A Word on Words; 3220; Steve Oney

that was john seale going to be lonely we're talking about and that the shore for rodgers that's the book it's a story that doesn't need to be told it's been told that another so well that it felt like a child or something years on so but of the person footing after that for an investment where all eyes were seventeen years and it's a story of love leonard george a rare moment in time quinn somehow an assailant senators and seized the city and result in more great judicial tragedies in history in this country the death of leo frank is something that the social and that's a good thing i think enough time has passed that they've come to grips with that but yes it was an extraordinary series of events that led to leo frank slipping outside a lead on august seventeen nineteen fifteen years of cornell educated

jews would come down to atlanta married into the best family one of us jewish families in town his wife's grandfather had founded the reform synagogue a temple and he had the misfortune of being accused and convicted of murdering a little girl who worked at his pencil factory in downtown atlanta thirteen euro marries a funeral where feminine that crime set off the previously buried class resentment and religious prejudice in atlanta and oftentimes i think class resentment played as much if not more than anti semitism in here was a ivy league educated backer superintendent running a big plan or a hundred and fifty workers most of them teenaged girls and you can imagine the sort of powder keg that was the year and the first suspect it is was june he was not the first suspect the first suspect was a gondolier even though they own their

offenders body he was the night watchman and the the black night watchman yes he was black and he was arrested but pretty quickly established his innocence he just had a terrible misfortune of being a black man alone in a building with a dead white girl and then dark after his arrest leo frank was quickly arrested because when the police came to frank's house to inform and that a girl and then found dead at his factory he shake uncontrollably couldn't get his necktie tied he asked repeatedly for a couple coffee he later gave contradictory answers regarding some key things all this behavior could be explained as horrible anxiety it could've been cognizance of go on his part that the police were suspicious of him from the get go they arrested and then the black man you mentioned jim conway comes into the picture there were two very enigmatic murder notes from by rarer things body they both set in a fact caloric tall black man did this i write while he'd play with me and that is almost designed to throw suspicion on when i left it was designed for us

is suspicion on someone other than tim conway thats for sure cause jon conley was a short stocky ginger colored black man an hour the police reform and studies notes in fact linguists and experts have been promised time even now but the pleased to know what to make of them at the time and probably came along hallucinated all said these notes were dictated to me by leo frank after he killed mary fagan in order to cast suspicion on yet another black man and the police by this point the one all the way down the highway with frank as their chief suspect we're happy to have another passenger given the current health and get to their destination it takes him a while to get where he's going to encounter he you really give them three you really didn't give the police three separate statements each won a little more incriminating and finally the ultimate incrimination of leo frank and in effect he said i didn't do it he did it it seems to me and reading what you say about that

that two of those officers who were questioning him particularly one of them sort of plain hard combat prior bad they want him to know he was the suspect and i guess if you take or jim ganley was in jail he's driving anyway can to get out of the limelight of trying it out live a suspicion and they're pushing pretty hard what's your sense of cellular missionary story of the details he just provided the please at each step down the road to write there were these three affidavits he provided them with a few more details in each affidavit that made it easier to pin the crime on frank and many of them you're also right we're at the places suggestion but yeah there are people claim that comment was just telling a little bit more the truth each time around and he in fact refer to himself after giving his last affidavit as a clean neighbor and what he meant by that was that he had washed away the geysers and piles of the

black man which white southerners believe black men and women at that era war and he'd come clean and told the truth so his final answer played to like a preconception about bloch's at that time and the dynamics in the room you're about as close to me as i could that will never know exactly what they were if you play with it's interesting to me that with about a night watchman by gun if you're sitting there any of the political frame they can frame either of them is addressing any given race isn't as it was on that day and some thousand as it was in a way and it's interesting to me that that the police went in the direction that they went and that the community was outraged to and chooses russo it's fascinating made to err and i play with that implicitly throughout the entire book what i'm trying to suggest

from the first chapter on is that there was a an unspoken sympathy and allegiance between blacks and poor whites and they both felt that they were being oppressed by the catalyst the industrialist and it wasn't out in the open it was unpleasant are not explicit but the frank case where you have this ivy league educated factory superintendent supported by capital an industry an exemplar of the ruling elite and the jewish and the jews are part in parcel and so a lower class white juror a lower class white policeman will look it up for black man and see for a moment there that he has more common with him than he does with the white elite power structure of the town and the leap forward that but tom watson played on more explicitly in his for tom watson the great emperor in rubble and populist to cuddle a fry case and railed against the letters juicy called in week after week and the praises of his paper the jeffersonian tom watson's genius was that he saw the common ground between poor white

and black he didn't stick with it to try to but he sought jefferson the jeffersonian was watson's vehicle to to national prominence statewide prominence but national prominence as well meaning made it made his way for a season and a semi known as race but he made his way back and he had a first flirt national prominence in the eighteen nineties when he was elected to congress as a vice presidential candidate then he'd always been along with william jennings bryan burrough voice of the common man in that era but he was lost in the wilderness and wandering alone without a friend jason it comes to him and he seizes on it as the mechanism to lift himself up and i also think he believed leo frank was going to say would react in good faith i stand and look at what tom watson wrote what tom watson rock also live with a measure of all in

fiberglass top flabbergasted know so you there's never been a writer like tom watson appoint someone today he did to quote more point write with a pen warmed up and how he was he was i mean it was vicious it was vicious and it was and it was and it will air with brutal when you say he was on a walking noon we'll listen in if you think about where he was in iowa where he had been a bum it is difficult to conclude anything except that he's solved this as a vehicle back there a couple of things that influences i get into a related and to me fascinating subject in the book a top box in the new york times says he used on the frank case with equal that are from a different angle than watson an ox fearful that his fellow southern lands was wrongfully accused down here turn the new york times into a vehicle to attempt

to exonerate leo frank in the new york times's coverage of the fry case is all out of proportion and they made a terrible editorial error and if you think they were over the top whitney johnson in augusta national it last year this is faraway eclipsing what they did then the day after david daily news columns would write usually one sided stories about the fry case and thirty five or six major editorials per month about the frank case lobbying for frank's exoneration will watson cannot let that pass a southern man cannot let the yankee press dictate to the georgia courts and so they were involved in a fast and dearest tennis game a rhetorical tennis game with frank as the increasingly battered ball and it was a the novel thing to figure out as i watched family and you can trace what the times says watson's response the chaotic out a response and when i wrote it i tried to make it like a call and response in a church you back and forth back and forth

close tom watson of the great advantages of every constituency and readership in georgia that a doctor even though we came out in chattanooga right has no ability to reach a wide variety of that tom watson's parishioner saved an l fox but adolf ochs has written an essay about north of purity of money to try and then made another nie is irene as i read your cow the trial it seems to me that he was badly represented i don't suggest that they didn't cry or it seemed to be almost as if they assumed that a white jury would never convict the white i think that assumption was behind the presentation from the gecko and i think that's why they didn't ask for a change of venue they there's a fascinating part of a case where some very off color evidence gets in involving frank's alleged propensity for making the service comments and having his way with young girls in the factory and the defense didn't strike it in fact they choose to

cross examine on it and it'll move to strike or other and it was because they believe the rule when despite it means uber says the word to make you rich right now the lawyers are confident they were right laura and i and i must say in reading verbatim excerpts closing arguments dorsey was powerful own end but i you know i approved almost as if they gave dorsey oh the district attorney the room too beat them over the head by their unwillingness to get passionate about that they were passionate but they weren't smart and there were so many dynamics in the courtroom door soon was married into liberal serves family with roles are frankly larger forces about fifteen years younger with ross are treated him like a teenager what were percent from sand

that might've been great for liberals are the government for a bad tactics in a courtroom judge identify with dorsey didn't wanna say this young man to be up on by this big blunder boss of an attorney i'm less willing to go to sleep and he sort of sitting back looking at this fresh troops are brought to bare heavily on an after the guilty verdict there are all sorts of factors to consider their affidavits saying that two of the jurors said are violent or el que le jue they're armed demonstration showed to hang him and silly finds a way to

commute the sentence and part of the way he does that and justifies it is on the basis of maybe you evidence that smells rain that excrement in the elevator shaft that these are not low tierce lee phrase in mallow tourists evidence that was discovered at the bottom of the powerful factor elevator shocked by the spawning officer this maybe this maybe bleep out of this program but it's as you described the ship and shares a sudden the shaft and the responding officers came the morning a body was found and they noticed some feces deposited in the elevator shaft and at the trial john connolly for reasons that don't really make any sense just offers offhand that he doesn't get it in that place that morning of the murder of john connolly testified that he and frank use the elevator to transport gerry fegan from the area that the prosecution theorized the crime occurred on the second floor down to the basement where the body was discovered

when the police came that the seas was fresh the police later that day took the elevator down and mass the feces so calmly anne frank could never taking the elevator on saturdays is calmly said otherwise the feces would've imagined slayton one the most interesting parts of his deliberations on the case he went over to the factory and ran the elevator down himself several times in a voice that was against the bottom for those of you just tuned in i'm talking with steve only the author about about his new book and the dead shall rise which is the story of the death or marriage say in a lynching of leo frank so he commutes it limits the sentence around from death to life and that's a life imprisonment and the faster you mentioned because it explains a lot of georgia's the program slayton was luther olsen small apartment with rosser was frank's lead counsel and for most organs there was no way to get around the fact that i think the fact of the aisle and i ask you

whether amid ongoing movie was that was produced on this subject jacqueline played the role and you point out look i think we're awesome connection with ignore it right you can ignore it but you have to wonder whether it's like nine light of what happened to him until i love the outrage the burning in effigy and he literally was driven from office and there are so many sadat's interesting john that are just compelling to me and i'll get back to slave in a moment but there was an editor at the augusta chronicle and thomas loyalists he was the only southern newspaper editor who in the wake of frank's lynching editorialized week after week saying this isn't our age we have to get control of the state of georgia it's in the hands of the law and in his editorials he pointed out that what that slain have again slayton look at this thing and all we saw was a lot of that road in front of him if he commuted the sentence says career he was a young man his crew was over his financial prospects were damaged he had nothing to gain others' would argue the other way but you know

i side with him and when i mentioned side like to spell more love song was soon out of the newspaper business he lost his eyesight went to work managing a little rundown hotel and resort in warm springs georgia and the causes paper was a democratic machine paper he knew young franklin d roosevelt then didn't come down with polio and brought him down to warm springs and supervises first treatments and no years alone newspaper man who stood up for leo frank the time hopping rehabilitate this great future president da but the fry case has been loyal do loads of little voice and a wonderful goats and and and release of expulsion of slate and from the state is a is the real tragedy really was a man of things to be a man of strong convictions and then a strong convictions and he came back to the state and for any lawyer of a certain age you say the name john slate and they have a happy memory because he supervised a bar exams in georgia up until right before his death in the late

nineteen fifties so a whole generation of wars past under his guidance and he was never a player again ga politics in fact he ran for the senate in the nineteen thirties and another hundred and fifty nine counties in the state carried only won a surprise victory episode it was his career was wrong before michael you the most compelling piece of evidence that was narrowed and was the sense of junk on his lawyer that real fight was an innocent man or which almost said to me that jim carly might not submit my book the votes on the change of mind of a long forgotten character named william smith williams their early advocate of civil rights for blocks their lives on our most of the time he went in to represent khalid calls the new fried for lawyers would try to

steamroller him and i get snow when it's a sign also that when a lower water smelled then he was telling me about his dad's partner jason how's that represented john connolly in the cemetery a somethin com in nineteen forty nine i was with my dad in the crawford long hospital and he had lou gehrig's disease and losses power of globalization but is still mentally sharp is dying and he's in an auction ten years can only these notes about insurance policy and what to do with mom and then he studied himself in on the back of a hospital prescription she wrote down and walk out the letters in articles of death i believe in the innocence and good character of leo him for it and he signed with a flourish podium smith fans is no doubt a son well something happen to go from this man who represented gen conway who helped defeat leo frank to this man on his deathbed wanted to exonerate we are frightened about that's a great story and it's a story that will allow me to avoid some of the cliched ways of

different cases been perceived in the past what i call good jews bad yet it is because i know that all made of southerners have an ability within them somewhere and this man dead and he acted on it his curve also badly damaged like slade left the region for a lot on it was a case that took no prisoners people were made or ruined by a gun that's watson as you mention a moment elektra united states senate afterwards few doors to the prosecutor becomes governor of the state the winners were ensconced in high places and the losers were banished the sidelines i'm also persuaded by the young settlers of the trial judge who had second third thought right judge lehner grown almost ground leo frank a new trial after the connection but he thought that he was in to

weaker position politically to do it and he would leave it to the palate procedures and that they would obviously find error and frank would be granted draw didn't happen go for your role is on his deathbed and he dictates a letter which became known as the voice from the tomb because he died before the letters really is but in that letter he said i may have erred i showed an due deference to this jury i felt the jury may have made the wrong decision i was never certain at this man's guilt of course a letter comes out of that fence but has poisoned different hands it's not literal sermon on with a new team and they use of shrewdly but it attacked by tom watson as being a planet the judge roll was not physically worn often dictated this letter so it begins another thing that they did so frank is convicted and is facing execution and his execution is set aside by the governor and then the conspiracy and so the legislature an inside and an end and

house side the legislature i mean we do if you do with little in marietta in unique ways those two chapters of the book really tell a conspiracy to get inside a prison plot his assassination and that failing to kidnap him we usually my eyes glaze over when someone mentioned conspiracy theory but the more i looked into this some more thought county get the most celebrated conduct in america out of a state penitentiary not out of the county jail and out of the state penitentiary without firing a shot then transporting them on the roads in maltese nevada night a hundred and fifty plus miles and legend of john and no one's arrested or even inconvenience tiny village it's a crime of such magnitude that their hasta least the pool and then i started to put together who the people were in marietta who wanted him dead their relationships to the prison commission that ran the state penitentiary system and i realize slowly slowly that this was a an officially state sanctioned crime that the village party planners got one of their own

appointed a legislator happened to one of their own appointed chairman of the subcommittee that controlled funding for the prison system and they offered a large appropriation to the prisoner or to the prison guards that they would look into why an and the dead and to me that's a shocking revelation in the book am it only guarantees already been said by know the convict an almost yet he almost like he was the time of the love and got i was down at the present to start muffin after so ago walking through and it's one of the few places in georgia that they're still exactly as it was at the time the fry case and in a visualizing will try to sleep a crazed moldable murder the prison incidentally was more like an army barracks or it sells everyone slept in the common room on cots and his prisoner came up to him and stabbed him in the throat with a butcher knife out while i was sleep and raked across a stroke at his external juggled than likely for frank couple i'm sober was a doctor who

had been convicted of murdering his mistresses has been in the seizure of the jocular and save his life right there leno my you know my interest and the scale you're doing furloughs back on top of the us backed them to tennessee and really applied role in discovering why miami office portfolio frank who had not alone story related goal in georgia apart and grow board jeri thompson my colleague at the newspaper did a wonderful job reporting on that in and finally there was a podcasting was pardoned pardoned which does not exonerate both ideas excuses and apologizes and what jack apologizes and i guess we'll never know well we you know i believe in my heart whoa front as innocent as a lonely killed that girl and it's one of the great kafka esque tragedies in real life that this man will fry could've walked into those sites and others life ruined but scientifically

were never been and i was so in my book i say we must maintain an aisle about the physical evidence is gone you can submit it to contend for a forensic science and you can't go over turning nearly nine year old convictions the others just isn't there the past is the past and i think the past is there to teach us as opposed to us to impose our will on it and there's a lot to be learned from this case will be new in regalia life to the story with a notebook i don't know if the book does well i'd love to write another book but there's a part of me was going back to work for a newspaper you not one of the emerson the here and now the great thing about being on a newspaper is it you're out every day and i like that i miss that reading a book like this that solitary work on your own time on and maybe you know i've been unemployed for too long and never be that employee again but that is a little more immediate things when the great work on his paper well i must say it's a book that everybody should read it talks about racism and the senators

and the talks about politics it talks about human life we run out of time mark it's been great then receive like we've been talking to steve about his book and the bid to rise and thank you also joining the film warlords and john's a you know in the dream right