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

Description: And the Dead Shall Rise by Steve Oney 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A highly acclaimed work of history and journalism set in Atlanta from 1913-1915, which recounts the murder of Mary Phagan, a poor factory worker, and the arrest, conviction, and ultimate lynching of Leo Frank. First time in paperback.The definitive account of one of American historys most repellent and most fascinating moments, combining investigative journalism and sweeping social history"Brilliane.... Years later, the tale of murder and revenge in Georgia still has the power to fascinate...Intense, suspenseful." -The Washington Post Book WorldIn 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 Oneys 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, Franks martyred wife, and a fiery populist who manipulated local anger at Northern newspapers that pushed for Franks exoneration. Author Biography Steve Oney was educated at the University of Georgia and at Harvard, where he was a Nieman Fellow. He worked for many years as a staff writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine. He has also contributed articles to many national publications, including Esquire, Playboy, Premiere, GQ and the New York Times Magazine.His stories have been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, 2006 and The Best American Magazine Writing, 2008.Oney lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Madeline Stuart. Review "Brilliant. . . . Ninety years later, the tale of murder and revenge in Georgia still has the power to fascinate. . . . Intense, suspenseful." –The Washington Post Book World "A major achievement . . . A fine work of history." –Los Angeles Times Book Review "Compelling and relentlessly preoccupying. . . . Oney dapples his volume with vibrant, multihued street scenes and thumbnail portraits. You can almost hear the squealing brakes and clanging bells of the trolley cars outside the courtroom." –The Houston Chronicle "Invites comparison to Norman Mailers Executioners Song. The book packs a wallop at many levels, from the mythic Southern characters to the violent infrastructure of our cultural memory." –The New York Times "A grim and teeming ghost story. . . . A monumental folk parable of innocent suffering and a blind, brutal urge for retribution that passes finally into the simple, stark awe and pity of tragedy." –The New York Review of Books Review Quote "Brilliant. . . . Ninety years later, the tale of murder and revenge in Georgia still has the power to fascinate. . . . Intense, suspenseful." --The Washington Post Book World "A major achievement . . . A fine work of history." Los Angeles Times Book Review "Compelling and relentlessly preoccupying. . . . Oney dapples his volume with vibrant, multihued street scenes and thumbnail portraits. You can almost hear the squealing brakes and clanging bells of the trolley cars outside the courtroom." The Houston Chronicle "Invites comparison to Norman MailersExecutioners Song. The book packs a wallopat many levels, from the mythic Southern characters to the violent infrastructure of our cultural memory." The New York Times "A grim and teeming ghost story. . . . A monumental folk parable of innocent suffering and a blind, brutal urge for retribution that passes finally into the simple, stark awe and pity of tragedy." The New York Review of Books Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 April 26, 1913 That morning, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, after eating a breakfast of cabbage and wheat biscuits, devoted herself to getting dressed. First, she donned stockings and garters, then a store-bought violet dress and gunmetal-gray pumps. Two bows in her auburn hair and a blue straw hat adorned with dried red flowers atop her head completed the outfit. Mary wanted to look nice, for Saturday, April 26, 1913, marked a special occasion-Confederate Memorial Day. Around 11:45, with a silvery mesh purse and an umbrella (the skies were misting rain) in her hands, she boarded the English Avenue trolley headed to downtown Atlanta, where the annual parade would soon begin. Well turned out or not, Mary would have been one of the prettiest girls in any crowd. Eyes blue as cornflowers, cheeks high-boned and rosy, smile beguiling as honeysuckle, figure busty (later, everyone acknowledged that "she was exceedingly well-developed for her age"), she had undoubtedly already tortured many a boy. There was simply something about her-a tilt to the chin, a dare in the gaze-that projected those flirtatious wiles that Southern girls often employ to devastating effect. As her correspondence with her country cousin and friend Myrtle Barmore illustrates, Mary could be a handful. On December 30, 1912, she wrote: Well, Myrt I dont know what to think of you for not coming [to lunch on Christmas day]. I think that was a poor excuse. When I come up there Ill give you what you need. Me and Ollie [her sister] & Mama & Charles & Joshua [her brothers] went out at Uncle Jack Thurs. and taken dinner. "But gee" how we did eat. Had fresh "hog." I dont know when I can get to come. Mama is getting where she will not let me go anywhere. "But gee" I am going to save my money and go West. Gee I will have some time . . . When I come there, we will have some time "kid." Yet despite her beauty and airy hopes (many inspired by the movies, which she attended frequently and followed in such magazines as Photo Lore), Mary Phagan was unlikely to escape drab and impoverished environs. She lived in Atlantas Bellwood section, no ones vision of a beautiful wood. Northwest of downtown, the neighborhood was bordered on one side by the Exposition Cotton Mill and its adjacent factory-owned village, Happy Hollow, on another by the clanging sheds of the Atlantic Steel Mill and on a third by an expanse of crookedly carpentered "nigger shacks." In homage to its bare-knuckled ward politics, the community was called "the bloody fifth." Like most Bellwood people, Mary was a hillbilly. Her father, a farmer named William Joshua Phagan, had died of the measles in 1899 a few months before her birth in Alabama. Around 1900, Marys widowed mother, Fannie, carried the children back to the familys ancestral home near Marietta in Cobb County, twenty miles northwest of Atlanta. At one time, Phagan had been a fine name around Marietta. During the 1890s, the patriarch-William Jackson-had stood in the traces behind his own mules on his own land snug against the Blue Ridge mountains that rim Cobb County. But the old man had accompanied his son to Alabama, and after the boys death, there he remained. When Fannie Phagan and her brood returned to Georgia, they moved in with her people, the Bentons, in the Sardis section, a rural area several miles outside Marietta. In 1907, the family relocated again-this time to the dingy mill town of Eagan, a tiny place encysted in the southern Atlanta suburb of East Point. There, the widow Phagan opened a boardinghouse. The clan didnt move to Georgias capital until 1912, when Fannie remarried. Her new husband, John W. Coleman, toiled intermittently at the Exposition mill but was presently employed by the municipal sanitation department. That, down deep, Mary Phagan cleaved tight to her struggling family can be seen in the lines of a poem entitled "My Pa," which shed recently copied from Successful Farmer magazine and presented to her stepfather: My pa aint no millyunaire, but, Gee! Hes offul smart! He aint no carpenter, but he can fix a fellers cart . . . My pa aint president becoz, he says, he never run, But he could do as well as any president has done . . . My pa aint rich, but thats becoz he never tried to be; He aint no lectrician, but one day he fixed the telephone for me . . . My pa knows everything, I guess, an you bet I dont care Coz he aint president or rich as any millyunaire! Whenever things go wrong, my pa can make em right, you see; An if he aint rich or president, my pas good enough fer me! Like many girls her age, Mary had quit school to help out at home. In 1909, at the age of ten, shed hired on part-time at a textile mill. In 1911, shed taken a steady job at a paper manufacturer. In 1912, shed moved to her current position at the National Pencil Factory, where she was paid ten cents an hour to run an apparatus called a knurling machine that inserted rubber erasers into the metal tips of nearly finished pencils. Tough as times had been for the Phagans, the family was no worse off than most Atlantans in the early twentieth century. During these years, refugees from Georgias hardscrabble tenant farms poured into the city, driven from the flatlands by the fluctuating price of cotton, from Appalachia by a rocky soil unkind to seed and plow. Figures compiled by the United States Census Bureau show that between 1900 and 1910 Atlanta nearly doubled in size. Many of the new arrivals toiled in the mills, chief among them the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, whose factory-owned village, Cabbagetown, spread out in row after identical clapboard row east of downtown. For these thousands of souls, the average workweek lasted 66 hours, and pay fell 37 percent below that earned by northern workers. In a city whose cost of living was exceeded among other American cities only by Bostons, a wage of ten or fifteen cents an hour did not go far. In 1911, Atlantas Journal of Labor reported four thousand requests for assistance; in 1912, five thousand. There were other problems as well. Over half of Atlantas school children-both Negro and white-suffered from anemia, enlarged glands, heart disease or malnutrition. Death rates were abnormally high for citizens of all ages. (In 1905, 2,414 of every 100,000 Atlantans died; the national average was 1,637.) And there wasnt much indication that things would get better soon. More than 50,000 Atlantans lived with no plumbing. To service its 10,800 "earth closets," as the newspapers called them, the city provided just fifteen horse-drawn honey wagons. Moreover, the capitals physicians possessed no means of isolating and then combating infections, as Georgia was among only a handful of states yet to set up a department of vital statistics. Nonetheless, Atlantas crackers-as country folk come to town were known generally-and its lintheads-as millworkers were known specifically-did not spend their time in despair. On April 1, theyd staged their own musicale-the first annual Atlanta Fiddlers Convention-at the Municipal Auditorium. The master of ceremonies was Colonel Max Poole, a one-armed Confederate veteran from Oxford, Georgia, who played by cradling a bow under his stub, while the featured performer was Fiddlin John Carson, a Cabbagetown resident and future RCA recording star who toted his 1714 Stradivarius reproduction in a feed sack. The Scotch-Irish reels the fiddlers favored-"Trail of the Lonesome Pine," "Annie Laurie," "Hop Light, Ladies"-could sure enough move a crowd. By closing night of the three-day festival, Momma and em were clogging in the aisles. The spirit of Atlantas crackers was independent to the point of contrariness, and a little bit hellish. No matter how bad things got, folks werent likely to complain unless, of course, their dignity was threatened, which was exactly what the citys industrialists, by relying increasingly on child laborers, were now doing. Rarely, if ever, had Atlantans been as conscious of the difficult lives to which so many of their children had been reduced as on April 26, 1913. thinks georgia treats little toilers worst, declared the headline in the afternoons Atlanta Georgian over an article pointing out that "Georgia is the only state that allows children ten years old to labor eleven hours a day in the mills and factories, and is worse in that respect than North Carolina, where the age limit is twelve years." Even more damning, the piece detailed how just a few months earlier a group of Georgia factory owners had banded together to kill a bill in the state senate that would have raised the legal working age to fourteen. The Georgians story was but the latest in a series of attacks by the newspaper on exploitative factory owners. William Randolph Hearst, its publisher since he purchased the sheet a year before, had pursued the issue relentlessly. His campaign, while intended to win readers, was not entirely disingenuous. The press barons wife, Millicent, was obsessed with the "little girl in the mill town [who] is not receiving a living wage." And his chief correspondent and ponderous moral conscience, Arthur Brisbane, was a fanatic on the subject. Earlier in the spring, Brisbane had filed a long, probably apocryphal piece about a Georgia mill owner so depraved that he refused to release his employees during daylight to attend the burial of one of their tiny coworkers. Entitled "A Funeral by Lamplight," the story was set in "a squalid room at midnight," wh Details ISBN0679764232 Author Steve Oney Short Title AND THE DEAD SHALL RISE Pages 784 Language English ISBN-10 0679764232 ISBN-13 9780679764236 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2004 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Birth 1954 Series Vintage Subtitle The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank DOI 10.1604/9780679764236 UK Release Date 2004-10-12 AU Release Date 2004-10-12 NZ Release Date 2004-10-12 US Release Date 2004-10-12 Illustrator Diane Dillon Affiliation both Research Scientists, Batelle Columbus Laboratories, Columbus, Ohio Position both Research Scientists Qualifications PhD Illustrations 32 PAGES B&W PHOTOS Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2004-10-12 Imprint Random House Inc DEWEY 364.15230975 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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