And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description

In 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan was found brutally murdered in the basement of the Atlanta pencil factory where she worked. The factory manager, a college-educated Jew named Leo Frank, was arrested, tried, and convicted in a trial that seized national headlines. When the governor commuted his death sentence, Frank was kidnapped and lynched by a group of prominent local citizens.

Steve Oney’s acclaimed account re-creates the entire story for the first time, from the police investigations to the gripping trial to the brutal lynching and its aftermath. Oney vividly renders Atlanta, a city enjoying newfound prosperity a half-century after the Civil War, but still rife with barely hidden prejudices and resentments. He introduces a Dickensian pageant of characters, including zealous policemen, intrepid reporters, Frank’s martyred wife, and a fiery populist who manipulated local anger at Northern newspapers that pushed for Frank’s exoneration. Combining investigative journalism and sweeping social history, this is the definitive account of one of American history’s most repellent and most fascinating moments.

The People v. Leo Frank is now a motion picture based on the book And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, starring Will Janowitz and Seth Gilliam. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.

---

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The 1913 lynching of Leo Frank is one of the most sensational and resonant incidents in U.S. criminal and legal history, and a touchstone of American anti-Semitism. Frank, a Northern Jew, was the manager of an Atlanta, Ga., pencil factory where 13-year-old Mary Phagan worked and was brutally murdered. After he was charged with the crime and arrested, Frank's religion and ethnicity were an unarticulated but central theme of the dramatic, two-year-long trial that garnered worldwide attention. Frank was convicted of Phagan's murder and sentenced to death, but the governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Georgians' anti-Semitism then reached a fever pitch, and Frank was dragged from his prison cell by a lynch mob and hanged near Phagan's hometown. Since then the Leo Frank case has become an emblem of American intolerance, inspiring a 1937 Hollywood movie, They Won't Forget, and a 1998 Broadway musical, Parade. Surprisingly, though, the Frank case has generated very few works of political or cultural analysis, an exception being Leonard Dinnerstein's The Leo Frank Case, originally published in 1968 and reissued in a slightly revised edition in 1986. Oney's is the best book on the subject to date. Oney, who spent years as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has written not only the definitive account of the murder, trial and lynching but also a stirring, eminently readable, and thrilling narrative. Oney has read extensively through court transcripts, contemporary newspaper articles, judicial and legal documents, and personal papers, uncovering new and unsettling material, most notably, that the men who planned Frank's lynching-they referred to themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan-were, or became, very important state politicians. The historical canvas here is broad, and Frank's story becomes a tapestry of American ethnicity, fear, hate and power. Oney carefully maps the history of the Jewish community in the South; the role that New York newspapers played in publicizing the trial and attacking anti-Semitism; and the complex role that racism and the interactions between black and white Georgians played in Frank's conviction. This complex turmoil comes together when, out of the blue, Oney details a suspenseful, beautifully detailed plot twist involving William Smith, the lawyer for the only other suspect, a black man named Jim Conley. Oney has a reporter's eye for detail and a novelist's sense of storytelling. While the narrative-fashioned as a crime story-is vividly detailed and deeply compelling, we never lose a sense of Oney's exacting accuracy and serious historical intent. This is a vital addition to the literature of race, Jewish studies and Southern history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 752 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First edition (October 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679421475
• ISBN-13: 978-0679421474
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #40,351 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #9 in	Books > History > United States > State & Local > Georgia
  #96 in	Books > Nonfiction > Crime & Criminals > Criminology

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And the Dead Shall Rise, October 30, 2003

By	"jss3rd" (Nashville, TN recently moved from Atlanta) - See all my reviews

I'm from Atlanta, and became interested in the Leo Frank case as a teen in the '50s. I remember many of the actual buildings before they were destroyed to make way for the "New" Atlanta. I read every book, newspaper account, court report, and Internet account that I could find.

This book is the best of the best. Oney puts you on the streets and in the buildings of Atlanta at the turn of the last century. He introduces you to the characters and makes you aware of the shifting intrigue and alliances. This is more than a book about little Mary Phagan and Leo Frank - it is a small glimpse of the times. You see the affects of child labor, workweeks of 66+ hours, wealth, poverty, and class warfare.

Both sides of the issue are fully laid out. Before reading this book, I had no doubt that Frank was innocent and Connelly was guilty. Now I'm only sure of one thing - the crowd that took law into its own hands robbed us of ever having a chance to find the whole truth.

Everyone seemed to play a part in this travesty - the "keystone" cops, attorneys, judges, newspapers, and everyday citizens. The only true innocent is poor Mary Phagan.

Great book - a must read for anyone interested in the history of the industrial revolution coming of age in the new south.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive exploration of a tragic injustice, January 16, 2004

By	Glenn R. Boston (Silver Spring, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Steve Oney's book will stand as the definitive account of the Leo Frank case. Frank, the superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, was accused of murdering one of his employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan, in 1913. His trial was conducted in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, and, despite the lack of solid evidence against him, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death -- due mainly to testimony from Jim Conley, a factory janitor who was probably the real killer. When Georgia's governor commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a lynch mob, formed by several leading citizens of Marietta, abducted Frank from prison and hung him from a tree. Oney retells the whole tragic tale with great detail but also considerable flair. The book clocks in at 700 pages but never feels dense or tedious. It is a spell-binding read that is difficult to put down. (Please disregard complaints by other reviewers that the book is too long or too detailed. This is an exhaustive account; a reasonably intelligent person who does not have the attention span of a gnat will find it no problem to get through.) Oney, a journalist by profession, tells the story with verve and style. Copiously researched and beatifully written, this book isn't just a "true crime" story from long ago. To the perceptive reader, it demonstrates the dangers of mob mentality and the threat posed by demagogues in politics and the media. It also brutally illustrates what can go wrong when people decide to ignore the rule of law.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling History, December 29, 2003

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There was a time, and it was not too long ago, when lynchings were common in America. It was mostly a southern phenomenon, and it was mostly whites lynching blacks. Because its victim had become an international cause before he was killed, the most famous lynching was that of Leo Frank, not a black but a Jew, in 1915. The tale of this atrocity has been told before, but never with the detail and sweep found in _And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank_ (Pantheon) by Steve Oney. It is a huge book, a result of seventeen years of research, and provides insights into the case from sources that have previously not been consulted. Despite the detail, Oney's essentially chronological narrative maintains intensity throughout. We already know that Frank gets lynched in the end, but the events leading up to the lynching are still suspenseful, and the varied aspects of the aftermath are still surprising.

The chronology begins with Mary Phagan, thirteen years old and an employee of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, of which Frank was superintendent. On 27 April 1913, her body was discovered in the basement of the factory. Suspicion turned to a black janitor, Jim Conley, who gave three different contradictory versions of his story to police. His final version was that Frank tried to seduce Mary Phagan while Conley stood guard for his superintendent, and then that he and Conley disposed of the body in the basement. When Frank was interviewed, he was visibly nervous, and urged by the Atlanta papers, police arrested him. It was easy for demagogues in Atlanta to rake up the old stories about Jewish plots or financial vampires sucking hard-laboring Christians dry, and whatever Frank's chance in the courtroom, public outrage against him was constant. Convicted, he was given a last minute commutation from death sentence to life imprisonment by the outgoing governor, since his cause was internationally known. Spurred by the demagoguery of Tom Watson and his weekly _Jeffersonian_, citizens of Marietta, Phagan's family home, organized an astonishing military-like operation to break into Frank's prison, transport him to Marietta, and lynch him. The citizens trooped out to see the hanging body, and one woman said she could not stand to see a hanging, "But this - this is different. It is all right. It is - the justice of God." Crowds enjoyed hearing the hymn "That Old Time Religion."

Not a single conspirator in the lynching was prosecuted. This was partially because one of their members was put in charge of the grand jury examining the case. Some of them went on to further civic careers. The lynching was a spark in the modern revival of the Ku Klux Klan. It also sparked B'nai B'rith to found the Anti-Defamation League. Tom Watson rode his popularity into the US Senate in 1920. Oney is especially good at giving a social history of Atlanta and the relations between blacks, whites, and Jews within it. His portraits of the many individuals nationwide who were involved in the case are excellent, with the most interesting being that of lawyer William Smith. Smith, after coaching Conley and thus assisting in Frank's conviction, became convinced that the trial's outcome was wrong, and began doing his own research into the case, amassing a body of facts that should have come to light during the trial. Although Conley is now generally thought to have been the true culprit, Oney quite rightly does not come down on one side or the other. He reports the evidence as given at the trial, almost all of it circumstantial, and the contradictions, and the evidence on both sides tainted by bribery. The result is a spectacular demonstration of narrative power through intensive detail; _And the Dead Shall Rise_ is factual history written with all the dash of a thriller.