Cutthroat Pardoned

After 20 years the name of Leo Frank still makes news in Georgia and beyond. A slender young Brooklyn Jew with a Cornell degree. Frank went South, married an Atlanta girl, became superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory. In April 1913, a 14-year-old worker named Mary Phagan was found violently murdered in the factory's basement. Two days later Frank was arrested for the crime, tried and convicted largely on the testimony of a Negro employed as a sweeper in the factory. New York City Jews rushed to Frank's defense, raised funds to appeal his case in vain to the U. S. Supreme Court, charged Georgia with "railroading" him. This outside interest caused Georgians to lust for Frank's blood, guilty or innocent. Racial and sectional feeling was at fever heat.

In 1915, just before Frank's scheduled execution. Governor John Marshall Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. A mob threatened the Governor's home. Martial law was declared. Troops were called out to save Governor Slaton from being torn limb from limb by citizens who charged he had been bribed with Jewish gold from New York to spare Frank's life. That commutation ruined Slaton's political career.

Frank was removed to the State Prison Farm at Milledgeville on June 20, 1915. On the night of July 17, William Creen, a murderer serving a life sentence, slashed Frank's throat with a butcher knife. "I guess they've got me," groaned Frank, blood pouring from his jugular vein. But they had not yet "got" him. Physicians took 25 stitches in his neck, saved his life until the early morning of Aug. 17. Then 25 masked men raided the Prison Farm, seized Frank in his night clothes, streaked cross-country by automobile to Marietta where Mary Phagan had been born. When the sun came up Leo Frank's corpse dangled from an oak tree near Prey's gin mill. After it was cut down, a man ground his heel into its pallid face. Said the Marietta Journal: "We regard the hanging of Leo Frank as an act of law abiding citizens." Georgia's condemnation at the time was nationwide.

Last week Leo Frank's name got back into the news again when Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge pardoned throat-cutting convict William Creen, now a sick, broken old man after his 20-year imprisonment.

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