Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Particularly galling to Lee were Long’s increasing attacks on President Roosevelt. Long was an early supporter of the president but broke with him soon into Roosevelt’s first administration and quickly emerged as perhaps his staunchest critic on the left. He castigated the president for not doing more to bring economic relief to the masses. For his part, Roosevelt viewed Long as the most likely figure in American life to emerge as a homegrown fascist, a Dixie equivalent of the cult-inducing strongmen then coming to power in Europe. Lee reported on the rumors that Long and Father Coughlin, the Catholic priest from Detroit whose radio broadcasts had won him enormous influence among the northern and midwestern working class, would team up on a “stop Roosevelt” ticket in 1936. In May 1935, Lee concluded that, since Long was such a publicity hog, the best thing to do was to give him the silent treatment. Yet he proceeded to editorialize on Long twice a month in May, June, July, and August, three times in September (not counting front-page coverage of Long’s assassination that month), and three more times by year’s end.

  Lee was too polite to recount for his readers the macabre scene of Long’s murder at the Louisiana state capitol on September 8. Long was there to orchestrate another of the special legislative sessions that he instructed his handpicked governor to call. One of the bills under consideration was a redistricting measure, outrageous even by Long’s standard, designed to oust a state district court judge, Benjamin Pavy, a longtime political opponent. Long darted about the capitol building, in and out of the legislative chamber and various offices. Aides and politicians trailed behind along with his bodyguards. In a marble corridor outside the governor’s office, Long turned to address the crowd following him. From behind a pillar a man in a white suit appeared, walked up to Long, and shot him. Policemen turned on the man and shot him dead. Outraged bodyguards emptied their pistols into the already deceased man, riddling him with some thirty bullet wounds. The assassin was a local doctor, Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Pavy. Long was taken to a local hospital and treated for his wounds, but he died two days later.

  For A. C. Lee, Long’s reckless pursuit of power, the riots, the armed guards, the assassination—all of these were the sad emblems of political dictatorship. A. C. recognized Long as “one of the brightest and most resourceful men the world has ever produced.” Yet he believed that Long’s demise dramatized perfectly the dangers of “iron handed rule.” Lee followed closely the fate of Long’s political machine in the months that followed. Years after Long’s assassination, when Lee wanted to evoke the importance of moral leadership and the dangers of concentrated personal power, he would often recall the tragic example of the Louisiana Kingfish.

  THE THREAT OF political dictatorship came home for A. C. Lee in a more immediate way in the spring of 1940. It involved the hotly contested campaign in Monroe County for the office of judge of probate. The seventy-year-old sitting judge, M. M. Fountain, was up for reelection. Fountain had made a name for himself in the county as a young man when he killed an escaped prisoner known locally as “the Negro outlaw, Wyatt Tate,” who had been arrested for killing a constable. He used his resulting fame to win election as sheriff, and eventually probate judge. His main challenger was E. T. “Short” Millsap, a forty-six-year-old mule trader who had served a term as state senator from 1931 to 1935 and was currently a member of the Monroe County Board of Education. In Montgomery, Millsap was well-known for applying the tough negotiating tactics he had learned in his business trade to his political work. Though small in stature, he was a presence in town, walking the streets of Monroeville with a whip in his hand. For A. C. Lee, ten years’ worth of high-minded editorializing on the responsibilities of self-government culminated in a singular, breathless effort to block Millsap’s election as probate judge. Never before or afterward would he support or oppose a candidate for public office as fiercely as he fought to defeat Millsap.

  Probate judge was no insignificant office in Alabama politics. In about two-thirds of the counties in the state, the probate judge was the chairman of the governing board, and as such, he was, according to V. O. Key Jr.—author of a classic study of mid-twentieth-century southern politics—the “principal factotum in local affairs.” In challenging Fountain, Millsap was vying to become, in essence, the head of Monroe County’s courthouse ring, a collection of local officials who used their office to dispense favors and thus consolidate their influence among the rural folk out in the county who almost always comprised the majority of eligible voters. Short Millsap would become one of Alabama’s legendary courthouse operatives. Generations of aspirants to statewide office would see it as a rite of passage to stop in at Millsap’s mule barn to talk politics. His rural supporters preferred meeting him there, rather than in the courthouse, where they were more likely to have to endure the condescending glances of town folk, some of whom, like A. C. Lee, would have been hard-pressed to conceal their disgust at witnessing Millsap’s political machine in actual operation. Late into the evening, country supplicants and hangers-on would gather at the barn, waiting their turn for a few minutes with Short, the little man reared back in his old oak chair, one leg thrown casually over the arm.

  Lee’s displeasure with Millsap dated to 1932 when, as state senator, Millsap had tried to undermine efforts to reorganize and save the Monroe County Bank. The suspicion was that Millsap wanted to be named the liquidating agent and reap the healthy fee paid for such service. Also, Lee complained that as more people in Monroe County found a spot on public payrolls, relief lists, or lists of old age or farm benefits, Millsap had convinced uneducated, rural voters that Millsap himself had been responsible for their jobs or the checks they had received. This, according to Lee, was how he amassed the political chits that he cashed at election time.

  As a newspaper editor, Lee took pride in not telling his readers how they should vote. He believed that his job was to inform them of the relevant facts and issues, and then trust that his fellow citizens would properly dispose of their responsibilities. Such restraint was particularly important in local races, where everybody knew or in some cases was related to everybody else. Only one time did A. C. ever break this rule, and it was with his endorsement of Judge Fountain against Short Millsap.

  Lee opened the campaign season in mid-February 1940 with a general disquisition on honesty in government. He followed with several pieces citing the Huey Long example and warning county folks not to fall for politicians who promised them the world. A month out from the election Lee turned up the heat. “[O]ur local county people are face to face with the greatest threat they have ever been called upon to deal with,” he wrote in an editorial titled “The Truth Shall Make Us Free.” The next week he denounced Millsap by name for the first time, along with “the vicious political system he has built in the county.” Nelle Dailey, an unwed forty-two-year-old middle school teacher, wrote a letter to the editor: “More power to you Mr. Editor! Let’s have Spring house-cleaning.” So, too, did Homer Dees, a fifty-year-old farmer and father of seven. “[F]or the last two or three years you have had a lot to say about the Huey P. Long dictatorship,” Dees wrote. “I guess that was O.K. in his day. But as to the men that’s running for Judge of Probate, I don’t think either of them is related to Huey.” Dees said that he had lived in Monroe County all his life, had been a legal voter since he was old enough, and had “never thought I needed the Editor of The Journal to tell me who I should vote for.” He asked that his subscription be discontinued.

  Thus it began in earnest. A letter to the editor the next week listed five signatories announcing their new Journal subscriptions to compensate for Dees’s discontinued one. Lee aired publicly his charge that Millsap had tried to undermine efforts to save the county bank, and published a long letter from a member of the County Democratic Executive Committee, who accused the Millsap machine of having stacked the list of officers overseeing election boxes with loyal henchmen.

  The night before the election, a crowd packed the county courthouse, the overflow filling
the surrounding square, to hear Hunter McDuffie, the third candidate in the race, announce that he was withdrawing his candidacy and throwing his support to Judge Fountain, thus consolidating the anti-Millsap vote. Still, it would not be enough. Millsap prevailed comfortably, winning by a margin of 600 out of some 3,900 votes cast.

  In defeat, A. C. Lee was magnanimous, at least at first. “The primary pillar of our governmental structure in this country of ours is majority rule,” he wrote. He urged everyone “to remove from their minds any bitterness that may have grown out of the campaign just closed, and present a united front in every effort to promote the welfare of our people upon the proper basis.” But it was hard for Lee himself to do so. An editorial the next week commented on the “refreshing” campaign for judge of probate in a nearby sister county. The successful candidate told voters, “I have nothing to offer for your support and vote except faithful, efficient and honest service.” Lee was comforted that “there are still some people in public life who seem to properly appraise values.”

  Harper Lee was fourteen years old when Short Millsap was elected judge of probate. Millsap surely inspired her description in Go Set a Watchman of William Willoughby, the Maycomb County political boss who met with his constituents in a hutch, and who sent out his operatives to “drum it into the head of every ignorant hungry wretch who accepted public assistance, whether job or relief money, that his vote was Willoughby’s.” And in her conception of Atticus’s summation in Mockingbird—that portrait of an honorable man making a desperate but ultimately futile plea to the better angels of a group of ordinary citizens—she may have drawn upon the memory of her father’s noble failure in his stand against the Millsap machine in the spring of 1940.

  AS UPSETTING AS Short Millsap’s victory was for A. C. Lee, developments abroad in the early summer of 1940 were far more troubling. Under Lee’s leadership, the Monroe Journal followed international matters closely. That wasn’t uncommon for rural newspapers of the day. The media landscape in the South was changing rapidly in the 1930s. Improved roads meant that metropolitan dailies started daily delivery in rural areas. As federal electrification programs brought down the price of utilities, more southerners bought radios. Yet the local weekly paper was still the place where the vast majority of rural southerners read the news. Compared to his fellow country editors, A. C. Lee was among the more curious, well-informed, and prolific commentators on the dramatic events unfolding around the world.

  The French army’s surrender to Germany in June 1940 prompted an editorial from Lee titled “Liberty’s Darkest Hour.” Not one normally to mix politics and religion, the fall of France led Lee to wonder aloud “why the all powerful God of the universe permits these things to be.” He took hope, however, in the resolute leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. A cablegram that Roosevelt sent to the president of France pledging to make available to the Allied army vital war materials received Lee’s heartiest endorsement. That same month he applauded Roosevelt’s decision to appoint the Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox as secretary of war and secretary of the navy. The move made clear the nation’s “united front in our program of preparedness.”

  Lee, like the great majority of southern editors and politicians, was among the earliest advocates for US intervention against Nazi Germany. In Gallup polls from September 1939 through the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the South ranked first among all American regions in its support for the British, even at the risk of war with Germany. When asked to explain the South’s eagerness to get involved in a distant war, southern editors and spokesmen chalked it up to the region’s endemic poverty—poor folks had less to lose in a war—or its ongoing dependence on cotton and tobacco, two international commodities sold profitably in foreign markets. Others pointed to the fact that so many southerners—meaning white southerners—were of English stock, and thus connected personally to the fate of Britain. One of the most common explanations concerned the Civil War. “[W]e of the South have once been a defeated and invaded country and we have learned just what this means,” said Clark Howell of the Atlanta Constitution. Other Americans “have never had the invader set his foot upon their soil and possibly this is why there is not the unanimity among them to defeat Hitler on the other side of the Atlantic rather than wait for him to come over here.”

  As for A. C. Lee, his interest in foreign matters sprung from his sense of ethnic loyalty with England combined with a genuine curiosity and love of learning. From the early years of his editorship, Lee’s Journal carried wire service reports on events including the civil disobedience campaigns of Mahatma Gandhi and fighting between communist and nationalist forces in China. Lee himself weighed in with editorials on Japanese imperial ambitions, Mussolini’s warmongering in Ethiopia, and, frequently, the rise of Hitler. Throughout the 1930s, Lee’s tireless warnings about would-be dictators in Monroe County, Louisiana, or Washington were magnified by the regular reports of portentous events in Germany. As early as August 1934, Lee warned his readers not to believe Hitler’s denials of Nazi involvement in the July putsch in Austria. The next year he decried German rearmament, and ran a front-page news item about Nazi persecution of Jews, the forced dissolution of Freemasonry, and ongoing harassment of Protestant and Catholic organizations. By March 1938, he wondered if Germans didn’t look back “upon Kaiser Bill as something of a ‘piker’ as compared with their present-day Hitler.”

  For Lee, events in Germany were not distant, marginal matters for his Monroe County readership. They dramatized the stakes of free government and the fragility of basic forms of civilized life. In a November 1938 editorial, he expressed his horror over reports of Jewish persecution that emerged in the weeks following Kristallnacht, the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that occurred on November 9 and 10, 1938. Just over a month earlier, Lee had celebrated on the front page the grand reopening of the newly refurbished Katz Department Store on the Monroeville square. The Katz family were the only Jews in Monroeville. Middle-class white families like the Lees took pride in their presence in the community. They noted what a good store Meyer Katz ran, how generous he was in supporting local charities. Townspeople loved to tell the story of how Katz sold to Klan members the white sheets they used to make their robes, a tale Harper Lee would fictionalize in Mockingbird. Stories of this sort were common in small towns across the South. The Journal was filled with congratulatory advertisements from Monroeville businesses celebrating Katz’s refurbished store. The Journal’s ad was the largest of them all, dominating the front page. “Your new store is a credit to this progressive community,” it read.

  Throughout the 1930s, as international agreements crumbled, nationalism reemerged, and fascists marched, Lee regularly evoked the tragic path-not-taken at the end of World War I. He memorialized as the paragon of international statesmanship the southern-born Woodrow Wilson, the previous Democratic president. In his wisdom, Lee believed, Wilson had imagined an international order that could bring an end to ancient rivalries and forge relationships among governments of free people based on order, mutual respect, and justice. Efforts by Republicans to disparage Wilson and the US role in World War I, such as the high-profile hearings led by Senator Gerald Nye in the mid-1930s, disgusted Lee. He was convinced that the world’s present troubles could be laid at the feet of the isolationist Republican Congress at the end of World War I, which had foolishly rejected Wilson’s leadership and refused to join the League of Nations.

  With Huey Long dead, no figures in American life elicited more consternation from A. C. Lee than the isolationist spokesmen who fought to keep the United States out of the European conflict. Colonel Charles Lindbergh, the flying hero of the 1920s, was a figure of great admiration and sympathy, Lee wrote in an October 1939 editorial, but he was “a serious disappointment as a statesman.” Lee noted Lindbergh’s recent visit to Berlin, which he suggested had muddled Lindbergh’s ideas about world affairs. Lindbergh’s suggestions, Lee argued, “would play very directly into the hands of Hitler and Stalin, and would insu
re the destruction of England and France.” Henry Ford possessed a “peculiar” mind, Lee believed. Ford auto plants had been turned over to the manufacture of airplanes, yet Ford stipulated that the planes should be used only for home defense, not sold to Britain. Many would rightly question “the complete loyalty of Mr. Ford to the cause of freedom in the world,” Lee contended. He applauded President Roosevelt’s decision to accept Colonel Lindbergh’s resignation as a reserve officer in the US Army in May 1941, as well as the decision not to renew the commission of General Hugh Johnson, another leading isolationist. These were men “who are known to be working at cross purposes with the aims and purposes of [the] government.”

  The isolationists had already left their mark by that point. Between August 1935 and May 1937, Congress passed a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, restricting US involvement in foreign wars. Even after war broke out in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt struggled to win concessions that would allow him to aid Britain and France in the struggle against Germany. Small town lawyer and editor though he was, Lee saw clearly the dangers of international developments and the need for US action years before many of his fellow Americans. Editorializing in September 1937 on Japanese attacks on China, Lee expressed his fear that “this may be the beginning of another world war.” It was a prescient statement, as was his March 1938 editorial, in which he explained to Monroeville’s citizens that war in Europe between free and fascist nations was inevitable. Better for Americans to join the fight in Europe, when it came, “rather than have the armies of the world invade our own country and let it suffer the extreme devastation that is bound to come.”

  Lee celebrated Roosevelt’s resolute support for the peoples of France and Great Britain. He hailed the president’s frank letter to Hitler and Mussolini in April 1939, confronting them on their continued aggressions. “The time is here even now,” Lee wrote, “when the ‘pussy footer’ has no place in this country of ours.” Roosevelt’s September address opening a special session of Congress to deal with the embargo on war materials was, in Lee’s estimation, “one of the outstanding messages of his whole administration.” That fall Roosevelt signed legislation that revised the Neutrality Acts, lifting the arms embargo that Congress had put in place at the height of the isolationist frenzy. Critical to the passage of the bill were southern Democrats. In the House they voted 110 to 8 in favor of revision.