Vol. 174: Atticus Finch, reconsidered
Would you want him as your lawyer?
Who could ever dare criticize Atticus Finch?
The hero of Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a model of civic rectitude— based on her father— in an otherwise narrowminded 1930s Alabama town. As a widower, he dispenses kindness and wisdom to his children without raising his voice. As a lawyer, he defends a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. In the 1962 film adaptation, when spat upon by a white bigot, Atticus (played by the unfailingly decent Gregory Peck) merely wipes the spittle off his cheek and proceeds on his pacifist way.
What killjoy could possibly find fault with such a noble character?
As it turns out, Harper Lee herself may have been one such wet blanket. In 2015, when this reclusive author was 89 years old, sight- and hearing-impaired, not to mention the victim of two strokes, she “discovered” and published her second novel. Go Set a Watchman may well have been Lee’s 55-year-old first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird— a darker, more nuanced rumination about small-town Southern bigotry that was probably reshaped by a gifted editor into the much more readable and comfortingly gallant novel, easily digestible by most middle-school students. And where Mockinghbird is set in the distant 1930s, Watchman takes place in the more immediate ’50s.
racist Atticus?
But the Atticus Finch of Watchman is no idol. He’s a racist, for one thing. He’s a member of the White Citizens Council, for another. And he’s much more cautiously conservative than the Atticus of Mockingbird.
“Listen, Scout,“ he tells his daughter, now an adult in her 20s, “what would happen if all the Negroes in the South were suddenly given full civil rights? I’ll tell you. There would be another Reconstruction. Would you want your state government run by people who don’t know how to run ’em?”
SaraKay Smullens, the Philadelphia writer and therapist, has suggested— persuasively, I think — that Harper Lee was muzzled for decades by her domineering older sister (and lawyer) Alice Lee, who had a vested interest in protecting the fantasy image of their fictitious father figure portrayed in Mockingbird. Not until Alice Lee died in 2014 at the age of 103 did Harper Lee dare to “discover” her more nuanced and negative Watchman manuscript.
The simple facts
Penalize me for piling on if you must, but I’ve found another defect in the saintly Atticus that even Harper Lee and her editor missed: He’s a crummy lawyer.
I watched a TV screening of To Kill a Mockingbird the other night and noticed a Finch flaw that had previously escaped me. The film’s emotional high point comes during the trial of Tom Robinson, the Black man unjustly accused of rape, when Atticus delivers his emotional closing argument to the jury. It’s a doozy.
(You can read the whole speech here.)
“Gentlemen,” he begins, “I shall be brief, but I would like to use my remaining time with you to remind you that this case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant.
“To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This case is as simple as black and white. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant.”
So far, so good. Atticus is beseeching the jurors to examine the evidence, or the lack thereof, all of which is on his side. But before you know it, he shifts gears and attacks the whole Southern system of racial segregation.
‘She kissed a Black man”
“I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the state,” Atticus declares, alluding to the alleged rape victim. “But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man’s life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with.”
His strategy, see, is to defend a Black man by attacking a white woman before a jury of good old white men.
“She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance,” Atticus continues, “but I cannot pity her: She is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it. She persisted, and her subsequent reaction is something that all of us have known at one time or another. She did something every child has done— she tried to put the evidence of her offense away from her….
“What was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did. What did she do? She tempted a Negro. She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: She kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man.”
This is great stuff, if you’re a political reformer, or a clergyman, or an actor auditioning for a screen test. But a lawyer’s first obligation is to his client. By attacking the South’s cherished Jim Crow system, Atticus alienates everyone on that all-white jury.
‘Do your duty’
The witnesses for the state, he asserts, “have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption— the evil assumption— that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you.”
That speech resonated with me when I first heard it in the early ’60s. Of course, I then was an Ivy League college student living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The jurors sitting in judgment on Tom Robinson were uneducated white bozos from a provincial Southern town in the 1930s. Atticus would’ve been well advised to try a different approach with such a jury.
Then comes the angry peroration: “In the name of God, do your duty.”
Atticus leaves the jurors no choice: They can acquit his client only if they also sign up for the Civil Rights movement. Surprise! They opted for conviction.
Maybe Atticus should have been a doctor?
Full disclosure time: I should mention that Julie Fallowfield, Harper Lee’s literary agent from 1970 to 1996, also represented me from 1975 to 1996 (when she retired). And Alan Pakula, who produced the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, was my cousin. Oh yes— and Rosemary Murphy, who played Atticus’s goodhearted next-door neighbor in the film, attended the same summer camp in the French Alps that I went to. But I never discussed the author, the book, or the film with any of them.
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
Launched just today, the NAACP's “Out of Bounds” campaign urges current and prospective Black athletes, their families, alumni, and fans to “withhold athletic and financial support” from major public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation.” So, basically, most of the South. Mostly college football and basketball. Just waiting for the Blacks in the pros to do the same.
I refer to the 1962 movie. Gregory Peck seems to have understood who he needed to be. He was no southern anything. He came across as a distant cerebral northern educated white man which was all he, as Gregory Peck, could be without making the character sanctimonious. Yes, the cerebral saved his character. If he knew this, we may never know, but he made the character believable in the narrowest sense even if the rest of his personal domestic setting was difficult to swallow as typically southern. Yes, he probably did not know the cues that any other white southern defense lawyer might have understood even if he was doing more than going through the motions as a public defender of a black man. Therefore, we cannot judge Peck on his authenticity as a southern white lawyer, but only whether he sticks to the script of being the cerebral white northern educated lawyer who happens to practice in a small southern town. We don’t have to pick apart his mannerisms or decide whether he was ‘real’ southern. Therefore, his stiffness at times can be forgiven because he exemplified the cerebral white northern educated type and not someone passing as southern white. Perhaps Peck understood that if he had attempted to be that tried and true southern white lawyer, the script would have become nonsensical. For if he was truly a southerner at the time this story took place and took the stance in the case that he did, he might have ended up in the trunk of a car sunk deep in a swamp. Or in the least, have lost his practice no matter how many people thought he was a fine and upstanding officer of the law. Kudos to Peck. He deserved the Oscar. He took a script that wanted to be a parable and made a more believable character even if his insertion into the story made the rest of the film seem at times less authentic.