William Ellery Leonard by Reinitz Neale;

Author:Reinitz, Neale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The words of workers, Leonard wrote, were “more fierce than dynamite.”[44] Mooney had once been a follower of Leonard’s second martyr, Eugene Debs. (Debs, like Norman Thomas, ran for president five times on the Socialist ticket.) In 1917 Debs was convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to ten years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for speaking publicly against the war. Leonard struck up a correspondence with him and in May of 1919 sent him his poem “The Old Agitator,” which had been printed in Victor Berger’s Socialist Milwaukee Leader. Leonard ironically affirmed that “a state must have firm laws / And watchful citizens that balk” against the “wagging tongue” of “one grown gray and gaunt with too much talk” (Debs was in his sixties).[45] Leonard had a third martyr, Leo Frank, who had been lynched in the South two years before the United States entered the war. Frank, the manager of his Jewish family’s pencil factory in Atlanta, had been found guilty in a corrupt trial of the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. His death sentence was commuted by the governor of Georgia, but a mob of what Leonard called “howling people-kings” had seized him from prison and hanged him. Leonard re-created an image of the victim, “Leo Frank, the Jew”: “Nor wind, nor rain, nor bird of prey, / Shall eat that awful form away.”[46]

The “strangely white” form of Leo Frank contrasted with the mutilated black victim of the title poem of The Lynching Bee, a literally scorching re-creation of the carnival atmosphere of the burning, castration, and dismemberment of a black man in the postwar South, a far cry from the lapse into racial prejudice in “From Senegal to Sunset Hill.” The year 1919, when Leonard wrote the poem, was one of racial strife throughout the United States. The Ku Klux Khan had been revived at the time of the Frank killing, and there was widespread fear of an assertion of black rights after the war. From a combination of particular incidents Leonard assembled a narrative that was a progenitor of the song “Strange Fruit,” the 1930s account of a lynching by Abel Meeropol, who later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Composed in twenty-one sections in the oral tradition that inspired Two Lives, Leonard’s poem demands to be read aloud. He employs the rhyming lines of varying length that had failed him in his ode on Lincoln, here not emptily pompous but a vehicle for searing imagery. At the beginning, middle, and end of “The Lynching Bee” he sets the scene with two lines that describe the cutting “sickle” of the new moon in the unnatural blackness, suspended

Keen as a knife, bent like a boomerang,

A witch’s bangle in the Zodiac.

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