Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,925

This is the grave of Mary Phagan, plus the pro-lynching propaganda placed there.

The story of Mary Phagan is a sad one and also an infuriating one in terms of what happened after her death.

The South was changing rapidly in the early 20th century and as these things go, people liked some of that and they did not like much of the rest of it. The rise of the textile mills transformed the little southern towns of the Piedmont, from Alabama up through north Georgia, the Carolinas, and east Tennessee. People from farms moved into these towns for work. Since child labor was part of the appeal for northern capital to move to the South, many of them were children. One of them was Mary Phagan, a young girl whose family moved to the growing textile town of Marietta, Georgia after she was born in 1899, in Florence, Alabama. Now, not every new factory was a textile factory. Some made other things. Phagan’s family was in Marietta, but she got a job in the National Pencil Company factory in nearby Atlanta. Her supervisor was a man named Leo Frank. One day, Frank saw her and then later that night, she was found dead in the factory, murdered after being raped. That day was also Confederate Memorial Parade Day, so the racists were all frothing at the mouth. She wanted to attend the parade but never made it.

What happened to Phagan remains unknown. But it’s extremely unlikely Frank killed her. A janitor is the most likely suspect. In any case, the murder of Phagan became a huge cause in Atlanta. That this factory was owned by Jews and northern Jews for that matter made the outrage reach a fever pitch. Suspicion fell on Leo Frank. He was charged with murder based on no evidence. The janitor was kept in isolation for six weeks and then told to testify against him, despite telling wildly different stories all the time about how Frank had him help hide the body. Mobs surrounded the courthouse, demanding a conviction. The entire city of Atlanta wanted to see the Jew pay for killing that nice white girl.

A leading musician known as Fiddlin’ John Carson, who later would become one of the first recording stars of country music, helped raise the stakes here, writing songs about Mary Phagan. When Frank was found guilty, Atlanta celebrated.

Meanwhile, Jews around the nation were aghast. Frank had incompetent defense lawyers. When the leading Jewish lawyer Louis Marshall gave advice to his lawyers, they ignored him entirely. There were appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, but they were all on procedural grounds, not on the point that he was not guilty and it was a farce. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes did vote to throw out the convictions based on the fact that it was a trial held in a mob atmosphere, but they were the only justices to do so.

Pressure grew to commute the sentence and let Frank free. The Georgia governor, John Slaton, was on the fence. But here came Tom Watson. The former Populist had now turned full on race-baiter and anti-Semite. He used his powerful newspaper network to demand justice for Phagan, which meant the death sentence for Frank. Slaton stayed on the fence despite the pressure. Although he was convinced of Frank’s innocence, he commuted the sentence to life in prison, assuming that once feelings cooled a bit, Frank would be found completely innocent and let free. Fiddlin’ John Carson was on the statehouse steps performing his new songs about Phagan in protest of the commutation in front of large crowds.

Frank was sent to a prison farm. He was nearly killed by another inmate who slashed his throat with a knife. On August 16, 1915, 25 citizens of Marietta, where Phagan was from, arrived at the prison farm and took him. It does seem that the guards did anything at all to even pretend to prevent this. They drove him to Marietta. And they lynched him from an oak tree. He was dead at the age of 31. Fiddlin’ John Carson then wrote another song about the oak tree and celebrating the murder. A crowd of 3,000 people gathered around the tree the next day and took pictures of themselves with the body.

This all helped spur the recreation of the Ku Klux Klan, also in 1915, and which dominated much of the nation for the next decade, using ideas of immigrants threatening white women as its core to succeed. While this iteration of the KKK was anti-Black, that wasn’t really where it focused its attention. It was on immigrants and especially Jews like Frank, as well as sexually liberated women who were voting too. The best way to think about the second KKK is as the real precursor to MAGA, though it never developed a Trump figure. But it’s really the same combination of nostalgia, fear, hate, and cynicism that drives these people too, with a lot of emphasis on the first issue, looking to roll back the nation to a time when its members felt more comfortable than they did with all this scary modernism changing their lives.

In 1982, an 83 year old man who had worked as an office boy all the way back in the day testified that he had seen the janitor move the body of Phagan to the factory’s basement after he had presumably murdered her. This led the state of Georgia to pardon Frank in 1986, a mere 71 years after his lynching.

Now, the fact that Phagan was killed and Frank lynched for it is just a horrible, awful, no-good story. Every part about it is awful. This would be a sad and depressing grave post anyway. And then you add in the pro-lynching apologies placed at the grave site after 1986. This isn’t some leftover from 1925. This is new! Better make sure to note that the pardon did not exonerate Leo Frank! Need to remind everyone that we totally think he did and no pardon by squishy Jew loving liberals is going to get in the way of our beliefs about this! It’s so, so gross and awful. They’re ready to lynch again to protect our white women!

I came out of that cemetery really cursing the South more bitterly than almost any other time and I’ve seen a lot of horrors of southern history.

Mary Phagan is buried in Marietta City Cemetery, Marietta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other people involved in this case, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Fiddlin’ John Carson is in Atlanta and Tom Watson is in Thomson, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.