My takeaway was as follows. There was absolutely no antisemitism behind the prosecution. Indeed, while southerners (and Frank’s defenence) were open and unashamed of their racism, directed against the main black witness who helped Frank hide the body, they made loud proclamations of how they found religious bigotry beneath them and unsavory. Indeed racism was used both to attach and rehabilitate the main black witness, with the prosecutors saying roughly this story is too complicated for a black man to make up and, further, notice he hasn’t changed his tune after multiple days of aggressive cross examination.

Organized Jewry came to Frank’s defense, and this awful crime–a rape and murder–was what got them all excited. This awful murder was the founding event of the ADL. They have since rewritten the history of this case. Frank was hated because the crime was absolutely terrible, and Phagan was rather a beautiful young girl. It was not because he was a Jew.

Frank did not take the stand, did not protest his innocence, and had a reputation for sexually harassing the factory girls that worked for him prior to this crime. His wife, furthermore, openly expressed her contempt for goyim.

Finally, here we have a Southern jury hat took the testimony of a black man among others to condemn a white man. Think about that. Further,even by modern standards there was more than enough evidence to convict, even though it was not a 100% case. I’m pretty sure he did it, but it could have been a random black man too. It’s not like they had DNA and the like.

The idea that the jury result was the expression of antisemitism is ridiculous. He was ultimately lynch-mobbed because of the atrocity he did and the use of unlawful influence on the governor to secure a pardon. Yes it was shameful, but it had nothing to do with antisemitism. The ultimate takeaway did have a lot to do with what Hillaire Belloc calls “Semitism” however.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEznh2JZvrI

The film contains a lot of authentic history, something I did not really know before, about the post-Civil War era in the South. Thomas Goodrich, in his book about the death of Lincoln, paints a miserable picture of the South after the Civil War ended, but this film added elements to that misery that Goodrich never mentioned: how black supremacy got so engorged, the KKK had to be invented to combat it.