DRAMATURGY PARADE Cygnet Theatre

Act 1 Scene 1
1. 1862: Georgia and the American Civil War

Declaration of Causes of Seceding States

GEORGIA The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption 1

in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen [Approved, Tuesday, January 29, 1861] 2. Southern Secession Rhetoric: a. The Gentleman s Club: Frequently, the Confederate States would refer to the Union as a Gentleman s Club from which a state could resign if they so chose. The idea of the United States of America as a Union was cemented during and after the Civil War through Northern propaganda. b. The North as the Bad Father : Another common Southern refrain was that the North was a bad father against whom a righteous son had the right to rebel.

3. Class and Enlistment in the Confederate Army The first general American military draft was enacted by the Confederate government on April 16, 1862, more than a year before the federal government did the same. The Confederacy took this step because it had to; its territory was being assailed on every front by overwhelming numbers, and the defending armies needed men to fill the ranks. The compulsory-service law was very unpopular in the South because it was viewed as a usurpation of the rights of individuals by the central government, one of the reasons the South went to war in the first place. Under the Conscription Act, all healthy white men between the ages of 18 and 35 were liable for a three year term of service. The act also extended the terms of enlistment for all one-year soldiers to three years. A September 1862 amendment raised the age limit to 45, and February 1864, the limits were extended to range between 17 and 50. Exempted from the draft were men employed in certain occupations considered to be most valuable for the home front, such as railroad and river workers, civil officials, telegraph operators, miners, druggists and teachers. On October 11, the Confederate Congress amended the draft law to exempt anyone who owned 20 or more slaves. Further, until the practice was abolished in December 1863, a rich drafted man could hire a substitute to take his place in the ranks, an unfair practice that brought on charges of class discrimination. Many Southerners, including the governors of Georgia and North Carolina, were vehemently opposed to the draft and worked to thwart its effect in their states. Thousands of men were exempted by the sham addition of their names to the civil servant rolls or by their enlistment in the state militias. Ninety-two percent of all exemptions for state service came from Georgia and North Carolina. From: http://www.wtv-zone.com/civilwar/condraft.html

4. Memorialization of the Confederacy in the South At the end of the Civil War the American people faced an enormous challenge of memorialization. Their war of limited aims in 1861 had become an all-out struggle of conquest and survival between the largest armies the western hemisphere had ever seen. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war, 60 percent on the Union side and 40 percent Confederate. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a family had escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13-43 had died in the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as many soldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it. Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers in countless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered to mourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, their skeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia. Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well before the war ended, both in towns on the homefront and sometimes at the battlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monuments representing their dead, and so was born the ritual of Decoration Day, known eventually as Memorial Day. In most places, the ritual was initially a spiritual practice. But very soon, remembering the dead and what they died for developed partisan fault lines. The evolution of Memorial Day during its first twenty years or so became a contest between three divergent, and sometimes overlapping, groups: blacks and their white former abolitionist allies, white Northerners, and white Southerners. With time, in the North, the war s two great results black freedom and the preservation of the Union were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice. Decoration Day, and the ways in which it was observed, shaped Civil War memory as much as any other cultural ritual. From Harvard University Press Blog: http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2011/05/origins-memorial-day-blight.html

5. The Origins of the Jim Crow South

Creating Jim Crow

By Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D. California State University, Northridge

The term Jim Crow originated in a song performed by Daddy Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal paste or burnt cork to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character, one of several stereotypical images of black inferiority in the 3

nation's popular culture, was a standard act in the minstrel shows of the day. How it became a term synonymous with the brutal segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the late nineteenth-century is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by 1900, the term was generally identified with those racist laws and actions that deprived African Americans of their civil rights by defining blacks as inferior to whites, as members of a caste of subordinate people. The emergence of segregation in the South actually began immediately after the Civil War when the formerly enslaved people acted quickly to establish their own churches and schools separate from whites. At the same time, most southern states tried to limit the economic and physical freedom of the formerly enslaved by adopting laws known as Black Codes. These early legal attempts at white-imposed segregation and discrimination were short-lived. During the period of Congressional Reconstruction, which lasted from 1866 to 1876, the federal government declared illegal all such acts of legal discrimination against African Americans. Moreover, the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, along with the two Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875 and the various Enforcements Acts of the early 1870s, curtailed the ability of southern whites to formally deprive blacks of their civil rights. As a result African Americans were able to make great progress in building their own institutions, passing civil rights laws, and electing officials to public office. In response to these achievements, southern whites launched a vicious, illegal war against southern blacks and their white Republican allies. In most places, whites carried out this war in the late 1860s and early 1870s under the cover of secret organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. Thousands of African Americans were killed, brutalized, and terrorized in these bloody years. The federal government attempted to stop the bloodshed by sending in troops and holding investigations, but its efforts were far too limited. When the Compromise of 1877 gave the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for his promise to end Reconstruction, the federal government essentially abandoned all efforts at protecting the civil rights of southern blacks. It was not long before a stepped-up reign of white terror erupted in the South. The decade of the 1880s was characterized by mob lynchings, a vicious system of convict prison farms and chain gains, the horribly debilitating debt peonage of sharecropping, the imposition of a legal color line in race relations, and a variety of laws that blatantly discriminated against blacks. Some southern states, for example, moved to legally impose segregation on public transportation, especially on trains. Blacks were required to sit in a special car reserved for blacks known as "The Jim Crow car," even if they had bought first-class tickets. Some states also passed so-called miscegenation laws banning interracial marriages. These bans were, in the opinion of some historians, the "ultimate segregation laws." They clearly announced that blacks were so inferior to whites that any mixing of the two threatened the very survival of the superior white race. Almost all southern states passed statutes restricting suffrage in the years from 1871 to 1889, including poll taxes in some cases. And the effects were devastating: over half the blacks voting in Georgia and South Carolina in 1880, for example, had vanished from the polls in 1888. Of those who did vote, many of their ballots were stolen, misdirected to opposing candidates, or simply not counted. In the 1890s, starting with Mississippi, most southern states began more systematically to disfranchise black males by imposing voter registration restrictions, such as literacy tests, poll 4

taxes, and the white primary. These new rules of the political game were used by white registrars to deny voting privileges to blacks at the registration place rather than at the ballot box, which had previously been done by means of fraud and force. By 1910, every state of the former Confederacy had adopted laws that segregated all aspects of life (especially schools and public places) wherein blacks and whites might socially mingle or come into contact. The impetus for this new, legally-enforced caste order of southern life was indeed complex. Many lower-class whites, for example, hoped to wrest political power from merchants and large landowners who controlled the vote of their indebted black tenants by taking away black suffrage. Some whites also feared a new generation of so-called "uppity" blacks, men and women born after slavery who wanted their full rights as American citizens. At the same time there appeared throughout America the new pseudo-science of eugenics that reinforced the racist views of black inferiority. Finally, many southern whites feared that the federal government might intervene in southern politics if the violence and fraud continued. They believed that by legally ending suffrage for blacks, the violence would also end. Even some blacks supported this idea and were willing to sacrifice their right to vote in return for an end to the terror. In the end, black resistance to segregation was difficult because the system of land tenancy, known as sharecropping, left most blacks economically dependent upon planter-landlords and merchant suppliers. Also, the white terror at the hands of lynch mobs threatened all members of the black family--adults and children alike. This reality made it nearly impossible for blacks to stand up to Jim Crow because such actions might bring down the wrath of the white mob on one's parents, brothers, spouse, and children. Few black families, moreover, were economically well off enough to buck the local white power structure of banks, merchants, and landlords. To put it succinctly: impoverished and often illiterate southern blacks were in a weak position in the 1890s for confronting the racist culture of Jim Crow. White terror did not end--as some blacks had hoped--with the disfranchisement of southern black men. To enforce the new legal order of segregation, southern whites often resorted to even more brutalizing acts of mob terror, including race riots and ritualized lynching, than had been practiced even by the old Klan of the 1870s. Some historians see this extremely brutal and near epidemic commitment to white supremacy as breaking with the South's more laissez-faire and paternalistic past. Others view this "new order" as a more rigid continuation of the "cult of whiteness" at work in the South since the end of the Civil War. Both perspectives agree, however, that the 1890s ushered in a more formally racist South--one in which white supremacists used law and mob terror to deprive blacks of the vote and to define them in life and popular culture as an inferior people. From The History of Jim Crow: http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/creating.htm

Act 1 Scene 2
1. Jewish Life in the South

A Tribe Apart: Jews of the American South

The Jewish Press Jason Maoz 2005

They are not the Jews of bagels and lox brunches with the Sunday New York Times. They do not necessarily get the humor of a Woody Allen movie and are as likely to salivate over a dinner of fried chicken, collard greens, sweet potato pie and iced tea as they are to crave a repast of matzoh-ball soup, pastrami on rye, side knish and glass of Dr. Brown`s. They are the Jews of the American South, fundamentally different from their Northern cousins, and not simply because, historically, they assimilated more quickly and intermarried more frequently. If the South, as Wilber J. Cash puts it in his classic The Mind of the South, is part of America and yet set apart most definitely from America, a nation within a nation, then Southern Jews likewise are part of American Jewry but distinct, a people within a people. Southern Jews have had a disproportionate effect on the history of their region. Though Jews never comprised more than 1 percent of the South`s population, writes Louis Schmier in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, few phases of the Southern experience and few places in the South escaped their influence. And Southern Jews displayed an almost visceral connection to the land never quite equaled by their Northern counterparts. In the North, noted the Southern-born writer Eli Evans (whose landmark portrait of Southern Jewry, The Provincials, has just been reissued by University of North Carolina Press), the seamstresses and tailors worked to get their children up and out of the ghettos and to Long Island. In the South the fathers wanted to build businesses to keep their sons at home. The key to understanding the Jews of the South is to grasp the sense of otherness that has always been at the center of their lives. Being Jewish in the South, according to Evans, is like being Gentile in New York. What I mean by that is that Jews in the South live as a minority in a majority culture. The schools close on Jewish holidays in New York; they don`t in the South. The generation of my friends in New York played stickball in the streets of the East Side while I was picking blackberries in the backyard. They were upwardly mobile; we wanted roots. In the Beginning How is the South best defined? The answer has changed significantly over the years, and in fact still depends largely on whom one asks. The U.S. Census Bureau classifies as Southern a wide swatch of states that includes West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware. Others prefer a cultural to a strictly geographical definition, such as the one suggested by John and Dale Reed in 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South a solid core from the Carolinas to Louisiana; some shakiness in Florida, Arkansas, Kentucky and Virginia; and a sphere of influence along the border from Delaware to Missouri. Texas and Oklahoma are marginal... The first Jewish settlements of note in the South were those of Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina in the closing decades of the 17th century. The numbers were minuscule barely a handful of families but in general Jewish immigration to the U.S. wa virtually non-existent: even a hundred years later, at the time of the Revolutionary War, the country was home to no more than 2,500 Jews, most of them residing in the Northeast. 6

Slowly, though, a Jewish presence was making itself felt in the lower colonies well in advance of the mass immigrations from Europe that commenced in the late 1800`s. In 1783, for example, Isaiah Isaacs and Jacob Cohen, a pair of Jewish merchants from Richmond, Virginia, commissioned the legendary explorer Daniel Boone to charter thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, thereby helping to open the vast, previously unclaimed territories of the West. On the back of the receipt Boone signed in exchange for his cash payment, Isaacs noted and dated the translation in Yiddish a historical tidbit left unmentioned in the various movie and television accounts of Boone`s exploits. By 1800 there were more Jews in Charleston than in any other U.S. city, and South Carolina`s Jewish population exceeded 1,000 making the state home to better than one in five American Jews. It was in Charleston that Germany`s Reform movement would establish its first American foothold, a harbinger of what by century`s end would be the near total dominance of Reform Judaism in the South. Southern Jews were for the most part left alone by their non-Jewish neighbors, though life was far from easy for those who wished to maintain a ritualistically meaningful lifestyle. The flavor of the times is conveyed in a letter written in 1791 by a woman named Rebecca Samuels, whose husband owned a silversmith shop in Petersburg, Virginia, to her parents in Germany: "We have a shochet who goes to market and buys treif food. On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the people worship here without one sefer [Torah]. And not one wore the tallit, except my Sammy's godfather....We do not know what the Sabbath and the Holidays are. On the Sabbath, all the Jewish shops are open...."As for the Gentiles, we have nothing to complain about. You cannot know what a wonderful country this is for the common man. People can live here peacefully." Civil War and Aftermath The Jews who lived in the South in the 18th and 19th centuries were almost without exception peddlers and merchants by the 1890`s their importance to the region`s economic well-being was such that a Georgia newspaper noted, with clumsy gratitude, Where there are no Jews there is no money but in the decades immediately following the Civil War they played an increasingly prominent role in the South`s political and social life as well. The loyalties of American Jews during the Civil War were divided along geographic lines, with the contribution of Southern Jews to the Confederate war effort deemed crucial enough for General Robert E. Lee to turn down requests for High Holiday furloughs. As Lee put it in a letter to a Virgina rabbi, Neither you nor any other member of the Jewish congregation would wish to jeopardize a cause you have so much at heart by the withdrawal, even for a season, of a portion of its defenders. The dominant Jewish personality of the Confederate South was Judah P. Benjamin, described by one writer as the most important American-Jewish diplomat before Henry Kissinger, the most eminent lawyer before Brandeis, the leading figure in martial affairs before Hyman Rickover, the greatest American-Jewish orator, and the most influential Jew ever to take a seat in the United States Senate. The son of an English Jewish father and a Portuguese Jewish mother, Benjamin became a senator in 1852 and a year later was offered a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, an appointment he declined in favor of continuing his career as a legislator and one of the South`s most vociferous voices on behalf of slavery. Benjamin would fill several key posts in the Confederate 7

government attrney general, secretary of war and, finally, secretary of state before escaping to England when the South lost the war. Southern Jews were neither more nor less likely to own slaves than their Christian neighbors, though on an individual basis Jews tended to treat blacks with an empathy unusual for Southern whites of the era, and they would continue to do so long after the abolition of slavery. In a perverse way, the persecution of blacks in the South served to deflect many potential problems from the region`s Jews. Bertram Korn, a prominent scholar of Southern Jewry, argued that blacks acted as an escape valve in Southern society. The Jews gained in status and security from the very presence of this large mass of defenseless victims who were compelled to absorb all of the prejudices which might otherwise have been expressed more frequently in anti-Jewish sentiment. Approximately 40,000 Jews, most of them German immigrants, made their way to the South in the fifty years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. The entrepreneurial and business skills of this group made the words Jew and shopkeeper synonymous in the Southern mind, and their names lived on long after they themselves were gone: the Rich brothers in Georgia, the Thalhimers in Virginia, the Godchaux family in Louisiana, the Levine brothers in North Carolina, Neiman and Marcus in Texas. And then there were men like Oscar Straus and Adolph Ochs, who would go on to bigger and better things elsewhere only after their forebears had first carved a niche for themselves in the South. Straus, whose father was a peddler in Georgia, eventually became the owner of R.H. Macy`s in New York; Ochs, whose mother was a charter member of Chattanooga`s United Daughters of the Confederacy, bought The New York Times and turned it into a journalistic institution. Further highlighting the accomplishments of the region`s Jews: no fewer than two dozen Southern towns are named for Jewish peddlers or landowners, among them Marks, Mississippi; Kaplan, Louisiana; and historic Manassas, Virginia. At Home in Dixie Of the various changes that marked the day-to-day lives of 20th century Southern Jews, two stand out, one internal, the other external. Internally, the staunchly anti-Zionist mindset of the community For the majority of Southern Jews and their rabbis, wrote Malcolm Stern, America was their Zion, and they wanted no other was reversed over time, with the 1967 Six-Day War in particular triggering an avalanche of emotion and pride. Externally, there was an appreciable drop in anti-Jewish sentiment among non-Jewish Southerners, and along with that a reduction in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. Not that violence against Jews was ever a pressing problem in the South; even taking into account the infamous lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 and a flurry of synagogue bombings at the height of the Civil Rights movement, attacks on Southern Jews and Jewish property were notable for their infrequency. Even the Ku Klux Klan, with rare exceptions, chose to harass Jews verbally rather than physically. The phenomenon of hardened white racists harboring a relatively benign attitude when it came to Jews was typified by Eugene Bull Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama commissioner of public 8

safety whose dogs and fire hoses became internationally recognized symbols of Southern racism in the 1960`s. At a law enforcement conference organized after the first wave of the aforementioned synagogue bombings, a perplexed Connor drawled, Nigras, maybe, but Jews why? Just as Israel`s military victories helped do away with Southern Jewry`s tradition of antiZionism, so too did the Jewish state`s success on the battlefield dispel some myths about Jews long held by the general public. The State of Israel, wrote Eli Evans, profoundly changed the image of the Jew in the South. The underdog region, celebrated for the fierceness of the [Confederate army] against the overwhelming odds of Yankee cannons and superior numbers, deeply admired the Israeli courage when outmanned and, above all, respected a winner. A legislator from a Southern state relished telling the story of the time, shortly after the Six-Day War, an admitted Ku Klux Klan member visited his office and noticed a newspaper photo of Moshe Dayan lying on the desk. The Klansman pointed to the picture and said, I admire that man more than anyone else in the world today except for George Wallace. Fundamentalist, Bible-based religion has played a major role in the South`s embrace of Israel. When Flonnie Maddox, mother of the rabidly segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox, visited Israel in the late 1960`s, a hawkish Israeli boasted to her, One day we`ll have Jordan. To which the devout Mrs. Maddox replied, You`ll have every inch of it. God said you would. With increased acceptance came the inevitable downside of intermarriage and assimilation, and in those departments Southern Jews had about a 50-year jump on Jews in the rest of the country. The result was an epidemic of synagogue closings throughout the South over the second half of the 20th century, particularly in towns whose Jewish populations were too small to sustain anything approaching a communal infrastructure. And yet, thanks in no small measure to a resurgence of Orthodoxy in areas long thought inhospitable, vibrant Jewish communities can be found in a number of large Southern cities. The situation looks even brighter if one goes by the Census Bureau`s definition of Dixie and adds the Jews of Texas and Florida to the mix. The South`s Jewish population, Evans recently noted, has tripled in size since I first started writing about it in 1970 from 382,000 to an estimated 1,200,000 in 2004. Atlanta is now one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in America, growing from 16,000 and three congregations when I first wrote about in 1969 to well over 100,000 and thirty-seven congregations today. Austin, Texas, has grown from 500 Jews when I was first writing about it to 15,000 to 18,000 today....The Research Triangle of the DurhamChapel Hill-Raleigh area has quadrupled in the last twenty years and Charlotte is well on its way to becoming the Atlanta of the twenty-first century. The Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando area is also growing dramatically. The late Harry Golden, editor of the Carolina Israelite and self-styled bard of Southern Jewry, liked to say that there were Jews in the South before there was a South. Nearly a quarter-century after Golden`s death one can add that there are more Jews than ever in the South no matter how you define the South. From: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1401699/posts

2. A Brief Biography of Leo Frank (1884-1915) In 1913, Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a 13 year old employee of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. After his death sentence was commuted by Georgia's governor, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was being held and lynched him. Frank 9

became the only known Jew lynched in American history. The case still spurs debate and controversy along with Broadway success. What are the facts of the Frank case? Little Mary Phagan, as she became known, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view the Confederate Day Parade. She never returned home. The next day, the factory night watchman found her sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, was asked to view the body, he became agitated, confirmed personally paying Mary tier wages, but could not say where she went next. Frank, the last to see Mary alive, became the prime suspect. Georgia's solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, sought a grand jury indictment against Frank. Rumor circulated that Mary had been sexually assaulted. Factory employees offered apparently false testimony that Frank had made sexual advances toward them. The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that Frank had phoned her several times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl. At a time when the cult of Southern chivalry made it a hanging crime for AfricanAmerican males to have sexual contact with the flower of white womanhood, these accusations against Frank, a Northern-born, college-educated Jew, proved equally inflammatory. For the grand jury, Hugh Dorsey painted Leo Frank as a sexual pervert who both was homosexual and preyed on young girls. What he did not tell the grand jury was that a janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, had been arrested two days after Frank when he was seen washing blood off his shirt. Conley then admitted writing two notes found by Mary Phagan's body. The police assumed that, as author of these notes, Conley was the murderer; but Conley claimed, after apparent coaching from Dorsey, that Leo Frank had confessed murdering Mary in the lathe room and paid Conley to pen the notes and help him move Mary's body to the basement. Even after Frank's housekeeper placed him at home, having lunch, at the time of the murder and despite gross inconsistencies in Conley's story, both the grand and trial jury chose to believe Conley This was a rare instance of a Southern black man's testimony being used to convict a white man. In August of 1913, the jury found Frank guilty in less than four hours while crowds outside the courthouse shouted, Hang the Jew. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein reports that one juror had been overheard to say before his selection for the jury, I am glad they indicted the G-d damn Jew. They ought to take him out and lynch him. And if I get on that jury, I'll hang that Jew for sure. Facing intimidation and mob rule, the judge sentenced Frank to death. He did not allow Frank in the court room on the grounds that, had he been acquitted, Frank might have been lynched by the crowd outside. Despite these breaches of due process, Georgia's higher courts rejected Frank's appeals, and the U. S. Supreme Court voted, 7-2, against reopening the case, with justices Holmes and Hughes dissenting. Frank's survival depended on Georgia governor Frank Slaton. After a 12-day review of the evidence and letters recommending commutation from the trial judge (who must have had second thoughts) and from a private investigator who had worked for Hugh Dorsey, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment. That night, state police kept a protesting crowd of 5,000 from the governor's mansion. Wary Jewish families fled Atlanta. Slaton held firm. Two thousand years ago, he wrote a few days later, another Governor washed his hands and 10

turned over a Jew to a mob. For two thousand years that governor's name has been accursed. If today another Jew [Leo Frank] were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty, I would all through life find his blood on my hands and would consider myself an assassin through cowardice. A year later Dorsey soundly defeated Slaton's bid for reelection. Soon after the commutation, on August 17, 1915, a group of 25 men, described by peers as sober, intelligent, of established good name and character stormed the prison hospital where Leo Frank was recovering from having his throat slashed by a fellow inmate. They kidnaped Frank, drove him more than 100 miles to Mary Phagan's hometown of Marietta, Georgia, and hanged him from a tree. Frank conducted himself with dignity, calmly proclaiming his innocence. Townsfolk were proudly photographed beneath Frank's swinging corpse, pictures still valued today by their descendants. From The Jewish Virtual Library:http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/antisemitism/frank.html

3. Meshuggeneh Yiddish word meaning crazy. 4. Child Labor in U.S. History

Breaker Boys Hughestown Borough Pa. Coal Co. Pittston, Pa. Photo: Lewis Hine Forms of child labor, including indentured servitude and child slavery, have existed throughout American history. As industrialization moved workers from farms and home workshops into urban areas and factory work, children were often preferred, because factory owners viewed them as more manageable, cheaper, and less likely to strike. Growing opposition to child labor in the North caused many factories to move to the South. By 1900, states varied considerably in whether they had child labor standards and in their content and degree of enforcement. By then, American children worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks, and peddlers.

11

Spinning Room Cornell Mill Fall River, Mass. Photo: Lewis Hine In the early decades of the twentieth century, the numbers of child laborers in the U.S. peaked. Child labor began to decline as the labor and reform movements grew and labor standards in general began improving, increasing the political power of working people and other social reformers to demand legislation regulating child labor. Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined, and common initiatives were conducted by organizations led by working women and middle class consumers, such as state Consumers Leagues and Working Women s Societies. These organizations generated the National Consumers League in 1899 and the National Child Labor Committee in 1904, which shared goals of challenging child labor, including through anti-sweatshop campaigns and labeling programs. The National Child Labor Committee s work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor.

CHRONOLGY OF KEY EVENTS IN AMERICAN CHILD LABOR

1836 Early trade unions propose state minimum age laws Union members at the National Trades Union Convention make the first formal, public proposal recommending that states establish minimum ages for factory work. 1836 First state child labor law Massachusetts requires children under 15 working in factories to attend school at least 3 months/year. 1842 States begin limiting children s work days Massachusetts limits children s work days to 10 hours; other states soon pass similar laws but most of these laws are not consistently enforced. 1876 Labor movement urges minimum age law 12

Working Men s Party proposes banning the employment of children under the age of 14. 1881 Newly formed AFL supports state minimum age laws The first national convention of the American Federation of Labor passes a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment. 1883 New York unions win state reform Led by Samuel Gompers, the New York labor movement successfully sponsors legislation prohibiting cigar making in tenements, where thousands of young children work in the trade. 1892 Democrats adopt union recommendations Democratic Party adopts platform plank based on union recommendations to ban factory employment for children under 15.

National Child Labor Committee 1904 National Child Labor Committee forms Aggressive national campaign for federal child labor law reform begins. 1916 New federal law sanctions state violators First federal child labor law prohibits movement of goods across state lines if minimum age laws are violated (law in effect only until 1918, when it s declared unconstitutional, then revised, passed, and declared unconstitutional again). 1924 First attempt to gain federal regulation fails Congress passes a constitutional amendment giving the federal government authority to regulate child labor, but too few states ratify it and it never takes effect. 13

1936 Federal purchasing law passes Walsh-Healey Act states U.S. government will not purchase goods made by underage children. 1937 Second attempt to gain federal regulation fails Second attempt to ratify constitutional amendment giving federal government authority to regulate child labor falls just short of getting necessary votes. 1937 New federal law sanctions growers Sugar Act makes sugar beet growers ineligible for benefit payments if they violate state minimum age and hours of work standards. 1938 Federal regulation of child labor achieved in Fair Labor Standards Act For the first time, minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children are regulated by federal law.

Act 1 Scene 3
1. Governor John M Slaton (1866-1955) John M. Slaton was Georgia's sixtieth governor, serving two terms, in 1911-12 and 1913-15. He was also a state representative and state senator, and he practiced law in Atlanta. John Marshall Slaton was born on December 25, 1866, to Nancy Jane Martin and William Franklin Slaton near Greenville, in Meriwether County. After the Civil War (1861-65) his father came to Atlanta, where he became superintendent of the public schools. Slaton attended Sam Bailey Institute in Griffin and graduated from Boys High School in Atlanta in 1880. He received a master of arts degree with highest honors from the University of Georgia in 1886 and was admitted to the bar in 1887. He then began working at the firm Glenn, Slaton, and Phillips.

John M. Slaton

Slaton was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives from Fulton County in 1896 and served until 1909. During the last four of these years he also served as Speaker of the House. In 1909 he was elected to the state senate from the Thirty-fifth District, a position he held until 1913. Serving as president of the senate, Slaton was appointed acting governor after Governor Hoke Smith was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1911. Slaton served in that capacity from 1911 to 1912, when Joseph M. Brown won a term as governor. 14

Subsequently, Slaton was elected to the governorship in his own right and served from 1913 to 1915. As governor, Slaton preserved the state-owned Western and Atlantic Railroad from the competition of a parallel railroad route, worked out a tax equalization program, paid teachers' salaries in full, and established such confidence in the stability of the state that when he refinanced the maturing bond issue of several million dollars, the Georgia bonds brought a higher price than those offered by the state of New York. Slaton's most notable act as governor was commuting Leo Frank's death sentence in 1915. Frank had been convicted ofmurdering Mary Phagan, a young worker in the pencil factory he managed, on what many saw as flimsy evidence. The judge who oversaw the case expressed doubt about Frank's guilt and urged clemency. The case received much publicity, and Slaton personally reviewed thousands of pages of documents related to the trial. Believing that Frank had not received a fair trial and had been convicted on circumstantial evidence, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment just days before he left office in June 1915. A mob threatened to attack the governor at home, but a detachment of the Georgia National Guard under the command of Major Asa Warren Candler, along with county policemen and a group of Slaton's friends who were sworn in as deputies, dispersed the mob. Slaton fled the state. Frank was abducted from prison and lynched in August 1915. After his governorship Slaton never held another publically elected position. He served as president of the Georgia Bar Association in 1928-29 and chaired the Board of Law Examiners for twenty-nine years. He was also a member of the General Council of the American Bar Association. Slaton's story was presented on NBC's Profiles in Courage series in 1964 and in a television movie with actor Jack Lemmon playing Slaton. Slaton died on January 11, 1955, in Atlanta and is buried in Oakland Cemetery. From: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2137

2. The Behavior of Proper Women The ideology of separate spheres dominated thought about gender roles from the late 18th century through the 19th century in America. Similar ideas influenced gender roles in other parts of the world. The concept of separate spheres continues to influence some thinking about "proper" gender roles today. In the conception of the division of gender roles into separate spheres, women's place was in the private sphere -- family life and the home. Men's place was in the public sphere -- in politics, in the economic world which was becoming increasingly separate from home life as the Industrial Revolution progressed, in public social and cultural activity. Natural Gender Division or Social Construction of Gender Many experts of the time wrote about how such a division was natural -- rooted in the nature of each gender. Those women who sought places in the public sphere often found themselves identified as unnatural, as well as unwelcome challenges to the cultural assumptions. The legal status of women -- as dependents until marriage and under coverture after marriage -- with no separate identity and no personal rights including economic and property rights, was in accord with the idea that women's place was in the home and man's place was in the public world. 15

While experts of the time often tried to document this division of gender rules as rooted in nature, the ideology of separate spheres is considered an example of the social construction of gender: that cultural and social attitudes built ideas of womanhood and manhood -- proper womanhood and manhood -- that empowered and/or constrained women and men. See Nancy Cott s The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's sphere" in New England, 1780-1835, an important work in Women s Studies.

Act 1 Scene 4
1. Yontiff Yiddish word meaning Days of Celebration.

2. Stereotypes of Jews from Dickens Oliver Twist

On the London Stage, New Depiction Of Fagin Revives an Old Stereotype

By Ben Quinn . London He is one of the most infamous antisemitic caricatures of all time, a devious hooknosed villain rivaled in stereotypical notoriety by only Shakespeare s Shylock. Fagin, the Jewish street thief immortalized in print by Charles Dickens, has once again made a triumphant return to the stage in a new production of Oliver! the musical version of Dickens s mid-19th-century novel, Oliver Twist. The show is already breaking box office records in London s theater district. But for the first time since the conception of the musical, a loud debate has erupted about whether it remains acceptable to revive the Jewish shyster with a nasal whine, who sings of having to pick a pocket or two. Critics have also raised eyebrows at publicity posters on London s subway, in which the L from the show s Oliver! logo has been refashioned into a long, protruding nose. You might as well chuck in a black character who goes round eating watermelon, stealing chickens and grinning his head off, theater reviewer Sam Leith wrote in The Sunday Times. The musical opened on January 14 at London s Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with television and film actor Rowan Atkinson playing Fagin. It s the latest incarnation of the novel s stage-musical adaptation, which has also played on Broadway. 16

The fact that Dickens s book was adapted by a Jewish composer has been used as a defense against the belief that the musical has antisemitic overtones. This time, however, that argument did not wash with Julia Pascal, a respected Jewish playwright and theater director who says that this ignores the fact that minorities have often enforced negative stereotypes to please their host society. British Jews don t want to make trouble, Pascal said. We were all brought up in a certain climate. Pascal stoked further debate by arguing that it is now regressive to revive the musical at all. Could it be that the stock character of the filthy, malevolent Jew is seamed so tightly into the British psyche that producers never ask if it might be dangerous? she asked in a recent opinion piece in the Guardian. A deluge of hostile correspondence came in response to Pascal, who told the Forward, A lot of the comments were very personal, so I obviously hit some sort of nerve. Pascal, known for producing controversial and hard-hitting plays of her own, including a Holocaust trilogy, adds that Fagin s famous song from the musical comes at an apposite moment, as Bernie Madoff, a Jew, is photographed outside the New York courthouse, accused of a fraud whose victims are predominantly Jewish charities and investors. Amid this scandal, it s a mistake to think that American Jews feel immune to the threat of antiSemitism, Pascal wrote in her piece. But U.S. Jews are not exposed to the constant low-level anti-Semitism that filters through British society. They aren t confronted with hook-nosed Jewish stereotypes on the subway posters. Those involved in the show have largely avoided engaging in the debate. But when Atkinson was interviewed by BBC Television shortly before the musical s opening, he said that he had always fancied the part, which he described as being the right degree of exotic, eccentric, characterful and unusual. He is a Jewish character, Atkinson said, one of the most famous Jewish characters in fiction as created by Charles Dickens, and as we created and redefined [him], very importantly, by Lionel Bart in his musical. Lionel Bart himself, of course, was Jewish, and when he wrote for Fagin, he wrote in songs which are in a Jewish rhythm and Jewish orchestration, so there is no doubt you are being given a lot of hints of what kind of character he is and how he should be played. So, my only hope is that I have played him convincingly. Another person who has expressed a viewpoint is British actor, comedian and Yiddish expert David Schneider. Though Schneider found the Dickens novel, in which Fagin is frequently referred to as simply the Jew, a difficult read, he saw Fagin in the musical as a complex character who was not the baddie.

17

I still think the show has merits, he said, while suggesting that Fagin should, perhaps, always be played by a Jewish actor, just as today, black actors always portray Shakespeare s Othello. It does tap into that Jewishness. There is a Jewishness that is true about Fagin. We are embarrassed to take that outside of our little Jewish homes. Nevertheless, others have echoed Pascal s argument. In his Sunday Times review, Leith wondered: Is it prissy, however, to find Fagin just a bit iffy in this day and age? In addition to giving the world a handful of stupendous show tunes, Oliver! did domesticate an anti-Semitic stereotype that was already old and ugly in Dickens s day. Debate about the extent of Charles Dickens s antisemitism has long been a fixture in academia, while a 1948 film version of Oliver Twist in which Fagin was played by Alec Guiness was considered so antisemitic that it was banned in Israel and faced protests from Jewish groups in the United States and elsewhere. But until now, stage productions of the musical have largely escaped charges of antisemitism. During the last major production of Oliver! in London s West End in 1994, actor Jonathan Pryce deliberately downplayed Fagin s Jewishness and says he was even criticized for not portraying a stereotype. The debate about Dickens s own views is almost as old as Oliver Twist itself. Some writers have pointed to evidence that Dickens received letters accusing him of antisemitism, thus making him alter his depiction of Fagin. Eliza Davies, the wife of a Jewish banker who bought a house from the author, wrote to Dickens in 1863, complaining of the vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew after Oliver Twist was first serialized. Experts believe that the book s last chapter was revised in 1867 to show Fagin in a better light. Scholars of Dickens also suggest that the reaction to Fagin may have weighed on his mind: Dickens had based the character on a real-life London underworld figure, Isaac Ikey Solomon, who was thought to have recruited children to act as pickpockets. John Drew, a lecturer in English at the University of Buckingham who in 2004 wrote the book Dickens the Journalist, said there is no evidence that Dickens had a gripe about Judaism as a religion. There is Fagin in Oliver Twist, which is a work of the 1830s, and then there is a character in Our Mutual Friend, a minor character called Mr. Riah, but one who is very much on the side of the angels, Drew said. He can clearly be thought of as Dickens s attempt to atone for the character of Fagin and any offense he may have caused to readers. From The Jewish Daily Forward: Published January 28, 2009 18

Act 1 Scene 5
1. Leo Frank and the Initial Interrogation In the Anti-Defamation Leagues The People vs.Leo Frank, Frank is described as agitated during his first interrogation by police detectives. This demeanor was later used by prosecutors as circumstantial evidence of Frank s guilt. 2. Map of Marietta, GA

Act 1 Scene 6
A Chronology of Events Surrounding Mary Phagan s Murder 1. April 26, 1913 - Mary Phagan, an employee of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, was murdered sometime after picking up her wages from the factory. 2. April 27, 1913 - Arthur Mullinax, an ex-street car driver, and Newt Lee, the night watchman at the National Pencil Factory, were both arrested on suspicion of being implicated in the murder of Mary Phagan. Lee was African-American and was the man who discovered her body soaked with blood, with two scrawled notes lying nearby. Mullinax had frequently driven Phagan to and from work; he was arrested because a witness claimed to have seen the two together Saturday, with Phagan appearing to be dazed or drugged. Both men declared their innocence. 3. April 28, 1913 - two more men were arrested on suspicion of being involved with the murder of Mary Phagan. One was John Gantt, a former bookkeeper at the National Pencil Factory, who had openly admired Phagan. He was arrested in Marietta with a packed suitcase, waiting to board a train. The second man arrested was an unnamed African-American. The Atlanta Constitution published an appeal, along with a reward of $1000, for anyone who had seen Mary Phagan after noon on April 26 to come forward. Meanwhile police had to disperse a white mob threatening to lynch Newt Lee, the night watchman who had discovered Phagan's body and was also under suspicion. In a side note to the investigation, the superintendent of the National Pencil Factory was questioned perfunctorily in the case, then expressed his unhappiness with the investigation's progress, so he personally brought in a Pinkerton's detective to aid in the investigation. This was the first mention of the superintendent, Leo Frank, in the information released to the public. 19

4. April 29, 1913 - Mary Phagan was buried; her mother was overcome with grief several times during the ceremonies. Most of the suspicion continued to fall on Newt Lee, though Leo Frank was brought in again for more detailed questioning. After his interrogation, Frank questioned Lee himself. A bloody shirt had been found in Lee's home; he claimed it was his own blood from an injury. The reward for information leading to the conviction of the murderer was raised to $2200 - $1000 from the Atlanta Constitution, $1000 from the city of Atlanta, and $200 from the state. One of the detectives released the following statement: "We have sufficient evidence to convict the murderers of Mary Phagan. More arrests will be made before daybreak. The mystery is cleared." No names were mentioned. 5. April 30, 1913 - at an inquest into the death of Mary Phagan, more suspicion began to fall on Leo Frank. George Epps, a fifteen year old friend of Mary Phagan, testified that Phagan was afraid of Frank because he had flirted with and made advances toward her. Newt Lee testified that Frank was nervous the day of the murder and had telephoned to see if everything was fine at the factory - not his usual practice. But two mechanics who had worked on the top floor of the factory that morning disputed Lee's story, saying Frank had acted normally. 6. May 1, 1913 - Arthur Mullinax and John Gantt were released, no longer suspects in the murder of Mary Phagan. Newt Lee and Leo Frank were still being held. Although the local media did not know (or at least did not report) it, another employee of the National Pencil Factory was arrested around 2:00 the afternoon of May 1. Jim Conley, a sweeper at the factory, was discovered trying to rinse out a soiled shirt in the basement. Upon further examination, the stains turned out to be blood. 7. May 2, 1913 - In talks with an Atlanta Constitution reporter, both Newt Lee and Leo Frank strongly insisted they were innocent of Mary Phagan's murder; Frank was confident his name would be cleared in the process of the investigation. 8. May 3, 1913 - Detectives investigating Mary Phagan's murder had a new problem; two impostors posing as Pinkerton detectives had interviewed George Epps (Phagan's friend who had reported she was afraid of Leo Frank) and Phagan's mother. 9. May 5, 1913 - Lemmie Quinn, foreman of Mary Phagan's work area at the National Pencil Factory, testified he saw Leo Frank the Saturday of the murder and that all was perfectly normal. Furthermore he knew Frank well and was certain that he was not guilty of the murder. But detectives accused him of accepting a bribe from Frank to make those statements, an accusation Quinn firmly denied. Meanwhile several witnesses had come forward to say they had seen a girl resembling Phagan at the Confederate Memorial Day parade that Saturday afternoon; she appeared to be drugged. So the decision was made to exhume Phagan's body and search her stomach for signs of drugs. 10. May 6, 1913 - a second exhumation of Mary Phagan's body took place, this time to look for fingerprints; a fingerprint expert had been called in to help with the case. 11. May 7, 1913 - the blood on Newt Lee's shirt was determined to be not more than a month old. The wife of one of the mechanics who had testified on April 30 said she visited her husband at the factory that day and saw a "strange Negro" boarding the elevator as she left around 1:00 PM. Detectives on the case said someone was planting false evidence and trying to block the investigation. 20

12. May 8, 1913 - a coroner's jury ordered Newt Lee and Leo Frank to be held under the charge of murder of Mary Phagan. Several women and girls had come forward to say Frank had made improper advances to them in the past. While detectives still expressed confidence in solving the case, they also admitted all the evidence they had up to that point was circumstantial. 13. May 9, 1913 - Fourteen year old Monteen Stover said she had arrived at the National Pencil Factory around 12:05 PM (roughly the same time as Mary Phagan had arrived) and that Leo Frank was not in his office. This contradicted Frank's testimony that he had been in his office the entire time in which it was thought Phagan had been murdered. Another woman reported that she was walking outside the factory around 4:30 PM when she heard three piercing screams come from the basement of the building. 14. May 10, 1913 - the Atlanta Constitution reported that Robert House, an ex-policeman, had said he once caught Leo Frank and a young girl in the woods at Druid Hills Park engaging in immoral acts. According to House, Frank had pleaded with him not to report the incident. This story was later proven to be false. 15. May 11, 1913 - officials of the National Pencil Factory told Pinkerton detectives to find the murderer of Mary Phagan, no matter who it might be, this despite Leo Frank having brought in the Pinkerton detective in the first place. A mysterious "girl in red" was rumored to have said, in a Marietta grocery store, that she was with Phagan on the day of the murder. After scouring the neighborhood and not finding the girl, detectives concluded the story was a hoax. 16. May 12, 1913 - an Atlanta Constitution reporter in Brooklyn interviewed Mrs. Rudolph Frank, Leo Frank's mother. She said "My son is entirely innocent, but it is a terrible thing that even a shadow of suspicion should fall upon him. I am sure of his innocence and am confident that he will be proven not guilty of this terrible crime." 17. May 13, 1913 -detectives investigating the murder of Mary Phagan were reported to be on the verge of making a new arrest "which would throw an entirely new light upon the case." Meanwhile rumors were swirling about the notes found near the body of Mary Phagan; samples of her handwriting had been collected and handwriting experts brought in. 18. May 14, 1913 - an identification slip had been found in Mary Phagan's pocketbook. It read "My name is Mary Phagan. I live at 146 Lindsey Street, near Bellwood and Asby Streets." Hugh Dorsey, the solicitor working the case, theorized that Phagan did this either because she had been threatened with violence previously or that she had a premonition of her death.

Act 1 Scene 7
1. Yellow Journalism Yellow journalism, in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact. Moreover, the practice of yellow journalism involved sensationalism, distorted stories, and misleading images for the sole purpose of boosting newspaper sales and exciting public opinion. It was particularly indicative of two papers founded and popularized in the late 19th century- The New York World, run by Joseph Pulitzer and The New York Journal, run by William Randolph Hearst. It all started, some historians believe, with the onset of the rapid industrialization that was happening all around the world. The Industrial Revolution eventually affected the newspaper 21

industry, allowing newspapers access to machines that could easily print thousands of papers in a single night. This is believed to have brought into play one of the most important characteristics of yellow journalism - the endless drive for circulation. And unfortunately, the publisher's greed was very often put before ethics. Although the actual practice of what would later become known as yellow journalism came into being during a more extended time period (between 1880-1890), the term was first coined based on a series of occurrences in and following the year of 1895. This was the year in which Hearst purchased the New York Journal, quickly becoming a key rival of Pulitzer's. The term was derived, through a series of peculiar circumstances, from a cartoon by the famous 19th century cartoonist, Robert Outcault called "The Yellow Kid" The cartoon was first published in The World, until Hearst hired him away to produce the strip in his newspaper. Pulitzer then hired another artist to produce the same strip in his newspaper. This comic strip happened to use a new special, non-smear yellow ink, and because of the significance of the comic strip, the term "yellow journalism" was coined by critics. Sadly though, this period of sensationalist news delivery (where the so-called yellow press routinely outsold the more honest, truthful, unbiased newspapers) does stand out as a particularly dark era in journalistic history. The demand of the United States people for absolutely free press allowed such aforementioned newspapers, which often appealed to the shorter attention spans and interests of the lower class, to print whatever they so desired. This means that they could easily steal a headline and story directly from another paper, or simply fabricate a story to fit their particular agenda. One of the more disturbing features involved with the former practice of yellow journalism, and the period in which it was most active in is that there is no definite line between this period of yellow journalism and the period afterwards. There only exists evidence that such practices were frowned upon by the general public - by 1910, circulation had dropped off very rapidly for such papers. But regardless, does this mean that yellow journalism simply faded away, never to return? Or did it absorb itself into the very heart of our newspapers, where it will remain forever? One thing is for certain - after the late 1800s, newspapers changed drastically, and still show no sign of changing back. The modernly present newspaper appearances of catchy headlines, humorous comic strips, special interest sections, intrusive investigative reporting, et cetera serve as a constant reminder that one must always stay skeptical when examining our news sources. What is the remedy to yellow journalism? Simply double- and triple-checking one's sources and reading between the lines. If one disregards the obvious marketing that is used to hook readers, newspapers may actually prove to be reliable sources of information. From: http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/spanamer/yellow.htm

2. Hugh M. Dorsey (1871-1948) Georgia governor Hugh Manson Dorsey brought both youth and progressive ideas to the office in 1917. 22

A lawyer by trade, he oversaw numerous education initiatives, vehemently opposed mob violence against blacks, and condemned the state's practice of a political convention system. While Dorsey tried with some success to bring Georgia into a more progressive era, he will forever be remembered as the man who prosecuted the notorious Leo Frank case. He was born in Fayetteville on July 10, 1871, to Matilda Bennett and Rufus Thomas Dorsey, a prominent attorney. Dorsey attended Atlanta public schools as well as private schools in Atlanta and Hartwell. He studied at the University of Georgia in 1889-93 and at the University of Virginia law school in 1894. He returned to Atlanta the next year to practice law in his father's Hugh M. Dorsey firm of Dorsey, Brewster, and Howell (later Dorsey, Brewster, Howell, and Heyman), where he later became a partner. In 1910 he was appointed solicitor general of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit, filling the unexpired term of Charles D. Hill. The following year Dorsey married Adair Wilkinson of Valdosta. The couple had two children. In 1913 young mill worker Mary Phagan was found murdered in the basement of the Atlanta Pencil Factory, and her Jewish employer, Leo Frank, was accused of the crime. In his short tenure as solicitor, Dorsey had prosecuted two other high-profile cases and failed to win a conviction in either one. The Frank trial was conducted in a carnival-like atmosphere fueled in part by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of political giant Thomas E. Watson. Dorsey's vigorous prosecution and subsequent success in the case won him favor with Watson. When outgoing governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence, protests erupted, led by Watson. A mob snatched Frank from his Milledgeville cell, carried him to Marietta, then lynched him and mutilated his body. Dorsey, who was unknown until the Frank case, rode his newfound popularity to the gubernatorial race of 1916. Openly supported by Watson, he ran on a platform of law enforcement and noninterference of government in judicial proceedings. At forty-five, Dorsey was the youngest man in the race, and he easily defeated incumbent Nat Harris and two other candidates. He was reelected in 1918 by a substantial margin. During his tenure the convention method of election was replaced statewide by the county unit system, which favored rural areas. Responding to the labor shortage due to World War I and the outmigration of blacks, the legislature passed a compulsory work law. Tax exemptions were granted for incorporated colleges, academies, seminaries, church property, public spaces, and charity institutions, and a board of public welfare was created to inspect jails and reformatories. In 1919 the legislature passed the most comprehensive school law to that date. It included mandatory attendance, codification of existing laws, the creation of an illiteracy commission, and the qualifications and duties for a board of education. A 1920 amendment to the law required county school taxes and abolished the legal limitations on black education. Dorsey's initiatives began a drop in the illiteracy rate and established much-needed reforms for the state's lagging educational system. In 1920 Dorsey ran for the U.S. Senate against his old ally Watson. Supporting both the League of Nations and a minimum wage, he also advocated repeal of the espionage and sedition laws and nongovernmental control of railroads. More progressive than his opponent, especially over the question of race, Dorsey lost badly to Watson and returned to Atlanta to serve the remainder of his term as governor. Before leaving the office, however, he published a pamphlet entitled A Statement from Governor Hugh M. Dorsey as to the Negro in Georgia (1921) to be presented at a conference of citizens. In it he listed 135 examples of the alleged mistreatment of blacks in the state and suggested such remedies as compulsory education for both races, penalties to counties in which lynchings occurred, and a state commission to investigate those 23

crimes. Historically an opponent of the mob violence that so stigmatized the South, he wrote, "To me it seems that we stand indicted as a people before the world." Dorsey resumed his law practice after leaving office in 1921. Appointed judge of the city court of Atlanta in 1926, he was later elected to that position and served until 1935. He then became a superior court judge of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit. Dorsey died in Atlanta on June 11, 1948, and was buried in Westview Cemetery.

Act 1 Scene 8
1. Fulton Tower

24

Act 1 Scene 9
1. Fountain of Blood Drawn from Immanuel s Veins Traditional Christian hymn by William Cowper describing blood flowing from a crucified Jesus over the repentant thief who was crucified next to him. The blood is meant to wash away the sins of the thief. 2. VFW Hall Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall

Act 1 Scene 10
1. Sally Slaton (Governor Slaton s Wife) 25

Act 1 Scene 11
1. Lynching in the South For many African Americans growing up in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries, the threat of lynching was commonplace. The popular image of an angry white mob stringing a black man up to a tree is only half the story. Lynching, an act of terror meant to spread fear among blacks, served the broad social purpose of maintaining white supremacy in the economic, social and political spheres. Pervasive Threat Author Richard Wright, who was born near Natchez in southwest Mississippi, knew of two men 26

who were lynched -- his step-uncle and the brother of a neighborhood friend. In his book Black Boy, he wrote: "The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew." Rise in Black Prominence Although the practice of lynching had existed since before slavery, it gained momentum during Reconstruction, when viable black towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic inroads by registering to vote, establishing businesses and running for public office. Many whites -- landowners and poor whites -- felt threatened by this rise in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was a fear of sex between the races. Some whites espoused the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration in order to be with white women. Public Events Lynchings were frequently committed with the most flagrant public display. Like executions by guillotine in medieval times, lynchings were often advertised in newspapers and drew large crowds of white families. They were a kind of vigilantism where Southern white men saw themselves as protectors of their way of life and their white women. By the early twentieth century, the writer Mark Twain had a name for it: the United States of Lyncherdom. Headlines and Grisly Souvenirs Lynchings were covered in local newspapers with headlines spelling out the horrific details. Photos of victims, with exultant white observers posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display. Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women. Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from a fight. Headlines such as the following were not uncommon: "Five White Men Take Negro Into Woods; Kill Him: Had Been Charged with Associating with White Women" went over The Associated Press wires about a lynching in Shreveport, Louisiana. "Negro Is Slain By Texas Posse: Victim's Heart Removed After His Capture By Armed Men" was published in The New York World Telegram on December 8, 1933. "Negro and White Scuffle; Negro Is Jailed, Lynched" was published in the Atlanta Constitution on July 6, 1933. Newspapers even printed that prominent white citizens in local towns attended lynchings, and often published victory pictures -- smiling crowds, many with children in tow -- standing next to the corpse. 27

Thousands of Victims In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the 1800s to 1955. Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5,000. Killed for Being "Insolent" Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from 1880 to 1930 were prompted by an accusation of rape. In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent." Though most victims were black men, women were by no means exempt. One Woman's Crusade According to black journalist and editor Ida B. Wells, who launched a fierce anti-lynching campaign in the 1890s, the lynching of successful black people was a means of subordinating potential black economic competitors. She also argued that consensual sex between black men and white women, while forbidden, was widespread. Thus lynching was also a means of imposing order on white women's sexuality. Wells, who would later help found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was forced to flee Memphis after her offices were torched. Total Repression With lynching as a violent backdrop in the South, Jim Crow as the law of the land, and the poverty of the sharecropper system, blacks had no recourse. This triage of repression ensured blacks would remain impoverished, endangered, and without rights or hope. Whites could accuse at will and rarely was a white punished for a crime committed against a black. Even for those whites who were opposed to lynching, there was not much they could do. If there was an investigation, white citizens closed ranks to protect their own and rarely were mob leaders identified. Violence Tapered Off Violence against blacks would taper off during the second World War and rise again after the passage of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that nullified the country's separate-but-equal doctrine. Armed with hope, blacks began to register and organize people to vote. Local NAACP chapters began sprouting up in small towns. Shock Over Till When Emmett Till was murdered, the head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, lambasted Mississippi and called Emmett's murder a lynching. "It would appear from this lynching that the State of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children." The brutal slaying of a 14-year-old boy was shocking, and when the killers later confessed to the crime in an article published in Look magazine, African Americans and others who supported 28

civil liberties realized they would have to organize en masse and risk their lives in order to bring change. From: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/e_lynch.html

Act 1 Scene 12
1. Luther Rosser-Leo Frank s Attorney

Rosser often refused to wear a necktie in court as a sign of free-thinking and/or idiosyncratic thinking.

2. Jim Conley The State's prosecution team was made up of the Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey, Assistant Solicitor General Frank Arthur Hooper and E. A Stevens. Frank was represented by eight lawyers (some of them jury selection specialists), led by Luther Z. Rosser. The defense used peremptory challenges to eliminate the only two black jurors. The prosecution's theory was that Conley's last affidavit was true, Frank was the murderer, and the murder notes had been dictated by Frank in an effort to pin the crime on Lee. The defense's theory was that Conley was the murderer, and that Lee helped Conley write the notes. The defense brought numerous witnesses who attested to Frank's alibi, which did not leave him enough time to have committed the crime. Conley reiterated his testimony from his final affidavit. He added to it by describing Frank as regularly having sex with women in his upstairs office on Saturdays while Conley kept a lookout on the first floor lobby. Another witness C. Brutus Dalton who, like Conley, had a criminal record, corroborated Conley. Although Conley admitted that he had changed his story and lied repeatedly,

29

this did not damage the prosecution's case as much as might have been expected, as he admitted to being an accessory. Many white observers did not believe that a black man could have been intelligent enough to make up such a complicated story. The Georgian wrote, "Many people are arguing to themselves that the negro, no matter how hard he tried or how generously he was coached, still never could have framed up a story like the one he told unless there was some foundation in fact."

Act 1 Scene 14
1. Tom Watson Thomas Edward Watson was born on his family's small plantation outside the village of Thomson, Georgia on September 5, 1856. The family owned forty-five slaves and more than one thousand acres of land; hardly aristocrats, though definitely not poor. Throughout his life, those early, idyllic days on the plantation would remain the paramount ideal for Watson, even as the social order of the antebellum South was being dismantled. His grandfather died in 1863 and Watson's father, a twice-wounded Confederate veteran, sold the plantation after the Civil War and moved the family to a smaller farm nearby. Watson experienced some poverty in his youth, but as an adult, he made a small fortune as a lawyer and landowner. He prospered and entered politics in the 1880s. He was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1882, but impatiently resigned before his term expired in 1884. He soon came to support the Farmers' Alliance platform, and was elected to Congress as an Alliance Democrat in 1890, the year the Alliance made huge inroads across Georgia by applying its "yardstick test" to candidates but not requiring them to officially join the organization. Watson, unlike most Alliance Democrats, wished to see a true third party grow out of the Alliance in the South. In Congress, he was the only Southern Alliance Democrat to abandon the Democratic caucus, instead attending the first Populist Party congressional caucus. At that meeting, he was nominated for Speaker of the House by the eight Western Populist congressmen. Watson was instrumental in the founding of the Georgia Populist Party in early 1892. Watson's reelection campaign that same year fell victim to wholesale fraud and intimidation, as the Democrats employed bribery, ballot box stuffing, voting of minors, repeat voting, out-of-state voters and violence to defeat him. Watson responded with an off-year campaign in 1893, during which he stumped the state in support of Populism. Subscription to his newspaper, The People's Party Paper, jumped during the campaign. He was renominated in 1894 for Congress, and again defeated through blatant Democratic fraud. The fraud was so bad that, as a remedy, Watson's opponent proposed a special election the following year. Watson agreed, but through the passage of fraudulent registration laws and black voter intimidation, the Democrats prevailed once again. 30

Watson did not attend the Populist Party convention in St. Louis in July, 1896. In the main, the Southern delegates, among whom Watson was revered, were "mid-roaders," opposing fusion with the Democrats, who had employed so many devious and illegal methods to defeat the Populists. In the West, however, where the Democrats were the minority party behind the Republicans, fusion enjoyed much more support. The national leadership of the Populist Party had fallen to Westerners, and a rule was implemented at the convention awarding delegates on the basis of successes in the past three elections. This greatly benefited the Western fusionists, for Democratic fraud and violence, as mentioned above, had snatched victory from Southern Populists time and again. During the confusion of that hotly-debated convention, Watson was nominated for Vice President, while William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Presidential nominee, was nominated for President. Bryan accepted the Populist nomination, but ignored his running mate. Meanwhile, Watson and the "mid-roaders," as those who opposed fusion with the Democrats were known, demanded that Bryan drop his Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Arthur Sewall, a conservative businessman who was anathema to die-hard Populists like Watson. The Democrats refused to budge, for in many Western states, where they were outnumbered by Republicans, deals had been struck with Populist leaders to support the Bryan-Sewall ticket in exchange for support of various Populist candidates for state and congressional offices. Watson found himself in a most uncomfortable position. Repudiated by his running mate, denounced by many in his own party, he lashed out against Wall Street and Democratic and Populist fusionists with equal fervor. As punishment for opposing fusion, the Bryan-Watson ticket was withdrawn from the ballot in many Southern states. In defeat, Watson received 217,000 votes in seventeen states, and twenty-seven electoral votes. After 1896, Watson left politics - but only briefly. He was the Populist candidate for President in 1904 and 1908, but these campaigns bore little resemblance to those of the 1890s. Watson was now a virulent racist, a far cry from the Populist leader of the 1890s who had openly called for black political equality and racial unity along class lines. As his own wealth grew, he denounced socialism, which had drawn many converts from the ashes of Populism. He was a vigorous anti-Catholic crusader who called for the reorganization of the Ku Klux Klan. He played an inflammatory role in the 1913 case of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent accused of murdering a young female worker. Watson and the Southern press sensationalized the case, hurling racist and anti-Semetic epithets at Frank while making wild, unsubstantiated charges. Frank was dragged from his prison cell and lynched in 1915 after his death sentence was commuted. Watson was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1920, where he rabidly attacked the Wilson administration and its foreign policy. He was very sick by this point, however, and suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage in 1922 at the age of sixty-six. 31

From: http://projects.vassar.edu/1896/watson.html 2. Leo Frank s Statement Before the Jury On August 18, 1913, a pale Leo Frank, with hands clasped, began four hours of testimony that included a personal history and explanation of his supervisory duties at the pencil factory. On the day of the murder, Frank said, he checked a large number of invoices to ensure their accuracy. He was so occupied when Mary Phagan visited his office to collect her pay envelope. Frank told jurors that at the time, he didn't even know her name: "I only recognized this little girl from having seen her around the plant." Phagan took her paycheck and left his office. Frank told jurors that he never saw Mary alive again. He admitted to being "completely unstrung" by the discovery of the body. He said the sight of "that little girl on the dawn of womanhood so cruelly murdered" was "a scene that would have melted stone." Frank called Conley's testimony "a tissue of lies from first to last" and said the story of women coming to him "for immoral purposes is a base lie." He finished his testimony with the words, "I have told you the truth, the whole truth." From: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/frank/frankaccount.html 3. Hugh Dorsey and the Timing of His Guiltys during Closing Statements Hugh Dorsey, for the state of Georgia, had the last word. He accused the defense attorneys of appealing to racial prejudice to salvage a losing case. He denied that Frank was prosecuted because he was a Jew, observing: This great people rise to heights sublime, but they sink to the depths of degradation, too, and they are amenable to the same laws as you or I and the black race. Later in his argument, Dorsey faced Frank and stated the prosecution s theory of the murder: You assaulted her, and she resisted. She wouldn t yield. You struck her and you ravished her and she was unconscious. You killed Mary Phagan, Dorsey told Frank, to save your reputation, because dead people tell no tales. Concluding, Dorsey said there can be but one verdict and that, he told the jury twelve times between the rings of the bells of a nearby church as it signaled noon, is guilty! From: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/frank/frankaccount.html

Act 2 Scene 2
1. Pressure on Governor Slaton: Adolph Ochs and The New York Times Early sensational coverage of Phagan s murder in three of Atlanta s papers Georgian, Journal and Constitution morphed into unabashed bias against Frank. This galvanized Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, to use his paper to crusade for Frank s cause. With the Civil War a fresh wound, the New South resented this influence. Surfing a wave of anti-North sentiment, Thomas Watson, a future American senator, instigated the lynching. In his papers ,Jeffersonian and Watson s Monthly, he condemned Och s meddling and touted Frank s guilt, which was eventually confirmed after 13 appeals. 32

From: http://www.forward.com/articles/105936/#ixzz1lrVty4Au

Act 2 Scene 3
1. Capital City Club The Capital City Club is a private social club located in Atlanta, Georgia. Chartered on May 21, 1883, it is one of the oldest private clubs in the South. According to its charter, the purpose of the club is "to promote the pleasure, kind feeling and general culture of its members." Harry C. Stockdell was the club's first president. He was succeeded in 1884 by Robert J. Lowry; and in 1885 Livingston Mims began the longest term as president, serving, with a two-year interruption, from 1886 through 1906. Subsequent presidents have all served two years or less. The first club house was located at 43 Walton Street. In August 1884, the club moved to a new establishment at 114 Peachtree Street.The Club presently operates three facilities for the use of its members, the oldest of which, the downtown Atlanta club building on Harris Street, was dedicated on December 16, 1911. The Capital City Country Club, located in Brookhaven, was leased in 1913 and purchased in 1915. At that time the golf course was increased from nine to eighteen holes. The present country club building was erected in 1928. In the autumn of 2002 an additional club facility, the Crabapple Golf Club, was completed on 600 acres (2.4 km2) in the northern portion of Fulton County, Georgia. Notable individuals, including several presidents of the United States and royalty from other nations, have been guests at the Capital City Club. From: http://www.capitalcityclub.org

Act 2 Scene 6
1. Governor Slaton s Re-examination of Leo Frank s Case When all the court appeals had been exhausted, Frank's attorneys sought a commutation from Georgia governor John M. Slaton. Thomas E. Watson, a former Populist and the publisher of the Jeffersonian, had conducted a campaign denouncing Frank that struck a chord, and Georgians responded to it. Watson's accusations against Jews and Leo Frank in particular increased the paper's sales and elicited enormous numbers of letters praising him and his publication. As Watson continued to fan the flames of public outrage, his readership grew. By the time Slaton reviewed the case, there was tremendous pressure from the public to let the courts' verdicts stand. Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, visited the pencil factory where the murder had taken place, and finally decided that Frank was innocent. He commuted the 33

sentence, however, to life imprisonment, assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free. From: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-906

Act 2 Scene 8
1. Reaction of Georgia to Frank s Commutation Slaton's decision enraged much of the Georgia populace, leading to riots throughout Atlanta, as well as a march to the governor's mansion by some of his more virulent opponents. The governor declared martial law and called out the National Guard. When Slaton's term as governor ended a few days later, police escorted him to the railroad station, where he and his wife boarded a train and left the state, not to return for a decade. Frank's stay at the prison farm in Milledgeville was cut short on the night of August 16, 1915, when some of the prominent citizens of Marietta, Phagan's hometown, took Frank from his cell and drove him back to Marietta. They hanged him from an oak tree the next morning. From: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-906

Act 2 Scene 9
1. The Prison Farm in Milledgeville

34

This photo allegedly shows Leo Frank s cot in the forefront.

Act 2 Scene 10
1. Rise of the new KKK after Frank s Lynching The Ku Klux Klan, a violent anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic fraternal organzation, experienced a powerful revival in the 1910s and 1920s, particularly in the Midwest, the South, and large industrial cities. The first Klan was a vigilante group that was founded during Reconstruction by Confederate veterans to disenfranchise newly freed slaves. Although the Klan was eventually suppressed as a terrorist group, many people, particularly in the South, romanticized the Klan as a group of modern day-knights that were fighting against an unjust order. The second version of the Klan was established in 1915 in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Klansmen believed that American citizenship should be reserved for white, native-born, AngloSaxon, Protestants. According to Klan ideology, Jews were a dishonest, alien group that exerted an unnatural level of influence on American (white Protestant) life.

The Ballad of Mary Phagan , which was composed by local balladeer Fiddlin John Carson, depicted Leo Frank as a murderer and pervert. It became quite popular and was recorded by well-known country singers during the early twentieth century. One of the catalysts for the re-emergence of the Klan was the 1913 Leo Frank case. Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company, was arrested, tried, and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan, a thirteen year old employee of his factory. Frank was convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death. When the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence to life in prison, the citizens of Atlanta were enraged. The governor was forced to call out the National Guard for his own protection, the only time in American history that this occurred. 35

A copy of Tom Watson's newspaper, The Jeffersonian, which incited the lynch mob that murdered Leo Frank. Angry mobs were incited by the writings of local politician Tom Watson who wrote weekly editorials demonizing Frank in his newspaper The Jeffersonian. Watson called for Frank s lynching. The call was answered on August 27, 1915 when a group of armed men from Marietta (known as "The Knights of Mary Phagan"), the birth place of Mary Phagan, drove to the state prison in Milledgeville, removed Frank from his cell, drove him back to Marietta, Georgia and hanged him from an oak tree. Two years after Frank's lynching, many of the original members of The Knights of Mary Phagan were present at the founding of the second Klan. The hysteria surrounding the Frank case illustrates many of the common fears and stereotypes that would be rehashed by groups like the Klan and the Nazi Party; Jews as greedy industrialists, Jews as sexual degenerates, and Jews as exploiters of women and children. Although Klan membership declined in the 1930s, due to internal dissent and a number of lurid scandals, the belief that Jews were somehow "un-American" lingered in the minds of many Americans.
From: http://www.thebreman.org/exhibitions/online/1000kids/klan.html

2.

Sh Ma Yisrael Shema Yisrael (or Sh'ma Yisrael "Hear, [O] Israel") are the first two words of a section of the Torah (Hebrew Bible) that is a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services. The first verse encapsulates the monotheistic essence of Judaism: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one," found in Deuteronomy 6:4 . Observant Jews consider the Shema to be the most important part of the prayer service in Judaism, and its twice-daily recitation as a mitzvah (religious commandment). It is traditional for Jews to say the Shema as their last words, and for parents to teach their children to say it before they go to sleep at night.

Prepared By: Kim Strassburger 36