Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  The Boswell Amendment was approved by a narrow margin, but it wouldn’t last long. A federal court struck it down only three years later. Yet the contentious debate over its passage, and the Lee family’s contrasting contributions to it, suggest something important about the nature of both the political and the emotional rift developing between father and daughter.

  Compared to the racist demagoguery of other conservatives, A. C. Lee’s editorials were notably restrained. He defended old-fashioned republican ideals of meritocracy in an age in which modern fashions demanded an absolute and indiscriminate leveling. Yet Lee’s conservative ideals did not exist in a vacuum. For him as for everyone, the political was shaped by the personal. Lee would have known how his daughter was repulsed by the pro-Boswell Negro haters. Perhaps that was one of the reasons that he went to such pains in those overwrought editorials to articulate the principled defense of the amendment. It was to prove to his daughter, and maybe to himself, that there was one.

  But Nelle wouldn’t have seen that. She would have seen a man willfully obtuse, disingenuous even, cloaking the sordid sentiments of Black Belt elites in abstract theories. Everybody in Alabama knew what was at stake in the Boswell debate. “Let us be frank and honest with ourselves,” Richard Rives wrote in the Alabama Lawyer. “You and I know that the people of our State are expected to adopt this Amendment in order to give the Registrars arbitrary power to exclude Negroes from voting.” Yet A. C. Lee would admit no such thing. It must have been maddening to his daughter. Her father was no Horace Wilkinson, no J.F.B. MacGillacuddy. Yet, in the end, what difference did his precious principles really make?

  THE TIGHTER A. C. Lee clung to his principles, the looser his hold became on his youngest daughter. Nelle Lee’s college writings provide more than just traces of their row. There were direct slights, too, or at least they were likely to have been read that way in Monroeville. The February 1947 issue of the Rammer Jammer included a spoof on “[t]he country weekly,” which Nelle wrote was “as much a Southern institution as grits and gravy.” The piece captured well the hokey, oddball notices that often appeared in small town southern papers, some of which she stole straight from the Monroe Journal. A small item in the Rammer Jammer spoof, for example, notes a prize turnip had been brought to the editor’s office, where it would be kept on display for interested townspeople. Something very similar had run in her father’s newspaper back in January 1941. Perhaps it was all in good fun and no one at home thought anything of it, if they even read it at all. But if Nelle ever did send copies of her publications to her family, there was a biting line introducing the satire that was likely to have raised eyebrows in Monroeville. “All in all, [the country weekly] reflects the opinions of the minute section of the country it represents,” it read. “It is gossipy, sometimes didactic, and always provencial [sic] in its outlook.”

  It seems to have been a calculated dig. Gossipy and didactic were easy to toss off, but provincial? The Monroe Journal may have been small in readership but it was large in outlook. Each night A. C. Lee religiously read state and national publications after dinner so that he could bring to his readers important matters concerning the nation and the world. If A. C. Lee noticed the line, he might have advised his daughter that if she was going to call someone provincial, she should at least spell the word correctly. The title of this mock weekly, however, would have been hard to miss: “The Jackassonian Democrat.” One Harper Lee biographer suspects that at some point A. C. Lee might have tried to persuade Nelle to come home to take over the editorship of the Monroe Journal. If true, the February Rammer Jammer would have provided Nelle’s answer.

  Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but around this same time, A. C. himself started losing interest in his newspaper. That spring he began hearing rumors that two newspapermen from out of town, Jimmy Faulkner and Bill Stewart, were scouting out Monroeville to start a rival weekly. Lee went straight to them and offered to sell them the Journal for a song. They leapt at the chance. Lee published his last issue on June 26, 1947. The editorial page included one final reprint of an Industrial News Review editorial and words of thanks to his loyal readers. He was proud to say, looking back on the many years of his editorship, that “we are unable to recall any position we have previously taken on any important question that we would wish to change.”

  That summer, when she was home for the wedding of her brother Edwin, Nelle made it plain to her family that her heart wasn’t in the law. Years later she would say that she had pursued it as “the line of easiest resistance.” She went back to Tuscaloosa in the fall, giving it one final go, but nothing was the same. She stopped hanging around the campus magazine crowd that had sustained her in her first two years. At her sorority and in her law school classes she was a spectral presence. Only a handful of young women were enrolled in the law school at Alabama in those days, yet few of them would even be able to recall Nelle Lee years later. Those who did remembered her as defiantly dowdy—long skirts, baggy blouses, plain flats, no makeup—and intensely reclusive, saying as little as she possibly could when called upon in class, scurrying out afterward with her head down.

  The political climate on campus had changed as well. The heady days of lectures by Ellis Arnall and Claude Pepper had come and gone in a flash. So, too, had the student editorials castigating the Birmingham Klan. All those veterans who had flooded campus as freshmen two or three years prior were now juniors and seniors, crowding campus organizations that during the war had enjoyed ample co-ed participation and leadership. On campus, as in national politics, the optimism of the postwar years had given over to loyalty oaths and subversive investigations. One of the few things that could provoke Nelle enough to crawl out of her shell that year was the red scare showing up in the pages of the Crimson-White.

  In February 1948, student columnist Jim Wood began with a simple question: “Is there any Communism on the University of Alabama campus?” Without offering any facts as evidence, the answer he came to quickly was yes. Universities were fertile ground for “communistic conquest,” as everyone knew. “There are numerous persons on campus who are professed communists,” he wrote, “either trying to be shocking or by actual belief.”

  Trying to be shocking was Nelle Lee’s specialty, if not in class then at least in print. It’s almost impossible to find anything she published in college that didn’t include at least one four-letter word, which in Baptist-soaked Alabama in the 1940s still had the power to scandalize. But she provoked readers in other ways as well, such as her line in the Crimson-White a year and a half earlier that for her “Utopia is a land with the culture of England and the government of Russia.” The comment was another of Nelle’s acts of rebelliousness—of a piece with her refusal to wear shorter skirts and makeup to class—rather than any sincere admiration for communism. Yet it surely would have marked Nelle as part of what Jim Wood called “the ‘intellectual’ group,” the ones who are “aware of the faults in our democratic system, yet overlook the faults of the Communistic system.” Perhaps that is why Nelle was one of the earliest and harshest critics of Wood’s column. In a letter addressed “My Dear Young Man,” she called Wood’s article a “horror,” nothing more than “fallacious propositions illogically strung together.” She challenged him to name names. “You do us conservatives no good by propounding such idiotic generalities,” she wrote.

  Nelle’s critical letter was one of several. A small tempest brewed in the pages of the Crimson-White. Wood, for example, responded that the real horror was Nelle Lee’s editions of the Rammer Jammer. Interestingly, one of the questions raised was about the conservatism of Ms. Lee. “Are you a conservative?” a friend of Wood’s wrote in, addressing Nelle directly. “That is a conservative radical—or am I too harsh in my interpretation.” A friend of Nelle’s responded that Lee was in fact a good conservative, but one who objected to the shabby, indiscriminate smearing of broad swaths of the university. “Let me assure [you] that far from riding the pink horse, Nellie is hanging onto
the extreme tail (right) end of the very black donkey!” her friend wrote. “In fact, on most any afternoon you may find her gazing with hard eyes toward the White cliffs, sipping her daily tea, and lustily singing, ‘God Save the King.’”

  This was calculated to confound Jim Wood and his friends, which it surely would have. The comment spoke to Lee’s Anglophilism, to which she would gesture frequently in interviews in later years, and which she was able to indulge that summer in a study program at Oxford. When she got back from England, she would manage only one more semester in Tuscaloosa before giving up the law for good. Her childhood friend Truman Capote had been urging her to come to New York for years. He had made a name for himself with his short stories, and his debut novel had been published earlier that year. Nelle decided to take the leap. She came home for Christmas in 1948, worked a few weeks waiting tables at the Monroeville golf club to save money, and in early 1949 headed to New York.

  As for Nelle’s conservatism, though it ran more toward the cultural traditionalism of Chesterton rather than the more narrow-minded racial and economic interests of the Alabama Black Belt, the fact that she would put herself in the company of Tuscaloosa’s conservatives is notable. Even in those years when she was pulling hard against the reins of family and tradition, she remained her father’s daughter. Her conservative inclinations could be seen in her irritability over what she saw as the melodrama, licentiousness, and opportunism of the southern gothic novels so lauded by the New York literati. In a 1945 essay lampooning modern writers, she mocked the trend toward writing about small southern towns with their “annual race riot full of blood and gore which cause violent reaction in [the author’s] sensitive soul.” The southern writer has the opportunity to “expose to the public the immoral goings-on in an out-of-the-way village… and instigate a movement which would do away with small towns forever.” In a review of a novel published by an Alabama faculty member, Nelle noted how “[t]he South has been repeatedly embarrassed by the [Lillian] Smith, Faulkners, Stowes, et al, who either wrote delicately of the mint julep era or championed the dark eddies of ‘niggertown.’”

  In the end, however, it’s a fool’s errand trying to pin down Nelle Lee too precisely on any political spectrum. She relished, above all, the role of the iconoclast. Unlike her father, she would never have a side, liberal or conservative. What she had, and this is no small irony for the woman who would create one of the quintessential figures of American liberal mythology, was an instinctive sense for gauging the amount of hot air in any particular literary or political idea, and a compulsion to poke a hole in it.

  THE HANDFUL OF writings Nelle Lee published in college did not exhaust her efforts to work out her differences with her father. Her first novel, Watchman, continued that work both literally and figuratively. Yet after college, and before she would take up her writing career in earnest, tragedy struck the Lee family. It would only deepen her sympathies for her father and make any genuine break with him all but unimaginable.

  Though Nelle’s mother Frances had struggled with her health for some time, nothing seemed particularly ominous in late May of 1951. She was sixty-two years old and still suffered from her “nervous disorder.” That month, when she told her doctor that she had been feeling ill, he sent her to Vaughan Memorial Hospital in Selma for tests. A. C. dropped his wife off for a couple of days of examinations on a Wednesday, and headed on to the annual Methodist conference, an early summer ritual for him given his longtime status as a lay delegate. When he returned on Friday to pick up his wife, he received the bad news. Frances had late stage malignancies in her liver and lungs. She wasn’t expected to live more than three months. A. C. went home to Monroeville to tell Alice and call the other children. They told Nelle not to come home from New York just yet. The family was going back to the hospital the next day, and they would know more then about what she should do. But on that Saturday afternoon, June 2, 1951, while the family went out to get food, Frances suffered a heart attack. She never regained consciousness and died later that evening.

  The death of Frances was compounded beyond measure the following month. A. C. was in his law office, just weeks after burying his wife, when a phone call came from the commandant at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. His only son Edwin was stationed there, having been called back to duty with the outbreak of the Korean War. The commandant had no explanation, only the grim news that Edwin Lee had been found dead in his bunk that morning. An autopsy would reveal that he had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was thirty years old. Left behind was his wife of four years, Sara Ann, the couple’s three-year-old daughter Molly, and a nine-month-old son, Edwin Jr.

  A. C. Lee, his arm propped on the train, included his granddaughter Molly Lee in a photo with the crew and staff of the Manistee & Repton Railroad. Molly’s father, Ed Lee, along with A. C.’s wife, Frances Lee, had passed away the year before. (Aaron White)

  The sorrow the Lees experienced in the summer of 1951 drew an already close-knit, private family even closer. Not long after Edwin’s funeral, A. C. sold the family home on Alabama Avenue and bought a small brick house in a new neighborhood development carved out of the pine forest behind the Monroe County High School. He and Alice would live there on West Avenue, and it was where Nelle stayed when she came home from New York, even after the phenomenal success of Mockingbird would have allowed the family to move to a more spacious home. Whether the move was to distance A. C. from old memories or simply to get away from the commercial blight that had encroached on South Alabama Avenue is anyone’s guess. Nelle wrote about the move in Watchman as an emblem of Atticus’s determination to soldier on despite the sadness. “He is an incredible man,” Jean Louise thinks, after Atticus loses his wife and son. “A chapter of his life comes to a close, Atticus tears down the old house and builds a new one in a new section of town. I couldn’t do it.” In the book, the old family home is replaced by an ice cream parlor, which was also true to life.

  On holidays the extended Lee family packed into the small house on West Avenue. A. C.’s grandchildren recall the lively exchanges among the three sisters—Alice, Louise, and Nelle—who, despite the spread of their ages (Alice was five years older than Louise, who was ten years older than Nelle) and the distance between them (Alice in Monroeville with their father; Nelle in New York; Louise in Eufala with her husband and two sons), remained extremely close the rest of their lives. Each of them had her distinctive role: Alice was the mother hen; Louise was the pretty one; Nelle was the cutup. Local gossip, family lore, and English history were common topics of conversation, and laughter abounded. “Opp,” as his grandchildren called A. C., listened to the sisters’ gabfest, smiling at witty or well-turned comments, until called upon by one of the daughters to weigh in on, and thereby resolve, an issue under debate. When not conversing, the family was reading, grandchildren too, everyone silently absorbed in a book—a work of history or biography for A. C. and Alice; fiction more likely for Louise and Nelle. The only allowance for modern entertainment was when Nelle, or Aunt Dody as her nieces and nephews called her, put on a record, carols at Christmastime; Handel, Elgar, or Gilbert and Sullivan year-round. Even in their music the Lees loved all things English.

  In the early 1950s, a controversy developed at the Monroeville Methodist church that shows the intensity of Nelle’s loyalty to her father, and how fiercely she would defend him. Reverend Ray Whatley was a thirty-one-year-old minister who came to Monroeville in June 1951, just after Frances Lee’s death. Edwin Lee’s funeral the next month was the first that he performed in Monroeville. Whatley had known when he went to Monroeville that the church had requested another pastor, the minister at the smaller of the two Methodist churches in Selma, a man well-known in the regional Methodist conference for his dynamic, evangelical preaching. But that man still had another two years in his term in Selma. By his own admission years later, Whatley was young and inexperienced when he went to Monroeville, and he was taking over a church with a number of prominent families w
ho were accustomed to running things as they wished. This was a common problem for Methodist ministers, who rotated among churches every four years—how to impose their own vision for the church without alienating the men and women who had their own pet projects, Sunday School classes, or committees that they ran like their own little fiefdoms. Whatley recognized this pattern in Monroeville, and moved quickly, perhaps presumptuously, to put his stamp on the church. He asked a talented churchwoman to take a step back from her frequent public speaking. The choir director pulled double duty as the chairman of the finance committee, a responsibility that Whatley believed was getting short shrift. When Whatley asked the chairman for regular committee reports, it was like lighting “a fuse onto dynamite.”

  None of it might have mattered had Whatley not been such a bore as a preacher. That would be the knock on him that survived in the Lee family’s account of things. In Watchman, Harper Lee imagined a young minister at the church in Maycomb who seemed modeled on Whatley, “a young man… with what [Uncle Jack] called the greatest talent for dullness he had ever seen in a man on the near side of fifty… he possessed all the necessary qualifications for a certified public accountant: he did not like people, he was quick with numbers, he had no sense of humor, and he was butt-headed.” This fictional preacher also “had long been suspected of liberal tendencies.”

  Those liberal tendencies were what was really at issue in Monroeville, or so Whatley believed. In no sense was he an agitating preacher from the outside. He was born and reared in the tiny village of Whatley, named for his family, some thirty miles west of Monroeville. He tried sincerely to fulfill the duties of his calling as he understood them. When it was Race Relations Sunday he preached on race relations. On Labor Day he preached on labor. The handful of notes and sermon transcripts that survive from his tenure in Monroeville reveal a young minister struggling to apply the wisdom of scripture to the problems of the day. Whatley received his divinity degree from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, the most progressive Methodist seminary in the South. There he became absorbed with the Old Testament prophets, Amos in particular. In 1946, when he was in Atlanta and had charge over three rural churches south of the city, in the heart of Eugene Talmadge country, he had given a sermon in the midst of the contentious gubernatorial campaign, when Talmadge inflamed racist reaction in opposition to the liberal administration of Ellis Arnall. Talmadge rode that reaction to victory. Before the election, when Whatley told his congregants that it was both undemocratic and un-Christian to deny a person the right to vote because of his race, attendance the following week dropped by roughly half, and did not improve from there.