Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Wallace’s chief opponent was his former mentor, Jim Folsom, who was vying for a third term. Back in 1946, one of Folsom’s campaign stops at the University of Alabama had contributed to the liberal atmosphere on campus that young Nelle had found so invigorating. His first term was taken up with progressive efforts on behalf of small farmers and working people. Reelected in 1954, he planned to do battle once again with the Black Belt–Big Mule coalition. Yet his racially moderate administration foundered on the shoals of massive resistance, charges of cronyism and corruption, and his own monumental drinking problem. At parties at the mansion, Folsom would quietly slip out only to have aides find him later under the trees on the front lawn, his massive frame spread-eagled on the grass, an empty bottle beside him. “That second term, he literally bombed himself to pieces with the bottle,” a political ally recalled.

  Despite his troubles, Folsom remained a formidable figure. His down-home rallies still drew large crowds throughout north Alabama, the campaign band serenading the crowd with the Bill Monroe tune that served as Folsom’s unofficial theme song, “Y’all Come.” The race turned on an incident that would go down in Alabama lore. The Folsom campaign had bought statewide television time to broadcast a tribute film the night before the primary election. Folsom himself only needed to make a brief live appearance introducing the program. But when the Folsom team showed up at the studio, they realized that the studio technicians did not have the actual film. Folsom, who had been drinking heavily all day, decided to go on live with his family and ad-lib. It was a disaster. Introducing his children, he seemed to forget their names. “Now, which one are you?” he asked one. A technician quickly put on a different film, which appeared upside down. The fallout was clear the next day. Folsom dropped to third place, narrowly missing the runoff election to the other racial moderate in the race, state representative Ryan DeGraffenried. Wallace defeated DeGraffenried to become the Democratic nominee, and, in the fall, easily won the general election.

  It’s doubtful that these dramatics were followed closely in the Lee home that spring. In April, just a few months after meeting Peck on his visit to Monroeville, A. C. Lee suffered a second heart attack. His first one had drawn Nelle home from New York, and initiated a pattern of her coming home more often, and for longer stretches. But this one he would not survive. He died early on the morning of Palm Sunday, April 15, 1962. He was laid to rest the next day in the Pineville cemetery, next to the Methodist church that he had helped build, and that he had served faithfully for so many years. The inspiration for Atticus Finch had passed, just as a new vision was being born.

  THE FILMING COMPLETED, Robert Mulligan worked up a series of rough cuts of the film. Gregory Peck watched them and sent comments to his agent, and later, a studio executive. Peck wasn’t happy, and neither were the studio executives, at what he called Mulligan’s “anti-heroic concept.” Atticus came off as “wishy-washy” and a “supporting character,” Peck wrote. He felt that Mulligan was “bending over backwards to avoid having Atticus do anything heroic.” Mulligan continued to recut the film in ways that reflected the preferences of Peck.

  Another artistic difference pitted Horton Foote on one side and Peck, Pakula, and Mulligan on the other, and it, too, shaped the image of Atticus that appeared onscreen. It involved a revision of Atticus’s summation to the jury that the three had asked Foote to write late in the filmmaking. In the original version that Foote had written, the summation followed closely the language in the book while also incorporating several of Atticus’s comments to his children in other parts of the novel. What Pakula, Mulligan, and Peck objected to in Foote’s version is unclear. Yet the revised language that Foote wrote dispensed with Atticus’s contemptuous comments about a generalized “low-grade white man,” and focused instead on two very specific low-grade white people, Bob and Mayella Ewell, and their “cynical confidence” that the jury would conspire in their “evil assumption” about Negroes. Foote wrote to Pakula and Mulligan that he had “worried considerably” over the revisions. He explained why in a letter that attempted to contextualize Atticus’s summation historically.

  In studying the material I think it should perhaps be kept in mind that particularly at this period a Southerner like Atticus is not an unprejudiced man speaking to a group of prejudiced ones. He is surely a man that has had to fight the prejudice in himself, so in a measure one might say he is addressing the speech to a part of himself as well as to the jurors. In other words, he is not a “noble man” explaining the obvious facts to a group of ignorant, unenlightened dirt farmers, but a man who has shared their prejudices, struggled with them, and who is determined to be free of them at all costs. And, too, he knows the depth of the complexity of the prejudice that he is trying to get them to renounce in themselves.

  Perhaps Foote was thinking of his own experience as a child growing up in the southeast Texas town of Wharton. His grandfather had held the young Foote in his arms, his grandmother, parents, aunts, and uncles standing beside them on the wide front gallery of their home on Richmond Road, watching the Klan march by, torches in hand, on the way to the Courthouse Square. Maybe he recalled the story of Henry Schulze, who lived with his senile mother in Wharton and was rumored to be sleeping with the black woman he had hired to look after her. The Klan kidnapped Schulze, whipped him, cut off his hair, tarred and feathered him, and then dumped him naked on a corner in front of the courthouse. Schulze lived as the town outcast the rest of his life, the Boo Radley of Wharton, and his sad tale was told over and over, long after the Klan died off. In imagining a man like Atticus fighting “the prejudice in himself,” surely Foote had in mind one particular event, which he related in his memoir. As a five-year-old boy poking around in a kitchen cabinet while his mother fixed supper, he stumbled upon a white robe, and, asking his mother what it was, watched her, suddenly flustered, explain that it was his Daddy’s Ku Klux Klan robe, that lots of folks had gone to the meetings, they’d been pressured to do so. But his Daddy and his Papa had been disgusted by what they had heard there and weren’t going to them anymore, or at least his Mama hoped they weren’t.

  Screenwriter Horton Foote, Harper Lee, and director Robert Mulligan at a preview of To Kill a Mockingbird. (1962 Pakula-Mulligan Productions, Inc., and Brentwood Productions, Inc./DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Horton Foote Papers)

  In the end, Foote’s concerns fell by the wayside. We watch Atticus’s entire speech from the perspective of the jurors, as though we are sitting in the jury box ourselves. In the background are the Ewells and their supporters, as well as the prosecutor, his leg slung over the arm of his chair, chewing on a pencil, evoking a casual confidence that the jury would agree with him. In his script notes on the summation scene, Peck wrote of the jury, “Fighting not to convince them of evidence but to break down their prejudice.” Peck’s Atticus never struggles with prejudice. He has none. The script called for reaction shots of the jurors at the beginning of Atticus’s speech and near the end, before he begins the soaring conclusion about the courts being the country’s great levelers. But the final version had no close-up shots of the poor white men on the jury. The only two cutaways were to the African Americans in the courtroom, one to Tom Robinson, to remind the audience of the object of Atticus’s heroism, and the other to the colored balcony, where, when Atticus speaks of all men being created equal, a few members look around in astonishment, not believing what they had just heard that white man say.

  For Peck, as well as for Mulligan and Pakula, the noble Atticus served the needs of the film. It was necessary to sharpen the conflict during the summation, the dramatic climax of the court scene. Good and evil were embodied and set against one another, Atticus versus the Ewells.

  Yet so many of the criticisms that would be lobbed at the movie’s Atticus over the years were already expressed in Foote’s letter. Atticus was too much the “noble man,” a historical anachronism, an untethered ideal. His goodness was set too starkly against the bigotry of poo
r whites, the “ignorant, unenlightened dirt farmers.” Foote had foreseen it all before the scene was ever filmed. Harper Lee would have seen it, too, how the character that she had first conceived back in 1957 in the midst of her own ambivalence—her outrage over militant resistance but also her resentment of northern liberal condescension—and that she had painstakingly revised into a calculated portrait of a principled “Black-Belt Bourbon,” as she would describe Atticus of Mockingbird decades later to a friend, had become something else altogether. Only the trappings remained: the tortoiseshell glasses, the three-piece suit, the watch fob, the southern accent, although even that was pretty erratic in Peck’s performance. What emerged was the handsome, dignified, blandly white face of mid-twentieth-century American liberalism.

  MAYBE THAT WAS why Harper Lee was so nervous. She hated the publicity events for the film. She was shy by nature, uncomfortable with her appearance, always feeling that she needed to lose a few pounds, a sentiment never discouraged by her birdlike older sister Alice. Harper Lee adored the movie, and heaped lavish, sincere praise on Foote, the filmmakers, and the cast at every opportunity. But the film quickly took on a life of its own. What could she say about it, and about herself, her family, and her hometown, that had provided the inspiration for all of it? “It is and it isn’t autobiographical,” she told a reporter in April 1962, which was precisely true.

  Her friends didn’t understand her trepidation. Though she dreaded the interviews, with the press she was wry, charming, and smart. She more than held her own at the dinner parties, which sometimes included fourteen people around the table—editors, press agents, producers, authors, actors, and actresses. They all loved her. “Nelle really does a splendid job, but she doesn’t know it!” Annie Laurie Williams wrote to Alice. So many people had told Williams how wonderful Nelle had been before audiences, large and small. “[B]ut when she gets through, she always thinks she didn’t do so well and gets real surprised when you tell her how good she is.”

  A photograph from these days captures both the thrill and the dread. It was taken in Washington in November 1962, at a pre-release screening of Mockingbird for members of Congress and the White House staff. Pakula would remember it as one of the worst nights of his life. The studio had sent him the wrong print of the film; images that should have appeared in sharp black and white came out in dull shades of gray. In the photo, Lee, dressed in a black satin smock and a modest gold necklace, no earrings, clutches her purse. She is on the far left, the only woman standing next to four men: the Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., President Kennedy’s in-house intellectual and the administration’s singular, unabashed liberal; Philip Gerard, publicity director for Universal Pictures; Pakula; and George Stevens Jr., head of the film and television division of the US Information Agency. Schlesinger, wearing his signature bow tie, is in mid-witticism, a cigar and near-empty highball glass in his left hand. Gerard, standing slightly behind Schlesinger, cranes his neck forward, trying to gauge Lee’s reaction. Pakula, fresh-faced, boyish, looks straight into the camera. Stevens, who could easily have passed as a Kennedy and who, along with Gregory Peck, would help establish and become the founding director of the American Film Institute, looks straight at Lee. She’s smiling, eyebrows raised, eyes cut to the camera, turning her face only enough to acknowledge that she’s being photographed, documented, scrutinized. One imagines her turning back to the men in front of her, dutifully holding up her end of the conversation, keeping things light and clever, or trying to, having no idea how she was actually coming across, enduring it all gamely, if warily, still not quite sure how it had all come to pass so quickly.

  Harper Lee at a preview of To Kill a Mockingbird in Washington, DC, November 1962. From left to right: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., special assistant to President John F. Kennedy; Philip Gerard, publicity director for Universal Pictures; producer Alan Pakula; and George Stevens Jr., head of the film and television division of the United States Information Agency. (Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York)

  The success of the film had surpassed what anyone could have imagined back when the relatively unknown Pakula had bought the film rights in January 1961. Back then, he had yet to find financing. Lee had yet to win the Pulitzer. Gregory Peck had yet to sign on to play Atticus. In pre-production, Mulligan talked to reporters about the importance of the film not jumping on the “segregation-integration soap box,” about it not making speeches. But now that they had the thing in the can, and had Gregory Peck on film in the performance of his career, one that seemed to speak so directly to vital issues in the nation and the world, speeches seemed entirely appropriate. “There existed in the 1930’s, and before that, and certainly today,” Mulligan lectured a reporter in January 1963 on one of the central lessons of the film, “men of real conscience who are real southerners who are working and are committed to continue working, in their own quiet ways, to establish the kind of justice toward the Negro that must exist if this nation is to fully realize its position as a free and democratic country.”

  TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD premiered in Los Angeles on Christmas Day 1962, a mere six years to the day after Joy and Michael Brown’s life-changing gift to Harper Lee. The idea was to have it out in time for award season in 1963. It opened nationally on Valentine’s Day at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. In between those dates, on January 14, newly elected governor George Wallace took office in Montgomery with a fervid inaugural speech that drew national news coverage. Thus did George Wallace and Atticus Finch, the id and the superego of the descendants of the Confederacy, enter together the mainstream of American political and cultural life.

  Shortly before his inauguration, Wallace met with a group of state senators one evening. “I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state,” he told them, “and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” The Klansman Asa Carter would help him do it. He wrote Wallace’s inaugural speech, just as he had his campaign speeches, despite efforts of more temperate members of the staff to keep Carter at arm’s length now that Wallace was in the governor’s mansion. The speech is most often remembered today for its infamous pledge: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say… segregation today… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever.” It’s tempting to think of it as one of the last gasps of the militant segregationists. After all, Congress would outlaw legalized segregation the very next year—so much for Wallace’s forever. But the civil rights bill, far from spelling Wallace’s doom, became evidence to Wallace and his supporters of how black civil rights leaders were calling the shots in Washington, of how weak-willed liberals had given things over to the radicals and the revolutionaries. Over the course of the 1960s, the size, zeal, and venom of Wallace’s rallies would only grow.

  In Asa Carter, Wallace had found not just any old silver-tongued race-baiter. He was Wallace’s grand strategist of white nationalism, the man who would help him take his political message far beyond the Tennessee Valley. At his inaugural, Wallace, his traditional morning attire covered by his overcoat, which he kept on due to the frosty weather, called on “the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland” to “rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us.” Yet he also summoned the southerners who had left the region, but whose hearts had “never left Dixieland,” as well as the “sons and daughters” of New England, the Midwest, and West. “[F]or you are of the Southern spirit… and the Southern philosophy… you are Southerners too,” he said, by which he meant that they were white, and that they resented the changes that blacks were demanding.

  Asa Carter even had a foreign policy, a vision of the colonial racial order retooled for the Cold War space age. The liberal internationalists had substituted “human rights” for individual rights, he had Wallace say in the speech. They had ceded too much ground to the “false doctrine of communistic amalgamation.” They spoke of new necessities in a changing world, but at its core it was “degenerate and decadent�
�� (this last word Wallace mispronounced “de-kay-dent”). The “international white minority” was persecuted at “the whim of the international colored majority.” The two superpowers fell over each other competing for the hearts and minds of the “Afro-Asian bloc.” Yet no war crimes commission would hear the appeals of the Belgian survivors of the Congo, the Portuguese in Angola, the dissidents in Castro’s Cuba, or, in reference to the desegregation of the University of Mississippi a few months earlier, “the citizens of Oxford, Mississippi.”

  Years later Wallace would defend his inaugural as an expression of constitutional principles. “We were against big government,” he said. “What we were really talking about was states’ rights or state responsibilities, and so forth, and we never were against black people.” The last point was absurd on its face. The speech was explicitly “against black people.” And yet still Wallace wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a lot in the speech about “big government,” which is to say that it was full of the overheated, conspiracy-minded rhetoric of the American far right. Much of Wallace’s speech would have been standard fare for a John Birch Society audience or any of the like-minded groups of the era, whose fervent, grassroots membership was upending conservative politics. Few of the people attending such rallies would have turned up their noses at Wallace’s talk of race and identity. They believed it all, too, that America was a white man’s country.