A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

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  THE FBI SENT advance word to the committee that protesters would picket outside the Federal Building and try to disrupt the proceedings inside Room 740 by packing the courtroom. The bureau knew this because one of its informants attended a Saturday meeting of forty subpoenaed witnesses and supporters where the protest plan was hatched. In response, to bolster the usual retinue of federal court bailiffs, the Detroit Police Department sent over a seventeen-man detail led by Inspector Cornelius Boyle to patrol the sidewalks and interior corridors. And to ensure that protesters did not snag too many of the seventy-five seats available in Judge Koscinski’s courtroom, committee officials decided that most of those seats would be reserved for government officials and lawmen.

  The line for public seats began forming in the seventh-floor corridor at eight that morning and had grown to two hundred by the time Counsel Tavenner came out to announce the delay. It was then that a guard finally opened the courtroom door, but he allowed only fifteen spectators inside; already the benches were full. Outside on the Lafayette Street side of the building, the first protesters were arriving and organizing their picket line under the leadership of Arthur McPhaul, who was executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Civil Rights Congress and a witness subpoenaed to appear later in the week. The Red Squad police were also there, snapping photos and writing down names. “There were approximately thirty-nine or forty persons in this picket line, which was carried on in an orderly manner,” the police noted in their after-action report. “The following persons were recognized”—and then they listed the names of all the protesters they could identify. In a reflection of the times, the list had one minor annotation: “* Denotes Negro.”

  Elliott was not among the names on the list. He was working that day at his newspaper job on the rewrite desk.

  Two women among the orderly picketers handed out leaflets calling the committee “most un-American of all” and urging it to get out of town. One picketer wore the white robes and hood of the Ku Klux Klan and carried a cardboard puppet in the likeness of Chairman Wood. McPhaul and another man carried a large banner that outlined their version of the “glorious history of [the] un-American committee”:

  1st chairman Martin Dies—Texas poll taxer

  2nd chairman John Rankin—Mississippi poll taxer

  3rd chairman J. Parnell Thomas—convicted New Jersey embezzler

  4th chairman John Wood—Georgia Dixiecrat

  The banner was provocative but mostly factual. Dies was the first chairman of the committee, starting in 1938, when it was in fact known as the Dies Committee. He not only supported the poll tax and other discriminatory measures but dismissed a call for the committee to investigate the Ku Klux Klan, which he called “an old American institution.” Rankin, from Mississippi, never chaired the committee but was for many years its most bigoted member. He not only supported the poll tax but consistently spoke disparagingly of blacks and Jews, publicly calling them “niggers” and “kikes,” along with almost all foreigners. Thomas, a Republican from New Jersey, took over the committee in 1947 and launched the first investigation of communist influence in the film industry. Soon thereafter he was convicted on charges of salary fraud and kickbacks in the conduct of his House office and ended up serving an eighteen-month term at the federal prison in Connecticut. In an instance of life as burlesque, among his fellow prisoners was Ring Lardner Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten whom Thomas had helped send away.

  Up and down the sidewalk picketers marched, carrying signs that were variations on the theme of the large banner.

  EVERYONE IN LOCAL 600 CAN VOTE: HOW ABOUT IN GEORGIA?

  WOOD VOTED FOR POLL TAX

  NEGRO-WHITE UNITY IS NOT SUBVERSIVE

  WHY DON’T YOU SPEND OUR MONEY INVESTIGATING LYNCHINGS IN FLORIDA?

  When the hearing opened that afternoon, Chairman Wood read a long statement that was aggressive and defensive. He talked about how the committee once had investigated fascism and Nazism and was interested in all forms of “totalitarian ‘isms’ designed to overthrow by force and violence the constitutional form of government under which we live.” He denied accusations that the committee was out to injure the labor movement, saying its only intent was to help certain unions rid themselves of communist domination. And then the Georgian came to the issue of race. He was a southern segregationist. Along with leftist union leaders, many of the targeted witnesses in Detroit were black activists. “You will also be told by the communists and their fellow travelers that this committee is motivated by a desire to raise racial issues,” he said. “This typical propaganda effort on the part of the communists has been worn threadbare.” He and his committee, Wood asserted, believed in “the basic integrity, character, and loyalty of all Americans, regardless of race and creed.” For his defense, he turned to a scene involving Jackie Robinson, the great athlete who broke the color line in Major League Baseball.

  In 1949 Wood and the committee had called Robinson to testify as a means of refuting the words of another prominent African American, Paul Robeson, the formidable, deep-voiced American singer, athlete, actor, and outspoken leftist partisan who never tried to hide his communist sympathies. Robeson had rejected America’s position in the cold war and spoke admiringly of the Soviet Union, seeing there a hope for world peace and a contrast to the painful struggle for equality in his home country.

  Jackie Robinson, in an appearance before HUAC on July 18, 1949, took issue with Robeson, and used a disparaging allusion that Chairman Wood now recited verbatim in Detroit: “I and other Americans of many races and faiths have too much invested in our country’s welfare for any of us to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass. I am a religious man. Therefore, I cherish America where I am free to worship as I please, a privilege which some countries do not give. And I suspect that nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of any thousand colored Americans you meet will tell you the same thing.”

  Robeson, who had been an ardent supporter of Robinson, felt betrayed by those words. The sporting and political press of America, on the other hand, wrote glowingly about Robinson, some with more support than they gave him during his brave and lonely fight to integrate baseball. Lost in the coverage, as the writer Gilbert King later pointed out, was another part of Robinson’s testimony, in which he said, “The fact that because it is a communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality and lynching, when it happens, doesn’t change the truth of his charges.” Discrimination, the racial pioneer said, was a reality, not a figment of the communist imagination.

  Wood omitted that section of Robinson’s testimony from his opening statement in Detroit. Considering the chairman’s history, that was no surprise.

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  Wheelman Wood

  AT THE TIME of the Detroit hearings, John Stephens Wood was nearly twice as old as Elliott Maraniss and came from a very different place. He was born in 1885 on a farm near the hamlet of Ball Ground in the hills of north Georgia. In his region of America, the founding ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness depended entirely upon the color of one’s skin. From the year of his birth to 1930, when Wood first left Georgia to serve in Congress, at least 458 black citizens were lynched in the state. That was second only to Mississippi.

  For black Georgians, the reality of inequality reached down to every level of their lives. Not only were they required by law to attend separate schools, drink from separate water fountains, ride in the back of the bus, and sit in separate areas in theaters, restaurants, and waiting rooms, but their mental patients could not be treated in the same hospitals as whites, their barbers could not cut the hair of white women, their children could not play in parks designed for white kids, and their dead could not be buried in graveyards intended for the bones of dead white people. If a birth certificate showed one parent was white and the other “colored,” the State Board of Health had to report this to the state attorney general, who was required to open criminal proceedin
gs against the offending couple. To accuse a white woman of having sexual intercourse with a black man was grounds for slander.

  Blacks were kept out of the democratic process through poll taxes and ad hoc oral exams imposed on Election Day. In what essentially was a one-party state, the dominant Democratic Party maintained a segregated process called a White Primary, prohibiting black participation altogether in the choosing of party nominees. This most blatant disenfranchisement of African Americans was in place for most of Wood’s elections in Georgia and was not abandoned until after World War II. All this was tolerated, accepted, enforced. None of it was considered un-American activity.

  Wood did not think of himself as privileged. He was one of fourteen children of Jesse and Sarah Holcomb Wood, who worked a small corn and cotton farm in Cherokee County near the Etowah River. It was only fifty-one miles due north of Atlanta, but that made it remote enough in those days. Wood’s rise out of that desolation seemed like the mythic American success story of a politician emerging from nowhere. From the farm, he went to live with relatives so that he could attend public schools in Dahlonega and then go to North Georgia Agricultural College there. He was handsome and athletic and a sharp enough student to get into law school at Mercer College in Macon. In 1910 he was admitted to the Georgia Bar and began practicing law, first in Jasper, the county seat of sparsely populated Pickens County, and then in Canton, the business hub of Cherokee County. It was there that he connected with Newton Augustus Morris, the circuit-rider judge for the Blue Ridge Circuit in north Georgia. Morris was a generation older than Wood, and it seems that he became the young lawyer’s mentor, or at least at times had Wood serve as his junior wheelman, driving the judge from town to town. That is where the story gets interesting, and at times murky. It involves a lynching, one of the most publicized in American history, which says something both about the incident and about race, class, and geography in America. The man lynched in this case was Jewish, not black, relatively wealthy, not poor, and came from the North.

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  NEWT MORRIS ALSO came out of rural Cherokee County and was a man of influence in the legal, political, and financial circles of Georgia by the time Wood fell into his orbit. From his home base on Sugar Hill near the town square of Marietta, twenty miles northwest of Atlanta, Judge Newt, as he was called, launched a career in the state legislature in 1897. He swiftly rose to leadership positions as Speaker pro tem and then Speaker of the House, where he wielded a mahogany gavel crafted from a stair rail taken from the historic Heard House, where Jefferson Davis had conducted the final meeting of the Confederate cabinet. When he left the Georgia State Capitol for the Blue Ridge judgeship in 1909, Morris was a wealthy man, a developer and construction company owner, boss of the town. People respected him or feared him or both. “A fourteen-carat son of a bitch with spare parts,” one Marietta lawyer said of him.

  On April 26, 1913, a murder occurred in Atlanta that stirred the passions and prejudices of Georgians like few before or since. The victim was from Marietta and her name was Mary Phagan. Although not yet fourteen, she was already holding down a job in the city, riding the streetcar to the National Pencil Company plant on South Forsyth Street to fit tiny erasers into the metal socket on pencils. On the day of her death, she had gone into the factory to pick up a paycheck. Her body was found near an incinerator in the basement. Her boss, the superintendent at the pencil factory, was Leo Frank, twenty-nine, married, Jewish, a transplant from Brooklyn, and said to be the last person in the building known to see her alive. He was charged with her murder and convicted, a finding based largely on the testimony of Jim Conley, the factory’s janitor, who was also in the building that day. Conley happened to be black. The fact that a white man would be convicted on the word of a black man was highly improbable in racist Georgia, but only one of many improbable aspects to this sensational case.

  Stories about the murder of Mary Phagan, the trial and conviction of Leo Frank, and Frank’s many unsuccessful appeals, dominated the front pages of newspapers not only in Atlanta but in most of the South and North month after month. The Atlanta Constitution believed Frank guilty from the start, and its daily accounts fueled a mob mentality. The fact that so many reporters and columnists from New York and Chicago and other northern cities descended on Atlanta and questioned Frank’s prosecution only heightened the animosity of the local populace. In her hometown of Marietta, and elsewhere in Georgia, Mary Phagan became the martyred symbol of white female vulnerability and innocence, a sentiment always present in southern culture but intensified in this instance by the victim’s tender age. There was also a complicated mix of class friction and populism at work. Before her murder, she had already been victimized by a system that encouraged child labor, low pay, unregulated working conditions, and long workweeks. From the perspective of Frank’s supporters, he was the victim of a rush to judgment fueled by a convergence of this economic resentment and anti-Semitism. The South was changing, losing some of its distinct agrarian culture, its leading cities becoming more industrialized and complicated, and a Jewish industrialist was unfairly paying the price for being a symbol of unwanted and disorienting change.

  Newton Augustus Morris and John Stephens Wood had little to do with the case up to this point, other than paying attention to it like everyone else in Georgia. The trial, conviction, and sentence of capital punishment for Leo Frank played out with Judge Newt and his wheelman on the periphery. But during the long appeals process and eventual commutation hearing, as Frank’s defense team began uncovering more and more evidence showing his likely innocence and that the perpetrator was probably the prosecution’s prime witness, Jim Conley, the presence of Morris started to be felt. When word spread that a private detective from the North was nosing around looking for information, a local mob in Marietta chased him down and cornered him until Judge Newt, the most powerful man in town, came upon the scene and brokered a deal. If the investigator promised to leave Marietta and never return, he could get out unharmed.

  Most historians have determined that Frank was innocent and that Conley was the perpetrator. The evidence was circumstantial, and more of that circumstantial evidence pointed toward Conley than Frank. That conclusion was reinforced generations later, in 1982, when two reporters for the Tennessean in Nashville, Jerry Thompson and Robert Sherborne, interviewed a local man named Alonzo Mann, who seven decades earlier had worked as Frank’s young office boy. Mann had testified briefly at the trial but had never been asked directly about what he had seen, and he talked about it later only with relatives, until the two reporters approached him. He told them that on that long ago April day at the pencil factory he stumbled upon Jim Conley holding the limp body of a young white girl who seemed dead. Startled that someone had caught sight of him, Conley told the office boy, “If you ever mention this, I’ll kill you,” Mann recalled. The Tennessean reporters asked Mann to take a lie detector test and psychological examination and reported that he “passed both impressively.”

  But whether Frank was wrongly convicted and Conley was the murderer is only tangentially relevant to the later involvement of Morris and Wood. The governor of Georgia, John Slaton, was persuaded by the defense evidence presented during the commutation process and, in an act of political courage, decided to commute Frank’s death sentence. The commutation created a furor in Georgia, riling the anti-Frank mobs into action. A group was formed in Marietta calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, a precursor to the second coming of the Klan. The rage was fueled by the rhetoric of Tom Watson, Georgia’s most well-known populist politician-journalist, who had remained relatively quiet during the trial but now was so outraged that he began campaigning for the people to take the law into their own hands. “Lynch law is a good sign,” he wrote in Watson’s Magazine. “It shows that a sense of justice lives among the people.” Many of the men of Marietta agreed.

  As reconstructed with meticulous detail in Steve Oney’s groundbreaking book And the Dead Shall Rise, the plot to lynch L
eo Frank was conceived and carried out by a gang of righteous hooligans orchestrated behind the scenes by some of the most powerful people in Marietta and throughout Georgia. After his death sentence was commuted, Frank was held at the state prison in Milledgeville. The lynching plotters worked it out so that everything was fixed to ease the way for the henchmen to kidnap him and hang him from a tree. In the logistics of getting the lynching party of twenty-five men and eight cars to the prison, into the prison, out of the prison, and back to Marietta, nothing was left to chance. Oney wrote, “During the past weeks, the band of 25 had made a trial run between Marietta and Milledgeville, learning which roads were passable while greasing the palms of various sheriffs. Cars were gassed, guns loaded, alibis (something about a fishing trip) were concocted and resolves firmed.”