We're nearing the end of the Watchman symposium -- we may have another post or two by Monday and then Steve Lubet will conclude the symposium early next week. This post is by Mary Ellen Maatman, who teaches Employment Discrimination Law, Torts, Legal Writing, and Law and Literature at Widener University’s Delaware Law School. She has written about the work of segregationist lawyers, as well as the meaning of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. She reflects here on the historical authenticity of Go Set a Watchman.
Like some of my fellow bloggers, I harbor doubts that Harper Lee ever meant to publish Go Set a Watchman. Yet, this book’s publication gives us a gift of remembrance that is especially useful at this time.
Elsewhere, I have suggested it is best to regard Watchman’s Atticus as a character whom Harper Lee mindfully chose to transform into Mockingbird’s beloved Atticus. That final Atticus represented what Lee ultimately wanted to say in the midst of the modern Civil Rights era.
Widespread love for this definitive Atticus set readers up for a shock upon encountering Watchman’s “first draft” Atticus. Consideration of history lessens the shock, and gives us a more thorough understanding of lawyers’ mixed roles in civil rights history.
Watchman’s Atticus is utterly representative of the majority of the South’s lawyers when it was drafted. In fact, 1957 may have been the White Citizens’ Council’s peak year in Alabama. Neil McMillen’s The Citizens’ Council documents the movement’s burst of growth in Alabama in 1956. In the wake of Autherine Lucy’s attempt to enroll in the University of Alabama and the Montgomery Bus Boycott—both alluded to in Watchman—Alabama’s movement grew to some 40,000 people, and a vigorous membership drive consumed 1957.
John Bartlow Martin’s The Deep South Says Never documented the rise of the White Citizens’ Council movement in opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This movement attracted the South’s most respectable factions—its real-life Atticus Finches. Founding members of the first council chapter included “a planter, a farmer, a dentist, the mayor, a lawyer, a [cotton] ginner, [and] a druggist and hardware dealer.” Martin explained how the council movement attracted such respectable men: it “eschewed secrecy . . . forswore violence, [and] proposed to prevent segregation by legal means.” In fact, the organizers’ strategy was to spread the segregationist word through local service clubs.
The meeting Jean Louise observes in Maycomb’s courthouse might well have been part of Alabama’s 1957 membership drive: Maycomb’s “trash” and “most respectable men” sit side by side listening to “Mr. Grady O’Hanlon” tell them why they need the citizens’ council. The snatches of O’Hanlon’s rhetoric in Watchman perfectly echo the era’s council propaganda. For example, the equation of school desegregation with the destruction of Christian civilization and the triumph of Communism was a staple of movement rhetoric. Likewise, the council literature Jean Louise finds at her father’s house echoes the rhetoric of one of the movement’s leading writers and speakers, Mississippi judge Thomas P. Brady.
This rhetoric was ugly enough, but the council movement espoused more than talk. McMillen documented the movement’s use of economic boycotts, “social pressure, and in some cases violence” to thwart desegregation. To be fair, McMillen found that these tactics faded after 1955, but this was clearly a determined movement. It is little wonder that Watchman’s Calpurnia says to Jean Louise, “ ‘what are you all doing to us?’ ”
In all likelihood, many more southern lawyers participated in the council movement than rejected it. Though the South was not monolithic in its opposition to Brown, McMillen found that “as many as 250,000 to 300,000 people from virtually every station of southern life” joined citizens’ councils and like organizations rather than leave massive resistance to their state legislators. According to McMillen, the councils drew membership including “governors, congressmen, judges, physicians, lawyers, industrialists, and bankers.” Such representation was important to the council movement’s avowed “respectability,” perhaps accounting for Calpurnia’s double-edged observation in Watchman that Atticus “ ‘always do right.’ ” In fact, council leaders would have deemed Atticus Finch a key recruit, given that its founders claimed to want “ ‘the finest and the best intelligence, the best law-abiding group, the most courageous, [and] the most honest.’ ” (McMillen at 22.)
History has forgottenthis time and mindset familiar to Harper Lee and her earliest readers, but Watchman brings it back to us. From today’s perspective, Watchman’s dose of historical reality is both sobering and instructive. Large swaths of readers for years grew comfortable with the fiction that Mockingbird’s Atticus represented some sort of lawyer archetype; now, those readers must adjust themselves to a more grim reality.
In Watchman, Lee attempted to confront this reality head on, only to stall in the book’s closing. Nonetheless, she tried to “talk back” to those whom southern progressive Lillian Smith once called “Killers of the Dream” by arguing with the tenets of their movement. Had Watchman actually been published when written, it is doubtful whether itsimpact would have been discernible; after all, Smith’s work had limited impact.
In Mockingbird, Leetook another route. This book held a kind of reverse mirror up to segregationist obstructionists by fleshing out in Atticus a counterstory of what southern law and lawyers could be, and sometimes were. Mockingbird’s counterstory was powerful enough tosuccessfully outlast the council’s rhetoric in the public’s memory. Much as I love Mockingbird, I am not sure this was a good thing. We lawyers had our Atticus, but it was at the cost of remembering all facets of our profession’s work.
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