Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Yet we would do well today to remember King’s faith in the power of moral example, and the essential role that it plays in democratic society. We should remember, too, the strange way that Atticus Finch emerged as a token of that faith. President Kennedy summoned it in one of the signature presidential addresses of the era, his nationally televised “Report to the American People” on June 11, 1963. A president best known for his strong, masculine rhetoric about bearing burdens and meeting hardships sounded like a Sunday School teacher when he spoke of how Americans were “confronted primarily with a moral issue” that was “as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He raised his own version of the Golden Rule: Were Americans “going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated?” Echoing Atticus’s counsel to Scout about crawling into another person’s skin and walking around in it, as well as King’s condemnation of those urging members of his race to wait, the president asked, “[W]ho among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in [the Negro’s] place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”

  King was convinced that the oppressors in Birmingham had been restrained not merely because the world looked on. The moral example of the protestors themselves had moved them. As King put it, the “hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Negroes who for the first time dared to look back at a white man, eye to eye,” revealed that “the Negro did not merely give lip service to nonviolence.” Despite the violence that had occurred, far greater violence that had been threatened never came to pass, King wrote, as “one side would not resort to it and the other was so often immobilized by confusion, uncertainty and disunity.”

  THE DISUNITED WHITE South. That was the side that Harper Lee and her people were on. It was to them that she had written a novel that would eventually be read and celebrated around the world as a timeless expression of universal values of moral courage, tolerance, and understanding. But she began the project confused and uncertain. In her first attempt at writing a novel, she had wanted to reconcile her abiding love and respect for her father with the hypocrisy and injustice that he and his generation of southerners had too easily abided, all while defending him from the condescension of the northern liberals. Yet through that process, and shaped, too, by the shifting politics of the day, she stumbled upon a simpler narrative: a father, inspired by his love and hope for his children, doing the right thing in a time of crisis. In that story, Atticus rose to the occasion. At the moment when it really mattered, he was his best self. Of course, Mockingbird doesn’t tell us that. We know it because in Watchman we see this other side of Atticus. In Mockingbird, we know of him only as the children do, because that is the internal logic of the novel.

  With the publication of Watchman, however, we know now not only that the Atticus of Mockingbird was always too good to be true, but that Harper Lee knew it as well. She knew all the things that Jean Louise discovers in Watchman: that Atticus’s kindly paternalism covered ugly beliefs about racial difference; that his willingness to represent black clients was in service to the racial status quo; that Calpurnia and all of Maycomb’s black population lived behind a veil; that what as a child she had assumed was genuine, reciprocal love and devotion across the color line was more like an elaborate act intended to ease, for whites, the guilt and, for blacks, the burden of racial injustice.

  She knew all of these things and yet never told us. Why?

  Epilogue

  The truth is that she intended to. Or at least she planned on it for a time. In the letter that she wrote to her friends Joy and Michael Brown in July of 1957 she described how Maurice Crain had convinced her to divide the novels that she had been trying to combine into one. He told her to finish the childhood novel, write a bridge, and it would flow into “Watchman.” But she never wrote the bridge—by which Crain and she presumably meant a third novel, to appear between the two existing ones—and she never came back to her other manuscript, “Watchman,” the one that she had actually written first.

  Perhaps she never took the idea of a trilogy terribly seriously, or she didn’t hold to it for very long. As far as we know, it is only mentioned in this one letter to the Browns written in 1957. Maybe she continued to work secretly on this plan after Mockingbird was published. Or perhaps the idea had always been a fleeting one, devised at a time when she was desperately trying to figure out which of the manuscripts that she had written could be worked into decent enough shape to land a book contract. And once one of them sold, and the contract was signed, and the manuscript was revised, and the book was published, and made into a movie, and hailed as a great American classic, and the movie was hailed as a great American classic, and the characters in it became as familiar to readers as members of their own family, that old idea about writing a bridge and following Atticus into old age and Scout into adulthood seemed utterly ridiculous.

  Yet some evidence suggests that in the years after Mockingbird’s publication, Lee was still trying to work through unresolved themes from Watchman. In 1961, after Mockingbird had taken flight and Lee had emerged as the freshest face on the southern literary scene, Harold Hayes, an editor at Esquire, commissioned her to write a short feature concerning the current state of affairs in the South. No record has yet been found of what Lee wrote. To a friend she described what she had produced as a “pastiche” that “had some white people who were segregationists & at the same time loathed & hated the K.K.K.” In late October, Hayes wrote an awkward letter rejecting the piece. “What seemed to have gone wrong—from our point of view,” Hayes wrote, “is that the piece is working too hard to carry a lot of weight—humor, characterization, the barbarity of the Klan, the goodness of a brave man and so on. A novel’s worth, in fact, with the result that it never quite makes it on either of these levels as a short feature.” Interestingly, Hayes said that he was “sympathetic to your decision to change it to a fictional form.”

  In a letter to a friend, Lee shrugged it off as another example of a New York editor ignorant of southern complexities. Her piece didn’t “conform to their Image (or the one they wish to project) of the South,” she wrote. She marveled that Hayes couldn’t believe that there were segregationists who also despised the Ku Klux Klan: “This is an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire! I wanted to say that according to those lights, nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”

  But Hayes was no obtuse outsider. He was a southerner himself, a native North Carolinian. It may have been that what was wrong with the piece was akin to what was wrong with Lee’s math. In 1961, when right-wing racists still had a veritable hotline to the Alabama governor’s office, nine-tenths of “the South”—by which Harper Lee would have meant the white South—did not despise the Ku Klux Klan. Nine-tenths of the Monroeville Kiwanis Club maybe, but probably not even that.

  Interviews that Lee gave in these years suggest that Watchman was still fresh in her mind. In March 1963 she described to an interviewer how Mockingbird had “tried to give a sense of proportion to life in the South, that there isn’t a lynching before every breakfast.” That line was also Jean Louise’s characterization of the New York Post’s coverage of the South in Watchman. More telling, however, was an interview Lee gave in March 1964 to Roy Newquist, host of the radio program Counterpoint, on WQXR in New York. When asked why the South produced so many writers, she spoke of how southerners “run high to Celtic blood and influence,” how they were “mostly Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh,” how they “grew up in a society that was primarily agricultural,” which had made the region one of “natural storytellers, just from tribal instinct.” All of these themes Lee had written about in Watchman. She put them in the mouth of Uncle Jack, who attempts to school Jean Louise on how Maycomb County was composed of “the living counterparts of every butt-headed Celt, Angle [sic], and Saxon who ever drew breath,” how this fact prompted “tribal feelin’,” how the South was populated by “small landowners and tenants by the thousands
,” how it was “a little England in its heritage and social structure.”

  These were all fragments of the conservative worldview that Uncle Jack sketches for Jean Louise in Watchman. Presumably Lee would have included them in any second book about Atticus Finch, one not written from a child’s perspective. She would have had to explain the roots of Atticus’s traditionalism, the loss of which Uncle Jack mourns in Watchman. “Men like me and my brother are obsolete and we’ve got to go,” he tells Jean Louise, “but it’s a pity we’ll carry with us the meaningful things of this society.”

  Even if these themes were on her mind, however, Lee faced a problem in any attempt to make Watchman a viable novel. What exactly were the “meaningful things” that were worth preserving from the “tribal instinct” of a racially and ethnically homogenous white South? In both Mockingbird and the interview with Newquist, it was clear that it was not the passing of Uncle Jack’s ethno-racial order that Harper Lee herself lamented, but rather the loss of small town southern life, with its simple pleasures, traditional values, and dense network of relationships. “There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me,” she told Newquist. “I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.” But the “social pattern” in the Jim Crow small towns that so fascinated Harper Lee was predicated on the “tribal instinct” of the white South. One did not exist without the other. And the one thing that was clear both in the overt moral outrage of Jean Louise in Watchman and in the quieter, more profound moral outrage of Mockingbird was that Harper Lee could no longer abide the tribalism of white southerners. She was unable to reconcile her love of small town southern life—and of the values and principles of her father that grew out of it—with the commitment to racial hierarchy that defined both her hometown and her father. This, more than any single factor, was the thing that would have prohibited her from trying to rewrite Watchman, and that, ultimately, frustrated her ambition to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

  Thanks to men like George Wallace and Asa Carter, the southern tradition that Atticus and Uncle Jack embodied in Watchman had become the rallying cry of the reprehensible. By June 1963, Wallace had begun to follow through on his pledge to make race “the basis of politics in this country.” His inaugural had launched him into the national political conversation, but it was Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door on June 11, 1963, that secured his place there. Wallace’s theatrics did nothing to stop the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama, the first African American students to enroll since Autherine Lucy’s brief stay in 1956, but he had known they wouldn’t. What he wanted was to set up a scenario in which he could stand up and denounce the tyrannical forces of federal authority for a national television audience. And in this he succeeded marvelously. He caught a break when Assistant Attorney General Nicholas de Katzenbach decided to approach Wallace himself, without Malone and Hood. It was prudent not to subject the two black students to potential violence, but the result was that Wallace wasn’t turning away polite, qualified black students. He was standing up to the government’s hatchet man, defending constitutional principles against federal overreach, or so he said. And many people around the country, a surprising number of them outside of the South, loved him for it, as signaled by the avalanche of letters and telegrams that poured into Wallace’s offices in the days and weeks following.

  Buoyed by the response, Wallace entered the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries with a vow to “shake the eyeteeth of the liberals in Washington.” He won roughly a third of the vote in primaries in Wisconsin and Indiana and very nearly won the Maryland primary outright. His rally at Serb Memorial Hall on Milwaukee’s South Side on April 1 was a preview of the seething, raucous gatherings that would come to characterize his future presidential campaigns. Seven hundred people jammed into the low-ceilinged community center adjacent to the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox church, with another three hundred outside. Tensions escalated when three black civil rights activists, who had staked out a place up front to confront Wallace directly, refused to stand during the national anthem. When one of them, Reverend Leo Champion, yelled at Wallace, “Get your dogs out!,” the rally organizer, Bronko Gruber, an ex-Marine tavern owner, grabbed the mike. “I’ll tell you something about your dogs, padre!” he shouted. “[T]hree weeks ago tonight a friend of mine was assaulted by three of your countrymen or whatever you want to call them…” Roars from the crowd drowned out the rest of the sentence. “They beat up old ladies 83-years old, rape our womenfolk. They mug people. They won’t work. They are on relief. How long can we tolerate this? Did I go to Guadalcanal and come back to something like this?” Wallace himself took the mike and the crowd calmed enough so that Reverend Champion and his associates could make their way out, showered by jeers. In his speech, Wallace implored the audience to send a message to Washington to let them know that “we want them to leave our homes, schools, jobs, business and farms alone.” When he finished, the throngs roared for five minutes. It took him an hour to shake all the hands and sign all the autographs.

  In those years when George Wallace was forging the politics of rage for the national scene, it would have been a strange project indeed for Harper Lee to rework Watchman to provide a more complex, historically grounded understanding of Atticus and his ilk. The Atticus of Mockingbird was already the symbolic antithesis of Wallace, sprung from the same south Alabama soil. In 1964 he still had a lot of important work to do. He had to make sure that George Wallace didn’t get to define the southern spirit.

  And not just the southern spirit, but the American one, too. In February 1963, the Hollywood Guilds Festival Committee had chosen Mockingbird to represent the United States at the Cannes Film Festival the following May. This was when participating countries still nominated only one film. It was screened on May 18, while conflict in Birmingham smoldered. One week before, bombs had destroyed the home of Martin Luther King’s brother, A. D. King, and parts of the A. G. Gaston Motel. The reaction to the film among the audience at the festival was mixed. Some people clapped during Peck’s more heroic moments, yet at the film’s conclusion boos and catcalls were interspersed with the applause and shouts of “bravo.”

  Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch giving his summation to the jury. (Getty Images)

  Afterward, an international group of reporters grilled Peck in a nearly hour-long news conference. “Wasn’t the picture an example of southern racism?” a French reporter asked. “The word racist has become a label that doesn’t mean much,” Peck answered. “The film represents a middle class moderate Southerner who is concerned about a Negro’s rights. I think this is how the Southern white moderate feels today.” Peck’s comments about white moderates came roughly a week before the publication of Martin Luther King’s condemnation of that group in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Another reporter asked Peck, “[D]o you like Negroes as you did in the film?” Peck said that he had never felt intolerance: “I’m thankful that I was born in an area where this type of prejudice doesn’t exist.” Peck was referring to southern California, where the very next year voters overturned an open housing law, where the year after that the Watts riot broke out, and where a few years after that, George Wallace’s 1968 campaign would tap deep and abiding strains of prejudice. An Israeli reporter asked Peck whether the character of Atticus was not too good to be true. “This is an ordinary type of American,” Peck replied. “My father was like this, and the father of Harper Lee… is like this also.”

  Quibble as one might, Peck was playing a bit role in a much larger drama. Allen Rivkin, the screenwriter who headed the American delegation at Cannes, noted that Peck’s press conference was the first time an American performer had answered questions from international reporters since Birmingham. “It is still a great problem,” Rivkin said, referring t
o racial tension, “but we are solving it and we are not afraid to talk about it or bring a picture on the race question to an international film festival.” The Kennedy administration was deeply concerned about how the violence in Birmingham was being covered internationally. A report sent to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on June 14, 1963, estimated that Soviet coverage of Birmingham was seven times that of the crisis in Oxford, Mississippi, where in 1962 James Meredith had become the first African American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Soviet foreign service news programs that were broadcast globally were reporting that racism was inevitable under the capitalist system, that the violence in Birmingham mocked US claims of leadership of the free world, and that racism in Alabama was “indicative of [US] policies toward colored peoples throughout the world.” The US Information Agency saw to it that editions of To Kill a Mockingbird were published in various Indian and Middle Eastern languages. Here in the middle of the ongoing Cold War, in the titanic struggle between democratic capitalism and communist authoritarianism, the heartwarming tale of an Alabama Brahmin defending an Untouchable seemed like a story all the world should hear.

  CLOSER TO HOME, other, more personal reasons inhibited Lee’s progress on another novel. She had worked out her first book in cheerful anonymity, but after Mockingbird there were new expectations, and new pressures. On the first anniversary of her book’s publication, Maurice Crain had gently inquired about a follow-up in a jokey telegram from “The Mockingbird.” “Tomorrow is my first birthday,” it read. “My agents think there should be another book written to keep me company. Do you think you can start one before I am another year old[?]” The pressure to match or exceed her first book wore on Lee. With Mockingbird she had been hoping “for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers,” she told an interviewer in 1964, “but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement.” She had hoped for a little, but had gotten a lot, which she said “in some ways… was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”