Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  What Reston didn’t say was that the court’s reasoning in Brown was closely connected to the precarious political position in which it found itself. There was no perfect way to outlaw southern school segregation. The court was going to provoke outrage in most quarters of the South no matter what it said. Earl Warren wanted to communicate the court’s ruling as reasonably and nonconfrontationally as possible. The sociological evidence was used to buttress the decision’s central moral claim that legally mandated segregation damaged the hearts and minds of black schoolchildren. Only eleven pages long, Warren wanted it to be short so that newspapers would reprint it in its entirety. Importantly, the court provided no implementation order, and it wouldn’t until the following year, when, in a seven-paragraph statement, it remanded the cases to the district courts and ordered them to proceed “with all deliberate speed.” The court was signaling its patience. The hope was that reasonable, responsible white leaders in the South would come to the fore and lead the region through a difficult but necessary transition.

  Atticus Finch loathed the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, yet Harper Lee believed him to be the kind of reasonable, responsible southerner that the nation needed if the South was going to adapt to it peacefully. Harper Lee knew that white southerners were not united in how they should respond to it. A good example of the division that soon appeared was the behind-the-scenes struggle that took place among southern senators over the drafting of a statement of southern resistance. The March 1956 “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” more commonly known as the Southern Manifesto, was signed by nineteen senators and eighty-two congressmen and was the blueprint for the discussion between Atticus and Jean Louise.

  With the Brown decision, the court substituted “naked power for established law,” the statement began, before moving quickly to a review of the Constitution’s checks and balances. Brown was the climax of a trend of the court “undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress.” Neither the Constitution nor the Fourteenth Amendment mentioned education, the statement observed, and the same Congress that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment later provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia. The statement recapitulated the long history of the court’s sanctioning of segregated education. No constitutional amendment or act of Congress had challenged this established legal practice. Instead, the court “undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.”

  The Southern Manifesto reads today like the embittered gasp of a dying political class, but at the time it represented the triumph of those who were considered the measured, responsible segregationists of the Senate. One of their more strident colleagues, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, originally drafted an incendiary statement around which he hoped to rally southern senators. At the center of it was the doctrine of interposition, an antiquated political idea dating back to James Madison’s Virginia Resolution of 1798, which held that states had the right to intercede when the federal government exceeded its enumerated powers. Interposition was all the rage among segregationists in 1956, owing mostly to the efforts of James J. Kilpatrick, the arch-segregationist newspaper editor at the Richmond News Leader and a close advisor to Virginia senator Harry Byrd. Thurmond, who had been the 1948 presidential candidate of the “Dixiecrats,” the third-party group that abandoned the Democrats in protest of Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals, worked closely with Byrd in pushing the idea of interposition. Byrd gave a Senate speech in February 1956 advocating the theory as a “perfectly legal means of appeal from the Supreme Court’s order.”

  Not all the southerners in Congress were convinced, particularly Richard Russell of Georgia, dean of the Senate’s southern caucus. In the 1950s, Russell was perhaps the single most respected member of the US Senate. His protégé, Lyndon Johnson, often spoke of how Russell had the learning, temperament, and wisdom to occupy the White House, yet was hamstrung politically by his southern origins. Russell knew in detail the political situations of all his fellow senators, and they would regularly pull him aside to ask for his advice. Yet they also would have known of his unalterable commitment to racial segregation. In a speech opposing the 1957 civil rights bill, Russell spoke of how he “would gladly part with what remains of [this] life if this would guarantee the preservation of a civilization of two races of unmixed blood in the land I love.”

  Russell had a frosty relationship with Thurmond, whom he distrusted as a self-interested grandstander. He gave Thurmond’s draft statement to a committee of southern senators of greater legal expertise and more even temperament than the South Carolinian. They excised the interposition sections and came up with the final language that stuck to the legal and historical aspects of the case. Russell even used the announcement of the manifesto to tweak another opportunistic southerner riding the wave of massive resistance. Herman Talmadge, son of Eugene and a distant cousin of Thurmond, not to mention the author the previous year of the hastily written volume You and Segregation (1955), was challenging Walter George for his Senate seat. Russell had Walter George read the statement into the record as a sign of his smart, tough-minded defense of segregation in opposition to the loudmouth Talmadge.

  Smart, tough-minded, politically astute, suffering the hotheads so that he could temper them: This is the Atticus Finch of Watchman. His discussion of Brown with Jean Louise is interesting as much in what it does not say as in what it does. There is no mention, for example, of the doctrine of interposition, nor of nullification, another obscure constitutional theory popular among segregationists at the time. Atticus Finch was too level-headed to tilt at such windmills.

  IN WATCHMAN, ATTICUS is a pragmatic segregationist, but he’s also a principled southerner. He describes himself as a “Jeffersonian Democrat.” Jefferson believed that citizenship and suffrage should not be privileges granted to every man, Atticus explains to Jean Louise, but only to those responsible enough to use them wisely. His political philosophy is most fully elaborated by his brother Jack, who shares his views completely and whom Jean Louise had visited earlier to try to make sense of what she had observed at the Citizens’ Council meeting. Uncle Jack explains how he and his brother represent a worldview under attack, one that includes “some good things in it.”

  Among those good things is a “mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses.” Uncle Jack articulates the despair of the principled Jeffersonian in mid-twentieth-century America. He decries the loss of the yeoman ideal, one rooted in “[t]he time-honored, common-law concept of property—a man’s interest in and duties to that property.” New ideas about government had emerged that were raising up the “have-nots” while restricting the “haves.” The South was industrializing, an ominous development that saw tenant farmers-turned-industrial workers become the coddled, unthinking masses manipulated by a federal government consolidating its power. The government “lends them money to build their houses,” Uncle Jack observes to Jean Louise, “it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks’ support if they lose their jobs.” The fear was of a federal government become “monstrous,” one that would destroy the liberty and individual initiative that had defined America. “The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to.”

  Harper Lee could have drawn this portrait of Jeffersonianism from a variety of sources, but the most obvious and direct was her own father. Invoking the Jeffersonian ideal in his editorials, A. C. Lee had encouraged tenant farmers in Monroe County to buy their own land as soon as they could, which would be good for them economically and good for the community. “[T]he happiest people are those who own their own homes and farms, and who are largely independent,” he wrote. “[T]he contented man or woman is necessarily the most valuable citizen to the community.… They are the ones who are free t
o think carefully, and to pursue their duties as citizens and as members of society fearlessly.” In July 1939 he warned about the “rapidly growing idea among our people that the government owes them a living,” an idea detrimental to “the American spirit of independence and self-reliance.” And in an August 1946 editorial, “What Is Liberalism Today?,” the one written in response to the liberal friends and perspectives that his daughter Nelle seemed to be embracing in Tuscaloosa, he reminded readers that liberalism, originally understood, meant “the rights of all our people to pursue their own ways and live their own lives as free from interference from governmental supervision,” an idea he attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “the Great Democrat.”

  A. C. Lee likely took inspiration from the Southern Agrarians, the collection of scholars and poets affiliated with Vanderbilt University who in 1930 published the collection of essays I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. That book, though put out by a group of intellectuals representing a diverse set of motivations, opinions, and ideas, was an attempt to combine an artistic aesthetic with an economic strategy. The authors criticized the sources of modernity and industrialization that they believed were undermining the conditions that made true art possible. Yet agrarianism was wrapped in a romantic defense of an idealized southern tradition. The failure to grapple with the legacies of slavery and segregation would lead a number of the original contributors to distance themselves from the initial project. One who would not was Donald Davidson, the poet, essayist, and longtime faculty member at Vanderbilt, who provided the most highbrow, real-world equivalent of the political views of Atticus and Uncle Jack.

  Davidson’s signature collection of essays, The Attack on Leviathan (1938), encompasses most aspects of the conservative worldview that Harper Lee sketches in Watchman. The ideas of Uncle Jack are all there: the learned references, the esteem for the Founding Fathers, the pointed comments on New Deal policies. “The greatest present threat to the Federal Union,” Davidson wrote, “comes… from the advocacy and the more than incipient growth of a Leviathan State.” No such state could ever “abolish sectionalism,” he warned, “unless like Tamerlane it proposes to rule from a pyramid of skulls.” Davidson revered Jefferson, of course, and took umbrage with southern liberals who tried to appropriate him for their cause. He mocked Virginius Dabney’s history of southern liberalism in which “Jefferson becomes the spiritual grandfather of the swashbuckling idealists who want the government to guarantee everything from bank deposits to tonsillectomy for the mountain whites.” As Davidson put it, “Above all things Jefferson feared the Leviathan state and denounced the tendencies toward ‘consolidation’ that Hamilton and Marshall were busily forwarding.”

  Davidson was in the midst of reinterpreting Agrarianism to meet the needs of a burgeoning mid-century conservative intellectual movement. One of the key figures in that movement, Russell Kirk, called The Attack on Leviathan “the most important neglected book of this century.” Davidson was an esteemed southern contributor to the National Review, the magazine established in 1955 by William F. Buckley to serve as the organ of the conservative movement. An essay he published there gives a sense of how southern Jeffersonians were merging with a nascent national conservatism. As the historian George Nash has observed, in the 1950s National Review was “one of the very few journals receptive to the viewpoint of conservative white Southerners.” In his essay, Davidson decried the assault on southern tradition represented by Brown. It was an attack on the southern social order, one founded on the “sense of kinship and the importance of family,” a condition reinforced by the fact that “the white population is largely descended from the original colonial stock” (a point that Uncle Jack stresses to Jean Louise as key to understanding the heated response of the Citizens’ Council movement). With Brown, the court had overstepped its bounds and plunged the nation into constitutional chaos. “[O]nce more,” Davidson wrote, “the Negro question is most confusedly mixed up with large and general constitutional questions far more important to the nation than the special matter of how the reasonable aspirations of the Negro minority or any other racial minority are to be satisfied.”

  This racially condescending tone—the “special matter” of the Negroes—was a staple of conservative political rhetoric in that era. It came from both North and South, and eased the regional integration of conservative thought that would be essential to a national mobilization of the right. A National Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail” that appeared during the debate over civil rights legislation in 1957 reflected a patronizing, racist view that black southerners were not yet ready for full integration into white southern society: “The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Atticus Finch expresses a very similar view in Watchman.

  Davidson longed for a cross-regional effort to “revive the old American conviction that a government which is not firmly kept in the position of a servant of society will inevitably become a tyrant over society.” His hope, and the hope of Buckley and other early leaders of conservative revival, was that the true Jeffersonians from below the Mason-Dixon line could join with the libertarians, the cultural traditionalists, and the fervent Cold Warriors of the North to form a new alliance in American politics. This merging would require that white southerners abandon their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party. Davidson himself had already done that. He was an enthusiastic backer of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat campaign in 1948.

  Harper Lee gives no indication of how Atticus might have voted in that historic election, but we do see him break ranks with the majority of his fellow white southerners in voting for the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Whether this was in 1952, when a fellow Alabaman, US senator John Sparkman, was the vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket, or in 1956, or both, is unclear. Eisenhower won significant southern support in each election, the first time in the twentieth century that a Republican candidate had really competed in the South. Atticus’s vote for the GOP was rooted in his individualist, small-government political philosophy. Jean Louise is clueless as to how Atticus could call himself a Jeffersonian Democrat and vote for a Republican. It’s intended as another sign of her callowness in comparison to the learned, principled politics of her father.

  NELLE HARPER MAY or may not have read Donald Davidson, but there is no doubt that she read and was deeply influenced by the most prominent southern writer of the day, William Faulkner. Awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, in the 1950s Faulkner was without equal as the internationally recognized authority on the racial ferment in his corner of the world. Already by the late 1940s, he was out in front of most of his fellow white southerners in accepting the inevitability of Jim Crow’s demise. He dramatized this view in the lawyer figure Gavin Stevens in his novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), a character and a book that Harper Lee borrowed from in her own fiction. But it also came through clearly in a number of high-profile public statements. In 1951, for example, he protested the conviction and sentencing to death of Willie McGee, a black man accused of raping a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi. McGee’s case approximated the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s as an international cause célèbre, and Faulkner’s comments provoked outrage among his fellow white Mississippians. The district attorney in the McGee case said Faulkner was either a fool or had “aligned himself with the Communists.”

  In the year and a half following the Brown decision, Faulkner became an important voice of white southern moderation. To a Memphis reporter, he defended desegregation as a commonsense proposal; opposing it was “like living in Alaska and saying you don’t like snow.” He was in Rome on a goodwill tour sponsored by the American government when the press called for his reaction to the murder of Emmett Till.
“If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color,” he declared, “we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” In the fall of 1955 he participated in a panel discussion at the Southern Historical Association, where he issued perhaps his most indelible quote about the southern racial crisis: “We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, ‘Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?’”

  With such statements, Faulkner cultivated what a biographer would call “the role of artist as savant, a capability he so much admired—indeed, even idolized—in several French writers.” But the public pronouncements obscured his private ambivalence. His fame and the accompanying pressures of the public spotlight also exacerbated personal crises, including his alcoholism, poor health, and an affair with a woman less than half his age. In early 1956, as he followed the protests in Tuscaloosa surrounding Autherine Lucy’s admission to the University of Alabama, Faulkner became convinced that someone was going to shoot Lucy, and that chaos would ensue. Both sides were digging in and something had to give. Faulkner felt compelled to adjust his public stance on racial matters. He would do so in ways both serious and absurd.