A Political Suicide

On a bleak, chilly day last week, as Samuel Marvin Griffin was inaugurated as the 72nd governor of Georgia, the Capitol flags flew at half-staff, in mourning for Georgia's 60th governor, John M. Slaton, who had died in the fullness of his 89th year just nine hours before the inauguration. Slaton's death recalled a story of rare political courage.

Festival Day. April 26, 1913 was a legal holiday in Georgia--Confederate Memorial Day--and Mary Phagan, a pretty blonde girl of 13, dressed carefully for the occasion. She was wearing her best dress, her blue hat with the flowers and ribbons on it and her Sunday shoes and carrying a gay little parasol when she got on the downtown streetcar to go to the parade. On her way, she stopped off at the National Pencil Factory, where she was employed at 10-c- an hour, to pick up $1.20 in back pay. Early the next morning her body, ravished and brutally garroted with a piece of cord and a strip of her petticoat, was found in the basement of the factory. Blood matted her hair and her face was swollen and grimy.

Leo Frank, the factory superintendent who had recently arrived in Georgia from Brooklyn, was arrested and charged with murder. After the most sensational trial in Georgia history, Frank, a Jew, was found guilty and sentenced to hang. A great deal of doubt and bitterness surrounded the case, and Columnist Mark Sullivan wrote that it "fanned into a new flame for the moment the old animosities of the North and South of 50 years ago." The U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a writ of habeas corpus, but a dissenting opinion--written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes with Charles Evans Hughes concurring--caused a sensation. "It is our duty," said the minority justices, "to declare lynch law as little valid when practiced by a regularly drawn jury as when administered by one elected by a mob intent on death."

Lynching Day. Governor Slaton, after lengthy hearings and a deathbed appeal for clemency from the trial judge, commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment. "I can endure misconstruction, abuse and condemnation," he said, "but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience which would remind me that I, as governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right . . . It means that I must live in obscurity the rest of my days, but I would rather be plowing in a field than to feel that I had that blood on my hands."

Governor Slaton knew that he was committing political suicide, but he was not prepared for the violence of the reaction. In Atlanta, a mob marched up Peachtree Street to the Governor's home, had to be driven off by armed militiamen. In Marietta (where Mary Phagan was born and buried), another mob of some 40 unmasked men was organized, drove off to Milledgeville penitentiary, where Frank was imprisoned. Brandishing guns, they forced their way inside and dragged Leo Frank from his bed. Then they drove the 150 miles back to Marietta and hanged Leo Frank from a pine tree near Mary Phagan's lonely grave.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.