The Pure and the Sodomite: Masculinity, Sexuality and Antisemitism in the Leo Frank Case
1On August 16, 1915, a group of white citizens, who called themselves ‘The Knights of Mary Phagan,’ broke into the state prison farm of Georgia, kidnapped the detained, northern- born, Jewish factory superintendent and part owner of Atlanta’s National Pencil Factory, Leo Frank and lynched him a few hours later. Before this horrible outrage occurred, the Leo Frank Case had occupied the people of Atlanta and of the whole United States of America for two years. The starting point for this two-year-long affaire was provided by the murder of the thirteen-year-old white Mary Phagan on the ground of the National Pencil Factory, where she had labored as a wageworker to support her family. After her corpse was found on April 27, 1913, the police of Atlanta, under great pressure from the publicity, hastily started the inquiry into the murder. Rumors that Mary Phagan had been raped before she was killed, sprawled through Atlanta and elevated popular outrage. Within a short time criminal investigations into the case focused on Leo Frank and Jim Conley, the latter an African-American who labored in the pencil factory and who had been in conflict with the law a few times before the murder of Mary Phagan. After being convicted of Mary Phagan’s murder, Conley started to give evidence that Leo Frank had in fact been the murderer of the young woman and that he had just helped Frank to get rid of the corpse. The police and the state attorney accepted the information as true and used Conley as the key witness in the trial against Leo Frank.
2After a long trial, which had aroused great attention and commotion among the population of Atlanta, Leo Frank was sentenced to capital punishment. Following this verdict, Frank and his attorney appealed against this sentence as far as to the United States Supreme Court, but without success. After the denial of the appeal, supporters of Leo Frank, including journalists and editors of mainly Northern newspapers and journals, started a movement to achieve commutation. Starting in fall of 1914 this engagement resulted by October in a statement of William M. Smith, the lawyer of Jim Conley, in which he accused his own client as murderer of Mary Phagan. On June 21, 1915, Governor Slaton, after exactly grappling with the Leo Frank case and the including inconsistencies, reduced capital punishment of Leo Frank to life imprisonment (Dinnerstein, Leo Frank 114-125). Part of the population reacted with an exclamation of fury and blamed Slaton of committing “treachery.” Assuming that Slaton, as associate in the attorney’s office of Rosser, who acted as lawyer of Leo Frank in the case, was bribed, The Jeffersonian, a newspaper published in Georgia, concluded that “Jew money has debased us, bought us, and sold us – and laughs at us” (Anonymous, Old Paths 2).
3This essay deals with the discourses concerning manhood and antisemitism in a political milieu, which is titled ‘reactionary populism’ by Nancy MacLean. MacLean subsumes to this idea all grassroots movements which attack the social and economic elites, but which also represent a political programme that is based on the subordination of other groups of people. (920) The leading spokesperson for such a “reactionary populism” in the Leo Frank case was Thomas E. Watson, who in his political views strongly adhered to the principles of Thomas Jefferson. William J. Bryan, who was supported at the beginning of his political career by The Jeffersonian, described the societal imaginations of Jefferson as a programme, based on the idea that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that, to secure these rights, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. He believed that the people could be trusted to govern themselves” (671). At least in the understanding of Thomas E. Watson at the time of the Leo Frank case, this equality of all men did not merely count for only white men, but it moreover required the mastery of African Americans, Jews, Catholics, and women. This political view became clearly apparent in his approach to the Ku Klux Klan. On the one hand Watson justified the action of the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War as a measure to “defend Southern homes, Southern women, Southern civilization” (Anonymous [Watson], Klux 5). On the other hand Watson had a great impact on the foundation of the second Klan by paving the way ideologically:
The North can rail itself hoarse, if it chooses to do so: but if the L.&N. Railroad, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, the Roman Catholic School-Book Trust, the Liquor Dealers’ Association, and the Paul Warburg Money Trust, doesn’t quit meddling with our business, increasing offices, raising taxes, and getting pardons and commutations for assassins, poisoners, and rapists who have a “pull,” another Ku Klux Klan may be organized to restore Home Rule. (Anonymous [Watson], Woodward 7)
4The reactionary populist discourse dealing with the Leo Frank case provides an insight into important aspects of Southern white manhood at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, the constellation of suspects and the conviction of Leo Frank appear to be very unusual and astonishing to the contemporary observer of New South history. Astonishing, because for two reasons: First, after the end of Reconstruction the white population of the South,[1]In this article, the phrase “the South” will be used as denomination of the states, which had declared their secession from the United States and built the Confederate States of America. concerned about losing their domination of African-Americans, propagated the myth of the ‘black beast rapist.’ According to the logic of this anti-black discourse, which also circulated in reactionary populist circles, Jim Conley would actually represent the typical African-American rapist and therefore it would have been logical to consider him as the culprit. Second, because it was totally unusual that a testimony of an African-American against a non-black citizen was regarded as sufficient. For that reason, the question comes up which social, economical and cultural changes occurred that induced reactionary populists to view a Jew a more adequate delinquent - respectively victim - than an African American in this case.
5This essay posits that reactionary populism considered urbanization and industrialization, especially the consequential increase in female autonomy and changes in female sexuality, as a great threat to white premodern manhood and by attributing a large share of this development to ”the Jews,” the resistance against them was regarded as a measure to reconstitute white Southern manhood.[2]Of course, it is not the intention of this article to state that the perceived crisis of masculinity was the only reason for an increasing antisemitism during the Leo Frank Case.