300 Page – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

Here is the translated text as follows:

268 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Never said a word about Mary's envelope. There's your conspiracy, with Jim Conley's story as its foundation. It's too thin. It's preposterous.

Then my friend Hooper says Frank discharged Gantt because he saw Gantt talking to Mary Phagan. If you convict men on such distorted evidence as this, you'd be hanging men perpetually. Gantt, in the first place, doesn't come into this case in any good light. It is ridiculously absurd to bring his discharge into this plot of the defense. Why, even Grace Hicks, who worked with Mary Phagan, and who is a sister-in-law of Boots Rogers, says that Frank did not know the little girl.

Hooper also says that bad things are going on in the pencil factory, and that it is natural for men to cast about for girls in such environments. We are not trying this case on whether you or I or Frank had been perfect in the past. This is a case of murder. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I say this much, and that is that there has been as little evidence of such conditions in this plant as any other of its kind you can find in the city. They have produced some, of course, but it is an easy matter to locate some ten or twelve disgruntled ex-employees who are vengeful enough to swear against their former superintendent, even though they don't know him except by sight.

I want to ask this much: Could Frank have remained at the head of this concern if he had been as loose morally as the state has striven to show? If he had carried on with the girls of the place as my friend alleged, wouldn't the entire working force have been demoralized, ruined? He may have looked into this dressing room, as the little Jackson girl says, but, if he did, it was done to see that the girls weren't loitering. There were no lavatories, no toilets, no baths in these dressing rooms. The girls only changed their top garments. He wouldn't have seen much if he had peered into the place. You can go to Piedmont Park any day and see girls and women with a whole lot less on their persons. And to the shows any night you can see the actresses with almost nothing on.