Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Mary Badham as Scout with Gregory Peck. (Getty Images)

  Atticus’s parenting, much more than his lawyering, is crucial to his politics. Atticus agrees to take Tom Robinson’s case not out of a sense of duty to help legitimate Alabama courts in the eyes of powerful outside interests, which likely would have factored into the equation for A. C. Lee back in 1919 when he took the Ezell case; that was a familiar, self-serving calculus of the Jim Crow elite that Harper Lee evoked in Watchman. He does what he does in order to set an example for his children. He has to save them from the prejudice that infects so many folks in Maycomb. Atticus’s preoccupation with the moral education of his children, more so even than his racial politics in Mockingbird, is the most anachronistic thing about him.

  It’s not that Americans in the 1930s didn’t care what their kids learned, but in the 1950s they were obsessed with the question. One reason was that there were so many children around who needed to be educated. The baby boom was in full swing. Young families moved to new suburbs where they had few friends. Life was so much different from the world in which they had grown up. The one thing everyone had in common was kids. This reality was apparent in popular television shows of the era, a number of which revolved around the figure of the wise and loving father: Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet. At least some parents in the early 1960s read Mockingbird as a kind of parenting guide, no doubt alongside that other publishing blockbuster of the era, Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Such was the case with four suburban Chicago couples who gathered on a Saturday night in 1962 for a dinner party and a discussion of Mockingbird. A Chicago Tribune reporter wrote about the gathering as a window onto young suburbanites. The couples lamented that their own children’s lives were so structured and unadventurous; the suburbs afforded few vacant lots or haunted houses. Atticus, of course, was their role model. “We all agreed he’s such a masculine image, a marvelous father,” one mother recalled. “He stands for integrity, for justice regardless of race, religion, or anything. And the way his example molded the characters of that little girl and boy! It’s great.”

  Concerns about the moral education of children played a central role in the racial politics of the era. The impact of segregation in shaping the character of black children worried parents and policymakers alike. The best example is the signature document of mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism, Earl Warren’s 1954 unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. Perhaps the most quoted line from Warren’s decision was his assessment of how de jure segregation generated in black children “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Among the evidence that Warren cited for this conclusion was a study by Kenneth B. Clark, the African American psychologist. Clark’s findings were based on a series of tests in which black schoolchildren were presented with a white and a black doll and asked a series of questions—which did they like best, which would they like to play with, which was “nice.” The frequency with which the black children chose the white doll Clark took as evidence of how black children had internalized the racial hierarchy of the larger society. The notion of the psychologically threatened black child appeared again and again in these years, notably in another iconic document of the era, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King evoked the image of a young girl learning that the local amusement park was closed to black children, and the agony of her parent witnessing the “ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky,” and how the girl began “to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people.”

  Black children were endangered by segregation, the thinking went, but so, too, were white southern children. One person who had written much on the subject, and whom Harper Lee very likely read and was influenced by, was Lillian Smith. As a student journalist at Alabama, Harper Lee had written a book review that lumped Smith in with William Faulkner and Harriet Beecher Stowe as writers who had “embarrassed” the South. No doubt she had in mind Smith’s controversial 1944 novel Strange Fruit, which depicted an interracial love affair in small town Georgia. Smith’s most celebrated work, however, Killers of the Dream (1949), would seem to have informed some of Harper Lee’s later writing. That book opens with the image of anxious children in a crumbling society. “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble,” Smith wrote. “No one had to tell them; no words said aloud. To them, it was a vague thing weaving in and out of their play, like a ghost haunting an old graveyard or whispers after the household sleeps.” Smith came from a prosperous family in north Florida that fell on hard times and moved to their summer home in the north Georgia mountains. There they started a summer camp for girls that Smith herself eventually took over. One of the most powerful passages in Killers of the Dream involves an idealized conversation that Smith has with a high school camper who, after seeing a fable-like play put on by the younger campers, is suddenly awakened to the immorality and hypocrisy of her family and the South writ large.

  The conversation bears some resemblance to the one that only a few years later Harper Lee would write between Jean Louise and Atticus in Go Set a Watchman. Both books depict a sheltered young southern white woman, the daughter of a loving, respectable father. Smith’s camper had “never seen Daddy do an unkind thing in all my life.” For Jean Louise, Atticus was “the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, ‘He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman.’” Both Jean Louise and Smith’s young camper lash out at the adults in their life—for Jean Louise it is Atticus; for the camper it is Smith herself—who had taught them to love virtues that they could never live by in the segregated South. “I think you have done a terrible thing to children,” the camper tells Smith. “[Y]ou have made us want to be good.… You made us think of ourselves as no better than other people.… You’ve unfitted us for the South. And yet, this is where we shall live. Unless we run away.” Near the end of Watchman, as all of Jean Louise’s anger at Atticus comes rushing forth, she fumes, “I’ll never forgive you for what you did to me. You cheated me, you’ve driven me out of my home and now I’m in a no-man’s-land but good—there’s no place for me any more in Maycomb, and I’ll never be entirely at home anywhere else.”

  In Mockingbird, however, Harper Lee abandons her earlier condemnation of the segregated South’s respectable white fathers while maintaining her evocation of children as the conscience of the white South. The unconventional Dolphus Raymond confides in the children because they haven’t yet been hardened by the prejudices of the town. Atticus laments that it is only the children who weep at the unjust fate of Tom Robinson. Atticus, in schooling his children in the injustices of Maycomb, does not ruin them for their future lives as Jim Crow white southerners. Rather he models for them how one could be in Maycomb without being of it. Here Harper Lee dramatizes what the moral education of white children in the segregated South might look like. They could learn to be tolerant and empathetic without having to stop being southerners. It was surely one reason that the novel was so popular among white southern audiences, despite its controversial racial theme.

  The politics of Atticus’s parenting are seen most clearly in the light of the ongoing crisis of the Brown decision. In Watchman, Harper Lee’s take on Brown was essentially a vindication of segregationist defiance. Atticus patronizingly walks Jean Louise through the critique of the court’s legal reasoning, at the end of which she can muster only a lame, emotional response, further evidence of her “feminine reasoning.” “I’m trying to say that I don’t approve of the way they did it,” Jean Louise says of the court, “that it scares me to death when I think about the way they did it, but they had to do it. It was put under their noses and they had to do it.” But she’s never able to convince Atticus of this, and, by the end of the novel, it’s Jean Louise who has come to see the logic of Atticus’s positi
on, not the other way around.

  In Mockingbird, because the action takes place in the 1930s, Lee can evoke only indirectly the crisis of Brown. She does so through Atticus’s parenting. His concern about the moral education of his children expresses the anxiety at the heart of Brown. If the South was going to become an integrated, democratic society, it would have to begin with the rising generation.

  Harper Lee captured the spirit of the Brown era in the scene that she conjured in front of the Maycomb County jail. Atticus goes there to head off the lynch mob. Yet it is not Atticus who saves Tom, but Scout. Her innocent, unknowing exchange with Mr. Cunningham stops the man in his tracks. Atticus makes sense of it for them all over breakfast the next morning. “So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ’em to their senses, didn’t it?” he says. “That proves something—that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.… you children last night made Walter Cunningham stand in my shoes for a minute. That was enough.”

  The scene of a child stopping a lynch mob in the 1930s South was, by any historical standard, an absurdity. It mocked the gruesome record of southern lynch mobs that had occurred in Harper Lee’s own lifetime, like the Claude Neal lynching that had taken place in her father’s home county when she was nine years old, where it was reported that among the mob that gathered were children who stabbed Neal’s corpse with sharpened sticks. The discrepancy between the historical record and Harper Lee’s neat resolution of the scene was perhaps one of the aspects of the novel that led Flannery O’Connor to dismiss Mockingbird as “a child’s book.” Harper Lee herself would observe to a friend late in her life that she was glad that the Young Adult category did not exist at the time that Mockingbird appeared, because it probably would have been categorized as such and might have lost the adult audience that it enjoyed.

  Scout turning back the lynch mob reflected the politics of the late 1950s, not the realities of the 1930s. Yet as Harper Lee wrote her novel, no one knew how Brown would be resolved in the South. Segregation had existed in southern public schools for as long as there had been southern public schools. In the years since the court’s ruling, the only things that had changed in Alabama were the volume and the virulence of organized militant resistance. “Atticus, the time has come when we’ve got to do right,” Jean Louise pleads with her father in Watchman. Yet how would it happen? How would the law be upheld in southern public schools? How could the South do right?

  And a little child shall lead them.… It was as though the prophecy of Isaiah, the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the leopard lying down with the goat, had been summoned in the dramatic confrontations outside southern schoolhouses in the late 1950s as black schoolchildren faced down white mobs. The first incident was in Clinton, Tennessee, where in the fall of 1956 twelve black students desegregated the public school. The governor eventually had to call out National Guard troops for two months to protect the students from riotous white protestors. Harper Lee tracked these events, we know, because in Watchman Hank assures Jean Louise that the Maycomb Citizens’ Council is not like the one in Tennessee (the Citizens’ Council in Clinton had led the protests that had turned violent).

  She surely followed the travails of the nine black students in Little Rock, which transfixed the nation in September 1957, the month before she signed her contract with Lippincott. Photographs from Little Rock captured one of the protestors, Elizabeth Eckford, walking alone, her eyes downcast, her notebook clutched in her left hand, surrounded by whites. The mob’s rage is distilled in the snarling face of Hazel Bryan, the white girl who marches close behind Eckford, hounding her, yelling God-knows-what. Who taught Hazel Bryan to hate like that? No one had been there to save her, as Atticus saves Jem and Scout, from “catching Maycomb’s usual disease,” from the hysteria that made “reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up.”

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1959, Harper Lee delivered to Annie Laurie Williams the final, revised version of Mockingbird. Soon afterward, Truman Capote contacted her about accompanying him on a research trip. He had come across a brief news item about a mysterious murder in rural Kansas. The Clutter family, the father Herbert, his wife, Bonnie, and two of their children, Nancy, sixteen, and Kenyon, fifteen, had been found murdered in their home outside the small farming community of Holcombe. Capote thought that the story of a small town upended by inexplicable violence could make for an appealing piece of writing. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people,” Nelle recalled later. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.” In mid-December, the two of them boarded a train for Kansas.

  Thus Nelle was not at home to experience firsthand the events that upended Monroeville that Christmas, and that would summon a bit of the decency in her hometown that she had been trying to imagine in her fiction. The annual Christmas parade had been organized as usual by members of the Kiwanis and Civitan clubs. As they had done for the last seven or eight years, civic leaders had invited the band from Union High School, the local black public school, to march. This meant, of course, that the Monroeville Christmas parade had been racially integrated. Nobody had thought too hard about it—until the Klan did. They paid a visit to the organizers and tried to pressure them into disinviting the Union High band. When the organizers refused, the Klan went directly to the school’s principal. Faced with the prospect of Klansmen assaulting his students on the Monroeville square, he promptly pulled his school’s band out of the event.

  Over the past several years white leaders in Monroeville had sat on their hands as the Klan had paraded through black neighborhoods and intimidated white organizations that had included blacks at their meetings. But the idea that the Klan would try to push the town’s leaders around over something as innocent as a Christmas parade was galling to many people. On December 17, the Monroe Journal ran a front-page editorial denouncing the “race hate mongers.” It reflected the racial paternalism that continued to characterize Monroeville’s white elite. “The Negroes can’t fight back,” the Journal noted, “but this newspaper can.” It challenged the Klan to “pick on somebody your size.” Yet it also revealed the consensus that had emerged among Monroe County’s town folk. Civic leaders decided that if the black school’s band couldn’t march, then no one would. They canceled the parade, and began a public relations campaign against the Klan in the pages of the Journal.

  The Kiwanis and Civitan clubs published a full-page statement explaining their decision, signed by the membership of both organizations. They thanked their fellow citizens for the outpouring of letters, commendation, and good wishes that they had received since the cancellation. Dozens of Monroe citizens wrote letters supporting the decision. The Journal published photographs of some of the scrawled, misspelled, scurrilous hate mail it had received in response to its editorial, mocking the letter writers for not having the courage to sign their names. Civic leaders hoped to “arouse the indignation of the citizens of the county… and properly impress upon them that we should not tolerate the actions of the Ku Klux Klan… in seeking to create racial discord.” The statement, published on Christmas Eve, closed with a prayer that Monroe County might stand “as a Christian bulwark for all the world,” recalling the words of the apostle Paul to the Galatians: “For as many of you as have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye all are one in Christ.” Years later A. B. Blass Jr., president of the Kiwanis Club, would remember seeing A. C. Lee, a longtime club member, after the cancellation had been announced. A. C. put his hand on Blass’s shoulder and said, “You did right, son.”

  According to the Monroe Journal, the Christmas parade was the tipping point that roused decent white folks to stand up and assert their proper leadership role. The moral of the parade incident was very much like the moral of Watchman. When
the time came for it, the decent white folks stood up. “Good grief, baby, people don’t agree with the Klan, but they certainly don’t try to prevent them from puttin’ on sheets and making fools of themselves in public,” Uncle Jack explains to Jean Louise at the end of the novel. “[T]he Klan can parade all it wants,” he says, “but when it starts bombing and beating people, don’t you know who’d be the first to try and stop it?”

  Yet Uncle Jack’s rationalizations in Watchman didn’t quite square, and neither did the triumphalism of Monroeville’s civic clubs. A line from their open letter was revealing. “Let us resolve as sensible, law abiding citizens, to make our views on this clear to everyone… public officials and private citizens alike.” Public officials in Monroe County weren’t necessarily on the same page as civic leaders. If they had been, then civic groups wouldn’t have canceled the parade; they would have held it as planned, with the Union High band included. Yet civic leaders knew that throughout Monroe County the Klan had many sympathizers, as suggested in a letter to the Journal that complained of how “some officials high in our county government have joined hands with some of the mental giants in the KKK.” Even beyond Monroe County, the Alabama Klan had support at the highest levels of state government, including in the governor’s mansion. Governor Patterson had appointed one of Monroe County’s best-known Klansmen as one of the county’s three jury commissioners. Another of the governor’s appointees in the county was widely suspected of being a Klansman.