Anti–New Deal sentiment: For Alabama conservatives’ challenge to Roosevelt’s third term, see Robert J. Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 57, no. 2 (May 1991): 219–220. Lee wrote editorials opposed to the principle of a third term for Roosevelt, but when push came to shove in the summer of 1940, he was firmly in Roosevelt’s camp. See Monroe Journal, August 26, 1937, and June 13, 1940.
Denounced in a 1934 editorial: Monroe Journal, August 30, 1934.
Lee lapped them up: For more on the anti–New Deal business lobby, see Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
His with the credit line: For more on the Industrial News Review, see Congressional Record, Senate, April 6, 1965, 6951–6957.
“State Leads to Despotism.”: Monroe Journal, December 5, 1940; February 6, 1941; and April 10, 1947. I did not record every Industrial News Review editorial published in the Monroe Journal, but a good sampling can be seen in issues on October 20, 1938; October 26, 1939; February 15 and 22, 1940; and January 27, 1944, as well as numerous editorials in 1945 and 1946.
Early years of the war: Monroe Journal, April 3, May 15, June 12, October 30, and November 20, 1941; and July 30, September 24, October 1, and December 17, 1942. There were also numerous other editorials on this subject in 1943.
Take its place: Monroe Journal, May 25, 1944; June 8, 1944; and May 16, 1946.
“Headed for Statism?”: Monroe Journal, September 23, 1943; November 30, 1944; September 27, 1945; October 11, 1945; and May 2, 1946.
“That way everywhere else?”: Quoted in Norrell, “Labor at the Ballot Box,” 219.
Age of eligibility: George C. Stoney, “Suffrage in the South—Part I: The Poll Tax,” Survey Graphic 29, no. 1 (January 1, 1940): 5–9.
Candidates in the preceding years: Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 147–208.
Pepper, an Alabama native: Monroe Journal, November 19 and 26, 1942; December 3, 1942; July 27, 1944; February 22, 1945; and March 8, 1945.
Community in fundraising efforts: Monroe Journal, May 8, 1941, and February 4, 1954.
“Relationships between the races.”: Monroe Journal, October 1, 1942.
“Hearts of the people of America.”: Monroe Journal, January 14, 1943.
“Fair country of ours.”: Monroe Journal, July 26, 1945. For other anti-FEPC editorials, see January 31 and June 20, 1946. Also see two guest editorials Lee published on June 28, 1945, and January 10, 1946.
“Bloc of the people.”: Monroe Journal, June 1, 1944.
“Road to ultimate destruction.”: Monroe Journal, November 29, 1945.
“À la Confederate era.”: Crimson-White, October 5 and 12, 1945.
“regular on the staff.”: Rammer-Jammer, December 1945.
Burglary at a sorority house: Crimson-White, June 13, June 21, and August 2, 1946.
“Something about it,” she wrote: Crimson-White, June 28, 1946.
Whom were freshmen: Crimson-White, May 27, 1947.
Country club of the South: For the impact of World War II veterans on the politics of the South, see Jennifer E. Brooks, Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
“Since it was built.”: Folsom quoted in Carl Grafton and Anne Permaloff, Big Mules & Branchheads: James E. Folsom and Political Power in Alabama (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 60; Crimson-White, April 12, 1946.
“Than its weakest element.”: Crimson-White, May 3, 1946.
“South could be broken.”: Crimson-White, April 19, 1946.
“Doctrine of the states’ rights.”: Crimson-White, March 22 and May 24, 1946.
Students at the summer convocation: Crimson-White, June 13, 1946.
“From somewhere in Mississippi.”: Crimson-White, August 16, 1946.
“Activities of the Klan discontinued.”: Crimson-White, July 26, 1946.
Cowardly to sign his name: Crimson-White, August 2, 1946.
“Our government was founded.”: Monroe Journal, August 22, 1946.
African American veterans’ hospital: Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Knopf, 1985), 59–63.
Fall of 1946: McCorvey quoted in Stephen F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 90. Also see Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 56.
“Proven themselves worthy.”: Monroe Journal, October 3, 10, 17, and 24, 1946.
Protest their disfranchisement: Rammer Jammer, October 1946, 7, 17–18.
Before the Supreme Court: Richard T. Rives, “Argument Against the Adoption of the Boswell Amendment,” Alabama Lawyer 7, no. 3 (July 1946): 291–297.
“Civilization known to man.”: Horace Wilkinson, “Argument for Adoption of the Boswell Amendment,” Alabama Lawyer 7, no. 4 (October 1946): 375–382.
Negroes demanding registration: Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 65–66.
Back in January 1941: Monroe Journal, January 23, 1941.
“The Jackassonian Democrat.”: Rammer Jammer, February 1947.
Editorship of the Monroe Journal: Shields, Mockingbird, 65.
“Wish to change.”: Monroe Journal, June 26, 1947.
“Line of easiest resistance.”: Washington Post, November 17, 1960.
With her head down: Shields, Mockingbird, 62–64.
Co-ed participation and leadership: For example, the summer that Nelle had a column in the Crimson-White, the editorial and business staff of the paper included an equal number of men and women. By her senior year, however, only two of the nine leadership staff positions were held by women.
“By actual belief.”: Crimson-White, February 9, 1948.
“Government of Russia.”: Crimson-White, October 8, 1946.
“Faults of the Communistic system.”: Crimson-White, February 9, 1948.
“Idiotic generalities,” she wrote: Crimson-White, February 17, 1948.
“Harsh in my interpretation.”: Crimson-White, March 2, 1948.
“‘God Save the King’”: Crimson-White, March 9, 1948.
“Small towns forever.”: Nelle Lee, “Some Writers of Our Times,” Rammer Jammer, November 1945.
“Dark eddies of ‘niggertown.’”: Crimson-White, October 1, 1946.
Died later that evening: Shields, Mockingbird, 70–72; Mills, Mockingbird Next Door, 143–144.
Nine-month-old son, Edwin Jr.: Shields, Mockingbird, 70–72; Mills, Mockingbird Next Door, 145–148.
Also true to life: Lee, GSAW, 32.
Loved all things English: Ed Conner, interview by author, March 7, 2017, Crespino papers.
“A fuse onto dynamite.”: Ray Whatley, interview by author, May 16, 2017, Crespino papers.
“Suspected of liberal tendencies.”: Lee, GSAW, 94–95.
Reaction to victory: Anderson, Wild Man from Sugar Creek, 231–233.
Did not improve from there: Ray Whatley, interview by author, May 16, 2017, Crespino papers.
Lures of communism: Ray E. Whatley, “The Laborer,” September 2, 1951, Ray Whatley Papers, Methodist Archives Center, Huntingdon College Library, Montgomery, Alabama.
“Me from Beulah Land.”: Hank Conner, interview by author, March 3, 2017, Crespino papers.
Led toward communism: A. C. Lee, “This Is My Father’s World,” c. 1952, Special Collections, Bounds Law Library, University of Alabama School of Law.
“Rule in America.”: Ray Whatley, “My Brother’s Keeper,” February 8, 1953, Ray Whatley Papers, Methodist Archives Center, Huntingdon College Library, Montgomery, Alabama.
“Stay off social issues.”: Ray E. Whatley, “Some Reflections on Race Relations in the South,” April 19, 1965, Ray Whatley Papers, Methodist Archives Center, Huntingdon College Library, Montgom
ery, Alabama.
Gesture of reconciliation: Ray Whatley, interview by author, May 16, 2017, Crespino papers.
Than Montgomery and Monroeville: Ray Whatley, “A Review of Personal Experiences in Racial Issues,” January 11, 1994, Ray Whatley Papers, Methodist Archives Center, Huntingdon College Library, Montgomery, Alabama.
Church in the North: L. Harold DeWolf to Rev. Ray E. Whatley, November 2, 1956, Ray Whatley Papers, Methodist Archives Center, Huntingdon College Library, Montgomery, Alabama.
Service on the pension board: Ray Whatley, interview by author, May 16, 2017, Crespino papers.
Church in Monroeville: Ray Whatley, interview by author, May 16, 2017, Crespino papers; Charles J. Shields, interview by author, June 21, 2017, Crespino papers.
“Doing a great job.”: Flynt, Mockingbird Songs, 72–73.
Chapter 3
And Annie Laurie Williams: Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1961.
“Yes, Mam and No Mam.”: P. Barnes to M. Crain, Subject Nelle Harper Lee, November 28, 1956, HarperCollins Collection.
Connecticut to write: Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1962.
Cruise on the Mississippi River: Alice Lee to Maurice Crain and Annie Laurie Williams, July 3, 1965, box 149, folder Lee, Nelle Harper—Motion Picture, Annie Laurie Williams Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Strength to hold a book: Nelle Harper Lee to Harold Caufield, June 16, 1956, and n.d., Kennerson Collection. A number of letters that Harper Lee wrote from Monroeville to friends in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s are in the private collection of Paul Kennerson, who allowed me to read, take notes on, and quote from the material. My notes on the letters are included in my research materials that are archived at the Rose Library at Emory University. For more on the Kennerson collection, see Rebecca Mead, “Yours Truly,” New Yorker, June 8 and 15, 2015.
She would fictionalize in Watchman.: Nelle Harper Lee to “Dears,” n.d., Kennerson Collection.
“If such is possible.”: Nelle Harper Lee to Harold Caufield and friends, n.d., Kennerson Collection.
“Gets into the newspapers.”: Lee, GSAW, 24.
Post and the New York Times: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 212–214.
“Bloodshed” would ensue: David Halberstam, “The White Citizens Councils: Respectable Means for Unrespectable Ends,” Commentary 22 (October 1, 1956): 293–302 (quotation on 294); Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 23.
“Renew a mortgage.”: Quoted in J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 393.
Membership was twelve thousand: Thornton, Dividing Lines, 73.
Membership of forty thousand: Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 43–44.
Political power for years: McMillen, Citizens’ Council, 47; Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 79.
“Negroes in every county office.”: Lee, GSAW, 243.
Out of three members: New York Times (NYT hereinafter) March 13, 1956.
Case to the nation: NYT, February 11, 1956.
Leading to a conviction: Washington Post, February 1, 1956.
In and around Birmingham: David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 344–347; Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 100–101. In one of the more bizarre second acts in American history, in the 1970s Carter took the pen name Forest Carter and penned a string of successful novels set in the American West, including one that would be made into a major motion picture, The Outlaw Josey Wales, starring Clint Eastwood, and The Education of Little Tree, a fictional memoir of a Native American childhood that became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s, some ten years after Carter’s death. NYT, October 4, 1991.
Whites with integrationist ideas: NYT, March 30, 1956.
“Only in maintaining segregation.”: NYT, March 6, 1956.
Performance in Birmingham: Atlanta Constitution, April 12, 1956.
Cars with black passengers: Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1956.
Violence in Clinton: NYT, September 25, 1956.
Klan meeting in Birmingham: Atlanta Constitution, January 24, 1957.
Charges were eventually dropped: McMillen, Citizens’ Council, 55.
Buses were unconstitutional: Washington Post, November 14, 1956.
Segregation on Birmingham buses: Christian Science Monitor, December 28, 1956.
“Dynamite with a short fuse.”: Philadelphia Tribune, January 1, 1957.
Determined to maintain segregation: NYT, December 16, 1956.
Calming the troubled waters: Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 164–167; New Journal and Guide, December 29, 1956.
“Creature all his life.”: Nelle Harper Lee to Hal Caufield, n.d., Kennerson Collection.
“Colored and white people.”: Monroe Journal, March 8, 1956.
“Time in a Christian Democracy.”: Monroe Journal, February 16, 1956.
“Feet on the ground.”: Monroe Journal, March 1, 1956.
Whites in Monroe County: Monroe Journal, March 15, 1956.
Monroe in the twentieth century: Steve Stewart, interview by author, January 13, 2017, Crespino papers.
On them soon enough: In Macon County, in addition to the white-controlled board of registrars refusing to meet, Engelhardt had introduced a bill in the state legislature to gerrymander the Tuskegee city boundaries to dilute black voting strength. For more on Engelhardt and white resistance in Macon County, see Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind, 93–110.
Representative from Harlem: Monroe Journal, March 22, 1956.
Over seven hundred members: Monroe Journal, May 31, 1956.
Mississippi judge Tom Brady: Monroe Journal, June 14, 1956 (Harris); July 19, 1956 (Brady); September 13, 1956 (Grant).
He had helped incite: Lee, GSAW, 238.
Kills a white man: The Selma case involved William Earl Fikes, a twenty-seven-year-old service station attendant accused of entering the home of the daughter of Selma’s mayor. See Thornton, Dividing Lines, 387–392.
“Like this to happen.”: Lee, GSAW, 148–149.
“Maycomb County council membership.”: Lee, GSAW, 250. In other places Lee disassociates Atticus from the extremists. Jean Louise is appalled to find among Atticus’s reading material a copy of a scurrilous pamphlet titled The Black Plague, yet we never hear Atticus defend the publication; it is only the insipid Aunt Alexandra who blithely suggests that “[t]here are a lot of truths in that book” (Lee, GSAW, 102). Atticus’s membership in the Klan in the 1920s, a revelation that Henry Clinton makes to Jean Louise, is explained by a moderate, pragmatic sensibility. “He had to know who he’d be fighting if the time ever came to,” Henry says of Atticus, “he had to find out who they were” (Lee, GSAW, 230).
“Be in such a hurry.”: Lee, GSAW, 229.
Mechanics, storekeepers, and small clerks: David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 345.
Would write him off: Lee, GSAW, 232.
Henry explains to Jean Louise: Lee, GSAW, 230.
“Supreme Court decision?”: Lee, GSAW, 238.
“Bid for immortality.”: Lee, GSAW, 24.
“Liberal by comparison”: All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Lee, GSAW, 238–240.
“Contemporary social justice.”: NYT, May 18, 1954.
Difficult but necessary transition: Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Educat
ion and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975), 700–747.
“Law of the land.”: Congressional Record—Senate, March 12, 1956, 4459–4460.
“Supreme Court’s order.”: NYT, February 26, 1956.
“Land I love.”: Quoted in Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 116.
Opposition to the loudmouth Talmadge: Keith M. Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 142–147; Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America, 105–107.
Use them wisely: Lee, GSAW, 244–245.
“Good things in it.”: Lee, GSAW, 200.
“If he wants to.”: All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Lee, GSAW, 197–198.
“Members of society fearlessly.”: Monroe Journal, December 19, 1935; also see Monroe Journal, January 30, 1941.
Jefferson, “the Great Democrat”: Monroe Journal, August 22, 1946.
South and the Agrarian Tradition: Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper, 1930).
“Marshall were busily forwarding.”: Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 106–107, 265–267.
Conservative intellectual movement: Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 146–149.
“Viewpoint of conservative white Southerners.”: George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 307.
(Response of the Citizens’ Council movement.): Lee, GSAW, 193–195.
“Minority are to be satisfied.”: Donald Davidson, “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” National Review 9 (September 10, 1960): 141–146 (quotation on 146).
“It is the advanced race.”: “Why the South Must Prevail,” National Review 4 (August 24, 1957): 148–149.
“Tyrant over society.”: Davidson, “New South and the Conservative Tradition,” 146.
“Himself with the Communists.”: Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 302.
Atticus Finch Page 24
