111 Years Ago Today (December 26, 2025): Connolly’s two-part Leo Frank case series ran in Collier’s Weekly on December 19, 1914, and December 26, 1914, transforming national opinion about this notorious true-crime saga while the murder conviction was still being contested in headlines and battled in appellate courts.
By Mary Phagan-Kean | 12-26-2025
Christopher Patrick Connolly, better known by his byline C. P. Connolly (1863 to 1935), carved out a national reputation in the Progressive Era as a hard-edged, radical investigative journalist. He built his stature and amplified his name through years of high-circulation writing for Collier’s Weekly. Yet in public and historical memory, he is most closely tethered to one widely promoted, defense-driven propaganda book, The Truth About the Frank Case (1915), a volume that helped drive the Leo Frank story deeper into America’s historiological bloodstream as one of the era’s most argued-over courtroom legends.
Before he became a full-time muckraking journalist and author, Connolly worked for a time as a prosecutor in Montana. That legal background is stamped all over his prose. He did not merely chronicle events. He prosecuted a narrative. He wrote as if the page were a courtroom, the reader the jury, and each paragraph a closing argument. He selected facts with intent, arranged motives with theatrical precision, and marshaled insinuation and emphasis to herd the reader toward the destination he had already chosen. His goal was not to set competing accounts side by side and let the public deliberate. His goal was to win. In serious historical work, the sequence should be straightforward: evidence first, conclusions second. Connolly repeatedly reversed that sequence. He began with a fixed verdict in his own mind and then assembled a story designed to justify it. When his claims are measured against the trial record and the appellate filings, the advocacy is not subtle. It is the point.
That approach became even more pronounced after Leo Frank’s 1913 conviction for the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. Connolly did not present himself as a neutral observer weighing testimony with proportion, context, and restraint. He aligned himself ideologically with the convicted man’s defense effort and wielded his national platform to push a pro-Frank narrative with urgency and force. His writing reads less like dispassionate reporting and more like a persuasion campaign aimed at the court of public opinion. The objective was to seed doubt about the verdict and keep that doubt alive while Frank’s attorneys continued their fight through the appellate courts, and while political and social pressure swirled around the case.
In late 1914, Connolly published a two-part series titled “The Frank Case” in Collier’s Weekly, dated December 19, 1914, and December 26, 1914. The timing mattered because the battle over Frank’s fate was still active, still moving through the appeals process, and still being contested in newspapers, pamphlets, and public agitation. Legal maneuvering continued, political pressure was being applied, and national sentiment remained malleable. Connolly framed the conviction as a grave injustice and treated the defense narrative as the most credible explanation, often adopting the posture of a man “correcting” a public he implied had been deceived. The broader ambition was clear. Win the argument nationally, win the emotional framing, and you create leverage. You shape the climate in which elites operate. You influence institutions. You lean on decision makers. This was psychological warfare fought through print, and the case became a cause célèbre, adopted and amplified as a national symbol.
Connolly then extended that same agenda into book form in 1915 with The Truth About the Frank Case, drawing heavily on his earlier magazine work. Even the title announces its posture of certainty. Connolly was not offering a cautious review, a balanced comparison of competing claims, or a neutral guide to the trial record. He declared he possessed “the truth” and presented the defense narrative as the corrective the public was obliged to accept. The book makes little pretense of objectivity. Its purpose is partisan persuasion, not historical balance.
The book’s influence also rested on a simple practical reality. It existed as a ready-made, forceful narrative in a single volume that could be consumed quickly. Most ordinary citizens were never going to locate and read the trial transcript as printed day by day in the Atlanta press, then chase down appellate filings, and then grind through the full brief of evidence. That material was sprawling, technical in places, and dispersed across legal documents and extended newspaper coverage. Connolly offered an easier product. One story, one voice, one set of conclusions, packaged for broad consumption and delivered with the confidence of certainty.
In that sense, Connolly’s book functioned as a substitute for primary-source labor. It offered an emotive narrative that blended polished storytelling with partisan passion, moral certainty, and righteous indignation. It was structured, it sounded authoritative, it quoted selectively, and it guided readers toward a preferred conclusion without forcing them to wade through thousands of pages of original material. In practice, the book became a shortcut, and for many people, that shortcut became the record.
A major engine of Connolly’s argument was his sustained assault on the prosecution’s central witness, Jim Conley, the admitted accessory after the fact, the Black janitor whose testimony connected Frank to the so-called death notes found near Mary Phagan’s body in the National Pencil Company factory basement. Connolly concentrates on presenting Conley as implausible, contradictory, and untrustworthy, pushing the reader toward the idea that the entire case collapses if Conley is rejected. He does not treat Conley as one contested witness among many, to be evaluated alongside corroborations, contradictions, and surrounding circumstances. He uses Conley as the lever to pry loose the verdict itself. The result is a simplified morality drama in which the process is corrupted, the defendant is persecuted, and the reader is guided toward outrage, rather than being invited into a dense evidentiary contest where hard details must be weighed carefully and methodically.
Connolly’s alignment with the defense effort was not subtle. One revealing detail is that Leo Frank wrote to Connolly on January 4, 1915, expressing confidence about eventual relief from the U.S. Supreme Court and noting the volume of supportive mail praising Connolly’s Collier’s articles. That kind of correspondence reads like the footprint of an alliance. It underlines the basic point. Connolly was not merely describing the defense campaign. He was part of it, acting as a national mouthpiece with the reach of a major magazine and the permanence of a book.
Seen in the broader context of his career, this posture fit Connolly’s muckraking identity and his tendency to frame major disputes as stories about institutions, power, and public manipulation. He also wrote extensively about the Idaho prosecution of Western Federation of Miners leaders accused in the 1905 assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, a high-profile episode that drew Clarence Darrow on the defense side and ended with acquittals that included labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. Connolly often approached such conflicts with suspicion toward official narratives and a willingness to inflame rather than cool. He carried that same instinct into the Frank case, where the rhetoric can read like a campaign address more than a measured review.
The tone of Connolly’s Frank case writing also mirrors the emotional climate of the era and the volatile racial, regional, and ethnic tensions surrounding the case. He frames the story primarily through the lens of persecution and injustice against Frank, while giving comparatively little space to the full breadth of what the prosecution argued, what the jury heard, and how the trial record was assembled day by day, including circumstantial strands and forensic elements. Over time, that framing can become self-sealing. Disagreement with the defense narrative begins to look, in Connolly’s presentation, like proof of bias or corruption rather than a competing interpretation that deserves to be tested on its own evidentiary merits.
For these reasons, Connolly’s book is best understood as a proselytizing instrument rather than neutral scholarship. It was crafted to influence editors, civic leaders, clergy, politicians, and ordinary readers at a moment when public pressure campaigns could move institutions. There was no internet, no instant access to court records, and no frictionless way for average readers to fact-check long legal documents. In that environment, a widely circulated magazine series followed by a book proclaiming “the truth” could function as an authority simply because it was accessible, confident, and endlessly repeatable. The aim was to build momentum, harden sympathies, and legitimize continued efforts to reverse or bypass the verdict by reshaping the public’s sense of what “really happened.”
Today, Connolly is often cited as an early, prominent voice in pro-Frank agitation and as a case study in how mass media shaped the long-term public meaning of the Leo Frank case. Many later writers argue Frank was wrongly convicted because of antisemitism, but Connolly’s work remains controversial because it wears its bias openly, relies on selective emphasis, and treats advocacy as the core purpose. Whatever one’s final conclusion about guilt or innocence, Connolly’s lasting significance lies in what he demonstrated about modern mythmaking through print: a notorious case can be fought as fiercely in magazines and books as it is fought in courtrooms, and a single widely promoted volume can become a long-running engine of belief, repetition, and persuasion.
Sources
Connolly, C. P. (1915). The truth about the Frank case. Vail-Ballou Company. https://archive.org/details/truthaboutfrank00conngoog/page/n8/mode/2up
Connolly, C. P. (1914, December 19). The Frank case. Collier’s: The National Weekly, 54(14). https://archive.org/details/sim_colliers-the-national-weekly_1914-12-19_54_14/page/6/mode/2up
Connolly, C. P. (1914, December 26). The Frank case. Collier’s: The National Weekly, 54(15). https://archive.org/details/sim_colliers-the-national-weekly_1914-12-26_54_15/page/18/mode/2up