The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered Summary

Great Essays
If there is one court case that captured all issues of class, gender and race in the 1910s, the famous Leo Frank Case in Atlanta, Georgia, truly represents that. In the article “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism,” author Nancy MacLean discussed the turbulent court case, which was from the beginning, designed to find a Jewish wealthy businessman named Leo Frank guilty, simply because of racial hatred by southern whites, the growth of industry in the South, and because he was a part of the encroaching Progressive business elite. However, the biggest factor throughout the case was gender. Many southern white fathers were reluctant and against the idea, of letting their daughters leave the home in order to work in industrial jobs. The mere …show more content…
What is also worth noting is that this case would have never become as intense as it had, without these changes in the sexual behavior of women, and changes in power. In the end, southern whites achieved their goal of coming together to punish a Jewish business man, merely out of racial and class hatred. Lizabeth Cohen’s book Making a New Deal also reflects the ways in which workers came together in order to achieve a common goal. In her book, Cohen focuses on the Chicago industrial working class and “how it was possible and what it meant for industrial workers to become effective as national political participants in the mid 1930s after having sustained defeats in 1919 and having refrained from unionism and national politics during the 1920s.” Employers would try to divide these movements, and it depended on the unionists themselves on whether they would allow these influences by employers to help or hamper their efforts. In 1919, Chicago workers conducted strikes in

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