Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  One day Ross failed to show for work. Thinking his friend might be on a bender, Adams wasn’t especially concerned. But Ross wasn’t drunk; he was gone. Adams eventually got a postcard from Pasadena, then another from Needles. Ross seems to have worked his way across the desert through early 1912, in Arizona and New Mexico, before turning up in, of all places, Panama. A few years earlier Adams himself had traveled through Central America, and he had mesmerized Ross with his recollections; Ross wrote his friend that he simply had to see if the stories were true. In Panama he worked at the English-language Star and Herald until anti-American rioting forced the yanquis on the staff to leave. He trooped up to Paraíso, where he got a job on the canal, which was still under construction. Years later Ross often bragged about how he had bossed a work crew of natives there, but this struck many listeners as a Rossian tall tale. Whatever he was doing, there is no question he was in the Canal Zone long enough to learn his way around. In a 1951 query sheet on a story dealing with the canal, Ross corrected some mistakes of geography, noting, “It so happens that I am quite familiar with the region the author is writing about in this piece. I worked on the Pedro Miguel locks and lived in Paraíso.… The way the author has it, he ignores the Pedro Miguel locks, which are between the Miraflores locks and the beginning of the Gaillard Cut. I regard this as a personal slight.”

  After he was felled by a serious fever, Ross began to have second thoughts about the tropics. He decided to return to the States and see something of the South, a part of the country he knew only secondhand. He arrived by steamer in New Orleans on Thanksgiving Day, 1912, and went to work covering the police and the courts for the Item “at the lowest pay I ever got on a newspaper anywhere, before or since.” In New Orleans he demonstrated the agile reporter’s trick for manufacturing news where none exists. He noticed that the doorway of a popular saloon displayed carvings of fetching nudes. If the saloon’s clientele had ever noticed the carvings before, they certainly didn’t mind them. But when Ross brought them to the attention of the city’s leading society matrons, a minor scandal—which is to say, a story—ensued.

  That spring Ross was among several newsmen enticed to Atlanta to work for William Randolph Hearst’s splashy new paper, the Georgian. On arriving, however, he found that the man who had recruited him had been recalled to New York, and the promise of a job had gone with him. Ross got a reprieve from a competing Atlanta paper, the Journal. It hired him as its new police reporter—just in time, as it happened, for the most notorious crime in the city’s history.

  ——

  In the spring of 1913, Harold Ross was twenty years old and had been on the road without stop for nearly three years. He had grown to his full height, just under six feet, and full weight, a lean 160 pounds, which is more or less what he remained the rest of his life. He was already walking with a trademark slouch. His arms and legs were so long that when he sat in a deep chair he resembled a tent folding in on itself. His unruly jet hair and high cheekbones gave his face an Indian cast. He was a little self-conscious about his smile because it revealed a pronounced gap between his two front teeth, easily wide enough to pull ten-penny nails. His best feature was his eyes, alternately penetrating and dancing.

  Transient and habitually broke, Ross owned a skimpy wardrobe. What clothes he had were loud and reflected dandyish tastes, a country boy’s idea of how a city boy should dress. He was especially remembered for a favorite pair of yellow high-button shoes. He was still young by the standards of the tramp brethren, but in their company he worked hard—a little too hard—to mask his innate shyness and be one of the boys: he was loud, boisterous and profane; he smoked heavily; he drank regularly, if not regularly to excess; and he could scarcely be dragged away from a poker table or dice game. He could be explosively funny and was regarded as excellent company, at least among other men. (There is no particular record of his amorous activities around this time, but given his choice of associations and off-duty milieus, he almost certainly wasn’t monastic.) He was considered a competent if not spectacular reporter, though he had a growing reputation as a capable “picture swiper,” a handy skill in those rough-and-tumble newspaper days.

  At about six o’clock on Sunday morning, April 27, Ross was rousted from bed by the telephone. It was his editor, instructing him to hustle down to Bloomfield’s Funeral Home. In its very late editions that morning, the rival Constitution had managed to print a short frontpage story about a brutal murder that had occurred the day before. A thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, had been found dead in the grimy pencil factory where she worked, and the Journal was playing catch-up.

  At the ramshackle mortuary Ross saw Mary Phagan’s lifeless and mutilated body lying atop a circular “cooling slab.” He was present as authorities led in the superintendent of the pencil factory, a reserved, soft-spoken man named Leo M. Frank, who within a week would become a prime suspect. As Frank gazed upon the dead girl, Ross made a point of studying him.

  The murder of Mary Phagan and the subsequent arrest and trial of Leo Frank made for one of the most sensational crime stories of the early twentieth century. Unfolding against a charged Georgia backdrop of racial prejudice, political intrigue, and sexual anxiety, the Frank case quickly built to such a lurid, hysterical pitch that it became a national fixation. As one of the Journal’s lead reporters on the story, Ross understood its complexities better than most. While not exactly a naïve man, he was shocked and deeply affected by much of what he saw transpire. This shock was still evident two years later when he wrote an analytical recapitulation of the case for the San Francisco Call and Post.

  Ross wrote that immediately after the murder, “the police did what they always do in Georgia—arrested a Negro.” This first suspect was Newt Lee, the factory night watchman who found the girl’s body and reported the murder. In quick succession several more black men were held on suspicion. Rather than reassure the community, however, the arrests seemed to fuel its outrage. Said Ross, “The police realized the truth which determined their whole future course of action: The murder of Mary Phagan must be paid for with blood. And a Negro’s blood would not suffice.”

  The investigation came to focus on Frank, the plant superintendent. He had admitted giving the girl her week’s pay in the near-deserted factory the morning of the murder, and he was the last person to see her alive. Frank was also a Northerner, a Jew, and, to many angry Georgians, a nearly ideal villain. On May 24, he was indicted for the murder.

  According to Ross, the decision to prosecute Frank was not made lightly, for even though the evidence against him was far from conclusive, authorities knew there could be no turning back once he was accused. That Sunday morning at Bloomfield’s, Ross had talked to Frank. He had doubts about the man’s guilt, doubts that the Journal returned to during and after the trial, despite the prevailing anti-Semitism and the overwhelming public sentiment that Frank was guilty.

  Ross, back row center, poses with other reporters covering the Leo Frank trial in Atlanta in 1913. (Atlanta Constitution)

  One reason for Ross’s apprehension was that Frank’s indictment was based in large part on the testimony of a black suspect, Jim Conley. Conley, who swept floors at the factory, changed his story about Frank repeatedly, and to Ross it seemed that each change “eventually dovetailed into the theory of the prosecution.” Also about this time, rumors began to circulate that Frank was a philanderer and, worse, a sexual deviate. When Conley was transferred to the county jail, police briefly made him available to reporters, and Ross got right to the point:

  I was, I think, the first newspaper man to talk to him after his series of confessions.

  “Is Frank a pervert?” I asked flatly.

  “No,” was the reply. Moreover the Negro exhibited surprise at the question. Obviously he had never even thought of such a thing before.

  Like its competitors, the Journal covered the case in staggering, at times even stenographic, detail. Ross himself contributed hundreds of inches’ worth of feat
ure stories, background, and examinations of legal strategy. Throughout, the Journal took a less frenzied, more evenhanded approach than its competitors did. For instance, after interviewing Conley, Ross and a Journal colleague, Harlee Branch, wrote long, side-by-side analyses on the hypothetical impact of Conley’s ever-evolving statements to police. One argued the position that the evidence tended to exculpate Frank, the other that it tended to convict him. At any rate, before long Conley altered his story again, now contending that Frank was a pervert. (He later testified to this effect in court.)

  The trial took place in a jammed courtroom through most of a sweltering August. Newspaper coverage was in the sensational, overwrought style of the day. Exacerbating the emotional situation was the fact that the two established Atlanta newspapers were tied to different factions within Georgia’s Democratic Party, so the trial coverage also was slanted for maximum political gain. The rhetoric proved nearly as hot as the weather.

  On August 25, Frank was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. But it had been obvious to many, including Ross and editorial writers at the Journal, that the trial had been a farce. Nearly two years of appeals ensued, during which public sentiment remained incendiary. When Frank’s last court appeal failed, he turned to Governor John M. Slaton, who was under enormous pressure to let Frank hang. However, on June 21, 1915, Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. On this news, Ross’s reminiscence appeared two days later in the Call and Post, which billed it as “the whole famous and dramatic chain of incidents as seen by a man trained in gathering correct impressions and deducing correct conclusions from tangled evidence.” Ross’s account is a fascinating if lumbering document. Typically, his main points are contained in the first three paragraphs:

  One who saw Leo M. Frank as he looked upon the mutilated and abused body of Mary Phagan in the morgue at Atlanta three hours after her remains had been found, who talked to him afterward, who observed his conduct in detention and under arrest, who listened to his remarkable statement at his trial and heard his intensely dramatic appeal when the death sentence was passed upon him for the first time, can not today believe him guilty.

  Without making the assertion that Frank is innocent, it may be said that his conduct from the outset was that of an innocent man, that he did not have a fair trial, that the evidence against him was not conclusive and that it did not prove him guilty beyond that “reasonable doubt” required by law.

  He begins his life sentence in prison after two years of suspense, a possible—perhaps a probable—victim of circumstances, and, incidentally, the living proof of the assertion that if juries convict men upon evidence such as was adduced against him, and judges uphold them, no man is absolutely safe from paying the penalty for a crime he did not commit. Because the evidence against Frank might, conceivably, grow up about any man.

  Ross went on to say that “Frank, of course, could not be hanged” under such circumstances, and he applauded Governor Slaton’s commutation, concluding, “His act will receive the endorsement of the American people, with a notable exception perhaps in his own state.”

  On August 16, a mob stormed the Georgia state prison at Milledgeville, retrieved Leo Frank, took him back to Mary Phagan’s childhood home of Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, and hanged him.

  The Frank case was so controversial that in some corners of Georgia it can still provoke an argument. His guilt was neither proved nor disproved, and the fact is that eighty years after the crime no one is really sure who killed Mary Phagan. Ross’s involvement in, and thoughts about, the case are significant on several counts. Most obvious, again, is the maturity evident in a reporter who, it must be remembered, was only twenty years old when entrusted with this incendiary story. Ross not only had to master the intricacies of the case but, as an outsider, had to sort through the shadowy forces behind it. Second, he demonstrated genuine courage in forming, and then maintaining, the belief that Frank just might be innocent, a decidedly unpopular view. Third, the Call piece is compelling for what it says about Ross’s fundamental democratic values, especially in light of the fact that twenty-five years later he himself would be accused of anti-Semitic and racist views. Like many men of his time and background, Ross held some prejudices, and they surfaced to sting him a few times when he was the editor of The New Yorker. But as the Leo Frank piece (not to mention countless friendships and professional associations) demonstrates, Ross was in no way anti-Semitic, and if he sometimes made thoughtless personal utterances about blacks—which he did—this shortcoming was more than offset by his unstinting insistence that New Yorker writers, virtually all more liberal than he, say what they liked in the pages of his magazine.

  There is one last noteworthy aspect of Ross’s stay in Atlanta: he produced some obvious forerunners to The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town stories. For the Sunday feature section of the Journal, he wrote a handful of offbeat pieces that employed the editorial “we” and a tone of detachment. One, written shortly before the Frank trial began, was a visit to Atlanta’s notorious police court, Judge Nash Broyles presiding, where the city’s detritus washed up for penance. The newspapers ran daily vignettes from the court, and Steve Oney, a writer who has studied them, says, “Usually these pieces were full of Uncle Remus dialect and illustrated by Little Black Sambo-like line drawings. Thus, in context, Ross’s piece strikes a more sophisticated—or scared—tone.” An excerpt:

  Being of that vast class of society which calls itself respectable, we have never been in police court before and are, therefore, shocked by what confronts us. Negroes—scores of them—banked up on tiers of benches on one side of a railing which divides the room in half, a dozen policemen lolling in chairs, and the judge’s rostrum on the other side—all this is disconcerting. It is not even a pleasing sight. But we are out to see the police court! So we will subdue for the nonce the just and decidedly respectable inclination to leave, and take seats among the policemen.

  Court has begun. The clerk from beside the judge’s chair calls a name without looking up from his docket. An attaché automatically opens a door on one side of the room and repeats the name raucously. His tone grates on our nerves. And then we have the opportunity of seeing one of those notorious people, a police court character.

  He comes out through the door—out of the cage—blinks, glances furtively around and then, probably having been there before and knowing the way, walks straight up to the judge’s stand. He looks human, that is about all we can say for him.…

  Full of himself after covering the first truly important story of his career, Ross decided to make his stab at the big time, New York City. He didn’t think he’d much like New York; he had a westerner’s prejudice against the city and the dudes, as he called them, who populated it. On the other hand, to work in New York was to establish one’s bona fides, and if he could show the city slickers a thing or two in the process, so much the better. He repeatedly tried to crack Manhattan from temporary assignments at the short-lived Hudson Observer, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the Brooklyn Eagle. He applied at the Times, and most likely to many of the dozen or so other dailies then publishing in New York. But the New York newspapers never had much need or use for transient help, and he was sent away discouraged.

  About the same time, Ross got a rather insistent plea from home: his father, now in his sixties, wanted him to come back to Salt Lake and join him in the family business. Unsurprisingly, Ross was dubious. He had been home a few times between jobs in the West; George and Ida were always glad to see him, and he was thankful for a few weeks of hot meals and clean sheets, but everyone understood the visits were temporary. What his father proposed now was different, permanent—working in a business he had never cared for, side by side with a man just as stubborn and cantankerous as he was. Still, down on his luck and tired of the road, Ross was inclined to be the good son this once. Setting aside his reservations, he returned to 622 Elizabeth Street, a footsore and worldly man of twenty-one back under his parents’ roof. He s
pent the better part of 1914, it appears, trying to make the arrangement work, but he couldn’t. He simply found the business of knocking down houses and peddling scrap too dull. Making matters worse was the buildup and outbreak of war in Europe, which he followed carefully in the papers and dreamed of covering. He knew too well that he lacked the necessary credentials to be a foreign correspondent, but the reveries nonetheless reinforced just how much he missed journalism. Informing his disappointed parents of his decision, he set off again for the most romantic destination within reach, San Francisco.

  ——

  Covering the waterfront was an important beat for the San Francisco papers, and good duty for any reporter, and this was the assignment Ross wangled from the Call and Post. If the city’s notorious Barbary Coast was in its death convulsions, its waterfront was busier than ever. Everywhere one looked were sailors and sea captains, visiting dignitaries, good restaurants, and accommodating saloons. The glittering Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 was reacquainting the world with San Francisco, which less than a decade before had been buried by earthquake and fire. Add to this the general to-and-fro of a busy harbor and it was a lot for a waterfront reporter to stay on top of. Ross thrived on it. Though one San Francisco colleague remembered him as “a picture-chaser and a rather grubby and not too efficient reporter,” others said that after his brush with the prosaic world of house demolition Ross brought a reinvigorated interest to his reporting. Certainly the Call of this period is full of (unbylined) news from the waterfront: sailors demanding better wages from shipowners; personnel changes at the shipping lines; the arrival of new steamers and exotic visitors. Ross made friends easily and was a good talker, qualities he used to get information from people. He cultivated contacts all along the waterfront. Long after he was gone, young reporters would hear about the man from the Call who prowled the piers and warehouses in a trenchcoat, battered hat pulled down mysteriously over his eyes.