Lasker was thrilled: “And by God, it was one of the biggest sensational things in journalism in the South . . . They came out with a two-column editorial, which they had never had in Atlanta—in the Atlanta Journal demanding a pardon or a new trial for the man. We had then the authority of the largest leading newspaper in Georgia, because the Journal was the largest circulation paper in Georgia, [and] the only evening paper in Atlanta.”38
But the Journal’s bold stance had crossed a line that both Louis Marshall and Adolph Ochs had worried about. Angry Georgians criticized it as having been “bought with Jew money.” Stung, the Journal waited another year before it dared to write favorably of Frank again.39
Lasker bankrolled the effort to save Leo Frank, but it is not clear exactly how much he spent on the cause. He paid the $4,500 retainer to Burns in the beginning of March 1914. He also paid Burns’s fees beyond that $4,500—although not always happily. In late April, for example, Lasker sent defense attorney Herbert Haas a pointed note: “Believe me, my dear Mr. Haas, there is a limit to the money that can be raised, and unless Burns proves something direct, there is a limit that can be paid him. If he is going to follow every lead to an indefinite conclusion, I can well see how he can keep on for years, and run up a bill of $100,000.”40
In this same letter, Lasker offered $10,000 more from himself and his father. He enclosed the first $5,000 directly and told Haas he could have the other $5,000 whenever he needed it. As of this point, it appears, Morris and Albert Lasker together had contributed $16,750. Haas had estimated that an additional $25,000 had to be raised outside Atlanta. Lasker felt that he could collect at least $5,000 in Chicago (with the help of Julius Rosenwald and others) and expected that “as New York had given nothing,” they could raise $10,000.
Two days later, though, in an apparent change of heart, Lasker wrote to Louis Wiley of the New York Times that he would underwrite the entire $25,000.41 This was certainly welcome news: Haas soon reported that the $5,000 that Lasker had sent on April 20 had already been expended to pay for Burns’s time, legal fees, medical experts, and other costs.42
In this case, as in so many other episodes in his life, Lasker assiduously covered his tracks. He got others to go along with him in concealing his role in the affair. Burns dutifully played the Sphinx. In May 1914, prosecutor Hugh Dorsey asked Dan Lehon, an assistant to Burns, to identify the financier of Burns’s investigation. Lehon identified Herbert Haas as the primary source of funds—which was true enough, as far as it went.
Investigator Burns was a showman; he loved the spotlight and enjoyed making a splash. His predisposition, combined with the Times’s determination to publicize the case, generated blizzards of headlines: “Burns Says He Can Solve Frank Case,” “Burns to Extend Frank Case Inquiry,” “Praise for Burns’s Work,” and “Conley Notes Show Guilt, Says Burns,” among others.43
Lasker focused his efforts on persuading other influential newspapers—such as the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Baltimore Sun—to cover the Frank case.44 Meanwhile, he kept his eye on his expensive investigator, and he didn’t like what he was reading. From his advertising experience, he knew the perils of claiming too much. As he wrote to Haas:
Referring to Burns: I do not know what effect it has in Atlanta, but when he was in the North he gave out statements that he knew who the murderer was. He gave it out in such a way that people up here expect that he will produce either a confession from the real murderer, or at least direct evidence. Failing to do that, the people up here will be very disappointed, and, to be very frank with you, I fear if he does not do something like that, it will hurt us and may do the case more harm than if he had not entered into it at all.45
Burns’s provocative statements also caused trouble closer to the front lines. On May 2, he traveled to Marietta, Georgia—where Mary Phagan’s family lived—and was set upon by an angry mob. The New York Times wrote: “The detective’s declaration that Frank was not guilty and that James Conley, a negro factory sweeper convicted as an accessory after the murder, alone was responsible for the crime, aroused intense feeling here.”46
Watson’s Jeffersonian, fulminating against northern intruders, helped to fuel these “intense feelings.” Just two weeks before, The Jeffersonian’s headline read: “The Leo Frank Case: Does the State of Georgia Deserve This Nation-Wide Abuse?”47 Georgians were becoming increasingly defensive. They resented the interference of northerners—including the flashy Burns—as well as a national publicity campaign in which they were depicted as ignorant racists.
In mid-April, Lasker persuaded a pair of defense lawyers, John Tye and Henry Peeples, to file a motion in the Fulton County Superior Court arguing that Frank had been deprived of his constitutional right of due process because he was not present when the jury returned the verdict. The motion not only delayed Frank’s execution, but—because it dealt with an alleged violation of a constitutional right—also provided a potential avenue into the United States Supreme Court.
Because the ruling on the motion was not expected until mid-autumn, the Frank case was out of the New York Times for most of the summer.48 But as September arrived, Lasker launched another energetic national publicity campaign in anticipation of a possible U.S. Supreme Court case.
Now Lasker’s cultivation of Collier’s editor Mark Sullivan began pay off. Sullivan assigned a celebrated journalist, Christopher Powell Connolly, to write an article in Collier’s.49 Frank’s defense team supplied Connolly with exclusive information and court documents once he reached Atlanta. In the first week of December, Connolly sent Frank a letter telling him that he would write an eighteen-thousand-word article on the case and would align himself with Frank and the defense. Moreover, Collier’s would distribute the article to ten thousand newspapers “with permission to write in full.”50
On November 14, 1914, the Supreme Court of Georgia denied the Tye-Peeples motion on the grounds that the appeal was not made directly after Frank’s conviction. Louis Marshall now joined Frank’s defense team, and the team approached the U.S. Supreme Court individually, including the distinguished Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In a written opinion, Holmes agreed that Frank had not received a fair trial, and argued that the trial took place “in the presence of a hostile demonstration and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding Judge to be ready for violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.”51 Holmes’s opinion garnered national media attention, but the U.S. Supreme Court denied the writ of error on December 7.52
After the failure to reverse the conviction, a new execution date was set: January 22, 1915. Throughout December, Ochs and the New York Times kept the spotlight on Frank. The defense made one last attempt to get the case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, filing a writ of habeas corpus on December 17. That same day, Collier’s published the first part of Connolly’s article. It argued, among other things, that Frank “did not have a fair trial; that his conviction was the result of popular passion, which demanded a victim, and that all the facts point, not to Frank’s guilt, but to his innocence and to the negro Conley as the murderer.”53
Connolly emphasized the mob qualities of the trial. He implied that Georgians were anti-Semitic, and willing to legally murder a Jew for the sake of “politics, prejudice, and perjury.” When the second part of the article appeared the following week, the Frank case once again became a national obsession. People across the country became overwhelmingly sympathetic to Frank, concluding that Georgia was determined to execute an innocent man.
Now Lasker gained a powerful new ally, as William Randolph Hearst aligned all of his papers with Frank. In a letter to a friend, Lasker reveled in the success of his stealthy campaign: “Outside the state of Georgia, the press of the United States, including the leading papers of every city in the South, are editorially agitating public sentiment for the unfortunate Frank. Daily, hundreds of papers are editorially crying that Frank’s execution would amount to judicial murder.”54
On December 28, the S
upreme Court agreed to review the Frank case. “The Supreme Court of the United States,” Justice Joseph R. Lamar wrote, “has never determined whether on a trial for murder in a state court, the due process clause of the federal Constitution guarantees the defendant a right to be present when the verdict is rendered.”55 Because the case would not be heard for eight weeks, Frank gained a new stay of execution.
The review began on February 25, 1915. Louis Marshall now managed Frank’s defense. “I am glad that Mr. Marshall is taking hold of the matter,” Lasker wrote to Frank.56 But on April 19, by a vote of seven to two, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction: “In our opinion, he is not shown to have been deprived of any right guaranteed to him by the Fourteenth Amendment or any other provision of the Constitution or laws of the United States. On the contrary, he has been convicted and is now held in custody under ‘due process of the law’ within the meaning of the Constitution. The judgment of the District Court refusing the application for a writ of habeas corpus is affirmed.”57
On May 10, Judge Benjamin H. Hill of the Fulton County Court set Frank’s execution for June 22.
Frank’s last hope rested in the hands of the governor of Georgia, who had the authority either to set aside Frank’s conviction—a highly unlikely outcome—or commute the death sentence. Frank’s defense team had hoped that the presumably sympathetic governor-elect, Nathaniel H. Harris, would make the commutation decision, but they had to make their appeal to lame-duck governor John M. Slaton, who would hold office until June 26.
Lasker launched yet another campaign of petitions and letters demanding the commutation of Frank’s death sentence. In a single week in Chicago, more than 400,000 people signed a petition supporting the prisoner. Prominent citizens ranging from Thomas Edison to Jane Addams spoke out in Frank’s defense.58 Senators and governors from fourteen states wrote to Governor Slaton, and groups of supporters traveled to Atlanta in the last week of May to present millions of signatures in person.59
On June 12, Slaton initiated the final hearing in the Frank case, coming under enormous pressure from both sides as he made his momentous decision. Years later, Lasker recalled that the formidable William Randolph Hearst himself had lobbied the governor: “Brisbane did that—got Hearst to come down to go to the Governor . . . The only reason that the Governor didn’t pardon him completely, they all became so convinced that he was legally innocent that the Governor was afraid of race riots and said, ‘It is much better to let him stay in the penitentiary for a few years, then he will be pardoned.’”60
After a week of mounting tension, Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence on the grounds that new evidence introduced after the trial undercut the testimony on which the conviction was based. Frank was transferred from his cell in the Tower to the State Prison Farm in rural Milledgeville.61 In a brief telegram to the New York Times, Frank responded to the commutation: “Deeply moved and gratified by Governor’s action, though innocent and suffering for a crime I did not commit, I await the complete vindication and exoneration which is rightfully mine. In the future I live to see the day when honor shall be restored to me.”62
Georgians, meanwhile, reacted to the commutation with fury. A crowd of a thousand demonstrators gathered outside the governor’s country home. Slaton declared martial law and surrounded himself with a Georgia National Guard battalion. In Marietta, the governor was hanged in effigy, alongside a sign reading “John M. Slaton, King of the Jews and Georgia’s Traitor Forever.”63
The nation remained intensely interested in Frank, creating enormous media pressure for more words from the prisoner. Haas advised against this strategy, believing that it would only inflame local passions and embolden Frank’s enemies. But Lasker encouraged Frank to keep issuing statements in his own defense.64
On Saturday, July 17—just four weeks after Leo Frank was remanded to the Milledgeville prison—a fellow prisoner used a kitchen knife to carve a seven-and-a-half-inch-long gash in Frank’s throat. Bleeding profusely from a severed jugular vein, Frank was rushed to the prison hospital. He survived, but just barely. Lasker paid Frank’s medical bills, again taking care to disguise the source of those funds.65
The Times report on the murderous assault was considerably shorter and more matter-of-fact than previous coverage, reflecting controversy at the newspaper about how much attention had been paid to Frank. But Adolph Ochs remained determined to keep the spotlight on the prisoner. At his insistence, the paper ran an article in late July condemning “the hideous mob spirit.”66
The article proved horribly prescient. On August 16, 1915, Frank was discharged from the prison hospital and sent back to his cell. Just before midnight, a mob of at least two dozen men, many with links to the Ku Klux Klan, cut the telephone and telegraph wires connecting the prison to the outside world, broke into the prison, and seized Frank.67 They then drove 125 miles to Marietta, and there, in the early morning sunlight, they lynched Leo Frank, hanging him from a tree in a grove where Mary Phagan had played as a child.
While the Constitution, the Journal, and the Georgian condemned the lynching, the Macon Daily Telegraph pointed to the role of outside influence in inflaming the passions of Georgians. An editorial entitled “Finis” asserted:
Thus was Leo Frank caught between the upper and nether millstones—the foolish, calamitous propaganda by alleged friends and the natural and justified resentment in Georgia against this outside interference, allied with the propaganda of Watson, and his life was taken—he was killed as an unclean thing is killed and left for the buzzards.
Such a thing can never happen again in Georgia. It would never have happened had the rest of the nation left this State to mind its own business, which would have been infinitely better for Frank, better for Georgia, better for the Jewish race in this State.68
The editorial captured the most common local interpretation of the lynching: that it was caused by outside interference, which intensified previously latent anti-Semitic feelings. Asserting that newspaper coverage had failed to present the Georgian point of view, a circuit court judge who had been involved in the lynching offered an explanation: “The Jewish element are a very thrifty element, as a rule law-abiding. They do lots of advertising. I believe that had a great deal to do with the attitude of the presses.”69
In the wake of Frank’s murder, Adolph Ochs instructed his staff to write an editorial condemning the horrific act of vigilantism, and then sent the piece to all of Georgia’s newspapers, assuming that they would dutifully print the editorial from New York. None did. In fact, the offended editor of the Macon Daily Telegraph wired Ochs that it was the “outside interference of the Jews”—including Ochs—that had made Frank’s death inevitable. He concluded by suggesting that the Times mind its own business.70
Albert Lasker poured his heart, soul, and wealth into the defense of Leo Frank. In a typical letter to his father, sent six months before the end, he wrote, “The Frank case is taking practically all my time, and leaves me sorely pressed to even keep up with my business in a most superficial way.”71 The case had upset his mental equilibrium: “The amount of work and time consumed by it [the Frank case] you cannot imagine—it’s letting now—five and six hours daily—I have to spend all next week in New York on it. Added to this not only my regular work—but some charities of large proportions I am reorganizing—and I am as near to a breakdown from overwork as ever I was in my life.”72
Now, despite all those costly efforts, Frank was dead, and Lasker concluded that his own relentless efforts had helped cause that death. He had inflamed deep racial prejudices, and once that evil genie escaped from its bottle, no one could put it back in: “I was seeing the ugly side of it; I was seeing what Macaulay saw, when he said, ‘The public is a great beast.’ And then the editors in working it up . . . ran editorials constantly with headlines like this: ‘The Crime of Georgia’ . . . We put the whole state of Georgia on trial, and we did what is so often done: in the cure that we gave for the disease, we increased the disease.”73
Reluctantly, Lasker conceded that a quieter campaign probably would have been more effective. “We handled it badly, Brisbane and I,” he said. “We got him lynched instead of hung.”74
From the Frank case, Lasker learned a lesson that he would remember for the rest of his life, which he summarized in an aphorism: “Very often the art of public relations is the art of private relations.”75 But it was a lesson learned at the cost of a man’s life.
Under the circumstances, though, Lasker was far too hard on himself. True, Frank ultimately was “lynched instead of hung.” A case can even be made that Lasker helped revitalize the Ku Klux Klan.76 But if the alternative was inaction, Lasker had no alternative. In response to his father’s repeated entreaties and his own impulses, he fought to protect a man who was in peril in part because of his religion—a Jewish man, from Texas, four years younger than himself, who like himself had made his own way in life.
In the tradition of his father and his uncle, Lasker acted to help the helpless. Perhaps the fight for Leo Frank was poorly fought—but it was fought, as Lasker later observed, by honest and inspired dreamers.77
Chapter Nine
Into the Tomato Business
ADVERTISING COMPLEMENTS a business, and sometimes even overshadows a business, but it is not the business itself. Documenting the successes of an advertising agency risks creating a distorted picture, by implying that the marketing of a product is more important to the success of that product than the product itself. Albert Lasker knew that wasn’t true. He told his clients that good advertising couldn’t rescue a bad product or a bad company.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 18