Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Yet it may have been that the process for Nelle of drafting her first novel, and putting down on the page the roiling mix of emotions that she had felt toward her father, had brought her new perspective, independent of Hohoff’s guidance. Nelle had been writing practically her whole life, but mostly short works, some of them satirical, pieces that were funny or that vented about some absurdity. She had never sat down to compose an extended piece of writing in which she was forced to develop and sustain the point of view of a character that didn’t come out of her own experience. Perhaps Lee was able to write the Atticus of Mockingbird only after having written the Atticus of Watchman. Late in Watchman, the narrator explains that Jean Louise “did not know that she worshiped” her father, but now, as she was writing and revising Mockingbird, Lee knew that she herself had. The words she puts in the mouth of Uncle Jack in Watchman are words she might have spoken to her younger self: “[Y]ou confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings.… You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”

  WHATEVER THE ARTISTIC and personal concerns that led to the new portrait of Atticus, the politics of the day would have influenced his transformation. The founders of the Citizens’ Councils had a theory, one that Atticus, Uncle Jack, and Henry Clinton subscribed to in Watchman. The Councils were the responsible element that calmed the racist hotheads. Violence and terrorism of the Klan only fueled the forces of change by inviting federal interference and alienating would-be white moderates. Strong leadership from the Councils would sap the momentum of the Klan while also providing firm direction for weak-willed whites, particularly those business and financial leaders whose eagerness to recruit new industry could cloud their thinking. In the process, the southern white community would speak with a single voice, and act with a unanimity of purpose, repelling the outside forces that threatened the southern way of life.

  That was the idea. But in truth resistance politics unfolded very differently in Alabama in the more than two years it took Harper Lee to write Mockingbird. Indeed, it’s possible if not likely that the new Atticus was, at least in part, a consequence of the amount of time Lee needed to write her new book. For while she was working with Hohoff, and writing and rewriting, the Councils were not moderating the Klan, as they claimed they would. Rather, the Klan was radicalizing the Councils. In 1957, whatever white moderation existed in Alabama came not from within the Councils, as Watchman implied that it would, but in opposition to them.

  An example that Harper Lee was unlikely to have missed was that of Buford Boone, editor of the Tuscaloosa News. In May 1957, by which time two houses had already passed on Watchman and Lee was hard at work on “The Long Goodbye,” Boone was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Amid the hysteria surrounding Autherine Lucy’s enrollment at the University of Alabama the previous year, Boone had written calm, measured editorials calling for law and order and respect for individual rights. Boone was no liberal. He, like the vast majority of white people in Alabama in the 1950s, was an avowed segregationist. Yet the backlash against him was fierce. Threats poured in, and many readers canceled their subscriptions. Windows in his house were broken. The family phone rang so frequently through the night that he had to get an unlisted number. Boone became the bane of the local Citizens’ Council, which tried to start a rival newspaper to compete with the News. A former FBI agent, Boone benefitted from confidential reports from Bureau contacts about various Council members, yet he had to face the public barrage by himself. That’s what he did in January 1957 when he accepted an invitation to speak before a tense, jam-packed Council meeting. During the question-and-answer session, Boone was asked what the university should do the next time a black student tried to enroll. Someone shouted “kill him.” Another said “hang him.” To some in attendance, it was unclear whether they were talking about Boone or the hypothetical black student.

  In the late 1950s, militant segregationists waged war on white moderation. The fight against black activism did not slacken, but Council leaders were confident that economic intimidation could repel those threats. The thing that caught their attention, the thing they worried about at night, was the existence of moderate segregationists like Buford Boone, along with business leaders intent on wooing outside industries. It was not merely that in their pragmatism and profit-mindedness these people might compromise on racial matters, so that little by little segregation would be chipped away. The fear went deeper. White moderates represented an existential threat to the foundational myth of the militant segregationists: the idea that all white southerners, united by the blood of their Scotch-Irish forebears and the tragic history of their fathers and grandfathers, were uniformly devoted to racial segregation. A fixed, invariable, unyielding response was essential for holding the line against the forces of change.

  In his exhaustive history of civil rights politics in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Mills Thornton showed how in Alabama in the period from roughly 1957 to 1961, militant segregationists effectively silenced any dissent in the white community. Moderate, interracial political projects that in the early 1950s had provided encouraging signs of progress in Montgomery and Birmingham were anathema by the decade’s end. In Montgomery in 1953, for example, voters elected a liberal police commissioner and the city voluntarily desegregated its police force, putting it in the vanguard of cities in the Deep South. In Birmingham in 1950, city leaders created an interracial committee in response to Klan bombings that had worked throughout the first half of the decade as a source of goodwill. Yet as the Citizens’ Councils spread and new Klaverns were formed across the state, all such efforts came to an abrupt halt. These were surreal days in Deep South politics. Views once thought extreme became mainstream. Any hint of deviation from segregationist orthodoxy could bring harassment or ostracism. Fairness, moderation, and patience became dirty words.

  The best indicator of the radicalization taking place in the white community was the 1958 Alabama governor’s race. Political experts handicapping the race identified two front-runners, one of whom, Jimmy Faulkner, was a well-known figure in Monroeville and a good friend of the Lee family. Faulkner was the editor and publisher of the Baldwin County Times in Bay Minette who, along with his business partner Bill Stewart, had bought the Monroe Journal from A. C. Lee in 1947. A former state senator, Faulkner had run for governor in 1954 and was now on his second try. His political advertisements soft-pedaled the segregation issue, highlighting his pledge to win more “pocket dollars” for Alabamans. His political style was suggested in the name of the singing group that accompanied him on campaign stops, The Statesmen Quartet.

  The other front-runner was also considered a racial moderate, although it’s easy to forget given his later exploits. George Wallace had served two terms in the state legislature and had been elected circuit judge. He had been at the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia when most of the Alabama delegation had bolted to form the Dixiecrat Party, but Wallace refused to join them. An ardent backer of Jim Folsom, he had built his political career as an economic populist. His reputation statewide was based largely on the Wallace Act of 1951, which enabled cities to issue revenue bonds to attract new industries.

  Front-runner status would matter little, however, because the 1958 race defied all political prognostication. The lesson of that election would be of the power of the militant segregationist vote. The candidate who learned it before any other was Attorney General John Patterson, who despite holding statewide office was relatively young and inexperienced. He had been elected in 1954 after taking over the candidacy of his father Albert, who had won the Democratic nomination only to be assassinated soon afterward by gambling interests that he had cracked down on in his hometown of Phenix City, Alabama. Outrage over the incident thrust young John to victory. In 1958 he campaigned for governor on the motto “Nobody’s for Patterson but the People.” The people, in t
his instance, meant primarily the Citizens’ Councils and the Klan, with whom the Patterson campaign allied in ways both covert and overt. It was Patterson whom the decent-minded Jimmy Faulkner would have had in mind in a speech he gave in Monroeville denouncing “[s]ome of the Johnny-come-latelies who, for personal or political reasons, are stirring up the racial issue unnecessarily.” Faulkner declared that “there is no room under the bright Alabama sun for demagoguery.”

  But in fact there was plenty of room. Patterson shocked everyone by winning the initial round of balloting by nearly thirty-five thousand votes. In the runoff, George Wallace tried to attack Patterson for his ties to the Klan, but the charge fell flat. A north Alabama businessman and Citizens’ Council member captured the majority white sentiment well when he told a Birmingham reporter that while he himself would never join the Klan, the organization did necessary work. “I’d rather have Attorney General Patterson attacking the Communists in the NAACP than running down an organization devoted to maintaining our way of life,” the man said. In the end, Patterson won the runoff easily. Afterward he paid off a conspicuous campaign debt by appointing Citizens’ Council leader Sam Engelhardt to the powerful position of state highway director. He also backed Engelhardt in his successful race for state Democratic Party chairman. George Wallace might have been late in recognizing the power of the militant vote, but it was a lesson he would never forget. After his loss to Patterson he famously vowed that “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

  Patterson’s election fit a pattern of white radicalization across the Deep South. In every southern state at the time politicians raced to the right. In Arkansas, extremist agitation had pressured Governor Orval Faubus into a remarkable metamorphosis. His entire career had been spent as an Ozark populist with little concern about racial matters, yet in the Little Rock crisis of 1957 he spied the opportunity for political immortality as the champion of the bitter-enders. Mississippians elected a clownish character, Ross Barnett, who had lost two previous races for governor. In 1959, he rode radicalization to victory, giving the Citizens’ Councils in the state effective control over the governor’s mansion for the next four years.

  Militant segregationists truly believed that they could stop integration, and history had given them little reason to doubt themselves. Their elders had stood firm against the race-mixers during the first Reconstruction. Or at least that is what they had been taught, and what they believed—that a valiant generation of whites had restored sanity to the postwar South by overthrowing Reconstruction-era Republican governments. This version of the past—history written by the losers of the Civil War—had become the standard narrative, not only for white southerners but for the great majority of the American public. Now the modern-day southern militants intended to do the same during the “second reconstruction.” That was actually the term they liked to use, since it signaled that whatever troubles they would have to endure, they would again emerge victorious. “When the history of the second reconstruction is written,” a resolution passed by the Alabama Citizens’ Council in 1959 read, Montgomery would be recorded as the place where “integration efforts were stopped cold.”

  IN MONROE COUNTY, militant racism showed up in late 1957 in the form of the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen burned crosses in fields throughout the county. Night caravans of men in robes and hoods, the license plates on their cars obscured by adhesive tape, paraded through Monroeville. Klansmen met three times with Monroe Journal publisher Bill Stewart, who by that time had bought out Jimmy Faulkner to become the sole publisher. The future of the Journal could be in danger if the paper opposed the Klan, the men warned. That only infuriated Stewart. In December, the Journal ran an editorial written by Stewart and signed by him along with the paper’s manager, Tom Gardner. “There is no place in Monroe County for a branch of any organization that is steeped in racial violence, whose trademark is fear,” it read. The job of maintaining segregation would be hard enough without “misguided zealots” burdening the county with unwarranted acts that would only “hurt the legal fight of thoughtful people to preserve segregation.”

  The column won first place in the better newspapers contest sponsored by the Alabama Press Association. Yet it did nothing to stop the spread of the Klan in Monroe County. The periodic reports of Klan activity published in the Journal over the course of 1958 and 1959 hint at the pressure and intimidation Klansmen exerted in Monroe. Conspicuous Klan barbecues held at prominent county crossroads became regular occurrences. So, too, did Klan caravans around town. During one of them, Klansmen fired shots into a black-owned business. A dozen robed and hooded Klansmen marched into revival meetings at rural churches. The Klan held a public screening of the film Birth of a Nation at the county coliseum. This was a common Klan recruitment tactic; an advertisement for the event carried the headline “Attention All White People.” The Klan held a district meeting at the coliseum a few months later, which they capped off with a parade around the courthouse square. Robed and hooded Klansmen stationed at each corner of the square directed traffic. Klansmen burned a cross in front of the Hi-Ho, a local restaurant, where a group of liquefied petroleum dealers had had a luncheon training meeting for employees, a few of whom were black. They even put up a sign on the south end of town welcoming motorists to Monroeville. At the bottom was the name of the sponsoring agency, “Realm National Alabama U.S. Klans, KKKK Inc., Monroe County Klaverns 46-202.”

  This kind of thing was not supposed to be happening in Monroeville, not with the respectable members of the Citizens’ Council organizing the white community. But in truth what constituted respectable resistance in Alabama in the late 1950s was hard to say. The decent white folks in the state had become like the proverbial boiling frog. As the Klan raised the temperature of white resistance, they lost sense of just how hot the water had become.

  Consider the editorial page of the Monroe Journal. The anti-Klan editorials were written and signed by the paper’s publisher, Bill Stewart, but regular editorials were written by Riley Kelly, a childhood friend of Nelle Harper’s, who in these years was a full-throated reactionary. Kelly and Harper Lee were the same age, and they shared literary ambitions (Kelly was an aspiring poet). On Harper Lee’s trips home from New York, she and Kelly would visit on the side porch of the Lee home, Kelly filling Lee in on Monroeville scuttlebutt and Lee telling Kelly stories about her novel and the New York editors with whom she worked. “They couldn’t believe the stories and situations in the book were really the way things were—and are—down here,” Kelly recalled years later. “She would have them call Alice or A. C. to verify that something she wrote could have happened that way down here.”

  In their stridency and anger, some of Kelly’s editorials would have fit comfortably in any Klan publication in the state. He praised Orval Faubus for standing up to “the Hitlerite appearance of federal soldiers and bayonets in public schools.” The lynching of Mack Charles Parker in Mississippi in 1959 Kelly blamed, remarkably, on an activist federal bench. “The Southern people have begun to lose their respect for their federal courts and the widespread compulsion is to lose respect for law and order,” he wrote. “Much of the mob action can be blamed directly on the U.S. Supreme Court.” He even reprinted a scurrilous editorial from the far-right newspaper Montgomery Home News, a suspected Klan organ, that urged the “do gooders” pushing civil rights to seek reforms in “the bushes of Darkest Africa” with “their buck dances, their rock and roll jungle rhythm and the good old fashioned native pastime of trading ‘mates’ and carving up on each other.”

  Never in his nearly eighteen years publishing the Journal had A. C. Lee run anything like the repugnant Home News piece. It’s impossible to say for certain how much Nelle herself registered the hardening of racist sentiment in late 1950s Alabama. She had felt alienated from home folks on racial issues for several years. In a letter she wrote from Monroeville to her New York friend Hal Caufield in 1956, she reported that the local Presbyterian minister wanted to date h
er, and that she just wasn’t up for it. “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut,” she wrote. “It will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which God forbid.”

  The best evidence that she noticed the changes in the South was her fiction. In writing Mockingbird, she had no interest anymore in publishing a book full of righteous indignation in which Jean Louise tells off her racist, hypocritical father. By the late 1950s, she could never have published that kind of thing and then come back to Monroeville for Christmas, or summer vacation, or her father’s funeral (given his health troubles, it was bound to happen soon enough), and expect her family and friends to just act like everything was normal, that nothing had changed. Watchman, had it been published then, would have been a slap in the face to all of them.

  The trick for Harper Lee in writing this new childhood novel was how to speak about racism and hypocrisy in a way that she could be heard. And what would have been clear by the late 1950s was that the people who needed to hear her most urgently were not northerners, as she had imagined in Watchman, nor the Klan, whom she knew didn’t read books anyway, nor Negroes, as she would have called them then, who it wouldn’t have occurred to her might be an audience for her stories. The people who needed to hear her most were her own tribe, the otherwise decent white folks like Riley Kelly, or the Presbyterian minister, the people who were boiling in the waters of militant resistance and had no clue that their time was almost up.

  WHATEVER ELSE CAN be said about Atticus Finch, he’s a good father. That is clear in Watchman, but in Mockingbird it’s the preeminent theme of the book. His unconventionality, the fact that his children call him by his first name, and that he reads to them not from children’s books but from the Alabama legislative code or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury only add to his charm. Atticus benefits, too, from the cultural tendency to turn single fathers into martyrs. Whereas single mothers tend to be viewed with suspicion, their single-parenting seen as the product of bad choices, it is often assumed that single fathers would rely on female caregivers, and therefore when they raise children by themselves they take on a role they’ve chosen, and it becomes a heroic choice. Atticus is the ideal parent in that he is both protector and nurturer. He is the expert shot who can kill the rabid dog, but also the loving bedside attendant who keeps watch over his injured son throughout the night.