For several years Lee had opposed the idea of a third term for Roosevelt. He was reluctant to abandon the two-term tradition established by George Washington. Yet by the summer of 1940, Lee believed that circumstances were extreme and that the moment demanded a man of Roosevelt’s experience and wisdom. He eagerly supported Roosevelt for a third term.
The great conflagration to come would leave almost no aspect of the world unchanged. Americans would have to fight to defend freedom around the globe, as A. C. Lee had feared. At home in Monroeville, Lee took it all in, writing his editorials in his Journal office, reading his newspapers and magazines at home in the parlor. The world as he knew it was being transformed, as was Lee himself. None of it would be lost on his youngest daughter.
Chapter 2
Jackassonian Democrats
If the impish, inquisitive Scout of To Kill a Mockingbird is not an exact autobiographical portrait of Harper Lee, it would seem a good approximation. “The first two-thirds of the book are quite literal and true,” Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend, wrote to mutual friends shortly after Mockingbird’s publication. “And yes, my dear, I am Dill.” Long summer days spent in a treehouse reenacting adventure stories, gewgaws uncovered from secret hiding places, tall tales and romps to the square: there’s no reason to think that these aspects of her book were too far from Harper Lee’s actual experience.
In these early days, A. C. Lee recognized the spark of intelligence and creativity in Nelle and her childhood friend Truman, and he encouraged them both. He patiently answered Nelle’s questions about the books and newspapers that he read, or Truman’s inquiries about the crossword puzzles that he worked. He played little games with them, making up sentences using words that started with the same letter, and gave them one of his old typewriters, an Underwood No. 5. The children hauled it out into the backyard, under the yellow rosebushes, taking turns hammering away at the keys, writing their first stories.
Nelle was purportedly the inspiration for the character of Idabel Thompkins in Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Idabel is the argumentative tomboy who befriends Joel, the thirteen-year-old protagonist. She bridles at Joel’s shyness in washing naked in the creek. “I never think like I’m a girl,” she explains, “you’ve got to remember that, or we can’t never be friends.” Plaintively she knocks her fists together, murmuring, “I want so much to be a boy: I would be a sailor, I would…” Later, she and Joel sneak off to the circus, where Idabel is mesmerized by the tiny, rouged, yellow-haired Miss Wisteria, a midget. Idabel fawns over her, insisting that she share a sodapop with them and ride the Ferris wheel. When Idabel is momentarily distracted, waving at other circus-goers, Miss Wisteria turns to Joel and asks, “Poor child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?”
How much of Nelle there was in Idabel, or vice versa, is hard to say. Perhaps Nelle felt like an oddity, but it’s also possible that by her early teens she was simply the youngest, most isolated member of what had become a rather somber, lonely household. She was a sophomore in high school on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which marked America’s official entry into World War II. All the older Lee children had moved away. Her eldest sister Alice was in Birmingham working as a clerk for the Social Security Administration and attending night school to get her law degree. Louise, ten years older than Nelle, was married with a small child living in Eufaula, with a husband who would soon be away at war. Edwin, a student at Auburn, had left his studies to join the US Army Air Corps.
The presence that would have compounded the sense of absence for A. C. Lee and Nelle both was that of Frances Lee. Back in 1910, the thirty-year-old A. C. Lee had married above his station. Frances Cunningham Finch, nine years his junior, had descended from Virginians who had moved south; her mother’s side of the family owned a plantation near Bells Landing on the Alabama River. Gentle and cultured, she had enjoyed a formal education that A. C. could have only dreamed of. At the girls’ boarding school in Montevallo, founded by the pioneering feminist leader and penal reform advocate Julia Tutwiler, Frances excelled in music, both as a pianist and a vocalist. She continued to play and sing the rest of her life. Her children recalled her expert musicianship, along with her love of reading, which she shared with her husband. Her aspirations as a mother were reflected in the title of a talk she gave in 1922 at a meeting of the Methodist Church’s missionary society, “The Home—a School of Ideals.”
Yet relatively early in her motherhood, Frances began struggling with mental health problems that would plague her the rest of her life. The family would always describe it as “a nervous disorder.” It began with the birth of her second child, Louise, who had a difficult infancy. The baby was losing weight and constantly crying. Frances couldn’t sleep and didn’t know how to help her child. A. C. couldn’t help his daughter or his wife. They finally found a pediatric specialist in Selma, Dr. William W. Harper, who diagnosed Louise’s problem. His aid was so important to A. C. and Frances that they would name their youngest child, Nelle Harper, for him.
The baby improved, but Frances didn’t. She lived away from her family for a year, staying with relatives near Mobile, where she received care from a doctor. During that time, A. C. was a single father to his five-year-old daughter Alice and the infant Louise. He was assisted by Hattie Belle Clausell, the family’s black servant who lived nearby and was a near-constant presence in the house. The Lee daughters always remained fiercely protective of their mother’s reputation, but given Frances’s precarious health, it would not have been easy for the teenaged Nelle to have dealt with her mother without her older siblings also around to contribute.
Nelle graduated from high school in 1944, and immediately enrolled in the summer session at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, formerly the Woman’s College of Alabama, which Alice had attended for a year. Alice herself had returned to Monroeville earlier that year, her law degree in hand, to join her father’s firm, becoming the first female lawyer in Monroe County. Nelle didn’t take to Huntingdon, which had too much the air of the finishing school for such an independent-minded young woman. Yet the school’s literary magazine, The Prelude, was where she would publish her first pieces of writing. The spring 1945 issue carried two short items. Both show that the political and racial themes that preoccupied Nelle’s later writing were present from the beginning.
The longer and more polished of the two pieces, “A Wink at Justice,” tells the story of a shrewd country judge who presides over the trial of eight black men arrested for gambling. The narrator views the action from the courtroom gallery. The story anticipates the form of Watchman in that it concerns a skeptical, uninitiated person learning the wisdom of an elder. The judge has the men hold out the palms of their hands so that he can inspect them. He dismisses three of the men and sentences the others to sixty days in jail. When the narrator asks the judge afterward how he had come to his decision, he explains that the hands of the men he dismissed had calluses, which, for the judge, marked them as farmhands likely to have families to support, whereas the hands of the men he sentenced were smooth, suggesting that they were professional gamblers. “Satisfied?” the judge snaps. “Satisfied,” the narrator nods.
The other piece, “Nightmare,” only three short paragraphs, describes a traumatic memory that comes flooding back to a daydreaming school girl. Crouching to peer through a broken board in a fence, she hears on the other side a man being lynched. She flees, screaming and sobbing, to her bedroom. Later, as the lynchers walk below her open bedroom window, she overhears their self-satisfied comments on their work.
Nelle only spent one year at Huntingdon. At the end of the school year, she transferred to the University of Alabama, where she planned to study law. Perhaps she would go back to Monroeville and join the family practice, just like Alice. A. C. liked to joke around town that he could rename the firm “A. C. Lee and Daughters, Lawyers.”
BY 1944, TAKING stock of developments in Alabama and around the
nation, A. C. Lee found fewer and fewer things to smile about. He was sixty-four years old, and an unmistakable crotchetiness suffused his editorials. A clear divide emerged in his political thinking. Roosevelt, so noble and wise in international matters, had all but ceded his domestic agenda to the liberals and the labor bosses, or so Lee felt. Gone was any effort by the New Dealers to balance the needs of labor with capital. In Alabama, political sentiment ran toward liberal New Dealers like Lister Hill, who had won reelection to the Senate earlier that year, despite Lee’s fervent opposition.
Times had been tougher in the 1930s, yet back then everyone seemed to be pulling their oar in the same direction. That’s the way A. C. Lee saw it in 1944. Roosevelt’s first hundred days were like a dream. Before taking office, Roosevelt had come over from Warm Springs to visit friends in Alabama. In Montgomery, he stood on the very spot where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as president of the Confederacy to announce the government would take over the Muscle Shoals dam and use it for a coordinated effort in regional development. Roosevelt’s critics called him “autocratic,” yet for A. C. Lee he was a man with “a keen conception of public duty.” For too long the country had been run by the “House of Morgan,” Lee believed, and Roosevelt was restoring a measure of balance to the financial sector. Monroe County got one of Roosevelt’s forestry camps, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was soon at work creating the Little River State Forest, which ran along the county’s southern edge. A. C. was even willing to go along with Roosevelt’s controversial National Industrial Recovery Act. True, it allowed for an extraordinary measure of government intervention in private business, yet were they not extraordinary times?
A. C. Lee knew it well. He was a member of the board of directors of the Monroe County Bank when it closed its doors on November 12, 1932, out of fear of a bank run. He published a front-page editorial explaining why people shouldn’t panic. Roosevelt had to do a similar thing with the bank holiday he had declared shortly after taking office, when local banks across the country were failing in unprecedented numbers. In the first of his radio addresses to the American people that would come to be known as “fireside chats,” the president described in clear, direct language what he had done, why he had done it, and what would happen next. “[T]he God who overrules the universe has raised up the man to lead us in this emergency,” Lee wrote in August 1933. “Whether we agree in matters of detail or not, the fact remains that the objectives sought are of the highest order, and marks Franklin D. Roosevelt one of the greatest leaders of all times.”
Most essential of the objectives that Roosevelt sought, at least to Lee, was relief for struggling farmers. The Agricultural Adjustment Act was the culmination of decades’ worth of progressive thought about how to organize the cotton industry, the lifeblood of south Alabama. It included a cotton allotment program that paid farmers to take land out of cultivation, thereby suppressing supply and raising prices in the way that Huey Long’s cotton holiday idea had intended to do. “Never in the memory of man now living have the farmers of the nation had so devoted and loyal a friend in the White House as its present occupant,” Lee wrote. Lee was more astute and forward-thinking on agricultural issues than many of his fellow country newspapermen. One study of rural southern editors observed how “badly befuddled” many of them were, lambasting Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as “a sinner who wasted the earth’s substances in the cotton and tobacco patches, to say nothing of his famous bloodletting at the pigpens.”
Lee, by contrast, was infuriated by southern politicians who stoked opposition to Roosevelt’s farm reforms. Alongside Huey Long and the isolationists in Lee’s hall of villains was Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge, who in 1935 was undermining the cotton allotment program, and, Lee believed, trying to feather his own political nest by urging southern farmers not to sign away their God-given right to plant as much cotton as they well pleased. For Lee, this was the height of irresponsible demagoguery.
Through the entirety of Roosevelt’s first term and even afterward, no New Deal policy provoked a quibble from Lee, not even Roosevelt’s controversial 1937 plan to restructure the Supreme Court. Yet a turning point in Lee’s thinking came that same year. “Much as we have desired to support the present administration in Washington in all its major undertakings,” he wrote in June 1937, “the time has now been reached when we find ourselves unable to travel with it on one of its policies.”
The policy in question established a minimum wage and set maximum work hours in industries throughout the country. It would eventually come to fruition in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, and it actually had its origins in Alabama. Hugo Black, the Alabama senator whose loyal support of the New Deal led Franklin Roosevelt to reward him with a Supreme Court appointment, had first introduced the legislation in 1932. Many southern laborers supported the bill, but A. C. Lee sided with business interests who argued that it would deal a terrible blow to still-fledgling industries in the South. He was concerned about the small manufacturers in rural areas who would be upended by the law, like the sawmills where he used to work keeping the books. When they shut down, workers would have to flee to urban manufacturing centers. As Lee saw it, only large-scale industries could compete under the new rules.
Yet in the South, even they would struggle, and that was an outcome that the bill’s backers knew full well, or so Lee suspected. The recruitment of new factories was critical to the South’s effort to balance agriculture with industry, and northerners didn’t like the South’s aggressive tactics, particularly the confidence with which they assured northern industrialists of a nonunionized workforce. Lee and many of his fellow southerners believed that the wages and hours bill was designed to kill the South’s competitive advantage, and they were not alone in this view. The influential journalist Walter Lippmann would describe the Fair Labor Standards Act as “a sectional bill thinly disguised as a humanitarian reform.” Just as northern states had been benefiting for decades from differential freight rates applied by the federal government, Lee argued, here again the South would get the short end of the stick.
Lee also fought against the Fair Labor Standards Act because it cut against one of the single most important developments in Monroeville history. In 1937, J. E. Barbey, owner of the Vanity Fair Corporation, a manufacturer of women’s lingerie, announced that he was closing down his mill in Reading, Pennsylvania, and building a new plant in Monroeville. Barbey was a trophy catch for the gregarious First District US congressman Frank Boykin, who had an international reputation for hosting powerful politicians and businessmen at his hunting lodge in Washington County. “One deer and three wild turkeys shot by the right people can bring a million or a million and a half dollars to Alabama,” Boykin was known to boast, although it was a chance encounter one morning in Washington that sparked the Vanity Fair deal. In his aptly titled memoir, Everything’s Made for Love in This Man’s World, Boykin told the story of inviting a Vanity Fair official to coffee and hearing his complaints about the horrible winter weather in Pennsylvania. Boykin enlightened him about the ideal climate of south Alabama.
It wasn’t the Pennsylvania winters that concerned J. E. Barbey, however. He had watched closely several strikes in the early 1930s in the northern hosiery industry, and he vowed that he would never operate a union shop. What Monroeville offered was a place off the beaten path that union organizers would have a hard time finding, and wouldn’t feel terribly comfortable visiting, even with the temperate winters. It was a place with state and local officials eager to provide the financial and tax incentives to make it worth it for Vanity Fair to relocate. The fact that Monroeville had an economically conservative state legislator who happened to own the local newspaper and who could pen a convincing editorial about how labor unions threatened the South’s economic future would have been a big mark in the town’s favor.
The Monroe Journal celebrated the opening of the mill with fanfare equal to that of VE Day, and for good reason. In economic terms, Vanity Fair bro
ught Monroeville into the twentieth century. The town was little different from nearby Jackson, Alabama, where the company built another factory two years after the Monroeville opening, and where, before Vanity Fair showed up, there wasn’t a brick building in the entire county. In Jackson, few people had electricity, because hardly anyone could afford the utility bill. Lawyers and doctors were accustomed to being paid in kind, as was the case, of course, with Mr. Cunningham’s payment to Atticus in Mockingbird. The three hundred employees Vanity Fair hired in Monroeville drew from the almost entirely untapped labor market of women. In a few cases the men stayed home and kept house, but many other households enjoyed dual incomes, dramatically raising living standards. In the decades to come the monotonous work of sewing women’s underwear would become a drudgery, particularly as competition from overseas led to speedups and compressed wages (talk of unionization flared up and then mysteriously died out, time and again). But in the 1930s, Vanity Fair was a godsend. The largest and most reliable consumer of gas and electricity in the county, the factory brought about expanded coverage and lower rates for everybody. Vanity Fair had standing orders for paper supplies and other goods among local merchants, allowing them to expand their businesses. It built a park and a lake, where local children played in the summertime. It even renovated the golf course, which A. C. Lee would have enjoyed immensely.
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