Fact-Checking the 1913 Leo Frank Case’s Popular Narrative of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Gentilism in the Information Age.
Leo Frank Hoax #9: Half of Georgia’s 3,000 Jews left the state in the aftermath of Leo Frank’s August 17, 1915, Lynching, because of the rampant and widespread milieu of Antisemitism at the time.
The Internet has changed our perceptual understanding of history from traditionally what it was supposed or meant to be — an objective chronicling of the past — to what it has mostly always been under the surface, especially on contentious events; a subjective power struggle of narrative dominance and intellectual warfare. Predominant orthodox narratives are often determined by more ideologically motivated ‘schools of thought’ and better-organized identity-based groups. These energetic clusters of identitarians are subjectively driven by their own self-serving social or political agendas, not objective history. In a world of editorial gatekeeping in peer-reviewed journals, media-controlled orthodoxies, manufactured consensus, and publish-or-perish mandates in the academy, breaking through bigoted schools of thought and challenging the orthodox entrenchment of dominant narratives, can prevent professors and journalists from developing their careers. The mainstream media and educational system, the way they are formulated today is no different from the way they have always been designed, heterodoxy and revisionism are punished, and orthodoxies are rewarded.
The Leo Frank case is a prime example of this tendency that the retelling of contentious events in history often becomes less about objectivity and facts, and more about intersectional dynamics of competing activist groups who are attempting to control popular perceptions of historical storylines for their own benefit of establishing the moral high-ground. The benefit of controlling the story of history should be clear and obvious, it benefits the up-and-coming establishment of the time, serves ethnocentric, racial-centric, and zealous religious groups, and their goal of weakening what they perceive as their opposition. Paraphrasing Orwell, “Who controls the present, controls the past and who controls the past controls the future.” Controlling the narrative of the present is all about controlling the narrative of the past, to control the narrative of the future.
Controlling historiography and its output in text, audio, and visual media is warfare with intention: political, ideological, ethnic, and racial, in nature. It is the reason why narratives of history that are commonly repeated should be examined for which group(s) it benefits and which group it detracts from. Qui Bono — who benefits? It’s a question we should continue to ask as we delve into the Leo Frank case and why.
Fact-checking the Jewish and Gentile accounts of Antisemitism and Antigentilism in the information age (AKA the Internet Age) is a way to give a clearer picture of what happened in the past by looking at the original evidence and how it was interpreted at the time, and how the chronicling the case has evolved over the decades and generations. The questions we should be asking when we are seeking the objective truth are: What facts are emphasized by the popular authors of the Leo Frank case, and what facts do they omit or obfuscate, especially since the #1 website on Google is Wikipedia and it says to paraphrase: “the consensus of historians is that Leo Frank is innocent and his employee Jim Conley is guilty”. For anyone unfamiliar with the case we might just presume to just trust modern historians, but for those who study the case in depth, there is a great division of opinion between the contemporary judicial system and modern intelligentsia.
We have a conundrum here because a coroner’s jury voted unanimously to bind Leo Frank over to a grand jury, a grand jury voted unanimously to indict Leo Frank, a petit jury voted unanimously to convict Leo Frank and sentence him to death, a state supreme ruled the evidence at the convicts trial sustained the verdict, and all appeals to the supreme court failed.
“The consensus of historians is that Leo Frank is innocent and his employee Jim Conley is guilty”
This is the orthodox narrative of our time by the dominant schools of thought, academic journals, news outlets, and popular culture adherents, but does it comport with the facts of the case?
The extrajudicial hanging of Leo Frank was obviously illegal and immoral, but would people presume it was justified and thereby validate mob law if he was actually guilty based on the evidence? Is this what is at the heart of all the false accusations of Antisemitism levied by our coreligionists? Does Frank’s stature as a B’nai B’rith president of Georgia and the reason why the ADL was founded, have anything to do with the fanatical desire to rehabilitate him with Antigentilic canards?
What is the context of his 1915 lynching if his 1913 murder trial jury unanimously judged him guilty and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in 1914 the trial evidence sustained his guilt? And, what is the context of the case if the Jury and Supreme Court of Georgia are not mistaken, but correct in their judgment? Is the context his lynching was illegal but karma is the highest God? Is the context that sometimes vigilantism is justice? If the trial brief of evidence tends to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, does it somehow validate his assassination? These are the vexing unanswered questions students of the Leo Frank case ask when they go beyond the issue of whether or not Leo Frank is innocent or guilty. These are the deeper curiosities of students when the justice system fails.
Does Frank’s lynching get tacit justification by “the people” when Governor John Slaton commuted the death sentence of his own law firm’s customer? Luther Rosser was Leo Frank’s lead counselor at the trial and state appeals. Governor John Slaton was Luther Rosser’s law partner in the law group of ‘Rosser, Bradon, Slaton, and Phillips’.
These are some of the sociological mysteries that people who study the case, without taking-sides, are trying to understand about human nature and justice. The ultimate question being: What is justice?
It’s also helpful to understand how our perceptual understanding of history has become one of skepticism as a starting point during the Internet age where disinformation and agenda-purposed propaganda are so easily spread under the guise of academic scholarship and independent journalism. Before the mainstreaming of the Internet, people were more likely to assume good faith as a starting point when presented with news and historical narratives, but after the Internet was overwhelmed with fake news, academic propaganda, and media disinformation, all of it coming from disparate political parties and state regimes, people are now more likely to assume skepticism as a starting point when learning about wedge issues.
The Internet might have inadvertently made people less susceptible to propaganda, as its users are more skeptical than ever before about the veracity of the information they receive in a world increasingly dominated by polarizing social politics. The Leo Frank case exemplifies this concept of polarizing opinions, with the judicial system coming to a polar opposite position from the academy and press.
The Leo Frank case was the perfect storm of intersectionality, fading regional resentments that opened fresh North vs. South wounds; working class vs. moneyed-interests seeking to protect their own economic interests; child labor, and racial hierarchies, to name a few. These hot-button issues are some of the major reasons why the case has been the focal point of intense coverage at the time and why there is a renewed interest in it today. Examples of antigentilism and antisemitism can be found colliding frequently in this case. And the issue of antigentilism has been given the least amount of coverage in this affair. Had Leo Frank not been a white Jew, but instead a white Gentile, the case would be framed in modern times as a victory in civil rights for African Americans, yet today few people know that Leo Frank tried to frame 2 of his African American employees and 1 White employee for the rape-murder of Mary Phagan.
Antisemitism vs. Facts.
In the Leo Frank case, the common narrative built into the fabric of our understanding of the case has been centered around allegations of antisemitism, with less focus put on the actual facts presented at the trial and why so many people were convinced of the defendant's guilt, then and now.
The lionshare of monographs, magazine articles, and news reports written in the centenary aftermath of the early 20th-century Phagan rape-murder case, have in hindsight been published by seemingly ethnically self-conscious Jewish intellectuals and to a lesser degree Jewish sympathetic Gentiles who have focused their analysis on framing the true crime as a morality tale of anti-terrorism and anti-semitism, while racistly directing suspicion on a Black man — an accessory to the aftermath of the murder — who contributed significantly to helping the police solve the murder. In these retellings, the murder of Mary Phagan is relegated to an afterthought and an inconvenient background fact, with the focus primarily on recontextualizing Leo Frank’s trial as a judicial farce, with a conviction by a mob-terrorized jury. The brief of evidence, sworn testimony and the significance of the exhibits presented at trial are sidelined in favor of a story that is more concerned with presenting the legal proceedings as an American Dreyfus affair or a Salem witch hunt.
The predominant narrative about the trial of Frank from Jewish civic groups is more or less monolithic that the episode was in essence a ‘war against the Jews’ due to “rampant” and “widespread” anti-Semitism in the anti-Jewish cultural milieu of the time. This narrative has even been publicly codified, etched in public monuments, funded, and inaugurated by the Jewish leaders and their civic or religious advocacy groups in Georgia. Gentiles on the other hand believe that Jews and Gentiles have gotten along just fine for centuries in the South, with much intermarriage and business partnership. Gentiles tend to believe Leo Frank was lynched because he was a lethal child-rapist, not because of his religious faith.
What is amazing about the Leo Frank case is the amount of brazen academic fraud that is promulgated to convince people Leo Frank was convicted and lynched because of antisemitism. A common assertion from Jewish professors, journalists, and communal groups is to paraphrase, “Half of Georgia’s 3,000 Jewish families left the state because of widespread Antisemitism related to the lynching of Leo Frank on August 17th, 1915, in Marietta.”
The Jewish Exodus of Georgia, Circa 1915: Fact or Antigentile Hoax?
Leo Frank’s historical defenders, and modern-day rehabilitators known together as The Frankites, have asserted, that following the lynching of Leo Frank on August 17, 1915, a milieu of anti-Semitism was so pervasive during that tumultuous period, that it had resulted in half of Georgia’s 3,000 Jewish families evacuating from the state.
But those activists who promulgated this assertion never bothered to actually check the freely available population statistics available in Jewish demography sources. This is a common feature of the Jewish narrative of the Leo Frank case, that the assertions made often veer into academic fraud and extreme Antigentilism.
The population of Jews in Georgia was estimated to be about 9,300 people in 1907 and in 1918 — three years after Leo Frank was lynched (1915), the Jewish population grew to an estimated 22,414 members, an increase of more than 13,000 Jewish residents. This population increase represents a 241% growth of Jewish people between this 11-year time period, an increase factor of 2.4 X (two point four ex), not a population decline of -50% (negative fifty percent) or a decrease factor of .5 (negative point five). If Antisemitism was widespread and rampant at the time, you would think the population of Jews would not have doubled. This is direct evidence that the false accusation of Antisemitism is a racial hoax and an example of antigentilism.
Was Anti-Semitism Rampant at the time?
Let us continue to explore the facts of the case and look to see if the evidence was sufficient to convict Leo Frank as the Georgia Supreme Court put in writing when they rejected Leo Frank’s appeal for a new trial. The evidence presented at the trial continues to convince people who are not of partisan camps that Leo Frank was in fact guilty. This is in direct opposition to most of the books written on the trial which seek to promote the idea he was the sole victim, not the perpetrator of any crime, and Mary Phagan is disregarded as an obtuse counterplot.
The Georgia Supreme Court records show egregious examples of Leo Frank’s defense team engaging in lawlessness from seduction of witnesses with jobs, bribery and subornation of perjury, lending more credence to Leo Frank’s guilt, but this information is seldom ever discussed in any of the books promoting Leo Frank’s innocence. It makes it even more necessary that these affidavits in the Georgia Supreme Court records of Frank's defense team's criminal actions, described by the people who supposedly repudiated their trial testimony, be released to the public.
The Antigentile hoaxes promoted about 3,000 Jews leaving the state, Mary Phagan’s bite wounds, and Leo Frank’s dental X-rays continue to abound, with total disregard for its obvious academic fraud by accredited professors and journalists who are bound by ethical rules mandating their honesty and integrity. This is direct evidence that history and journalism are warfare, while the rules of academic integrity are completely disregarded by ideology-driven professors and orthodoxy-affirming journalists.
August 17, 2015 — August 17, 1915: The Centennial of Leo Frank’s Lynching.
On August 17th, 2015, there were three well-known memorials for Leo Frank, several in Marrietta — metro Atlanta Georgia — by two competing Synagogues, juxtaposed by an event featuring Jonathan Greenblatt, and one major event at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens NY, held by Jewish leadership which was in political office in New York City. Those in attendance at Mount Carmel Cemetery are listed below, including a rising star in the Anti-Defamation League, the organization which was founded in response to the conviction of Leo Frank (according to a tweet by Jonathan Greenblatt, now CEO of ADL).
April 26, 2013 — April 26, 1913.
What was completely absent on the centennial of Mary Phagan’s molestation-murder was the same level of media coverage Frank received at his lynching centennial. Sadly, there were no church memorials for Phagan’s grotesque slaying on the 100th anniversary.
APPENDIX
A Little Girl is Dead, 1965, Harry Golden
Pages: 275–276
“By noon, all the Jewish businessmen had closed shop, and on the South Side people had sent their colored servants home. Jews locked their homes and, in the afternoon, began checking into the hotels, the Winecoff, the Kimball House, the Georgia Terrace, and the Piedmont. Many of the Jewish men took their families to the railroad station and sent their wives and children to relatives outside the state.”
Strangers within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845–1915 (Philadelphia, 1978) Steven Hertzberg,
Page 213:
“Harry Golden has written that all Jewish businessmen closed shop, locked their homes, and checked into hotels, most remaining for several days. However, while Jews undoubtedly preferred the safety of hotel rooms and a few send their families out of the state, there was no dramatic exodus or panic. The Jews were frightened, but most went about their business as usual, and no serious incidents occurred.”
Page 217:
“From 4,000 in 1910, the Jewish population rose to 10,000 in 1948, 16,500 in 1968, and 21,000 in 1976.”
Portrait of an American: Lawyer Sam Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Wilson Quarterly (1976-) Vol. 14, №1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 118–123 (6 pages) Published By: Wilson Quarterly https://www.jstor.org/stable/4025949
Page 120:
“He might have had a career in Georgia politics, even though he was a Jew. But unpleasant events surrounding the infamous Leo Frank case intervened and made this impossible. In 1912, the innocent pencil manufacturer Leo Frank was railroaded on a charge of raping and murdering of is employees in a turbulent that roused the ugliest passion of racism and anti-Semitism that Georgia had ever seen. The case became a newspaper sensation. My father, though still one of the most junior members of the bar, lent a local hand to the defense, as aide to several eminent imported Eastern lawyers, including the distinguished Louis Marshall. When to no one’s surprise, Frank was convicted, my father had the bitter assignment of carrying that word to Frank’s wife. In 1915, after his death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, Frank was seized and lynched by a raging mob, who has the shamelessness to have their photographs taken standing proudly beside the dangling body of the innocent Frank. There followed in Atlanta one of the worst pogroms ever known in an American city, an unpleasant remainder of the Russia from which the Boorstin-Boorsetin Brothers had fled. My mother’s brothers then owned a men’s clothing store in Atlanta, whose store windows, like those of other Jewish merchants, were smashed in the aftermath of the Frank case. The prospects were not good for a young Jewish lawyer interested in politics.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Boorstin
Biography, “Boorstin was born in 1914, in Atlanta, Georgia, into a Jewish family. His father, Samuel, was a lawyer who participated in the defense of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was accused and convicted of the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl. After Frank’s 1915 lynching led to a surge of anti-Semitic sentiment in Georgia, the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Boorstin was raised. He graduated from Tulsa’s Central High School in 1930, at the age of 15.[3]”
The Jew Accused, 1991 by Albert S. Lindemann
Page 270:
“Earlier accounts of this period, particularly Golden’s A Little Girl is Dead, presented a picture of Jewish panic, of exodus from the city [of Atlanta] but a more recent and careful scholar [Hertzberg] has concluded that ‘there was no dramatic exodus or panic [of Jews]. The Jews were frightened, but most went about their business as usual and no serious incidents occurred.”
Page 275:
“Even when is Atlanta, where the Jewish community was deeply shaken by the Frank Affair and where Jewish leaders long opposed efforts to rehabilitate Frank because of the hostility such efforts might revive, Jews continued to move into the city in numbers no less impressive than before the Frank Affair.”
Institute of Southern Jewish Life Study, Goldring/Woldenberg, 2006 http://www.isjl.org/history/archive/ga/atlanta.html
“The Community Grows
Despite the fears stemming from the Frank lynching, Atlanta’s Jewish community continued to grow. In 1910 there had been 4,000 Jews, by 1937 there were 12,000.”
The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Vol 3, The Leo Frank Case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man, 2016, Nation of Islam
Pages 339:
“Despite the fears stemming from the Frank lynching, Atlanta’s Jewish community continued to grow from 4,000 Jews in 1910 to 12,000 by 1937.” Source: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Vol 3, ‘The Leo Frank Case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man’ (2016), Nation of Islam, Pages 330–344.
BACKGROUND:
What we call “The Internet” or “World Wide Web” and take for granted as a fact of everyday life, is incuriously treated with ambivalence about its original intentions and why those intentions matter today. Many endusers are unaware that the Internet’s nascent development in the early 1970s — first among a growing number of U.S. governmental, military, and civic research institutions — was designed for the purpose of speedily enabling the sharing of information across vast distances, whilst being fundamentally structured to serve as a robust nuclear-proof communication network. Nuclear-proof meant even if some nodes (points of connection and contact) were voluntarily or involuntarily disconnected, or even in a worst-case scenario destroyed in military strikes, other nodes could continue to be unaffected — in a word, it was a censorship-proof web in its whole, despite individual nodes having the capacity to moderate access to content.
With increased adoption and usage of the expanding Internet network in the academy during the forthcoming decades, the Internet was destined to eventually go mainstream and as fate would have it, become a global phenomenon. Then a tipping point occurred. “The Internet age” as it is called, is generally thought to have begun in the 1990s when Internet access and resources began to be more freely available to anyone with a computer. Fast forward to the present and we find ourselves with this vital resource on steroids, having the majority of books, images, videos, and public records found to be stored online at various websites. Now thanks to Elon Musk and Starlink, people in even the most remote parts of the planet can access the web via satellite.
While the Internet was intended to be decentralized without anyone being able to completely control it, there was a shakeout and consolidation of big tech websites during the new millennia around the year 2000, into what are at present an oligopoly of technology behemoths controlling the most widely used search engines, email tools, podcast outlets, video-sharing platforms, e-stores and social media websites. With those resources becoming quickly policy-dominated by hyperethnocentric lobby groups, like the ADL, SPLC, and other Jewish organizations which purport to be “civil rights groups”. One thing became completely apparent, they conspicuously turn a blind eye when Jews are violating people's human rights. This is why history is warfare and this is why many of our moral guardians are really only seeking to protect their own interests, not the universal values to seek to protect everyone from violence.
Largely Jewish activist groups partnered with the emerging big tech companies to censor people which they considered anathema to their extreme end of the political spectrum, which was a schizophrenic combination of far-left social agendas for Western countries and far-right advocacy for the apartheid regime of Israel. Through backroom dealings with politicians and government officials, the Internet became a tool to censor political opponents by labeling them, extremist or fringe. When members of their own group engaged in such behavior, they turned a blind eye and censored whistleblowers who exposed such violence.
In effect, the Internet became a tool to silence political opponents and anyone skeptical of hasbara propaganda was labeled an anti-Semite or in my case a “self-hating” Jew because I seek universal civil rights for all peoples. The Internet became a perverse tool for censorship by the most organized of the ruling elites and ethnoreligious lobbies, instead of a Townsquare for increased dialogue and debate, challenging our basic assumptions and presuppositions.
The nuclear-proof Internet entered into semi-dark ages of Jewish supremacist cancel culture and pro-Zionist hegemonic propaganda, something which deeply troubles me as a liberal-leaning Jew. It’s something that is deeply troubling to a growing number of diasporic Jews, who are increasingly seeing Zionism as a vicious form of White supremacism and an ongoing crime against humanity.
Before the Internet, it was easy for academic activists and ethnic activist groups like the ADL to control the narratives on subjects of interest to them by shaping our perceptions with a monolithic narrative. This came about by them focusing their influence on creating partnerships with news or entertainment media on TV in the evenings and weekend presentations, while during the day they could determine scholarship narratives in the academy through agitator professors with tenure.
But even with ADL partnerships enabling big tech censorship efforts, we could still explore elsewhere on the Internet without using manipulated algorithms like Google. We have the ability to shape our own narratives on topics of interest to us through old-fashioned independent research, starting with the primary sources and discarding the secondary schools of thought which are determined by ethnocentric propaganda. The Leo Frank case is the perfect example of how this tendency for identity-based groups, such as Jewish advocates to create self-serving conclusions. If Leo Frank is determined to be guilty by people who read his trial brief of evidence, then many people might see his extrajudicial lynching as justified. Is this what is at stake and why there is so much pro-Frank propaganda that veers into academic fraud?
The last 30 years of advancements in the science of computer and network technology have made it exceedingly possible for diverse people and identity-based groupings of people from across the world to communicate and share information with each other instantaneously and at the click of a button.
The development of the global information age has also seen an increased demand for the use of the Internet as a means of disseminating information and exchange of ideas, but not always with the best intentions. One man’s facts are another man’s falsehoods. Getting at the truth is more of a process than a destination. The development of a new form of communication, known as social media, has accelerated this process of the spread of disinformation and objective truth-seeking.
With respect to the issue of fakenews and fact searching, deeper questions that emerge when you study the Leo Frank case is not whether Leo Frank is innocent or guilty, but why are there so many journalists and professors with academic credentials willing to engage in academic fraud in an effort to try and convince people of Leo Frank’s innocence. This question keeps emerging now that the legal records of the case have been made available to the public.
Accusations of hubris, prejudice, bigotry, bias, and disinformation levied by major sectarian groups from all walks of life have been hurled against others with such vehemence about nearly every contentious subject that the public has been led to believe that skepticism of every claim is necessary. Trust but verify, is being replaced with always investigate the motives and who benefits from the given claims.
Skepticism of the narrative that the historical consensus of “Leo Frank was innocent and Jim Conley was the real killer” have led many to the conclusion that history is warfare with professors and journalists acting as its mercenaries.
