It's my great pleasure to introduce a blog symposium on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, which we'll be running this week at the faculty lounge. So much of the commentary has been on Atticus Finch's fall from hero status when we learn that he's a supporter of the local White Citzens Council and that he debates Jean Louise over the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And there is certainly a lot to talk about there -- from how Atticus fits with our understanding of southern "moderates" to the clash of constitutional visions between Atticus and Jean Louise, to gender, and a lot more than that. And then there are the myriad of questions about this as literature (as opposed to its importance as a document about southern attitudes and race relations at the twilight of Jim Crow), and of course about the ethics of publishing this now.
Over the next week we'll be posting a lot of takes on Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird.
What struck me on my initial reading was how much Jean Louise articulated a new vision for the fourteenth amendment that was so different from Atticus' backward looking constitutional law. Atticus had a constitutional vision grounded in states rights, in white supremacy, and in an out-moded historical understanding. "What would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights?," Atticus asks Jean Louise. "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 Atticus' idea that Reconstruction (then called Redemption by so many white southerners) was a period of disaster for white people in the south. It correlates with, I'm sad to say, Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, which was made into the movie Birth of a Nation.
In place of Atticus' constitutionalism, Jean Louise had a separate vision (though she did criticize the Supreme Court for overstepping on the Tenth Amendment). She thought that the Court ""had to do it. It was put under their noses and they had to do it." In her straight-forward phrasing, "the time has come when we’ve got to do right." It was a vision of equal treatment grounded in a Jefferson-like slogan “Equal rights for all; special privileges for none."
These conflicting visions remind me in some ways of the Herbert Wechsler -- Charles Black debate about Brown. Black suggested that there was something inherently lawful in equal treatment. (And speaking of Charles Black, I think you'll find Robin Black's essay about Atticus and her father a very moving read.) Charles Black, some many other civil rights leaders, Jean Louise, and the Supreme Court had a constitutional vision fit for the Atomic Age. Meanwhile people like Atticus and his brother were lamenting the decline of property rights, which we saw again over debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to the posts; the ones that have come in already are terrific. The first one will post early tomorrow morning and we'll go from there.
Update as of Spring 2017, the Cumberland Law Review published a symposium on Harper Lee in fall 2016.
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