A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  Late on the night of August 16, 1915, with the complicity of prison officials, Frank was snatched from the prison by the lynching party and thrown into the back of a car. This was the early era of automobiles. It had taken the men seven hours to drive about 120 miles from Marietta to Milledgeville, and it would take another seven hours back. News that Frank had been kidnapped spread across the state quickly as the caravan rumbled through the darkness down dusty roads on a circuitous route past one sleepy small town after another. By the time the caravan neared its destination, a large crowd had amassed in a grove at Frey’s Gin on the outskirts of Marietta, and more citizens were heading there by car and horse and foot from all directions. The tree, the noose, the hanging table—all had been set up and were ready and waiting. Oney described what happened next: “With soft morning sunlight dappling down through the late-summer foliage, the vigilantes blindfolded Frank, bound his feet together, cinched a khaki cloth around his exposed lower torso, lifted him onto the table and placed the noose over his head. . . . A man identified in most reports as simply ‘the leader’ pronounced the court’s sentence and kicked over the table. The time was 7:04.” Frank fought against the suffocating of the hangman’s rope so much that it took him several minutes to die, his shirt bloodied by the frantic jerking that broke open flesh on his neck. He remained there, dangling from the tree, as the grove at Frey’s Gin filled with onlookers, eventually numbering over a thousand, the mob drugged with an adrenaline-fueled concoction of primal vengeance and ghoulish curiosity. To one rabble-rouser in the riotous mob, a man named Howell, Frank’s hanging was insufficient. He wanted to cut the body into pieces. The mob appeared ready to partake in the mutilation.

  It so happened that Judge Newt was there, with Wood at his side. He stepped from the crowd to take command with these words: “Whoever did this thing did a thorough job. Whoever did this thing left nothing more for us to do. Little Mary Phagan is vindicated. Her foul murder is avenged. Now I ask you, I appeal to you, as citizens of Cobb County in the good name of our county, not to do more. I appeal to you to let the undertaker take it.”

  Frank’s body was cut from the tree; there were a few final kicks and shouts before it found its way to the undertaker’s basket and was loaded up for the drive to the mortuary in Atlanta. It ended up in the backseat of the Model T driven by Judge Newt’s wheelman, John Stephens Wood. In the car were Morris, Wood, and Rogers Winter, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, which had editorialized in favor of a new trial for Frank. Winter had the firsthand scoop:

  Opening wide his throttle, Wood poured his motor everything it would hold.

  By his side, with drawn face and gleaming eyes, Judge Morris strained forward, peering through the dust, waving his arms and shouting for automobiles to make way.

  Crosswise of the tonneau [open rear passenger compartment], the end of it projecting a foot or more on each side of the car, jostled and swayed the undertaker’s long basket with the dead body inside.

  Down the road toward Atlanta sped the car, and up the road toward Marietta sped automobiles loaded with men going like mad to see the body.

  The car with the body gave the cars with the sightseers just enough room for the end of the basket to miss a collision, and the cars with the sightseers gave equally as little room for the car with the dead man.

  Low over the road hung an endless roll of dust, and through this dust the three men in the death car would dimly see cars coming one after another, a procession of them, all speeding like racers; and the death car would swerve a little to the right to pass them, which made the basket jostle and sway and rattle, while the sightseers flashing past would wave their hands and shout hoarse shouts as they raced northward to Marietta hoping to see the body hanging in the grove.

  A logical impression at this point is that the judge and his wheelman acted with noble intentions. Morris calmed the mob, averted the mutilation of Frank’s body, and Wood drove fearlessly to deliver the body to the undertaker for proper burial. But then a question arises: What were Morris and Wood doing at the lynching field in the first place?

  The answer had always been that they learned of it by happenstance and acted out of probity and concern. As the two men, judge and protégé, told the story to associates, they happened to be staying overnight in the town of Alpharetta on Sunday, August 16, so that Judge Morris could hear cases there the next morning, a Monday. In researching his book nearly eight decades after the event, Oney interviewed a lawyer named Herman Spence, who in Wood’s later years served as his law partner. As Spence told Oney, according to notes of the interview in the files of the Georgia Historical Society, Wood explained that he had gone out for a walk early the next morning and happened to see some cars on the road to Marietta, and it appeared that “there was a sheeted figure in the middle of one.” Convinced that this figure must be Leo Frank, Wood went back to the hotel and alerted Judge Newt, who said they should follow the lynching party to its destination, so they hopped in Wood’s Model T.

  Wood’s grandson, John Gollner, offered another recollection that differs in some details but follows the same general outline. Long after Wood had retired from Congress and was living in Canton, Gollner heard a story about the Frank lynching and was so alarmed that he called his grandfather. “I called him up from Atlanta, got the maid, and told her I needed to speak to my grandfather. She said, ‘You know he tries to nap in the afternoon,’ and I said, ‘I don’t care, I need to talk to him,’ and she finally drags the phone far enough to his room so he can answer it, and I say, ‘Grandpa, someone just told me that you were there when Leo Frank was lynched. Is that true?’ He was real quiet for a second, then he started laughing, and I was like, ‘I don’t think it’s funny,’ and he said, ‘I’ll see if I’ve got a copy of the newspaper article around here, but whoever told you that didn’t read the whole story. And the judge and I were in court and heard that they had broken out and lynched him, which was what we were afraid would happen, and typically when they lynched someone they would mutilate the body, and I didn’t really believe he was guilty, and neither did the judge, and we went down and cut him down and carried him down to the funeral home.’ ”

  Milledgeville was southeast of Marietta, while Alpharetta, where Morris and Wood were preparing for court, was northeast, so it was a roundabout route that the kidnap caravan took on the way to the lynching. Oney determined that they did that on purpose, driving north to Eatonton and Lawrenceville and then turning west in Alpharetta and from there down into Marietta. This was done to avoid Atlanta and any police in the state capital who were under orders to protect Frank. And it made it appear the lynching party was just a group of men heading home from a fishing weekend in the north Georgia mountain streams. But there was another reason: so that Judge Newt could accompany them on the final leg. He was not as removed from the lynching as he wanted people to believe.

  The timing of events that morning punches a few holes in the Wood-Morris version of events. Frank was lynched at 7:04. The caravan on its long and roundabout haul from Milledgeville was traveling at about eighteen miles an hour. It was about nineteen miles from Alpharetta to Frey’s Gin. Wood and Morris arrived at the lynching field at the tail end of the caravan, well before Frank was hanged. If you add that time with the time it took Wood earlier to get back to the hotel and put the judge into the Model T, that places Wood going out for his morning walk well before six in the morning. In that part of Georgia in mid-August, the sun rose at seven. This means Wood was walking in darkness.

  Possible, if problematic. But there is far more to it. Through documents and interviews Oney uncovered the hidden figures who were the brains and influence behind the lynching drama. Several relatives passed on information that had been kept secret while the participants were still alive. One descendant kept a Bible that had a handwritten list of the lynching plotters inside. The mayor of Marietta was in on it, a former governor was in on it, a sheriff was part of the plan, legislators and several of the business leaders
in Marietta helped execute it, and at the center of it all was Newton Augustus Morris. He did not just stumble upon the lynching scene; he was essential to its planning. He had been involved in the key meetings beforehand. The lynching party did not drive by Alpharetta by accident, but to pick up the mastermind. “It was, in its way, an extraordinary group,” Oney wrote. “Yet had it not been for Judge Newt Morris, it would have been lacking in the raw nerve essential to the task under consideration. Where [others] were drunk with the idea of lynching Frank and would attempt to intoxicate both their fellow Cobb Countians and the officials in Milledgeville with the same wine, Morris was coldly sober.” Some in the group, Oney wrote, thought they were doing their duty as citizens or refighting the Civil War or wreaking revenge against political opponents, but Morris was “amassing capital for future use.”

  Most of Marietta wanted Frank dead, and all of those who were part of the secret mission would from then on owe allegiance to Judge Newt. His final act of refusing to allow Frank’s lynched body to be mutilated reflects the limits of his allowable behavior, but it also helped establish the larger alibi.

  And his wheelman, his young disciple, was John Stephens Wood, the man who had the authority to question whether Elliott Maraniss was sufficiently American.

  * * *

  ONE YEAR AFTER he drove the Model T carrying Leo Frank’s lynched body down the highway toward an Atlanta mortuary, Wood won a seat in the Georgia legislature representing Cherokee County. He ran as a populist in the Tom Watson mold, promising free schoolbooks for children and raises for teachers (white children and teachers, that is), and took office in 1917, only to resign a year later to go off to war. “With the resignation comes a vigorous expression of patriotism that is refreshing even in this day when the spirit of loyalty is sweeping the country as never before,” wrote James A. Hollomon in the Atlanta Constitution. Hollomon quoted from Wood’s letter of resignation to the governor, in which the freshman legislator said that he had hoped to get a leave from Camp Dick in Dallas, where he was a member of the 8th Cadet Flying Squadron, but was unable to unless he resigned from the service altogether, forcing him to choose. “Although I keenly appreciate the importance of the work to be done in the legislature at this time,” Wood wrote, “I feel that in the present crisis every citizen should serve in the capacity that will render the maximum of benefit to the government regardless of the sacrifice on the part of the citizen.”

  Wood was already thirty-three when he enlisted. The army sent him from Camp Dick up to the military aeronautics school at the University of Illinois, but he never reached the battlefields overseas. When the war ended, he went home to Canton, resumed his law practice, and became what he called “sort of a joiner.” He joined the Masons and the American Legion and the Great Council of the Improved Order of Red Men, the oldest secret organization in America, going back to the Tea Party in Boston—that is, oldest depending on how one defines America. Despite its name, the Order of Red Men wanted nothing to do with Native Americans; it was a white-males-only group that in the twentieth century became known for its opposition to welfare and communism. Since the murder in the pencil factory and the lynching at Frey’s Gin and the emergence of the Knights of Mary Phagan, another likeminded civic group was rising in Georgia when Wood got home, one that all the leading men in Georgia were joining. So the joiner joined, writing out a check for fifteen dollars to attend an initiation meeting of the Ku Klux Klan.

  By Wood’s later account, that was his one and only Klan meeting. When an organizer said that he would have to wear a hood and administer punishment to anyone the KKK deemed undesirable, he left and did not return. The Klan kept his fifteen bucks, he said.

  In the forgiving spirit of my father, I’d like to give Wood the benefit of the doubt. There are no records, the people are all dead, the truth hard to discern. But there is a context to consider, both what Wood would do and say later and what he already had said and done, starting with the fact that for the rest of his life he would maintain a cover story to conceal his aiding-and-abetting role with Judge Newt in the lynching of Leo Frank.

  * * *

  WHEN WOOD WAS first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1930, the New York Times characterized his congressional district as perhaps the most isolated in the nation. His territory encompassed the mountains and hollows of north Georgia. Of the nineteen counties in his district, two lacked telephones, two others had no newspapers, and seven were so remote they could not be reached by railroad. From his base in Canton, Wood knew how to negotiate the winding backcountry roads all the way up to Rabun Bald Mountain near the North Carolina border, having traversed them as a solicitor and then judge on the Blue Ridge Circuit. His victory over incumbent Thomas M. Bell, who had served in Congress for a quarter-century, was attributed to the fact that he “went out among the hillbillies.”

  By the time of his rise to Washington, Wood was far from being the Ball Ground corn and cotton farm boy of his youth. After a failed first marriage, the second time around he had married Louise Coggins Jones, and in so doing joined the first family of Canton. Louise was the third child of the second marriage of Robert Tyre Jones Sr., known as R.T., who had eleven children by his first wife and four by his second. R.T. founded the Jones Mercantile Company, offering goods to Cherokee County farmers in exchange for cotton, then started the Canton Cotton Mill, a textile plant that served as the major employer for generations of Canton’s working-class families, and from there established the Bank of Canton, known informally as “the Jones bank.” He also served as councilman and mayor and had a stake in the Hotel Canton and the local newspaper. In every respect, the Jones family ran the town.

  Two years after their marriage in 1926, Wood and his wife moved into a redbrick Colonial Revival nestled on an expansive estate high above the Etowah River on the edge of Canton. The home had been in the Jones family, and the deed was registered to Louise. Wood was a circuit judge then, and people in Canton referred to him as Judge Wood. Many of them spoke glowingly of his courtroom skills as lawyer and jurist, but his affiliation with the Jones family is what burnished his reputation and gave him great cachet. Among Louise’s many half-brothers was Robert Permedus Jones, an Atlanta lawyer whose son was one of the most famous athletes during the Golden Age of American sports, the brilliant amateur golfer Robert Tyre Jones Jr., known to the world as Bobby Jones.

  Wood also had strong connections in Marietta, a city halfway between Canton and Atlanta that was not in his congressional district but had been part of his judicial circuit and the longtime domain of his mentor, Judge Newt. Before Wood left for Washington, Marietta’s legal establishment honored him at a luncheon with a luggage set for his trip north. He went to Capitol Hill as a conventional southern white politician of that era, unwavering in his opposition to desegregation and civil rights, rationalizing Jim Crow society as an expression of states’ rights. He was closely allied with Richard B. Russell Jr., Georgia’s new governor and a former ally in the Georgia House, who within two years would join Wood in Washington and launch a Senate career making him one of the nation’s most powerful legislators.

  When Russell was governor, he and his father, Richard B. Russell Sr., then chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, were honored along with Wood at a ceremony by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Old man Russell was awarded the Cross of Honor, while Russell Jr. and Wood each received the Cross of Service. At the time, the United Daughters of the Confederacy was instrumental in perpetuating the myth of southern innocence, its leaders playing key roles in determining how the antebellum South and Civil War were portrayed in Georgia’s textbooks: slaves were well treated, cheerful, and prosperous; slavery was not the cause of the war; Robert E. Lee was the hero, not Abraham Lincoln.

  During the time when Wood had the power to deem who and what was un-American, he sought to put the best face on racism. He was unlike two of his predecessors in that respect. Former chairman Martin Dies of Texas and influential member John Ran
kin of Mississippi were open about their bigotry even as they chaired the committee. Wood was more genteel and defensive. Aside from asserting that he had been involved with the Klan for only one meeting and had joined only because he was a joiner, he often tried to emphasize his impartiality by citing a case he brought against alleged Klan members in Marietta when he was solicitor general on the Blue Ridge Circuit.

  This was the Hasty case, in which the defendants were a local celebrity named Keller Hasty, a major league pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics; two of Hasty’s brothers, Arthur and Frank; and Tom Black, Joe Bramlett, and Parks G. Cook. The six men were charged with donning Klan hoods one night in 1923 and heading out to the highway near Smyrna in search of Mrs. Bertha Holcombe and a companion, S. H. Norton of Atlanta, whom they proceeded to “whip, flog, wound and ill-treat almost into insensibility.” When Wood declared in court that he intended to “prosecute this flogging case to the full extent of the law, regardless of the affiliation of any of the parties concerned,” he earned the editorial praise of the Atlanta Journal, which hailed him for “protecting community and commonwealth against inroads of lawlessness.” Wood and his allies used this editorial as Exhibit A of his strong character decades later, when his sentiments about the Klan came into question.

  It is a low bar to gain credit for bringing a flogging case to court, but in that time and place it was rare for any cases to be brought against Klansmen, so credit where credit is due, however minimal the expectations. But there is a coda to the Hasty case that Wood and his supporters failed to mention. The first defendant, Parks G. Cook, claimed that he was at home in bed when the floggings occurred at 8:30 that night and denied that he ever wore a mask or was a member of the Klan. Bertha Holcombe clearly identified him, but the jury did not believe her and voted for acquittal. When that happened, Solicitor Wood made a motion to dismiss all charges against the others, including the ballplayer, and the judge agreed, instructing the jury to return with verdicts of not guilty. The courthouse, according to newspaper accounts, rang with applause as the verdict was announced.