They Won't Forget

"Articulating the populist response was future U.S. Sen. Tom Watson, a Georgia lawyer and polemicist of such superior rhetorical gifts and inexhaustible vitriol that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck pale in comparison. Week after week in his widely circulated paper, the Jeffersonian, Watson rebutted Ochs and Lasker, arguing to his vast readership that self-appointed elites representing money and privilege had decreed that a child laborer's life was not equal in value to that of a Jewish industrialist. 'The agrarian rebel,' as historian C. Vann Woodward dubbed Watson, gave voice to a constituency that felt excluded from the halls of power in Washington and on Wall Street. When Slaton commuted Frank's sentence, Watson called for the lynching."

Steve Oney in the Los Angeles Times revisits the Leo Frank case.