The Leo Frank Case

New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. First edition. Hardcover. Fine/very good. First printing. Hardcover. xiii+ 248 pp. with bibliography, index. Illustrations. Fine (prev. own. signature front pastedown hidden by jacket flap. In very good, price clipped dust jacket with a couple minor flaws. In April, 1913, the body of a 13-year-old girl was found in the basement of an Atlanta factory where she had worked. The factory's owner, a Jewish northern industrialist Leo Frank, admitted to being the last one to see her alive and he soon became the prime suspect in her murder. There followed a trial with sensational newspaper coverage, popular hysteria, and legal demagoguery, and Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. After the Georgia governor was presented with ecidence that justice had probably miscarries, his sentence was commuted but Frank was kidnapped from federal prison and lynched outside of Marietta. The vigilante mob included a former Georgia Governor, a former as well as current Marietta mayor. This work studies the case and its social ramifications, arguing that Frank paid for his real or imagined crimes by the citizens of Atlanta who believed themselves to have benn disadvantaged by northerners, industrialists, and Jews.