Go Set a Watchman: Quick Takes on Legal History

Maybe I'm going to be swimming against the tide on this one (not that different from walking out of Django and saying maybe I'm the only the person in the country who feels this way, but there was less violence in there than I'd expected -- and everyone looked at me and said, yes you are). But I think there's a lot to admire in Go Set a Watchman.

First off, as others have commented Tom Robinson's trial occupies only a small part in this novel, and get this -- he was acquitted. Bet there's an interesting story, which we'll likely never know, about why Lee switched the outcome. And so we're primed to see Atticus in even more God-like terms than before. But instead we find him attending a White Citizens Council meeting where all the usual rhetoric about how "God made the races separate" and the "Supreme Court justices are a bunch of communists" appear. And it's not just that the Court and federal government are in favor of integration; the New Deal and social security come under attack.

There are a couple of chapters that I think will warrant particular scrutiny in this. There's discussion in chapter eight about the centrality of property rights to civilization. The property professor in me just loves this stuff. (Also, a quick aside here: there's a cameo for an Alabama law professor who teaches procedure. Not the nicest guy in the world. I'll have to hunt around to see who that was. In fact, legal education isn't portrayed too favorably in here.)

Chapter 17 has the White Citizens Council meeting. Sounds just like them. Lee got their rhetoric right, I think. Maybe not all that hard. For me the most interesting part is chapter 18, where Atticus and Jean Louise discuss Brown v. Board of Education. Jean Louise is angry with the Supreme Court, because she thinks they overstepped the tenth amendment and they're telling southerners what to do again. The "again" part is somewhat confusing.  Does she mean for the first time?  Or is that a reference to the Civil War?  Jean Louise supports the outcome in Brown and believes it's necessary and just -- and she focuses on the many ways that Jim Crow is an attack on dignity. So while in some ways she sounds like Herbert Wechsler, she ends up with a defense of Brown. There's a lot to say about the conflicting views of constitutional interpretation. There's a lot more in here, about how Jean Louise is out of place in Maycomb, not just because of her views on race, integration, and citizenship are different from those of her father and uncle, but because she has different values on family and gender-roles from the people she grew up with. This reflects again that constitutional ideas and political philosophy correlate with a whole set of ideas that do not at first appear to be about politics at all.

While the reviewers are pronouncing this book a mess and a failure, those of us interested in our nation's long struggle with racial equality are going to be turning to this to understand the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This gives us a glimpse of those who opposed integration, the generational struggles within the white community in the south, and it asks us to take a look at ourselves and ask what more is needed for justice. This is a more introspective book than Mockingbird, though certainly not the celebratory story of Mockingbird and I can sure understand why Lee's editors at Lippincott wanted a very different book.

I, for one, am really happy we have this. And can I admit that I prefer it to Mockingbird, which strikes me as too celebratory. This one is more pessimistic, but I think it offers a story that causes us to wonder about our demons and what more is necessary rather than offering up a two-dimensional hero. I am delighted we have this book and it raises Harper Lee in my estimation.

Update: I have some more thoughts, "Go Set a Watchman Reveals America's Constitutional Conundrum" up in Time magazine's ideas section.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

The portrait of the "two-dimensional hero," Atticus Finch was, in any case, based on a careless reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Monroe Freedman makes clear in his essay, "Atticus Finch—Right and Wrong," 45 Alabama Law Review 473 (1994), available here: http://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/faculty_scholarship/220/

See too this post by Stephen Gillers at the Legal Ethics Forum: http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2015/07/atticus-finch-a-racist-monroe-freedman-would-not-be-surprised.html#comments

[Anders Walker]

Well said Al, it's interesting to contemplate the editor's role in all this. Looking forward to picking up a copy.

[Ron Turner]

Hear hear

[Alfred L. Brophy]

Thanks for the kind words, Anders and Ron -- and Anders I've been thinking a lot about your book on moderates in this context. I'm guessing Atticus wouldn't even qualify for inclusion on your list of moderates, though.

Patrick -- Monroe's article (and a host of others, including Steve Lubet's that I linked to in the last post and by my friend Katie Rose Guest Pryal) called into question Atticus' hero status. And I think there might have been more he could have done to help Tom's case. However, the central tendency of TKAM was criticism of a legalized lynching -- similar to the actual lynchings in Tuscaloosa in 1933 and to the very-nearly successful legal lynchings in Scottsboro also in the early 1930s -- and the elevation of Atticus for the courage for standing up to that, even if unsuccessfully. Where in TKAM Atticus was on the right side of history, as the lines of battle in the civil rights movement changed, he ended up on the other side. This might have been predicted, though perhaps not to the same degree that we saw in GSAW.

And to take this one step further, one wonders how someone like Jean Louise might react to the black power movement of the 1960s/early 1970s, which took the claims of the Civil Rights movement one step further.

[Mary Ellen Maatman]

I'm looking forward to reading it for precisely the reasons you've articulated.

[Miriam Cherry]

I appreciate your view, but to me it took away from the story, sadly. It was just a bummer of a read. I think Lee is fairly explicit that she is engaging in iconoclastic behavior. The most interesting part of the book might have been what in the world the author was thinking.

[twbb]

"those of us interested in our nation's long struggle with racial equality are going to be turning to this to understand the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s"

Does this really give us any new or groundbreaking information about the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? There are probably 100,000+ people living today who grew up in the south during that time period, both black and white, as well as pivotal civil rights leaders from that time period still alive, and many first-person non-fiction accounts and ethnographic research. Does this book add much on that dimension?

[Alfred L. Brophy]

twbb,

Among the things Watchman does is provide an account of the division within the white community over civil rights (and Brown in particular) written at the time (not clouded by memories or re-writing of history that is so common for oral histories). It has also brought attention to the breadth of support for groups like the White Citizens Council.