Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  GIVEN THE DESPONDENCY evident on his editorial page, perhaps the brightest news for A. C. Lee in the fall of 1945 was the fact that his youngest daughter Nelle seemed to be finally hitting her stride in college. The second half of her freshman year at Huntingdon Nelle had spent in practical seclusion. The transition to the University of Alabama had been just what she needed. She was never much of a joiner, so it was a measure of her eagerness to make a new start that Nelle went out for sorority rush.

  The Greek scene in Tuscaloosa was legendary, even then. The Tri Delts’ rush party adopted a wedding theme, as did the ADPi’s, where guests were seated by ushers as they entered and wedding cake was served afterward. The Delta Zetas had an Arabian nights motif where guests rubbed a magic lamp and a genie appeared with gifts. The Chi O’s, where Nelle eventually pledged, had a plantation party. Mint juleps were served and a “Negro quartet furnished music Southern style.” A southern colonel and his wife met rushees at the door and showered them with hospitality “à la Confederate era.”

  More exciting to Nelle, however, were the campus publications. Her first semester in Tuscaloosa she started working at Rammer Jammer, the monthly student humor magazine. By December she was considered “a valuable regular on the staff.” The next year, she would serve as editor-in-chief, leading a staff of sixteen. She also became a contributor to the Crimson-White, the student newspaper. During the summer session of 1946, in between her sophomore and junior years when Nelle stayed in Tuscaloosa to take classes, she had a weekly column aptly titled “Caustic Comment.” It consisted of mordant, humorous portraits of campus scenes, such as Nelle suffering through the byzantine registration process in the law school, a friend’s frustrated attempt to find an unsanitized copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the library, and the pathetic response of campus police to an attempted burglary at a sorority house.

  In her June 28 column, Nelle was unusually upbeat. There was a “striking difference,” she wrote, between university students in 1946 and those five years earlier. Undergrads used to be interested only in Greek life, debating the merits of Glenn Miller versus Tommy Dorsey, or making sure their clothes were exactly the same as everyone else’s. Now, however, the average student “doesn’t give a damn what kind of pants he wears to a formal.” Students all of a sudden cared about “things that really count.” As an example she mentioned the “hell-for-leather” political campaigning on campus during the recent gubernatorial election, and new groups organizing for the upcoming US Senate race. “Young people are at last waking up to the need for good government and are doing something about it,” she wrote.

  It was true. Tuscaloosa had changed. World War II veterans newly mustered out of the service flooded the campus. Student enrollment that year had been 6,000, a university record. The next year it would increase to 8,500 students, over half of whom were freshmen. The campus was so crowded that Pug’s, the diner on University Avenue that was the preferred student hangout, ran ads in the Crimson-White asking students to share booths so that more people could be served. Floated by the GI Bill, some of the veterans on campus treated college like an extended R&R. But a significant number were older, had traveled the world, had fought to save democracy, and were now interested to see how it was operating back home in Alabama. They brought a seriousness and relative sophistication to a campus that was often characterized as the country club of the South.

  Nelle, second from left, was designated a “campus personality” in the 1948 yearbook at the University of Alabama. (The University of Alabama Libraries Special Collections)

  The new tenor on campus was noticeable in at least two ways. First was the popularity among students of “Big” Jim Folsom and his whirlwind campaign for governor in the spring of 1946. Folsom came by his nickname honestly. Six feet, eight inches tall, only thirty-seven years old, a strapping, raw-boned country boy from northern Alabama, Folsom advocated opening up the franchise and rewriting the state constitution in order to break the power of the Black Belt. Knowing how rural people lacked for entertainment, Folsom traveled with a “hillbilly band,” the Strawberry Pickers, top-notch musicians who occasionally counted Hank Williams among their members, his schedule permitting. Folsom liked to address his audiences holding a corn-shuck mop. “I’m going to take that mop and scour out the kitchen and open up the windows and let [in] a green breeze out of the north…,” he would tell the crowd, “you’ll have the freshest, sweetest smell that you’ve seen in that Old Alabama capitol since it was built.” Some of the veterans and other college students might have rolled their eyes at the bumpkinism. Yet Folsom’s youth and energy contrasted sharply with his opponents, the same Big Mule stooges and party gatekeepers who acted like state politics was their own private game.

  A second indicator was the slate of liberal speakers who appeared on campus in the spring of 1946, toward the end of Nelle Lee’s first year in Tuscaloosa. Her conservative father would have been suspicious of the lineup, to be sure. Whether Nelle herself attended any of the lectures is not known, but the events fed the political ferment on campus that she found so invigorating.

  In May, Horace M. Kallen, an influential philosopher of cultural pluralism and dean of the graduate school at the New School for Social Research in New York, spoke to the Alabama student forum. Asked why the South was not more of a leader in education, Kallen answered bluntly: “[T]he disintegration of the economic system following the Civil War and oppression of the Negro are the causes. A society is no stronger than its weakest element.” The same group had heard earlier that spring from Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School, the racially integrated training ground for a generation of labor and civil rights activists in the South, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. “The CIO has done more to solve the problem of race in the South than all the other educational forces put together,” Horton told the students. He pointed to Georgia governor Ellis Arnall, the thirty-five-year-old reform candidate who had bested Eugene Talmadge in the Georgia governor’s race, as proof that the “reactionary stronghold on the South could be broken.”

  Arnall himself spoke on campus as well. A Crimson-White article announcing the visit noted Arnall’s opposition to what the governor called “the moth-eaten doctrine of the states’ rights.” In office, he had successfully pushed a variety of progressive reforms, including repeal of the poll tax. Three weeks after Arnall’s appearance, that other prominent southern liberal who had provoked A. C. Lee’s ire in regard to the poll tax, Claude Pepper, a university alumnus, addressed students at the summer convocation.

  At the Crimson-White, Nelle befriended a tight-knit group of smart, curious nonconformists who all, like her, loved to write. She memorialized each of the staffers by name in an ebullient final column in August. The editor Bill Mayes was a “lanky, Klan-hating six-footer from somewhere in Mississippi.” A veteran of the Pacific War, Mayes had led a campaign that summer against Klansmen who had incorporated several klaverns in and near Birmingham with designs on statewide expansion. The real problem, Mayes believed, was not the Klansmen themselves, though they were repugnant, but the fact that “the authorities—that is, the lawmakers—in this state do not wish the activities of the Klan discontinued.” An anonymous letter was sent to the Crimson-White office the next week. “It would be advisable for you to stop your yankee-inspired propaganda against the Klan,” it warned. Mayes reiterated his stand for decency and law enforcement, and mocked the letter writer for being too cowardly to sign his name.

  The Crimson-White published its last issue of the summer term on August 16. Presumably Nelle Lee went home to Monroeville for a week or two before fall semester began. If so, she and her father might have had some heated political conversation around the dinner table. It’s impossible to say for sure, yet, given his usual editorial themes, it was odd that in his August 22 editorial A. C. Lee chose to write about the confusion among contemporary young people about the origins and meaning of liberalism.

  Everyone liked the term liberalism, A.
C. wrote, and liked to think of themselves as liberal. But young people didn’t realize that liberalism originally referred to the “broad recognition of the rights of all our people to pursue their own ways and to live their own lives as free from interference from governmental supervision.” Yet today, “the word has been appropriated by those who would regiment the American people, bestow special favors upon certain groups and classes, and extend governmental regulation over all the activities of life.” Lee implored America’s youth to “re-dedicate themselves to the task of studying anew the principles upon which our government was founded.”

  While the dispute that might have spurred A. C. Lee to write the column can only be imagined, two months later the political differences between father and daughter were made plain in the pages of the respective publications they edited. At issue was the Boswell Amendment, the Alabama legislature’s response to the Supreme Court’s historic 1944 decision outlawing the white primary. Alabama’s conservatives were on the defensive. In Georgia, Ellis Arnall had not only abolished the poll tax but also lowered the voting age to eighteen. In Alabama, Governor Folsom was planning on mirroring Arnall’s program. Conservatives warned that these measures could threaten white supremacy. In the years immediately following World War II, however, such fear-mongering didn’t have the same traction that it had had historically, and that it would regain in the massive resistance era of the 1950s and 1960s. Without the benefit of the white primary, and given the rising sentiment against the poll tax, the prospect of large numbers of liberal-leaning voters, white and black, registering to vote seemed increasingly likely. Not only that, but blacks had already sued a county board of registrars in Alabama and won relief in federal court. The case came out of the Black Belt county of Macon, home to the Tuskegee Institute and an African American veterans’ hospital. Given these developments, the existing property and literacy requirements under current law seemed to Jim Crow’s defenders like weak measures indeed. Any person who owned an automobile was exempt from the $300 property requirement, and as for literacy, as Gessner McCorvey, the chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party, put it, “A smart parrot could be taught to recite a section of our Constitution.” The key should be whether an applicant understood the Constitution, he believed.

  This was the thinking behind an amendment proposed by the south Alabama legislator Elmo C. “Bud” Boswell. Under the measure, county boards of registrars would be empowered to test the comprehension of an applicant and, if necessary, “prevent from registering those elements in our community which have not yet fitted themselves for self government.” The legislature passed the measure and scheduled a ratification vote for the fall of 1946. The Boswell Amendment split the Alabama Democratic Party down the middle. Almost all of the major daily newspapers in the state, along with Governor-elect Folsom and the state’s two senators, opposed it. Supporting the amendment were current governor Chauncey Sparks, former governor Frank Dixon, Democratic chairman McCorvey, and many legislators.

  A. C. Lee was among the supporters. He made his case in four ponderous editorials in consecutive weeks in October (the last one began: “It may be that our readers are growing tired of reading about the Boswell Amendment…”). The liberals were in favor of universal suffrage; conservatives were opposed to it, but for good reasons, Lee argued. The simple question was “[w]ill our people, as a whole, fare better under the leadership of an intelligent electorate?” The amendment would help protect against political bosses manipulating the votes of the ill-informed, uninterested masses, a widespread problem under current voting rules, according to Lee (his more devoted readers might have recognized this as a veiled jab at Short Millsap). Lee did take a few liberties in laying out his position. For example, he repeatedly implied that opponents of the measure were for complete universal suffrage, opposed even to safeguards against criminals voting, which was not the case. His tone throughout was unapologetically elitist. Yet to a notable degree, he kept the discussion on the high plane of theory and principle: “We believe very definitely in the idea that our people will be happiest under a system of rules and regulations dictated by an electorate that prizes the privileges of citizenship, and who have proven themselves worthy.”

  Political sentiment at the Rammer Jammer ran in the opposite direction. The unsigned introductory column to the October issue included a wry, oblique note: “If the Boswell amendment goes through, the campus liberals are going to petition the legislature to change the state motto from ‘We Dare Defend Our Rights’ to ‘Dare We Defend Our Rights?’” But there was nothing indirect about the parody Nelle Lee published under her own name, “Now Is the Time for All Good Men: A One-Act Play.” A precocious piece of political satire for a twenty-year-old college student, it showed not only Nelle’s sharp wit and talent for setting a scene, but also her sophisticated understanding of important divisions in southern politics, and her early desire to comment on them in a fictional form.

  Scene I opens with the Honorable Jacob F. B. MacGillacuddy, chairman of the Citizens’ Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague, sounding forth in the manner of the bumptious Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a popular radio character at the time on the Fred Allen Show. MacGillacuddy, known as J.F.B. to his “multitude of acquaintances and one friend,” rails against the “goddam yankees” who came to tell folks how to vote, how to run their businesses, and “even influencing our colored friends to turn against their benefactors.” A small group of “‘Communists from the U. of A.” stands nearby, holding signs reading “Wallace for President—of the University” (a reference to Henry, the liberal former vice-president and 1948 Progressive Party presidential candidate; not George, the future governor of Alabama) singing Woody Guthrie lyrics to the tune of the socialist anthem “The Red Flag.” J.F.B. has worked up a measure that perfectly resembles the Boswell Amendment: a requirement that every “gonna-be voter” would have to interpret passages of “the Yewnited States Constitution.” Scene II shows J.F.B. before his local registrar, trying to sign up to vote so as to beat back a liquor referendum. As he interprets the required passage, the local political boss walks behind him and gives a nod to the registrar, who tells him his interpretation is not to her satisfaction. J.F.B. fumes that he wrote the goddam law. He vows to take the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, the site of Scene III. “Of all the cheek!” the justices say upon hearing J.F.B.’s complaint—and this was the best gag in the piece—“How can the state of Alabama be so presumptuous as to require an ordinary voter to interpret the Constitution when we can’t even interpret it ourselves?” The justices beg off on deciding the matter, noting that their calendar is full until 1983. The play closes with J.F.B. prattling on in the same manner as in Scene I, only this time he heads the Citizens’ Committee to Restore Civil Liberties. The protestors wear signs labeled “reactionaries.” J.F.B. tries to rally the crowd to protest their disfranchisement.

  The broader debate over the amendment framed the disagreement between A. C. and Nelle Lee. It was neatly summarized in a staged face-off in the pages of the Alabama Lawyer, the official publication of the Alabama bar. Richard T. Rives, a Montgomery attorney who represented the boards of registrars in Montgomery and Macon County, and who would eventually serve on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where in the 1950s he joined in historic decisions that desegregated public transportation and public education in Alabama, argued against the amendment. Rives was no proponent of black voting, but he objected to the arbitrary power given to registrars. Not only could it be abused by “an unscrupulous political boss or machine,” as Nelle suggested in her play, but it also amounted to legislative overreach that could invite federal interference in Alabama voting law, also a possibility Nelle evoked in the scene before the Supreme Court.

  Arguing in favor was Horace Wilkinson, a Birmingham judge and longtime Alabama politico. His article was breathtaking in its unabashed appeal to white supremacy; Nelle’s caricature of the Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague seems tame by comparison. “I ear
nestly favor a law that will make it impossible for a Negro to qualify [to vote],” Wilkinson wrote. Given that that was unlikely, the Boswell Amendment was for him the next best thing. “[N]o Negro is good enough,” Wilkinson claimed, “and no Negro will ever be good enough to participate in making the laws under which the white people in Alabama have to live.” The amendment could be used to keep some whites from the polls, he admitted, but that was “a small price to pay… to keep this inferior, unreliable, irresponsible, easily corrupted race from destroying the highest civilization known to man.”

  Such beliefs were common among the amendment’s conservative supporters. J. Miller Bonner, a prominent Black Belt planter, told the Montgomery Civitan Club that if the Boswell Amendment failed to pass, whites would have only three choices: “leave their homes, submit to Negro domination, or engage in inter-racial conflict resulting in extermination of one or the other races.” Outgoing governor Sparks campaigned for the amendment around the state, telling crowds that “around 2,000” blacks had shown up on registration day in Macon County, a wildly exaggerated number. Pro-Boswell forces ran newspaper ads evoking the specter of county courthouses ringed by throngs of Negroes demanding registration.