The Leo Frank Case

Eighty-five years ago the murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent trial and lynching of the accused killer, Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager from the North, was the event that prompted B'nai B'rith to found the Anti-Defamation League. Dinnerstein not only tells the story of Phagan's and Frank's deaths, but he also places Frank's trial and lynching in the context of a rapidly changing southern society.

The author's thorough research, his careful organization of the findings, his cautious and dispassionate appraisal presented in lean and readable prose, all combine to inspire confidence that historians now have as nearly as they shall ever have the complete account of this tragedy.

Dinnerstein's study offers a running commentary on these events in their relation to the general southern and local Georgian endemic xenophobia in 1913-1915; anti-Semitism and the response of organized Jewish self-defense; trial by sensational newspaper coverage; and 'case-building' by the police, inept legal defense, and judicial cowardice.

Much has been written about the famed Leo Frank case. . . . Of them all, Leonard Dinnerstein's The Leo Frank Case . . . has always been considered the standard work.

The author's research has been painstaking and thorough; material was located in many Northern as well as Georgian collections. The selection of Georgia newspapers was judicious and representative.

Dinnerstein's analysis should interest students of southern history, anti-Semitism, civil liberties and social change. His conclusion, that unless societies 'eradicate the conditions which turn men into beasts. . . other Leo Franks will continue to appear,' seems particularly appropriate in our own time of racial strife and international conflict.