“It was not evidence that convicted Frank,” MacDonald wrote. “It was the mob and [Solicitor General] Dorsey’s speech to the jury.” Dorsey’s closing statement lasted three days and drew plaudits even from critics. It was even reprinted in pamphlet form for mass distribution. Dorsey drew upon biblical and historical references to Jewish triumph and betrayal, the latter including Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold, summarizing Jewish contributions to civilization: “They rise to heights sublime, but they sink to the depths of degradation.”
He concluded on the third day telling the jury, “There can be but one verdict.…We the jury find the defendant, Leo M. Frank, guilty!” Bells at the nearby church rang out, enabling Dorsey to chime “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” with prosecutorial flourish.
Local observers gushed, but MacDonald remained unimpressed. “The speech was an appeal to the prejudices of the jurors and the mob….The mob dominated the trials. There can be no doubt about that.” Even presiding judge Leonard Roan had doubts. “If Christ and his angels came down here and showed this jury that Frank was innocent, it would bring him in guilty.”
Indeed, the jury found Frank guilty of murder. The following day, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
Editors and journalists around Georgia might have believed Frank’s trial unfair and his claim to a retrial the only just course of action, but they feared saying as much. “We dare not,” they told MacDonald. “We would be accused of being bought by Jew money.” As writer W.E. Thompson noted in 1914, “It was said the Jews had made up $50,000 to buy the court and the jury.…Slanders floated on every breeze. Ashes thrown to the four winds that could not be gathered again.” After the Atlanta Journal labeled the verdict “judicial murder,” the newspaper experienced a loss in circulation, and “never said a word since then about unfairness to Frank nor a new trial,” MacDonald wrote.
The greater the national coverage, the more Georgians dug in their heels. Demagogues like Thomas E. Watson, former Populist politician, member of Congress, vice presidential candidate, and publisher of The Jeffersonian and Watson’s Magazine, assailed such efforts. Watson had begun his career in politics opposing lynching and endorsing Black enfranchisement and had gained the support of Black voters in Georgia. In 1904, he reversed course, adopting not only anti-Black positions, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic ones. The Frank case served as a distinct opportunity for Watson to further burnish such stances and defend the state’s honor. In one 1914 article he asked, “Does a Jew expect extraordinary favors and immunities, because of his race?” and in another asserted “We cannot have…one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile.” An April 19, 1914, headline in The Jeffersonian stated it plainly: “The Leo Frank Case. Does the State of Georgia Deserve this Nation-Wide Abuse?”