Reading Time: 9 minutes [1598 words]
111 Years Ago Today (December 26, 2025): His two-part Leo Frank case series ran in Collier’s Weekly on December 19, 1914, and December 26, 1914, shaping national opinion on the true-crime while the murder conviction was still being hotly disputed in the press and fought in the appellate courts.
By Mary Phagan-Kean | 12-26-2025
Christopher Patrick Connolly, better known by his byline C. P. Connolly (1863 to 1935), built a national reputation in the Progressive Era as a hard-edged, radical investigative journalist. He developed his public profile and rose to prominence through years of writing for Collier’s Weekly. In public and historical memory, however, he is most closely associated with one highly promoted, defense-oriented propaganda book, The Truth About the Frank Case (1915), a work that helped push the Leo Frank story even deeper into America's historiological bloodstream of controversial courtroom sagas.
Before he became a full-time muckraking journalist and author, Connolly worked for a time as a prosecutor in Montana. That legalistic background shaped his writing style in a way that is easy to spot. He did not simply report. He argued. He wrote like a lawyer delivering a closing argument, selecting facts, arranging motives, and steering the reader toward the conclusion he wanted. His goal was not to present both sides of the case impartially and let the reader decide. The tone of his writing on the case of Mary Phagan was confident and directional, less about weighing possibilities and more about winning the case in the reader’s mind. In careful historical work, the order should be simple: first comes the evidence, then come the conclusions. Connolly often reversed that order. He began with a fixed position and then crafted a narrative designed to support it. When you test his claims against the trial record and the appellate materials, the advocacy becomes hard to miss.
That approach became especially obvious 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 competing evidence with nuance and proportional weight. He aligned himself ideologically with the convict's defense effort and used his national platform to push a pro-Frank narrative with intensity and urgency. His work reads less like careful, objective journalism and more like public persuasion, designed to reshape the court of public opinion and encourage distrust of the verdict. The aim was to seed doubt about the verdict of guilt and to keep that doubt alive while Frank’s attorneys continued fighting through the appellate courts.
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 matters because he wrote it while the struggle over Frank’s fate was still active and moving through the appeals process, with legal maneuvering, newspaper agitprop, and political pressure still in motion, and with public sentiment still potentially influential and malleable. Connolly framed the conviction as a grave injustice and treated the defense narrative as the most credible explanation, often in the voice of someone correcting a public that had been misled. The broader hope was to win the case in the court of public opinion, to build national momentum that could shape the opinion of elites, influence institutions, and lean on decision makers long before any final legal outcome. This was a psyche war at the nation-state level. American Jewry adopted the case as a cause-cĂ©lèbre.Â
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 signals the posture. Connolly was not offering a tentative review, a cautious comparison of claims, or a neutral guide to the trial record. He was asserting that he possessed the “truth” and presenting the defense story as the corrective account the public needed to accept. The book makes little pretense of objectivity. Its purpose is partisan persuasion, not balance.
The book’s influence came largely from the simple fact that it existed as a ready-made, forceful narrative in a single volume that could be read in a day. Most ordinary citizens were never going to do the exhausting work of locating, obtaining, and reading the trial transcript as published day by day in the Atlanta press, plus the later appellate filings, including the full brief of evidence. That material was long, sometimes technical, and scattered across legal documents and extended newspaper coverage. Connolly offered something easier: a single story with a strong point of view, packaged for broad consumption, and written with the confidence of certainty.
Connolly’s book provided an easy substitute for the hard work of primary-source reading: an emotive narrative that blended polished storytelling with partisan passion and moral certainty. It was organized, sounded authoritative, quoted selectively, and guided readers toward a preferred conclusion without requiring 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 attack on the prosecution’s core 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 depicting Conley as implausible, contradictory, and untrustworthy, and he pushes readers toward the idea that the entire case collapses if Conley is not believed. He does not treat Conley as one contested witness among many. He uses Conley as the lever to pry loose the verdict itself. The result is a narrative that turns the case into a binary morality play about a corrupted process and a persecuted defendant, rather than a dense evidentiary contest with competing interpretations, contradictions, and corroborations that must be weighed in context.
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 (American Jewish Archives, Ohio). That kind of correspondence reads like the footprint of an alliance. It underlines the basic point. Connolly was not merely writing about the defense campaign. He was participating in it, serving 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 national attention, featured Clarence Darrow on the defense side, and ended with acquittals that included labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood. Connolly often approached such events with a strong suspicion of official narratives and a willingness to write in a way that inflamed rather than cooled. He carried that same instinct into the Frank case, where the rhetoric can feel more like a campaign speech than a measured review.
The tone of Connolly’s Frank case writing also reflects the emotional climate of the era and the combustible 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 built day by day, including both circumstantial and forensic elements. Over time, that framing can become self-sealing. Disagreement with the defense narrative starts to look, in Connolly’s presentation, like proof of bias or corruption rather than an alternative reading of evidence that deserves to be examined on its own terms.
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 full court records, and no easy way for the average reader to fact-check long legal documents. In that environment, a single widely circulated magazine series, followed by a book that claimed to present “the truth,” could function like an authoritative source simply because it was accessible, confident, and repeatable. The goal 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 the pro-Frank agitation narrative and as a case study in how mass media helped shape 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 central purpose. Whatever one’s conclusion about guilt or innocence, Connolly’s lasting significance lies in how he showed that the Leo Frank case would be fought in print as aggressively as it was fought in court, and that a single widely promoted book could become a long-running engine of public belief, repetition, and persuasion.