trial, he had
suspended a motorman for arriving a few minutes before his scheduled
time. Sometimes, one car would “cut off” another which was ahead of
it and come in much too early. On one occasion, he had seen one car
cut off another which was scheduled to arrive at Broad and Marietta at
12:05.
In rebuttal, the prosecution put one of the line’s inspectors on the
stand. He had never heard of a 12:07½ time for reaching Broad and
Marietta; as he remembered it, the schedule called for a 12:07 arrival
at that crossing. On one occasion, he had seen Mathas cut off the car
in front of him. The men liked to come in ahead of schedule “on relief
time, for supper and dinner.” In fact, the crew on Mary’s car had been
relieved for lunch just after it arrived in the center of the city
after dropping her off at Broad and Hunter.
At 12:50 that day, Frank had announced to several people in the factory
that he was going home for lunch. Three employees had seen him leave
the building ten minutes later and a dozen witnesses passed him as he
walked home where he arrived at 1:20. Yet Conley had said that it had
been 12:56 when he had seen Frank at the head of the stairs with a
piece of rope in his hand. He had also testified that the two notes had
been written after one o’clock and that Frank was still in the building
when the porter left at 1:30.
Conley had stated that Mary’s body had been taken to the basement in
the electric elevator that serviced the building. But two factory
employees who had been working on the fourth floor that afternoon had
not heard the whirring noise that always accompanied its operation.
More important, a pile of trash that Conley himself had observed at the
bottom of the elevator shaft on Saturday morning was not crushed by the
descending car.
The porter had also insisted that Mary had been killed in the metal
room. However, no blood was found anywhere on the second floor or in
the elevator cab. But in the basement, Atlanta police had found blood
scattered on the floor, the walls and the inner door that led to the
alley in back of the plant. Incidentally, the hasp of the outer door
had been pried off with an iron bar.
Frank’s attorneys were convinced that Conley, who was on a holiday
toot, had attacked Mary and killed her. It was their opinion that the
cinders which were found all over her clothes indicated that Mary
had put up quite a battle for her life in the cellar and that it had
taken the drunken porter some time to kill her. After her death, he
had suddenly come to his senses and decided to write notes putting
the blame on a “long, sleam tall negro.” Since he was a stocky,
light-colored Negro, this description would, he had thought, prevent
suspicion from falling on him. His last precautionary effort had been
to wash his bloodstained shirt in the basement sink on the Thursday
after the murder.
In addition to trying to prove that Frank was a sexual deviate, the
prosecution was determined to show that he had had his eyes on Mary for
a long time. W. E. Turner, a boy who worked as a messenger at National,
said that “I saw Leo Frank talking to Mary Phagan on the second floor
about the middle of March.... There was nobody else in the room then.
She was going to work when he stopped her. She told him she had to go
to work. He told her that he was the superintendent of the factory
and that he wanted to talk to her ... she backed off, and he went on
towards her, talking to her. The last thing I heard him say was he
wanted to talk to her.” At this point, Turner had left the floor and
had seen and heard nothing else.
Dewie Howell, a girl who had once labored in the metal room with
Mary, had been found by the prosecution in Cincinnati’s Home of the
Good Shepherd. Miss Howell had worked at the pencil factory during
February and March of 1913. She had “seen Mr. Frank hold his hand on
Mary’s shoulder. He would stand pretty close to Mary when he talked to
her. He would lean over in her face.” Irene Jackson, another National
employee, had seen him open the door of the girls’ dressing room one
afternoon and stare inside.
After Frank had been arrested, four policemen came to the jail with
Conley in tow and insisted on seeing the defendant. Frank had refused
to talk to them because his lawyer wasn’t to be present at the
conference. Dorsey took great pleasure in pointing out that it had
been one of the private investigators hired by the factory at Frank’s
request who had suggested that Conley be taken to the superintendent’s
cell in an effort to shake the truth out of the porter. He was later
to tell the jury that Frank had not been so coy at the time he had
requested permission to visit Newt Lee’s cell when the night watchman
was still under suspicion.
Since the time of Mary’s visit to the factory was crucial to both the
state’s and the defendant’s cases, each side tried to show by the
condition of the food in her stomach how many minutes had elapsed
between her 11:30 lunch and the time she died. Dr. H. F. Harris,
Dorsey’s medical expert, was the secretary of the Georgia Board of
Health while Dr. W. F. Westmoreland, who testified for the defense,
was its former president. Harris thought that the girl had eaten her
cabbage and wheat bread “perhaps three quarters of an hour or half an
hour or forty minutes, or something like that, before death occurred.”
Westmoreland estimated that death had occurred nearer to one o’clock.
Both physicians had previously been involved in an altercation provoked
by charges of professional misconduct being filed against Harris by
Westmoreland. The former was subsequently cleared and his accuser
forced to resign as president of the Board of Health. There was bad
blood all around and the two physicians effectively neutralized each
other.
When the defense took over, it tried to dispel the aura of sexual
degeneracy that the Solicitor General had so painstakingly developed.
A reward of $5000.00, offered by William J. Burns to anyone who could
turn up a single immoral act in Frank’s past life, went begging.
Even the Atlanta police, who could hardly be classed as impartial
observers, were unable to locate any evidence in Brooklyn or Ithaca
that in any way implicated the defendant. So clean was his record
that Chief Beavers did an about-face and insisted that the police had
never claimed that he was a degenerate. But if Atlanta officialdom
had changed its mind, the man in the street still saw Frank as the
anti-Christ.
Dorsey, who was later to refer to the sodomy trial of Oscar Wilde in
his summation, had also introduced testimony that Mrs. Frank had never
visited her husband in jail. What could be clearer evidence that he was
guilty of murdering what Tom Watson’s _The Jeffersonian_ referred to as
“our little girl--ours by the Eternal God!” To rebut these inferences,
the defense put witness after witness on the stand to testify to
Frank’s good character. But Judge Roan consistently permitted Dorsey to
undermine the effect of their testimony. The cross-examination of Mary
Pirk, a National worker, was typical.
Q. You never heard of a single thing immoral during the five years?
A. Yes, sir, that’s true.
Q. You never knew of his being guilty of a thing that was immoral
during the five years--is that true?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. You never heard a single soul during that time discuss it?
A. No, sir.
Q. You never heard of his going in the dressing room there of the
girls?
A. No, sir.
Q. You never heard of his slapping them as he would go by?
A. No, sir.
The trial was destined to last for a month. As it wore on, popular
feeling against Frank grew by leaps and bounds. In its last week, the
Solicitor General was carried down the steps of the courthouse at the
end of each day on the shoulders of a surging crowd that shouted,
“Hurrah for Dorsey.” On August 23rd, when one of Frank’s character
witnesses was on the stand, the spectators began to laugh and it
took all of Judge Roan’s courtroom savvy to quiet them down. An hour
later, a claque in the rear of the room began to applaud exchanges
of causticities between Dorsey and various defense lawyers. Again,
Judge Roan stepped into the breech and restored some sort of order.
But apparently he was at the end of his resources because he promptly
called in the police and the Fifth Georgia Regiment to keep the
restive audience under wraps.
On August 25, 1913, the trial’s last day, the courthouse was ringed by
thousands of people who shouted such pleasantries as “Hang the Jew or
we will hang you!” into the Pryor Avenue windows of the first-floor
courtroom. As the _Atlanta Constitution_ described it, “A veritable
honeycomb of humanity spread over the section ... Men and women clung
to the walls of buildings and stood in doorways. Windows were crowded
with women and girls and children. It was as though a street audience
had gathered to watch an eventful procession.”
The situation grew so bad that Roan cleared the courtroom when the
jury announced that it had decided on a verdict. The cheering from the
outside reached such a crescendo that it was almost impossible to hear
the foreman inform the judge that he and his colleagues had found Leo
Frank guilty of murder in the first degree. When a court bailiff leaned
out of a window and shouted the word “guilty,” a reporter noted that
“a combined shout ... rose to the sky. Pandemonium reigned. Hats went
into the air. Women wept and shouted by turns ... Few will live to see
another such demonstration.”
Judge Roan, who had previously said that “if Christ and his angels
came down here and showed this jury Frank was innocent, it would bring
him in guilty,” denied his attorneys’ motion for a new trial despite
the fact that he publicly acknowledged that he did not know “this
morning whether Leo Frank is innocent or guilty.” The next day, Frank
was sentenced to be hanged in the courtyard of the “common jail of
Fulton County.” Before Roan went through the dreary formalities that
marked the first step in taking a man’s life, he afforded the slender,
dark-haired defendant an opportunity to make a last statement. Frank,
in a voice that was all but drowned out by the clamor outside the
courtroom, swore that “I am innocent of little Mary Phagan’s death, and
have no knowledge of how it occurred....”
On February 17, 1914, the Supreme Court of Georgia affirmed the death
sentence. Ten months later, the United States Supreme Court refused
to intervene although Mr. Justice Holmes was moved to state that “I
very seriously doubt if the petitioner has had due process of law
... because of the trial taking place in the presence of a hostile
demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd.” It looked very much as if
Leo Frank would never live to see his thirty-first year.
But on June 30, 1915, Governor John H. Slaton, with rare courage,
sacrificed his political career and commuted Frank’s sentence to life
imprisonment. Unfortunately, his _beau geste_ was an empty one because,
several months later, a mob broke into the prison hospital where Frank
was recovering from an attack by a fellow prisoner who, in a frenzy of
self-righteousness, had cut his throat, rushed him back to Atlanta, and
hanged him from a tree that grew in front of Mary Phagan’s house. After
the jury’s verdict, the defendant had asked a reporter, “Can it be that
the law, and our system of its administration, is so inexorable that
truth and innocence may never be heard after once the die is cast? Is
the door forever closed and the way barred?” His swinging body was the
answer.
3
_In Union There is Death_
The State of California
_versus_
Thomas J. Mooney
Saturday, July 22, 1916, was a day that San Francisco would long
remember. Its Chamber of Commerce, anticipating early American entrance
into World War I, had organized a Preparedness Day parade which was
scheduled to kick off at 1:30 p.m. The two-mile line of march extended
from the Ferry end of Market Street to the Civic Center, and every
organization in the Bay area that could muster a column of fours was to
be represented. Market Street had been closed to all traffic shortly
before the parade started and an enormous crowd lined both sides of the
route. The various units had assembled in the Embarcadero at noon and
marched westward to the music of more bands than San Francisco had ever
heard at one time. At 2:06 p.m., as the Spanish-American War veterans
stepped smartly out of Steuart Street to join the parade, an enormous
explosion shattered the air. When the smoke cleared, the police found
eight mutilated corpses lying in the street.
It was soon clear that a bomb had gone off on the westerly sidewalk
of Steuart Street, some seventeen feet in from Market Street. Captain
Duncan Matheson of the San Francisco Police, who was on duty nearby,
ordered Lieutenant Stephen Bunner to take care of the wounded while he
kept the parade moving. As soon as the dead and injured had been taken
away, Bunner ordered the sidewalks washed with fire hoses. He later
stated that he “was satisfied that all the evidence had been collected
by the detectives and the persons around before I ordered the sidewalks
washed.”
About an hour and a half later, District Attorney Charles M. Fickert,
accompanied by a San Francisco banker named Frederick H. Colburn,
arrived at the scene. Colburn found some “nickel flattened bullets and
a ragged piece of pipe, one or two .32 cartridge shells, rim fire,”
on the sidewalk. A remarkably curious man, he then asked for a sledge
hammer and “broke a strip three or four inches wide around the little
hole in the sidewalk where the concrete was shattered.” Some more
cartridges and several jagged pieces of iron were found in the hole.
Colburn then pushed in some loosened bricks in the adjoining wall and
discovered a few more scraps of metal lodged behind them.
After clearing Market Street for the 42nd Division which had come over
from Oakland to join the parade, Captain Matheson returned to Steuart
Street, only to find that Bunner had washed the sidewalk clean. The
police officer walked over the explosion area and found a bloody strip
of iron, a narrow piece of metal with several nails in it, fifteen
exploded .32-caliber shells, three .22-caliber bullets, and some fibre
strands which he thought looked like “imitation leather.” He then
returned to Market Street where he “stayed until all the parade had
cleared about 4:30, and then walked back to the scene of the explosion.”
In his absence, Fickert and Colburn had arrived and the latter had
enlarged the break in the sidewalk. Matheson was extremely angry that
no efforts had been made to guard the explosion area and he ordered
Steuart Street roped off. He also set up a police detail to keep the
souvenir hunters from removing any evidence that had not yet been
picked over. The detectives who had swarmed over the area minutes after
the explosion had taken no measurements of the size of the hole in the
sidewalk and had made no record of the positions of the victims’ bodies.
That evening, Martin Swanson, a former Pinkerton operative who was
employed by the Public Utilities Protective Bureau, strolled into
Fickert’s office and nonchalantly remarked that he knew who was
responsible for the tragedy. He named two coast labor leaders--Warren
K. Billings and Thomas J. Mooney--as the ones who had planted the bomb.
They had been assisted, he said, by Israel Weinberg, a cab driver,
Edward D. Nolan, the President-elect of Machinists’ Lodge 68, and
Mooney’s wife, Rena. Swanson was evidently quite persuasive because
Fickert immediately put him on the payroll, and picked up Billings,
Weinberg and Nolan four days later. The Mooneys were on vacation in
Montesano, Washington, when they read that they were being sought as
suspects in the bomb case. After Mooney had wired Chief of Police White
that “this attempt to incriminate me in connection with bomb outrage is
one of the most dastardly pieces of work ever attempted,” the couple
took the first train back to San Francisco. They were arrested on July
27th, by policemen who boarded their coach at Guerneyville.
This wasn’t the first time that Swanson had used Mooney’s name in vain.
Three years earlier, when the linemen of the Pacific Gas & Electric
Company in neighboring Contra Costa County had gone on strike, the
detective had been hired to find out who was dynamiting the utility’s
property. He had accused Mooney, who was leading the strike, of
possessing explosives, and the union organizer was tried three times
before he was eventually acquitted. Swanson had been more successful
with Billings who was sentenced to two years at Folsom Penitentiary for
carrying dynamite.
On June 10, 1916, Mooney, as a representative of the Amalgamated
Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America, called
an organization meeting of the carmen of the United Railroads, San
Francisco’s trolley lines, at Woodsman’s Hall. Early the next morning,
three of the carrier’s transmission towers near San Bruno were slightly
damaged by dynamite. According to Weinberg and Billings, Swanson
went all out to pin this bombing on Mooney. On July 17th, he hailed
Weinberg’s taxi and offered the cabbie $5000.00 to swear that he had
driven Mooney to San Bruno after the meeting at Woodsman’s Hall. When
he repeated the offer two days later, Weinberg told him that he had no
information to sell.
On July 18th, Swanson met Billings at the office of the Pacific Gas
& Electric Company, where the latter had gone to pay a bill. The
detective promised him a machinist’s job with the utility as well as
five thousand dollars if he would help connect Mooney with the San
Bruno explosion. Billings was as uncooperative as Weinberg had been,
and Swanson soon gave him up as a bad job. He later admitted that
he had spoken to both men about Mooney’s part in the bombing of the
transmission towers, but denied that he had offered any money to either
one.
When Billings, Weinberg, Nolan and the Mooneys were arrested, they were
held incommunicado until the Grand Jury met on the evening of August
1. Meanwhile, San Francisco was staging mass meetings at which speaker
after speaker urged that all radicals, anarchists and liberals be run
out of town. The Law and Order Committee of the Chamber of Commerce
raised more than $400,000 for the avowed purpose of ridding the city
of its “anarchistic” elements. All of the newspapers embarked on an
orgy of speculation, openly inspired by the District Attorney’s office,
in which no effort was made to separate fact from fancy. As far as
the _Examiner_, the _Call_, the _Chronicle_ and the _Bulletin_ were
concerned, Fickert had an open-and-shut case against all the suspects,
and it made little difference what they printed under their banner
headlines.