Chapter Eight

Fighting for Leo Frank

ON THE MORNING of Sunday, April 27, 1913, at about 3:30 a.m., a night watchman named Newt Lee discovered the lifeless body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan in the basement of the Atlanta-based National Pencil Factory. Sawdust, pencil shavings, and soot covered the young factory girl. She had bruises and cuts on her face.¹ A subsequent medical examination revealed that Phagan had been strangled and sexually abused.²

Police investigating the crime scene discovered two notes—later to become known as the “murder notes”—amid the debris that littered the floor near the dead girl’s head. They read:

he said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef

mam that negro hire down here did this I went to make water and he push me down that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it wase long sleam tall negro I wright while play with me³

These notes pointed to Newt Lee as the murderer, because he matched the description of a “tall black negro.” Lee—also a suspect because he had discovered the body—was arrested immediately and taken to the local jail for questioning.

At 7:00 that Sunday morning, in response to a request by the investigating officers, factory superintendent Leo Frank arrived at the scene. Born in Texas and raised in Brooklyn, Frank—then twenty-nine years old—had been living in Atlanta for five years. He had married a local Jewish woman and had recently been elected president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, cementing his position as a prominent member of the local Jewish community.

Initially, he told police he did not know anyone named Mary Phagan, but it soon emerged that he was the last person known to have seen her alive.⁴ Shortly after noon on the previous day, Phagan had visited the factory to collect her paycheck before heading off to watch the Confederate Memorial Day Parade. According to Frank—his memory now refreshed—she came into his office, he handed her wages to her, and she left his office.

Newt Lee had come in two hours early for his Saturday-to-Sunday shift, arriving at 4:00 p.m. Oddly, Frank instructed Lee to leave the factory and return at his usual starting time of 6:00 p.m. Then Frank telephoned Lee from home at around 7:00 p.m. to see if everything was in order—a call that Lee found strange, since Frank had never before called him from home.⁵

Increasingly, the investigators became interested in Superintendent Frank.

There were then three daily newspapers in Atlanta: the leading Atlanta Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Atlanta Georgian. William Randolph Hearst had bought the anemic Georgian the previous year, and immediately set out to boost its circulation. The murder of Mary Phagan presented Hearst—as well as his competitors—with a golden opportunity.

A reporter for the Constitution had the good luck to be at police headquarters when Lee’s emergency call came in, and he covered the murder exclusively in a Sunday morning extra edition. But the competition intensified on Monday, when the Journal “borrowed” and printed the murder notes: a stunning breach of police procedure that prevented any fingerprint analysis from being performed. Not to be outdone, Hearst’s Georgian published a morgue photograph of Phagan’s battered face crudely pasted onto a picture of a live girl’s torso, along with an inflammatory five-page article.

On the Monday after the murder, Hearst offered a $500 reward for “Exclusive Information Leading to the Arrest and Conviction of the Murderer.” On Tuesday, a bidding war erupted between the Constitution and the Georgian, with the Georgian offering $1,800 by midday.⁶

Albert Lasker, the lapsed journalist, later described the effect of this sensationalism on Atlanta readers:

They [the Georgian] weren’t doing very well. So they had all their northern editors and they had to take what at that time was the big city yellow journal method. They had to find some sensation, and just imagine when, on a Sunday morning in a town that had surely not seen an ‘extra’ since the Civil War, they came out with an eight column streamer about this murder...

That [sensationalism] . . . grew up gradually in the north. It didn’t come overnight—but here it came overnight, and can you imagine the shock of that impact in the community, and how it excited them? Human beings [being] what they are? And so the stage was all set.⁷

Yellow journalism sold papers. By the end of 1913, the Georgian had the largest circulation of any southern daily newspaper.⁸

A shocked public demanded that the murderer be discovered and punished. Leo Frank, anxious about the sloppy police work in the case, hired the celebrated Pinkerton Detective Agency to perform an independent investigation. The factory superintendent had reason to be concerned. Among other things, the investigating officers had given away the murder notes, lost a board smeared with bloody fingerprints, and failed to issue a report on the bloody fingerprints on Phagan’s jacket.⁹

On the morning of Mary Phagan’s funeral—Tuesday, April 29—Frank was taken into custody, largely because he had been the last person to see Mary Phagan alive and had appeared extremely nervous in the presence of the police. The coroner conducted the largest inquest in Georgia’s history, summoning every employee of the National Pencil Factory to give testimony.¹⁰ Over the course of this inquiry, two very different pictures of Leo Frank emerged. One was of a model citizen with a Cornell diploma and a responsible job, occupying a prestigious place in his community. The other was of a vicious fiend who preyed on working-class girls—Christian girls.

The fact that Frank was Jewish was never far from people’s minds, and the more difficult Frank’s circumstances became, the more aggressively Atlanta’s Jewish population defended him. To some extent, their efforts paid off. The Georgian, for example, reversed its course and emerged as “pro-Frank,” in large part because of the Atlanta Jewish community’s unhappiness with Hearst’s initial anti-Frank coverage.¹¹

Nevertheless, the tide was running against Frank. On May 24, he was formally indicted for the murder of Mary Phagan. To the delight of Hearst and his competitors, the case kept throwing up bizarre new twists. On the day that Frank was indicted, for example, an African American sweeper at the factory named Jim Conley confessed to having written the murder notes for him. Police had arrested Conley two days after Frank’s arrest when he was observed washing blood from a shirt.

The big surprise to most Atlantans following the case was that a black factory sweeper could read and write. Conley had remained mum about those abilities, he told investigators, because he was hoping to extort a large sum of money from Frank to keep the murder quiet. Within a week, Conley produced three affidavits swearing that he not only had written the notes, but also that he helped Frank move the body to the basement. Despite glaring inconsistencies in Conley’s accounts and his suspicious behavior, police considered his testimony to be conclusive evidence that Frank was guilty. “The Mary Phagan murder is no longer a mystery,” they declared.¹²

Frank, now fearing for his life, stopped talking to the press. Predictably, the newspapers punished him for his lack of cooperation, dubbing him the “Silent Man in the Tower”—as the Fulton County Jail was popularly known—and hinting that his silence was somehow incriminating.¹³

Frank’s trial lasted a month, making it the longest criminal trial on record in Georgia. On August 25, 1913, he was convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan. Breaking his silence, he simply declared: “I am as innocent as I was one year ago.”¹⁴

Frank was sentenced to hang on October 10. His lawyers immediately moved for a new trial, arguing that the guilty verdict was both unlawful and contrary to the weight of the evidence.¹⁵

Although the murder and trial dominated the newspapers and conversations of Atlanta for four months, they received minimal coverage outside of Georgia. Three short articles appeared in the New York Times in May of 1913, focusing on tangential aspects of the case. The Times also reported on the sentencing of Leo Frank, his motions for a new trial, and the efforts of several Cornell alumni to free him.

The first significant coverage of the Frank case in the Times, four columns’ worth, ran on February 18, 1914, when the Supreme Court of Georgia denied Frank a new trial.¹⁶ Frank’s story now became an obsession for the Times, which produced more than a hundred articles—about the case, the prisoner, and his fight to stay alive—over the next year and a half. When the Times weighed in, other publications took note, so Times owner Adolph Ochs was largely responsible for stirring up a national media frenzy about an obscure local case that had already been decided and its verdict upheld.

And it was Albert Lasker who persuaded Ochs to take up the seemingly lost cause of Leo Frank.

Atlanta’s Jewish community felt that anti-Semitism had played a major role in the decision of the jury that convicted Frank. One of the factors contributing to this sentiment, they believed, was a scurrilous weekly newspaper, The Jeffersonian, written by a politician-turned-publisher named Thomas E. Watson.

The Frank case opened new vistas for Watson, just as it had for Hearst and his competitors. Watson began by asking his readership rhetorical questions—“Does a Jew expect extraordinary favors and immunities because of his race?”—and quickly escalated from there.¹⁷ His simplistic editorials, touching a nativist nerve, became wildly popular. Watson intensified his attacks on Frank, depicting him as a northern Jew whose main goal was to savagely exploit young southern women.

Lasker, himself a master manipulator of public opinion, was appalled. “This paper [The Jeffersonian],” he later said, “was devoted to hatred of Catholics and Negroes, and when the Frank case came up, he jumped in and added Jews.”¹⁸

Rabbi David Marx, a close friend of Frank’s and one of his most passionate defenders, considered the trial an American version of the Dreyfus Affair—the celebrated court martial of a French Jew that fifteen years earlier had torn apart that country. “The feeling against the Damned Jew is so bitter,” Marx wrote, “that the jury was intimidated and feared for their lives, which undoubtedly would have been in danger had any other verdict been rendered.”¹⁹

Hoping to gain support for a movement to free Frank, Marx visited New York City. While there, he contacted Louis Marshall, a highly successful lawyer, champion of Jewish rights, and president of the American Jewish Committee. Although he was concerned about Frank’s plight, Marshall refused to make Frank’s case an official cause of the Committee.²⁰ He believed that a behind-the-scenes appeal for financial and legal aid would minimize southern resentment toward northern—and Jewish—intervention, and therefore be more successful.

Marx then attempted to meet with Adolph Ochs, hoping to focus media scrutiny on the case. Marx’s timing wasn’t good—at the time, Ochs was traveling in Europe. But in any case, the Frank case was not a cause that Ochs normally would choose to embrace—he had gone to great lengths to prevent the Times from appearing to be a “Jewish paper.”

The missing ingredient, soon to be supplied, was Albert Lasker.

During this period, Lasker’s recurring emotional distress was interfering with his ability to work. He fell back into depression in 1912, and took almost half of the year off for an extended trip to Mexico. He became “tired,” he said—so much so that he disappeared from Lord & Thomas’s expanded offices in the Maller Building at Addison and Wabash and hid himself away from his colleagues: “I had gotten so tired that I had three floors below built a hideaway office with a private phone going out, where I could see people by appointment without any stenographer or secretary. It was the only time in my life I did anything eccentric.”²¹ Given his state of mind, Lasker probably would have ignored the Frank case entirely, had it not been for a letter from his father in the later months of 1913.

It is not clear how Morris Lasker became entangled in Leo Frank’s cause, but by November 1913, he was serving as a clearinghouse—in the Jewish community of Galveston, and beyond—for news related to Frank. Morris did not share Louis Marshall’s or Adolph Och’s fastidiousness about Jews advancing a Jewish cause. On the contrary: he believed that Jews had to take action when confronted with a challenge like the Frank case. And he felt, further, that his increasingly influential son ought to be among those leading the way.

Albert initially hoped to sidestep the whole affair. After getting his father’s letter, he contacted Arthur Brisbane—the celebrated editor of Hearst’s New York newspaper, the Evening Journal—and called in a favor. He told Brisbane: “It will satisfy my father entirely if I’ll say to him that Brisbane is looking into it first. The great Brisbane with his trained mind, and second, it equals getting a review from the Hearst papers. Would you do that for me? Send me a long telegram, I’ll send it to my father and the whole thing will be dismissed, and I’ll have satisfied my father.”²²

In New York, Brisbane met at length with David Marx, and the following evening, he sent Lasker a telegram. “Spent four hours with a rabbi,” Brisbane wired. “The thing concerns us both. I am taking the train for Atlanta tonight and expect you to meet me there the day after tomorrow morning.”

Lasker’s escape plan had backfired. He later described this trip to Atlanta with Brisbane:

He and I went and talked to the District Attorney. We went and talked first to every one of the prosecution, and then we went and talked to the defense, and we talked to the prisoner. Both he and I took a tremendous prejudice against the prisoner. Like so many, all this publicity had gone to his head—he became a megalomaniac . . .

But we were determined in our minds that he was innocent and that this was a big frame-up. Then we were dejected, Brisbane and I, what we were about to do. I never got back to my desk in nine months.

Lasker soon decided that his skills as a “propagandist” might prove decisive:

[The Frank case] struck deeply into me for several reasons. First, it was the first thing my father had ever asked me to do. He had never asked me anything in his life, and I felt when he asked me to tend to it that it was just an old man being imposed upon, and then putting the burden on me. I was resentful.

When I found . . . that there was no legal base for finding [Frank] guilty, then I felt guilty in my feeling of resentment toward my father, and I felt I had an obligation. Then also, I was a reporter and a propagandist, and when I made up my mind this was a legal crime that they were committing . . . I wanted to both run down the facts and spread them to the public—with the same instinct that has kept me going in my whole career . . .

Then of course I was deeply moved directly and personally because of the anti-Semitism involved.²³

Lasker was not a particularly observant Jew. In fact, according to his youngest daughter, Francie, he was “very antireligion.” He didn’t need a middleman between himself and his God, he used to tell his children.²⁴ Although he had encountered anti-Semitism in his childhood and throughout his professional career, he had either ignored it or deflected it.

At the same time, he was proud of his Jewish heritage, and was an active member of the Chicago Jewish community. Throughout his adult life, he raised money for the Associated Jewish Charities of Chicago. Every Wednesday night and Saturday afternoon, he sat down to a poker game with his local cronies—the “Partridges”—all of whom were Jewish. (They also made a point, Francie recalls, of playing poker together every year on Christmas Eve.) And in an unguarded moment, Lasker might even admit that he was prejudiced in favor of the Jews:

The Jews are a superior people, I have a hard time hiding that; I feel we should be patient with non-Jews, that we should be understanding because we have gone through all that suffering ourselves that makes you cultured and civilized . . .

I deeply believe that no Christian civilization can last that removed from it the Jews. That it is the Jew that brings them the pollen.²⁵

Lasker understood that the three most salient facts about Frank—that he was a mill superintendent, a northerner, and a Jew—all counted against him. “I would say it was split three ways,” he concluded, “in three equal parts.”²⁶ But it was the anti-Semitism that spurred Lasker to action. He possessed a keen sense of justice, and he had a boundless admiration for his uncle Eduard, who had fought for religious tolerance in Germany. And of course there was his father’s example, as well as his request. “Broadminded in all things, his benefactions, the extent of which only himself knew, were restricted by no creed, race, or factional lines,” the Galveston News editorialized at the time of Morris’s death in 1916. “He was always ready to help the helpless.”²⁷

By the time Lasker got back to Chicago from his unscheduled Atlanta trip, he had decided to help Leo Frank.

Late in 1913, Lasker quietly donated $1,000 to Frank’s cause. He also arranged for his father and his friend Julius Rosenwald—the chairman of Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck and Company—to make equal (and equally quiet) contributions. In response, Frank sent a personal note to each of them, thanking them.²⁸

Lasker decided that he had to raise the stakes, in part by focusing an intense media spotlight on Georgia. David Marx and Louis Marshall had been trying to get on Adolph Ochs’s calendar as soon as he returned from Europe. Lasker joined Marx’s and Marshall’s cause, and—toward the end of 1913—he secured the all-important meeting with Ochs, as well as an audience with Mark Sullivan, the influential editor of Collier’s Weekly:

I came up north [after visiting Atlanta with Brisbane] and I called on two men—Adolph Ochs and Mark Sullivan . . . If I could get those two to crusade I didn’t have to take care of any other thing, that it would be quite spontaneous combustion. I have got the type of mind that works that way, if you start a fire it will spread—the thing to do is get the fire started away from a firehouse—[so] instead of scattering, I made up my mind to concentrate on them.²⁹

Lasker, ever the salesman, delivered a powerful pitch to the skeptical head of the Times:

“Mr. Ochs,” I said, “they are about to hang a man in Atlanta, Georgia, who in any event isn’t legally guilty, and that is legal murder, and you have a duty, Mr. Ochs.”

Mr. Ochs, far from being intrigued, was annoyed . . . First, I saw in that interview that no man could love a thing more preciously than he loved America, and he said such a thing couldn’t happen in America, and he really acted as if he thought that I was a traitor to our country.

The second thing was, he was a southerner, and he loved the South, and his idea of southern fairness and southern fair play was shocked—that I brought that charge against the South.

The third reason was that he was a Jew, and Frank was a Jew, and I was a Jew, and he thought I was coming to him and trying to use his paper, which he really tried to keep free of any entanglements . . .

He was very impatient with me . . . Seeing I was getting nowhere, I turned to him and said, “Mr. Ochs, when this man dies, and afterward, you will [be an] accessory to the fact of this legal murder, because you can’t get away from [the fact] that I came here and notified you.

“I don’t propose to you to bring to you any proof but the record of the trial, and the record of the Supreme Court; if you read that, and tell me as an American, that this man is legally guilty, then I will say to you not only that I won’t put any more pressure on you, but I will withdraw from the case, because I have more confidence in your objective judgment than I have in my own . . .”

Well, that appealed to him . . . He said, “You come in tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.” . . .

I came in at eleven o’clock the next morning and Mr. Ochs was there with tears streaming down his cheeks. He said, “I have read that record. I stayed up until four o’clock in the morning, and I read every word of it. I never believed that could happen in America. Of course, this man is legally not guilty.”

He said, “So far as calling the nation’s attention to it, you leave that to me. I am sending my best man down there today.”

On February 17, 1914, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Frank’s appeal for a new trial. For the first time, thanks to the Times, the story commanded a national audience.³⁰ From February to May, the Times reported on all major and minor developments in the Frank case, treating many as front-page news. Behind the scenes, Lasker exulted: “They had that case all quieted. The Supreme Court had dropped it; there was nothing left but to execute him. The northern papers had hardly printed anything about him. And in four weeks, I had it every day in every paper, [and] it was on every breakfast table in the country. So it wasn’t a bad job.”³¹

At the same time that he was wooing Ochs and the Times, Lasker was also cultivating Mark Sullivan. “He came to Collier’s with reluctance,” Sullivan later recalled, “because his advertising agency was throwing business [our] way.”³² Lasker used the same strategy with Sullivan that he had used with Ochs, putting the documents in front of Sullivan and trusting that the editor would respond with moral outrage. It worked: “I was deeply stirred by it,” Sullivan said.

Lasker knew that there were still at least two more fronts to be opened. First, he had to break down the government’s case against Frank. On Ochs’s advice, Lasker retained a celebrated detective, William J. Burns, to poke holes in the prosecution’s case. With great fanfare, Burns arrived in Atlanta on March 14, 1914.³³ Entirely without fanfare, Lasker had slipped into Atlanta a few days ahead of him. This visit constituted the “second front” in Lasker’s overall campaign, whereby he would rehabilitate Frank’s image. Frank could no longer afford to play the “Silent Man in the Tower.” He had to swing public sentiment in his favor—no small challenge, given that he had been convicted of raping and murdering a child.

The day after the Georgia Supreme Court denied Frank’s appeal, Frank made what the Times called “a remarkable statement to the public,” which included declarations of his innocence and his unshaken faith in God. The statement, scripted by Lasker, focused on truth, and incorporated a core slogan: a technique that characterized all of Lasker’s advocacy and political campaigns. “I stake all on the truth,” Frank said in his statement. “The truth will out . . . The truth is on the march.”³⁴

The Times did its part, reporting that the previously inaccessible Frank had decided to open up to the media:

Until then Frank himself was a riddle. He had spoken only through his attorneys and had received no visits from reporters. Silence seemed wisest, and he was as hard to spy as an Irish banshee. But suddenly word was given that Frank was ready to see questioners, and to answer all the queries they could put. Since then he has been under daily cross-examination, and his air of mystery has given way to definite impressions of Frank as an individual.³⁵

Overnight, with a lot of help from Lasker, the Silent Man in the Tower began exhibiting an unexpected eloquence. In those daily media sessions, Frank reiterated Lasker’s slogan. “I, again, say that truth is on the march,” he told the assembled reporters. “Truth is coming like a dawning day, and the first pink signs of it can be seen in the East.”

Lasker was rarely on the scene. He visited Atlanta two or three times, staying three or four days each time. “I did my work up North, and I surely did it well, too.”³⁶ On the same trip that he advised Frank to start speaking with reporters, for example, Lasker and Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane persuaded the Atlanta Journal to publish an editorial—on March 10, 1914—asserting that Frank was not guilty. According to a historian of the Frank case, this editorial created a sensation, and proved to be the “most dramatic appeal for Frank.”³⁷

Lasker was thrilled: “And by God, it was one of the biggest sensational things in journalism in the South . . . They came out with a two-column editorial, which they had never had in Atlanta—in the Atlanta Journal demanding a pardon or a new trial for the man. We had then the authority of the largest leading newspaper in Georgia, because the Journal was the largest circulation paper in Georgia, [and] the only evening paper in Atlanta.”³⁸

But the Journal’s bold stance had crossed a line that both Louis Marshall and Adolph Ochs had worried about. Angry Georgians criticized it as having been “bought with Jew money.” Stung, the Journal waited another year before it dared to write favorably of Frank again.³⁹

Lasker bankrolled the effort to save Leo Frank, but it is not clear exactly how much he spent on the cause. He paid the $4,500 retainer to Burns in the beginning of March 1914. He also paid Burns’s fees beyond that $4,500—although not always happily. In late April, for example, Lasker sent defense attorney Herbert Haas a pointed note: “Believe me, my dear Mr. Haas, there is a limit to the money that can be raised, and unless Burns proves something direct, there is a limit that can be paid him. If he is going to follow every lead to an indefinite conclusion, I can well see how he can keep on for years, and run up a bill of $100,000.”⁴⁰

In this same letter, Lasker offered $10,000 more from himself and his father. He enclosed the first $5,000 directly and told Haas he could have the other $5,000 whenever he needed it. As of this point, it appears, Morris and Albert Lasker together had contributed $16,750. Haas had estimated that an additional $25,000 had to be raised outside Atlanta. Lasker felt that he could collect at least $5,000 in Chicago (with the help of Julius Rosenwald and others) and expected that “as New York had given nothing,” they could raise $10,000.

Two days later, though, in an apparent change of heart, Lasker wrote to Louis Wiley of the New York Times that he would underwrite the entire $25,000.⁴¹ This was certainly welcome news: Haas soon reported that the $5,000 that Lasker had sent on April 20 had already been expended to pay for Burns’s time, legal fees, medical experts, and other costs.⁴²

In this case, as in so many other episodes in his life, Lasker assiduously covered his tracks. He got others to go along with him in concealing his role in the affair. Burns dutifully played the Sphinx. In May 1914, prosecutor Hugh Dorsey asked Dan Lehon, an assistant to Burns, to identify the financier of Burns’s investigation. Lehon identified Herbert Haas as the primary source of funds—which was true enough, as far as it went.

Investigator Burns was a showman; he loved the spotlight and enjoyed making a splash. His predisposition, combined with the Times’s determination to publicize the case, generated blizzards of headlines: “Burns Says He Can Solve Frank Case,” “Burns to Extend Frank Case Inquiry,” “Praise for Burns’s Work,” and “Conley Notes Show Guilt, Says Burns,” among others.⁴³

Lasker focused his efforts on persuading other influential newspapers—such as the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Baltimore Sun—to cover the Frank case.⁴⁴ Meanwhile, he kept his eye on his expensive investigator, and he didn’t like what he was reading. From his advertising experience, he knew the perils of claiming too much. As he wrote to Haas:

Referring to Burns: I do not know what effect it has in Atlanta, but when he was in the North he gave out statements that he knew who the murderer was. He gave it out in such a way that people up here expect that he will produce either a confession from the real murderer, or at least direct evidence. Failing to do that, the people up here will be very disappointed, and, to be very frank with you, I fear if he does not do something like that, it will hurt us and may do the case more harm than if he had not entered into it at all.⁴⁵

Burns’s provocative statements also caused trouble closer to the front lines. On May 2, he traveled to Marietta, Georgia—where Mary Phagan’s family lived—and was set upon by an angry mob. The New York Times wrote: “The detective’s declaration that Frank was not guilty and that James Conley, a negro factory sweeper convicted as an accessory after the murder, alone was responsible for the crime, aroused intense feeling here.”⁴⁶

Watson’s Jeffersonian, fulminating against northern intruders, helped to fuel these “intense feelings.” Just two weeks before, The Jeffersonian’s headline read: “The Leo Frank Case: Does the State of Georgia Deserve This Nation-Wide Abuse?”⁴⁷ Georgians were becoming increasingly defensive. They resented the interference of northerners—including the flashy Burns—as well as a national publicity campaign in which they were depicted as ignorant racists.

In mid-April, Lasker persuaded a pair of defense lawyers, John Tye and Henry Peeples, to file a motion in the Fulton County Superior Court arguing that Frank had been deprived of his constitutional right of due process because he was not present when the jury returned the verdict. The motion not only delayed Frank’s execution, but—because it dealt with an alleged violation of a constitutional right—also provided a potential avenue into the United States Supreme Court.

Because the ruling on the motion was not expected until mid-autumn, the Frank case was out of the New York Times for most of the summer.⁴⁸ But as September arrived, Lasker launched another energetic national publicity campaign in anticipation of a possible U.S. Supreme Court case.

Now Lasker’s cultivation of Collier’s editor Mark Sullivan began pay off. Sullivan assigned a celebrated journalist, Christopher Powell Connolly, to write an article in Collier’s.⁴⁹ Frank’s defense team supplied Connolly with exclusive information and court documents once he reached Atlanta. In the first week of December, Connolly sent Frank a letter telling him that he would write an eighteen-thousand-word article on the case and would align himself with Frank and the defense. Moreover, Collier’s would distribute the article to ten thousand newspapers “with permission to write in full.”⁵⁰

On November 14, 1914, the Supreme Court of Georgia denied the Tye-Peeples motion on the grounds that the appeal was not made directly after Frank’s conviction. Louis Marshall now joined Frank’s defense team, and the team approached the U.S. Supreme Court individually, including the distinguished Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In a written opinion, Holmes agreed that Frank had not received a fair trial, and argued that the trial took place “in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.”⁵¹ Holmes’s opinion garnered national media attention, but the U.S. Supreme Court denied the writ of error on December 7.⁵²

After the failure to reverse the conviction, a new execution date was set: January 22, 1915. Throughout December, Ochs and the New York Times kept the spotlight on Frank. The defense made one last attempt to get the case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, filing a writ of habeas corpus on December 17. That same day, Collier’s published the first part of Connolly’s article. It argued, among other things, that Frank “did not have a fair trial; that his conviction was the result of popular passion, which demanded a victim, and that all the facts point, not to Frank’s guilt, but to his innocence and to the negro Conley as the murderer.”⁵³

Connolly emphasized the mob qualities of the trial. He implied that Georgians were anti-Semitic, and willing to legally murder a Jew for the sake of “politics, prejudice, and perjury.” When the second part of the article appeared the following week, the Frank case once again became a national obsession. People across the country became overwhelmingly sympathetic to Frank, concluding that Georgia was determined to execute an innocent man.

Now Lasker gained a powerful new ally, as William Randolph Hearst aligned all of his papers with Frank. In a letter to a friend, Lasker reveled in the success of his stealthy campaign: “Outside the state of Georgia, the press of the United States, including the leading papers of every city in the South, are editorially agitating public sentiment for the unfortunate Frank. Daily, hundreds of papers are editorially crying that Frank’s execution would amount to judicial murder.”⁵⁴

On December 28, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Frank case. “The Supreme Court of the United States,” Justice Joseph R. Lamar wrote, “has never determined whether on a trial for murder in a state court, the due process clause of the federal Constitution guarantees the defendant a right to be present when the verdict is rendered.”⁵⁵ Because the case would not be heard for eight weeks, Frank gained a new stay of execution.

The review began on February 25, 1915. Louis Marshall now managed Frank’s defense. “I am glad that Mr. Marshall is taking hold of the matter,” Lasker wrote to Frank.⁵⁶ But on April 19, by a vote of seven to two, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction: “In our opinion, he is not shown to have been deprived of any right guaranteed to him by the Fourteenth Amendment or any other provision of the Constitution or laws of the United States. On the contrary, he has been convicted and is now held in custody under ‘due process of the law’ within the meaning of the Constitution. The judgment of the District Court refusing the application for a writ of habeas corpus is affirmed.”⁵⁷

On May 10, Judge Benjamin H. Hill of the Fulton County Court set Frank’s execution for June 22.

Frank’s last hope rested in the hands of the governor of Georgia, who had the authority either to set aside Frank’s conviction—a highly unlikely outcome—or commute the death sentence. Frank’s defense team had hoped that the presumably sympathetic governor-elect, Nathaniel H. Harris, would make the commutation decision, but they had to make their appeal to lame-duck governor John M. Slaton, who would hold office until June 26.

Lasker launched yet another campaign of petitions and letters demanding the commutation of Frank’s death sentence. In a single week in Chicago, more than 400,000 people signed a petition supporting the prisoner. Prominent citizens ranging from Thomas Edison to Jane Addams spoke out in Frank’s defense.⁵⁸ Senators and governors from fourteen states wrote to Governor Slaton, and groups of supporters traveled to Atlanta in the last week of May to present millions of signatures in person.⁵⁹

On June 12, Slaton initiated the final hearing in the Frank case, coming under enormous pressure from both sides as he made his momentous decision. Years later, Lasker recalled that the formidable William Randolph Hearst himself had lobbied the governor: “Brisbane did that—got Hearst to come down to go to the Governor . . . The only reason that the Governor didn’t pardon him completely, they all became so convinced that he was legally innocent that the Governor was afraid of race riots and said, ‘It is much better to let him stay in the penitentiary for a few years, then he will be pardoned.’”⁶⁰

After a week of mounting tension, Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence on the grounds that new evidence introduced after the trial undercut the testimony on which the conviction was based. Frank was transferred from his cell in the Tower to the State Prison Farm in rural Milledgeville.⁶¹ In a brief telegram to the New York Times, Frank responded to the commutation: “Deeply moved and gratified by Governor’s action, though innocent and suffering for a crime I did not commit, I await the complete vindication and exoneration which is rightfully mine. In the future I live to see the day when honor shall be restored to me.”⁶²

Georgians, meanwhile, reacted to the commutation with fury. A crowd of a thousand demonstrators gathered outside the governor’s country home. Slaton declared martial law and surrounded himself with a Georgia National Guard battalion. In Marietta, the governor was hanged in effigy, alongside a sign reading “John M. Slaton, King of the Jews and Georgia’s Traitor Forever.”⁶³

The nation remained intensely interested in Frank, creating enormous media pressure for more words from the prisoner. Haas advised against this strategy, believing that it would only inflame local passions and embolden Frank’s enemies. But Lasker encouraged Frank to keep issuing statements in his own defense.⁶⁴

On Saturday, July 17—just four weeks after Leo Frank was remanded to the Milledgeville prison—a fellow prisoner used a kitchen knife to carve a seven-and-a-half-inch-long gash in Frank’s throat. Bleeding profusely from a severed jugular vein, Frank was rushed to the prison hospital. He survived, but just barely. Lasker paid Frank’s medical bills, again taking care to disguise the source of those funds.⁶⁵

The Times report on the murderous assault was considerably shorter and more matter-of-fact than previous coverage, reflecting controversy at the newspaper about how much attention had been paid to Frank. But Adolph Ochs remained determined to keep the spotlight on the prisoner. At his insistence, the paper ran an article in late July condemning “the hideous mob spirit.”⁶⁶

The article proved horribly prescient. On August 16, 1915, Frank was discharged from the prison hospital and sent back to his cell. Just before midnight, a mob of at least two dozen men, many with links to the Ku Klux Klan, cut the telephone and telegraph wires connecting the prison to the outside world, broke into the prison, and seized Frank.⁶⁷ They then drove 125 miles to Marietta, and there, in the early morning sunlight, they lynched Leo Frank, hanging him from a tree in a grove where Mary Phagan had played as a child.

While the Constitution, the Journal, and the Georgian condemned the lynching, the Macon Daily Telegraph pointed to the role of outside influence in inflaming the passions of Georgians. An editorial entitled “Finis” asserted:

Thus was Leo Frank caught between the upper and nether millstones—the foolish, calamitous propaganda by alleged friends and the natural and justified resentment in Georgia against this outside interference, allied with the propaganda of Watson, and his life was taken—he was killed as an unclean thing is killed and left for the buzzards.

Such a thing can never happen again in Georgia. It would never have happened had the rest of the nation left this State to mind its own business, which would have been infinitely better for Frank, better for Georgia, better for the Jewish race in this State.⁶⁸

The editorial captured the most common local interpretation of the lynching: that it was caused by outside interference, which intensified previously latent anti-Semitic feelings. Asserting that newspaper coverage had failed to present the Georgian point of view, a circuit court judge who had been involved in the lynching offered an explanation: “The Jewish element are a very thrifty element, as a rule law-abiding. They do lots of advertising. I believe that had a great deal to do with the attitude of the presses.”⁶⁹

In the wake of Frank’s murder, Adolph Ochs instructed his staff to write an editorial condemning the horrific act of vigilantism, and then sent the piece to all of Georgia’s newspapers, assuming that they would dutifully print the editorial from New York. None did. In fact, the offended editor of the Macon Daily Telegraph wired Ochs that it was the “outside interference of the Jews”—including Ochs—that had made Frank’s death inevitable. He concluded by suggesting that the Times mind its own business.⁷⁰

Albert Lasker poured his heart, soul, and wealth into the defense of Leo Frank. In a typical letter to his father, sent six months before the end, he wrote, “The Frank case is taking practically all my time, and leaves me sorely pressed to even keep up with my business in a most superficial way.”⁷¹ The case had upset his mental equilibrium: “The amount of work and time consumed by it [the Frank case] you cannot imagine—it’s letting now—five and six hours daily—I have to spend all next week in New York on it. Added to this not only my regular work—but some charities of large proportions I am reorganizing—and I am as near to a breakdown from overwork as ever I was in my life.”⁷²

Now, despite all those costly efforts, Frank was dead, and Lasker concluded that his own relentless efforts had helped cause that death. He had inflamed deep racial prejudices, and once that evil genie escaped from its bottle, no one could put it back in: “I was seeing the ugly side of it; I was seeing what Macaulay saw, when he said, ‘The public is a great beast.’ And then the editors in working it up . . . ran editorials constantly with headlines like this: ‘The Crime of Georgia’ . . . We put the whole state of Georgia on trial, and we did what is so often done: in the cure that we gave for the disease, we increased the disease.”⁷³ Reluctantly, Lasker conceded that a quieter campaign probably would have been more effective. “We handled it badly, Brisbane and I,” he said. “We got him lynched instead of hung.”⁷⁴

From the Frank case, Lasker learned a lesson that he would remember for the rest of his life, which he summarized in an aphorism: “Very often the art of public relations is the art of private relations.”⁷⁵ But it was a lesson learned at the cost of a man’s life.

Under the circumstances, though, Lasker was far too hard on himself. True, Frank ultimately was “lynched instead of hung.” A case can even be made that Lasker helped revitalize the Ku Klux Klan.⁷⁶ But if the alternative was inaction, Lasker had no alternative. In response to his father’s repeated entreaties and his own impulses, he fought to protect a man who was in peril in part because of his religion—a Jewish man, from Texas, four years younger than himself, who like himself had made his own way in life.

In the tradition of his father and his uncle, Lasker acted to help the helpless. Perhaps the fight for Leo Frank was poorly fought—but it was fought, as Lasker later observed, by honest and inspired dreamers.⁷⁷