Sarah Lawn was shocked by what she had read in the newspaper.
It was a hot summer day in a sleepy patch of southern Missouri called King, not far from the Arkansas line.
A headline from Georgia had caught her attention. She’d followed the story over the summer, but its conclusion left her struggling for understanding.
“Dearest Father,” she wrote on Aug. 18, 1915. “I saw in the newspaper this awful item about Leo Frank from Atlanta.”
Tom Lawn, her father, had come to America more than 30 years earlier from a village near Leeds in northern England. He labored his way across the continent from Montreal to Michigan, where Sarah was born in 1881. His search for work had led him to southern Missouri, from where he traveled to pick up whatever job he could.
Sarah wrote often seeking his wise counsel. With his working-class Englishman’s perspective, he provided answers no one else could. She had asked him often about the war building in Europe. In May, she wrote asking what to make of the sinking of a civilian ship, the Lusitania.
“Nothing much for us,” he responded. “But quite a lot for them back home.”
Her handwriting was elegant, the ovals curved perfectly, the lines straight and confident. Pretty with dark eyes, she had just turned 24. She was uncommonly gentle and would get lost in books. Her faith was growing. Later, she was attracted to the teachings of the Christian Science Church, which was then slightly younger than Sarah. Followers believed the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good. The material world, with its evil, sickness and death, is only an illusion.
Leo Frank’s story was no illusion.
“How can this happen? I don’t understand it,” she wrote.
The newspaper story detailed the events in Georgia from the day before. Even in the days before broadcast news and 24/7 cable, the lurid and incendiary Leo Frank story riveted and divided the nation. That it troubled the mind of a young woman so far away from anywhere speaks to its power.
Two years earlier, Frank was convicted for murdering Mary Phagan, a 13 year old who worked with him at the National Pencil Co. in Atlanta. He was a manager and last person to admit to seeing her when she came to collect her $1.2o pay for her work that week.
Early the next morning, the night watchman found her strangled and beaten body on the floor of the factory’s cellar. Evidence suggested that she had been raped. The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, then fierce rivals, mobilized for a newspaper war with big and lurid headlines. On the day police narrowed their suspect list to include Frank, the Hearst empire’s Atlanta Georgian carried the headline “Police Have the Strangler.”
Suspicions had turned quickly to Leo Frank, a frail young man who seemed so out of place. For one thing, he was educated in the North — at Cornell University. For another he was a Jew; worse, he was seen as a Yankee Jew (even though he was born in a tiny Texas town). For many Georgians of the time, this was a toxic blend of qualities to be despised. It was enough to assume guilt.
Just 50 years after the Civil War, the coverage inflamed old wounds. The national press followed the story with ardor, escalating it to front-page drumbeat, with sentiments dividing at the Mason-Dixon line.
Anti-Semitism was on the rise. Earlier in 1915, D.W. Griffith’s epic “The Birth of a Nation” debuted with its call for racial purity - the “Aryan birthright.” A few months after the Leo Frank story appeared in Sarah’s newspaper, 15 men gathered at Stone Mountain to revive the old Ku Klux Klan.
From the start, the evidence against Frank was shaky and relied on the shifting testimony of one man, who was also implicated in her killing. Even so, he was found guilty and sentenced to die.
Sarah had read how the case was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected Frank’s appeal. Even so, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes worried that the judge in the case may have been pressured by the angry mob that would have accepted nothing less than a death penalty.
In fact, the presiding judge had reached out to Gov. Jack Slaton, who was moved to commute Frank’s sentence to life in prison, inspiring mobs to take to the streets. The idea that a Georgia governor would intervene to side with such a man was more than folks could take. Slaton and his wife immediately left the state and remained away for some time.
In the Northern press, Slaton became a hero – the enlightened Southerner who had stood against the Rebel mob. In June, The New York Times led its front page with a fawning interview of the governor. “I told (my wife) that it might cost my life but that I was convinced that it was my duty,” he told the reporter. “But I don’t deserve any credit for this act. It was justice.”
A few weeks later, an angry phalanx ripped Frank from his cell in Milledgeville and carried him to Marietta. There they handcuffed him and tied his legs at the ankles. They tossed a rope and a noose over the branch of a tree. They faced him toward Mary Phagan’s house and hanged him.
“How can anyone do such a thing?” Sarah asked.
How could her father know? Tom Lawn came from a place without context to explain the motives of men who would kidnap a man from prison and hang him.
“My Darling Daughter,” he wrote back a few days later. “Such are things in this world that cannot be explained. It’s the way of this world.”
Long after my grandmother’s death in 1981, I found this exchange among letters folded in a small travel case. They document both her deep curiosity about world-shaping events a century ago and later the successful wooing by a young soldier who sent increasingly bold letters and postcards as he marched through France toward Germany near the end of World War I.
I’ve believed that Sarah was shaped in some way by her curiosity about unfathomable stories such as the Leo Frank tragedy, and that this story about Sarah is in some way about the intimate power of journalism.
The letters also hinted at something bigger. Decades before broadcast, 24/7 cable news and social media, such stories have held the power to incite and polarize — penetrating deep enough to trouble a young woman in such a remote place a century ago.
What would the Leo Frank story look like in the age of Facebook, Twitter, Fox and CNN? The mind reels.
And I wonder if the media saturation of 2015 has left any space for the deeper contemplation that took place in the mind of a thoughtful young woman like Sarah.
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