Leo Frank died seventeen years ago, the victim of a lynching mob’s fury, but the bitterness engendered by the famous case is not dead. The ghosts of the Frank case arose from their grave here yesterday to hand an overwhelming defeat to John M. Slaton, the governor who pardoned Frank, in his race for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate.
It appears that while the mob killed Frank, the stroke of the pen that pardoned Frank signed the death warrant of Slaton’s political acreer. The results of the election show, that although avoided at the beginning of the campaign by both Slaton and his opponent, Senator Harris as a dead issue, the Frank case had developed into the outstanding issue by the close of the campaign.
The issue was bandied to and fro through large advertisements in the local press, through the distribution of circulars throughout the state and in campaign speeches. The election returns which swamped Slaton are regarded as showing decisively that Slaton’s leniency to Frank has not been forgotten in any section of Georgia, in spite of the long lapse of time and the widely proclaimed innocence of Frank.
The local Jewish communities took no observable part in the campaign, although manifesting a keen interest in the outcome.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
