I remark from time to time that many Jews, having some knowledge of the long course of three thousand years of anti-semitism, remain always alarmed at possibilities of recurrence. Here's a typical example why:

Mary Phagan was a country girl, her family part of the haggard Southern yeomanry that, with the onset of industrialization in post-bellum Georgia, had forsaken the land for the bleak mill villages around Atlanta. She was auburn-haired and blue-eyed, with ruddy cheeks, and was said to have an eager and sprightly nature. Little more is known of her beyond, as Oney reports, the fact that she was entranced with the new glamour of the movies. She had been working since the age of ten, most recently for about a year in the National Pencil Factory. On the morning of the day she was to die—Saturday, April 26, 1913—"after eating a breakfast of cabbage and wheat biscuits," in Oney's striking opening line, she had dressed and boarded a trolley car for downtown Atlanta to pick up her pay envelope of $1.20.

[...]

But many of its factories were flourishing on child labor, Georgia law allowing ten-year-olds to work as long as eleven hours a day. The dispossessed country folk like Mary Phagan's family, from whom those child laborers came, felt a sullen resentment at their desperate dependence on that license. It was a rancor, with many of the factories owned by Jewish entrepreneurs, that would smolder throughout the trial following Mary Phagan's death.

[...]

While Atlanta had long shown an unusually easy and hospitable acceptance of the Jewish families settled in its midst, neither they nor Frank could have been unaware that they made their home in a region of raw racism. Though the Klan with its anti-Semitic vituperations had been fairly dormant since the 1870s, lynchings continued at a brisk pace—in Georgia, there would be 508 of them between 1882 and 1930, twenty-two in 1915 alone. But this readiness for vigilante execution had seemed almost exclusively occupied with African-Americans, and Atlanta's Jews maintained a resolute cheerfulness about the comfortable normalcy of their own place in the community.

[...]

However bizarre and unlikely these notes seemed, police suspicions quickly settled on Leo Frank, principally owing to his behavior when they arrived at his house early Sunday morning to notify him of Mary Phagan's murder. It was a time when much melodramatic import was placed on particulars of manner, and police would later testify that Frank paced about his front parlor "nervous" and "excited," blurting questions as he twisted his hands, his voice "hoarse and trembling." Being aroused early on a morning to receive such macabre news from two bluff and baleful Atlanta police officers might have been enough to unnerve anyone. But it was to be presented as additionally incriminating that when Frank was taken to the factory site, he answered detectives' queries with explanations that struck them as too elaborately voluble and that, on being taken to a mortuary, he had turned away from the sight of Mary Phagan's body lying on the concrete slab. On little more evidence than this, he was formally arrested a day later and put in Atlanta's city jail.

The murder notes, though, remained something of a puzzle until the factory's twenty-nine-year-old black sweeper, James Conley, was also arrested when seen at the factory's water cooler trying to wash out red stains from a work shirt. Having been frequently jailed before for drunk and disorderly conduct, once for attempted armed robbery, with two terms on Georgia chain gangs, Conley now offered up a succession of contradictory avowals—including, initially, that he couldn't read or write. But under the sort of strenuous interrogation Southern lawmen could apply to a black subject, he finally professed that Frank, after killing the girl on the factory's second floor in a ravishment attempt gone awry, had enlisted his aid in transporting her body in the elevator down to the basement, and then dictated to him the murder notes, with the rather improbable remark to him, Conley claimed, "Why should I hang, I have wealthy people in Brooklyn."

Meanwhile, public fevers had already begun gathering. On the afternoon of Frank's visit to the funeral home, some ten thousand local folk had also collected there to shuffle past an open casket holding Mary Phagan's body, and Frank's subsequent arrest was announced by a local paper, above a photo of him, "POLICE HAVE THE STRANGLER," in what had become a free-for-all among the city's three newspapers of clangoring headlines like "NEIGHBORS OF SLAIN GIRL CRY FOR VENGEANCE." This rising clamor stirred no little unease among those in Atlanta's Jewish community sensitive to the precariousness of their position in a society into which they had assiduously strived to absorb themselves. After a somewhat raffishly opportunistic local attorney was found to have offered money for stolen police documents that might compromise the case against Frank, he simply counter-blustered that the police had "sold out to the Jews for big money" to humiliate him in order "to protect this damned Jew." Thus, only a month after Frank's arrest, what Atlanta's Jews feared most—an outbreak of anti-Semitic antipathies lurking in the populace—was loosed into the air.

[...]

Instead, those proceedings to decide Frank's fate turned into largely a tournament of competing racisms. It was one of the few instances in the South of a white man, in every other way impeccably respectable, being tried for a capital crime mainly on the testimony of, as Conley was characterized by the defense, "a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger...fired with lust...." In fact, the racial derision of Conley was heartily participated in by all parties, including the press, one reporter pointing out, "Conley isn't a cornfield negro. He's more of the present-day type of city darkey," and even The New York Times would eventually describe him as a "drunken, lowlived, utterly worthless...black human animal." But the prosecution as well concurred in the racist caricaturing of its central witness, Dorsey declaring, about Frank's reluctance to directly confront Conley before the trial, "never in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race...did an ignorant, filthy negro accuse a white man of a crime and that man decline to face him."

The telling difference in that formulation, of course, was that Frank didn't happen to be of the Anglo-Saxon race. And as if in acknowledgment of that liability, a defense lawyer insisted, "Frank's race don't kill. They are not a violent race," and later, the defense felt it had to stipulate that one of its witnesses was, "it's true, a Jew, but she was telling the truth." The defense finally risked arousing exactly what it was protesting by claiming that Frank had only invited prosecution because he "comes from a race of people that have made money." To counter that suggestion, Dorsey intoned that while "this great people rise to heights sublime...they sink to the depths of degradation, too," mentioning among a list of Jewish malefactors Judas Iscariot, "a good character and one of the Twelve" who nevertheless "took the thirty pieces of silver and betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ."

It wasn't long before these two contending racisms would be joined by the offstage vociferations of Georgia's raucous demagogue Tom Watson. A scruffy populist evangel descended from Jefferson's old dream of a democracy of small farmers, Watson had originally labored to mobilize, against the advent of the industrial Gilded Age financed by Wall Street, an alliance between the poor whites and blacks of the South. But after a defeat for reelection to Congress and then as the vice-presidential nominee of William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party, Watson by 1913 had retreated into a rancorous vilification of not only blacks but Catholics and Jews. He wrote in his weekly The Jeffersonian, as the trial began to catch the appalled attention of the national press, "It seems that Negroes are good enough to hold office, sleep in our beds, eat at our tables, marry our daughters, and mongrelize the Anglo-Saxon race, but are not good enough to bear testimony against a rich Jew!"; "the fact" was, he quoted from a dingily anti-Semitic volume of the time, "pleasure loving Jewish businessmen spare Jewesses, but PURSUE GENTILE GIRLS...." Before things were over with, Watson's weekly had tripled its readership to almost 100,000 across the state.

[...]

After a trial lasting a month, the jury took only an hour and forty-five minutes to declare Frank guilty. The throng of five thousand outside the courtroom broke into a tumult of celebration, hats tossed in the air, and when Dorsey emerged, he was hoisted up and passed by jubilant hands over the heads of the crowd. The next morning, Frank was sentenced to hang, and shortly thereafter, the jurors, Dorsey, the judge, and reporters congregated at a park for a convivial barbecue with catfish and Brunswick stew.

But Atlanta's Jewish citizens had been left profoundly shaken by the trial's revelations of the anti-Semitic sentiment lingering in the society where they had with such determined optimism chosen to make their lives. Even so, against the pronounced misgivings of some Jewish leaders, others now mounted within the nation's Jewish community—which would later evolve into the Anti-Defamation League—a campaign to appeal to the whole country's conscience, for a rejection of the plainly anti-Semitic verdict against Frank. The publisher Adolph Ochs, after an initial reluctance to involve his New York Times lest it be perceived as simply "a Jewish newspaper," finally opened its pages to a series of condemnatory reports and editorials. And before long, the Frank case had amplified into a national scandal, with protests in magazines and newspapers from Boston to Milwaukee to Houston, and popular appeals for clemency and a new trial from an array of governors and senators and figures ranging from Boston's mayor James Curley to Jane Addams, Thomas Edison, even, improbably, Henry Ford.

Yet for the most part, the national furor only had the effect in Georgia of producing a popular backfire of indignation over being maligned by outsiders, and an intractable resolve that Frank must hang. That reaction was especially invigorated by the invective of Tom Watson in The Jeffersonian: "The pure little Gentile victim is dust in the grave, while the Sodomite who took her sweet young life basks in the warmth..., the be-flowered pet" of a national solicitude promoted by "millionaire Jews." And he delivered, in his usual circus-poster effusion of punctuation and typefaces, clear exhortations to a lynching: "If Frank's rich connections keep on lying about this case, SOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN."