Frank's Fate

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Steve Oney's And The Dead Shall Rise (Pantheon; 742 pages) aspires to be the last word on the notorious Leo Frank lynching. Given all that has come before on the subject (books, movies, even a Broadway musical) and the massiveness of Oney's work, that might seem a reasonable expectation. But people will never stop reexamining and debating Frank's fate.

A Brooklyn-reared Jew, Frank was the manager of an Atlanta pencil factory where a female employee, 13, was raped and strangled to death in 1913. On shaky evidence and over his vehement denials, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Two years later, after his sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, a gang abducted him from prison and lynched him.

The saga was a national sensation, laced with anti-Semitism, demagoguery and racism. Oney's account, backed by 17 years of research, is the most comprehensive and detailed yet. The book teems with fresh information, notably about the identities and later careers of the lynchers. The most poignant of its gallery of portraits is of anguished lawyer William Smith, whose black, lowlife client was Frank's chief accuser but who, Smith decided, was probably the murderer. If, in its exhaustive thoroughness, Oney's narrative meanders, it does so like a vast river: cumulatively it moves with a steady, somber power.