August 14, 2009
Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism
Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:
In 1954, when James (Big Jim) Folsom was running for a second term as governor of Alabama, he drove to Clayton, in Barbour County, to meet a powerful local probate judge. This was in the heart of the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was in full effect. In Barbour County, the races did not mix, and white men were expected to uphold the privileges of their gender and color. But when his car pulled up to the curb, where the judge was waiting, Folsom spotted two black men on the sidewalk. He jumped out, shook their hands heartily, and only then turned to the stunned judge. “All men are just alike,” Folsom liked to say.
Big Jim Folsom was six feet eight inches tall, and had the looks of a movie star. He was a prodigious drinker, and a brilliant campaigner, who travelled around the state with a hillbilly string band called the Strawberry Pickers. The press referred to him (not always affectionately) as Kissin’ Jim, for his habit of grabbing the prettiest woman at hand. Folsom was far and away the dominant figure in postwar Alabama politics—and he was a prime example of that now rare species of progressive Southern populist.
Folsom would end his speeches by brandishing a corn-shuck mop and promising a spring cleaning of the state capitol. He was against the Big Mules, as the entrenched corporate interests were known. He worked to extend the vote to disenfranchised blacks. He wanted to equalize salaries between white and black schoolteachers. He routinely commuted the death sentences of blacks convicted in what he believed were less than fair trials. He made no attempt to segregate the crowd at his inaugural address. “Ya’ll come,” he would say to one and all, making a proud and lonely stand for racial justice.
Big Jim Folsom left office in 1959. The next year, a young Southern woman published a novel set in mid-century Alabama about one man’s proud and lonely stand for racial justice. The woman was Harper Lee and the novel was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and one way to make sense of Lee’s classic—and of a controversy that is swirling around the book on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary—is to start with Big Jim Folsom.
More here.
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Posted by: Ruchira | Aug 14, 2009 5:20:07 PM
Yes! Go to Ruchira's blog for very interesting and valuable opinions on this article, and so much else.
Southerners like me, who have been aware of Atticus Finch since childhood, have had a long time to think about him. To have been a white Alabama lawyer in the far advance guard of the Civil Rights movement would have made Atticus -- or anyone else -- little short of a hero. This is not how he was represented; he was only a man who did not deny the humanity of his fellow men, black or white. For the era, that was quite advanced -- trust me.
There is certainly condescension in Atticus, and self-congratulation. One cannot say whether Harper Lee knew this as she wrote, but a novelist might well make a character who lives on a higher plane than most a bit self-righteous -- that would fall under the heading of realism in literature.
For Gladwell to point out that the long run-up to the Civil Rights Era was figured with half-enlightened folks who were yet more racist and condescending than they would ever, ever know is -- unnecessary. Or, is it? Maybe it's a good thing to occasionally do that 10,000 mile check-up for condescension -- it's nice if you're the one who detects it in yourself.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 14, 2009 7:41:12 PM
Sigh...
I read that piece and kept going. My first reaction as a Southerner was "Here's yet another Yankee looking South down his condescending nose. All he knows about walking in someone else's moccasins is that if they were uncomfortable it's because they were not the right size. Had they fit more appropriately he might know all he needs to know.
"Outliers" may be the most important book of a generation and Gladwell hit upon some ideas as important as Toffler did in "Future Shock" in the Sixties. But I have read Future Shock, Mr. Gladwell, and you're no Alvin Toffler. If history teaches no other lesson it is that the further in the past we look the better we think we see, overlooking whether that proto-human painting cave drawings felt, thought or made rational choices about his ecosystem.
Hell no, he didn't. His main reason for getting up in the morning was the same as ours: stay alive another day, put food on the table and try not to go to bed hungry. He and his buddies sitting around the fire didn't have long conversations about why their belly buttons were in the middle of their tummies instead of near their butts because birthing would make more sense if navels were located at the other end of things.
Harper Lee knew Atticus Finch. She understood that man far better than Malcolm Gladwell. And she knew, just as I knew my own father, that he was a man, not a diety, whose instincts and respect for human decency were intact. And in the words of the serenity prayer, he was obliged to accept the things he could not change.
And if that meant allowing a contradiction or two into his universe, it's no different from the subtext of Fried Green Tomatoes which includes a timeless image of the remains of a dead racist being fed to his peers as barbecue.
Let the man without contradictions cast the first stone.
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 15, 2009 7:38:48 AM
I didn't really see Gladwell as being condescending in that article, any more than Orwell was being condescending to Dickens in the quote on page 4; it was just an interesting discussion of the fact that sometimes being a well-intentioned person trying to do good things on a small scale isn't enough, that there are larger structural problems in a society which need to be reformed in order for justice to be achieved. Nothing in the article suggested to me that Gladwell would say our own society is exempt from such problems (consider environmental problems today, and whether they are likely to be solved solely by individuals caring about animals and being dutiful about recycling). But to see such problems and find solutions for them we may need to view society more with the eyes of a Martian viewing society as a system to be analyzed, and less with the eyes of a moralist interested in the narratives of individuals and what is in the heart of each person.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Aug 15, 2009 11:34:03 PM
A superb analogy, Jesse M. -- and nice to see you.
If there had been significantly more men like Atticus in the Mid-century South, the treatment that Black people received might have been...oh, kinder. But Civil Rights are not a question of good treatment, kindness, individual acts of refraining from the worst sort of racist nastiness, etc., etc. Civil Rights are about equality before the law, so that the good will of Whites who tolerate you is not your best safeguard. Had there been vastly more Whites like Atticus in positions of responsibility, and no Civil Rights movement, it is easily conceivable that Whites like Atticus would control the South, never doubting that their excellent treatment of Blacks was quite sufficient to redress their forefathers' crimes, and to secure a just society for all. Men like Atticus do not give you freedom -- not because they are bad men, but because freedom is something you take for yourself.
Now, Jesse -- to pursue the analogy, who shall act for the earth? And which Martian shall show the way?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 16, 2009 12:29:32 AM
Now, Jesse -- to pursue the analogy, who shall act for the earth? And which Martian shall show the way?
Al Gore? ;) Seriously, I wish I knew. The "Martian" description might make it sound like I'm talking about dispassionate analysis free from moralism, but that obviously wasn't the case with the civil rights struggle; for big societal problems like this, what's needed is the ability to have a big-picture vision of a different type of society combined with the ability to win "hearts and minds", a lot of which is based on moral persuasion (though it's a different type of moral persuasion than the kind just directed at reforming individual behavior). I think it's harder to make the injustice of what we're doing to the environment visceral in the same way as the injustice of segregation, which caused a lot of clear human suffering.
Posted by: Jesse M. | Aug 16, 2009 3:30:04 AM
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