Lines from Go Set a Watchman

With just a little bit of perspective, I want to pick out some lines from Go Set a Watchman that'll resonate with lawyers, law students, and law faculty (particularly property professors, I think).  The most exciting to me -- as a property professor and someone who studies property rights in the old south -- is "The time-honored, common-law concept of property-- a man's interest in and duties to that property--has become almost extinct.  People's attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed.  The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due."  (I know that's Atticus' brother speaking, but later he says that Atticus thinks the same.)  My gosh that sounds like stuff my antebellum southerners were saying.  And it also sounds a lot like what people were saying in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Much of the action divides along the reactions of Jean Louise versus her Maycomb relatives to the growing civil rights movement.  Early on, Atticus offers to defend a young African American man accused of (I guess it's) vehicle homicide -- he ran over a drunk white man who was in the street.  The man is Calpurnia's grandson -- and Atticus makes the offer so that NAACP lawyers won't take the case ; they would start asking questions about the composition of the jury pool.  This makes me think that the violence Karl Llewellyn wrote about back in 1933 -- which was designed to scare African Americans in Alabama away from using outside counsel.

Atticus' critique of Brown v. Board of Education reveals the breadth of his ideas of white supremacy.  When Atticus got past his critique of the law, he arrived at pure ideas of white superiority and black inferiority.  "What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights?," he asks.  "I’ll tell you. There’d be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ’em?"  (This reflects the ideas about Reconstruction -- called redemption, as in white southerners redeemed the south from the dominion of Yankees and African Americans -- so prevalent in southern thought from the 1890s through the Civil Rights movement.  And there are other echoes of this history in the book, such as Atticus' statement (or was it Jean Louise's thought?) that "No war was ever fought for so many different reasons.")

Perhaps the key to Atticus was his adherence to law, as he interpreted it.  And what the law meant to him was fixed in fundamental ways by the social surroundings.  Jean Louise thought that meant some kind of abstract justice, but not formal equality.  She told Atticus that "You love justice .... Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief— nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief ."  

At least that how Atticus' family thought about him -- Atticus' brother thought that "he’ll always do it by the letter and by the spirit of the law."  That may be a lot of what explains the shift from Atticus the lawyer working against lynching and the supporter of the White Citizens Council.  He was against lynchings, but not in favor of a law that upheld equal status.  

Jean Louise also had a critique of Brown ("[I]n trying to satisfy one amendment, it looks like they rubbed out another one . The Tenth. It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow.”)  And yet Jean Louise can see through this, to the reality.  (There's something to be done with her and legal realism, I'm feeling pretty sure.)  For she veered away from criticizing the Court to supporting the result: "that I don’t approve of the way they did it, 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. Atticus, the time has come when we’ve got to do right."  And this is a place where Jean Louise, even, seems to have a paternalist view towards African American citizens.  She asks "Has anybody , in all the wrangling and high words over states’ rights and what kind of government we should have, thought about helping the Negroes."  Now it's hard to know just how much of this is flat-out paternalism (as in African Americans need help from white people) versus a sense -- that we sometimes hear from the like of DuBois -- that laws should look towards facilitating advancement (such as providing a decent education) rather than regulating.

Regarding the presence of communists at the University of Alabama (Robin Kelly has something to say about this, obviously):

I do know there's a cell right up the road in Tuscaloosa, and if it weren't for those boys a n--d be goin' to classes with the rest of 'em. ...

Didn't you read about those fancy professors asking those questions in that--that Convocation?  Why, they'd let her right in.  If it hadn't been for those fraternity boys.

And as long as I'm thinking about the University of Alabama, how about this law professor talking about his course in Alabama procedure: 

Although [Henry Clinton] was able to keep up and manage very well, he learned little of practical value. Atticus Finch was right when he said the only good the University did Henry was let him make friends with Alabama’s future politicians, demagogues, and statesmen. One began to get an inkling of what law was about only when the time came to practice it. Alabama and common law pleading, for instance, was a subject so ethereal in nature that Henry passed it only by memorizing the book. The bitter little man who taught the course was the lone professor in the school who had guts enough to try to teach it, and even he evinced the rigidity of imperfect understanding. “Mr. Clinton,” he had said, when Henry ventured to inquire about a particularly ambiguous examination, “you may write until doomsday for all I care, but if your answers do not coincide with my answers they are wrong. Wrong, sir.

I'll have to look and see who was teaching Alabama procedure at the University back in the 1940s, to see if this is a wink at someone in particular.  As to law school, Atticus "said it took at least five years to learn law after one left law school: one practiced economy for two years, learned Alabama Pleading for two more, reread the Bible and Shakespeare for the fifth."

The confusion of Jean Louise -- and so many other white southerners -- is captured at the end of the book when she says, "I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who's preserving it for me."  The upshot here is that everyone comes out looking more human and less heroic -- and in that regard I think this book has better portrayals of the south's challenges and what the Civil Rights movement had to face as it remade the world.

Update: I've put some of this together into a short piece that's up at Time magazine's ideas section.

Comments

[Anders Walker]

Al, you're comments on Alabama Law raise an interesting question: is Lee's take on legal education and the law in general somehow related to her own experience as a law student? According to Charles Shields's biography "I Am Scout," Lee attended law school at the University of Alabama in the 1940s but dropped out before graduating. Average class size was around 100 (mostly male), faculty numbered 13, and Daniel J. Meador was one of her classmates. Lee began law school as a junior thanks to a special program at the university, but because she dropped out before graduating, never earned a degree, not even a BA. According to Shields, Lee's father was "crestfallen" that she dropped out a semester short of graduation.

[Alfred L. Brophy]

I'm guessing that this is related in some way to Harper Lee's experience at UA Law. I'm going to hunt around and see who was teaching Alabama pleading back in the late 1940s. Perhaps this is a nod in the direction of that person.

[anon]

Al

"Now it's hard to know just how much of this is flat-out paternalism (as in African Americans need help from white people) versus a sense -- that we sometimes hear from the like of DuBois -- that laws should look towards facilitating advancement (such as providing a decent education) rather than regulating."

Republicans favor "equal opportunity" (e.g., a "decent education" to use your words) but not "equal outcomes" (e.g., affirmative action in admissions, hiring, etc. that bends "objective" criteria in favor of diversity).

Al, most of your colleagues would think that affirmative action is justified when choosing among equally qualified candidates (based on non racial criteria), but also justified by making one of those "qualifications" race. Would you characterize giving an edge in hiring to a black female candidate as "paternalism" if, for example, her non-racial "qualifications" were less impressive that those of a white male competitor?

Obviously, a discourse on affirmative action is beyond the scope of this comment section. But, this is sort of a basic "yes" or "no" ...

I ask because the sentence quoted above seemed out of character with your usually quite apparent bias (e.g., never giving an inch or an ounce of credit to a "white" person - even if that person reversed the conviction of a black defendant in an era when such reversals were not easy - because that person was white and your assumptions about his racism despite laudable action are unshakeable, or combing thru a work of fiction, seeking any tidbit of expression that might be waived around as emblematic of the "racist South" (as if other areas of the country were not as bad or worse) to satisfy notions about "racist white Southerners" so popular today.

All this hoopla reminds one of a person "discovering" Archie Bunker and then making broad sweeping generalizations about racist Irish New Yorkers. Some truth to it? Sure. But not enough, IMHO, for a historian to pronounce as evidence of anything.

[anon]

POST

If the South was solid blue, rather than red, you wouldn't be hearing non stop about how the entire South is just a collection of redneck, racist, secessionist Confederates from journalists and politicians and others who live in segregated enclaves, send their kids to segregated private schools, etc. in the North and elsewhere.