Raining on Parade

The musical about the trial and lynching of Leo Frank didn't sit well with me

First day of the Leo Frank Trial, 1915

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Last night, my wife and I went to see Parade, winner of the Tony Award for best revival of a musical among other accolades. The production is extremely accomplished—well-directed, well-acted, well-sung, and with a propulsive momentum that kept me consistently engaged even as the knot forming in the pit of my stomach grew tighter and more unpleasant. But grow tighter and more unpleasant it did. By the end, I kind of hated it.

Part of that reaction I can explain easily, and it’s not necessarily a knock on the show but just a personal predisposition. Parade tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta who in 1913 was arrested for the murder a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in the factory. He was tried and convicted, but after questions arose about the fairness of the trial and the justice of the verdict, the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, expecting him to be fully exonerated in due time. Instead Frank was forcibly removed from his place of incarceration by a mob and summarily lynched. It was one of the worst incidents of antisemitic violence in American history and prompted half of the Jewish population of Georgia to flee the state.

I was apprehensive before going mostly for two reasons. First, because musicals tend to paint in bold, clear emotions intended to carry the audience along on an empathetic emotional journey (there are exceptions, but this is the rule), and that really didn’t feel like the right palate for the American equivalent of the Dreyfus Affair. Second, because frankly I don’t like stories about Jewish victimhood, especially not stories of consecrated Jewish victimhood, and extra-especially stories that consecrate Jewish victimhood to a brand of feel-good liberalism, and I was really worried that a musical about Leo Frank would inevitably be precisely that. I wrote recently about how I don’t tend to call myself a Zionist (because I think the Zionist project has long since been accomplished and so the term has inevitably changed its meaning), but Parade struck me as the kind of thing that would make me change my mind and reflexively reach for my copy of Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.

Those apprehensions were to a considerable extent vindicated. The presiding spirit of Parade isn’t exactly feel-good liberalism, but feel-bad liberalism might hit the nail on the head. In that way the show is very much in tune with the times; the dramatic rise in antisemitism, and the ongoing Trump ructions, have caused many liberals’ view of the American people, the American political system and even democracy itself to darken considerably, and Parade reaffirms that dark assessment. That’s probably unavoidable and appropriate given the subject matter. Less necessary, I think, was to make Frank quite so blandly perfect a victim. Perhaps the fear was that giving him a more definable character risked causing the audience to question his manifest innocence, but I’m always in favor of trusting the audience more rather rather than less, and the downsides of making him a perfect victim strike me as far more significant than the risk that someone in the audience might think he had it coming.

Yair Rosenberg has argued, provocatively, that the whole point of Parade is almost the opposite of what I felt on watching it. He also notes the blandness with which Frank is portrayed, and how charismatic and showy his opponents are, but sees that as central to the show’s design. Antisemites need to steal the show, he avers, so that the audience comes to experience the emotions that swept the people of Georgia along to become a lynch mob (there’s that empathetic journey I was talking about earlier), and thereby come to understand how antisemitism persists and continues to manifest in murder. But that’s not what I experienced in the audience last night. The story I experienced was more like: Leo Frank died for America’s sins, or at least the old Confederacy’s sins. And I really don’t want any part of that mythology.

But something else bothered me about the show that felt less like a personal reaction It’s related to Frank’s helplessness but not identical to it. The more I thought about it, the angrier I got at the show. I can encapsulate the problem in a single sentence: what happened to Leo Frank’s defense?

We all know how trials work. The prosecution makes its case, calling witnesses and presenting evidence. The defense cross-examines the witnesses, questions the prosecution’s evidence, calls its own witnesses, and so forth. Real trials move much more ploddingly than those on stage, and cross-examination almost never results in the kind of confession that Perry Mason managed routinely to extract, but even in real trials much of the drama comes from new and unexpected information coming to light, a piece of evidence or a bit of witness testimony being taken apart. There’s a reason that “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit” has entered the national memory. Regardless of how much drama there has been along the way, however, in the end both attorneys get to sum up their cases, and then the jury renders a verdict.

That’s not how the trial in Parade proceeds. The prosecution certainly gets to make its case—flamboyantly, bombastically, and corruptly, supported by a parade of witnesses who have been coached, intimidated, and suborned. But all the defense does is object to matters of form once or twice. There is no cross-examination. There are no witnesses for the defense. The defense gets no summation—appropriately, I suppose, because it presented no case. Leo Frank himself does get to make a statement—though his lawyer tries to prevent him from doing even that—but all he says is that he didn’t do anything and that he can’t understand how he wound up on trial.

The whole thing felt more like a show trial than a real one, and perhaps that’s what the show intended: we don’t need to see Frank defend himself because we’re supposed to believe that in Georgia in 1913 defense would be unavailing. But the real Atlanta courtroom featured far more of a contest.

I had heard of Leo Frank before seeing Parade, but I didn’t know much about the case. I did a little quick reading after seeing it, because that missing defense nagged at me. And what I discovered is that Frank’s lawyers mounted quite a robust defense. Specifically, they accused Jim Conley, the janitor at the factory where Mary Phagan worked, of killing her as part of a botched robbery attempt, and of framing Frank for the crime. Conley’s testimony was central to the prosecution’s case, and much of the drama of the actual trial revolved around the complexity of convincing a White jury in Georgia to convict a White defendant on the basis of testimony from a Black man. The defense attacked Conley’s character ruthlessly, describing him as hyper-violent and uncontrollable. They interrogated him for sixteen hours—but they couldn’t break his story. Meanwhile, the prosecution portrayed Conley as obviously too trusting and natively simple (being Black) to have made up such an elaborate story and to have stuck to it under such intense scrutiny. Both sides, in other words, made ample use of racist archetypes to try to sway the jury. It was an ugly battle—but it was a battle.

There were other aspects to the defense—dueling character witnesses, questions about the plausibility of the prosecution’s timeline, and so forth—none of which make it into the trial Parade shows us, all part of making Frank into more of a passive victim. But I suspect there was another reason why the show declined to finger Conley. Not only would it have made Frank a more active participant in his own defense rather than a passive victim, it would have shown him, and his team, as comprehending the conditions under which they were operating, and adapting accordingly. And it would have required the audience to ask itself: if Frank didn’t kill Mary Phagan, then who did? The consensus among historians is that Conley probably did it. That’s what Governor Stanton, who commuted Frank’s sentence, strongly suspected. It’s also what the trial judge himself, who regretted Frank’s conviction before his death, concluded. Telling that story, though, would split Parade’s comfortably liberal audience, putting Black and Jewish partisans at odds while acknowledging that both were trying to figure out how to thrive, or at least survive, within a racist system they both suffered under, but also both understood.

There’s another way that Parade lets the audience off the hook, and that’s with respect to the relationship between people in power and the common people of Georgia. The show highlights the role that sensationalist journalism played in whipping up antisemitic fervor calling for Frank’s head, and that was certainly a major factor at the time. But it also depicts the political powers that be as united and, with the important exception of Governor Stanton, unrepentant in their determination to frame Frank, and the people as largely following their lead, and that’s not entirely right. We can debate why the seeds of those lurid newspaper stories fell on fertile soil—how much was due to anger at “foreign” Yankee capital and the social disruptions of industrialization, versus how much due to a baseline antisemitism always there in the background—but fall on fertile soil they did. The reason why the trial was seen as unfair by observers outside of Georgia wasn’t so much that the prosecution had rigged things, but that there was an angry mob right there at the courthouse day in and day out baying for Frank’s blood, very plausibly intimidating witnesses and jurors alike.

Parade doesn’t hide this, but it is at pains to finger people in positions of power whenever it can for manipulating the mob, rather than acknowledge that at least as much of the time the people in those positions were pandering to the mob rather than controlling it—or, in some cases, that they were part of the mob; a former governor of Georgia was among the men who kidnapped Frank from his jail and hanged him from a tree. The show even portrays the lynch mob as somewhat reluctant, ready and even eager to return Frank to prison if only he will confess his guilt. I understand why the show’s writer and director might have flinched from the enthusiastic brutality of Frank’s actual lynching, but that again strikes me less as a good dramaturgical choice than a good reason not to make a lynching the subject of a musical.

When we first meet Leo Frank, he professes bafflement at the Southerners he lives among, calling them barely civilized, belonging in a zoo. You might think his lynching would vindicate that early assessment, but the show seems to want the audience to land somewhere less gruesome, somewhere more tragically empathetic. I admire that ambition in the abstract; expanding my empathy is precisely why I go to the theater, and I’m not averse to extending it to those who would readily hang me by my neck until dead in the right circumstances. I don’t know whether to blame the show for not getting me there, or whether to blame—or praise—myself for not wanting to go there. But I didn’t go there. And, fair or not, that’s probably what I resent about the show most of all.