In two previous articles I wrote about the most famous murder case in the state of Georgia that was tried in 1913 and was ultimately decided by the United States Supreme Court (Earlier Happenings September 20, 2021 and November 1, 2021).
In the first article I unfortunately did a minimum amount of research and presented the facts from the position of the possibility that the defendant, Leo Frank, was the victim of Anti-Semitism and was falsely accused of the rape and murder of the 13-year-old female victim who was an employee at the pencil factory in Atlanta where Frank was the manager.
Shortly thereafter I received a manila envelope that contained a book by the Nation of Islam titled “The Leo Frank Case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man (2016) that presented an entirely opposite perspective of the case.
In a well-documented 551-page commentary it is claimed that efforts by many newspapers, organizations, and others were asked over the years to assert the innocence of the defendant. Amongst the avowed supporters were the New York Times (NYT) and the Nashville Tennessean (NT).
(Ironically on March 11, 1986, the Georgia Legislature in an action similar to that of the Criminal Court of Hamilton County in 2000 in the Ed Johnson murder case granted a post-death pardon after both Frank and Johnson were hung by vigilante groups. (The facts, but not the results of each case were different in that the evidence was considered overwhelming in the Georgia case but extremely weak in the Chattanooga case.)
I attempted to “present both sides of the story” and wrote Article No. 2 which supported the theory of guilt based on the documentary evidenced contained in the Islam book.
However, a third corroborative source was discovered in the 870-page revelation of the origin of the Ochs-Sulzberger newspapers dynasty written by co-authors Susan E. Tifft and Alex Jones in the 1999 treatise, “The Trust.”
In a statement on the back cover about the authors it stated:
“The Trust was written with the full cooperation of the Ochses and Sulzbergers and unconditional access to the New York Times archives, but with the authors retaining complete independence. The result is not only a richly detailed portrait of an American dynasty but a fascinating chronicle of the twentieth century.”
However, this freedom to independently produce a history of the family opened many doors that some thought should probably have remained closed.
It is the story of how Adolph Ochs from humble beginnings purchased the Chattanooga Daily Times in 1878, the New York Times in 1896 and changed it into what is one of the leading sources of news in America and throughout the world.
In Chapter 8, pages 92-97 of “The Trust” styled “A Non-Jewish Jew” Adolph Ochs grappled with the Frank case.
“He rarely used the New York Times to advance a cause, especially one associated with Jews.”
However, in 1914 Louis Marshall, President of the American Jewish Community, “asked him to help rally support for Leo Frank.”
Adolph Ochs allegedly had some concerns about whether Frank was guilty or innocent of the murder and rape of the young girl, but Marshall convinced him that there had been a “horrible miscarriage of justice” and Ochs asked his fellow journalists to write editorials about the case as it moved along through the courts “based on his sincere and sentimental belief that in America an innocent man should not be hanged.”
Although the case was fraught with racial prejudice against both blacks and Jews, Adolph Ochs wanted to dismiss “racial prejudice” as a factor in the Frank case, but the opposing viewpoints were set in stone.
According to a footnote in “The Trust,” from May 1913 until September 1915 the New York Times ran 194 articles and 22 editorials about the case, which helped lead to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith in 1913.
The result of the historic case had a debilitating effect on Adolph’s nerves and state of mind.
The support for Frank produced personal “hate mail” and brought on a temporary state of depression.
He had previously vowed never to encourage a perception of the NYT as “Jewish” but he realized that by entering the controversy surrounding the case he had allegedly encouraged that perception of the paper.
Tifft and Jones in their exhaustive treatise on the Ochs-Sulzberger family and the paper assert that “never again did Adolph support a cause, certainly not one honoring Jews!”
(Whether this is a “third other side of the story” is left to the subjective determination of the reader!)
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Jerry Summers
(If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact Mr. Summers at jsummers@summersfirm.com)