I agree that the book has no artistic obligation to make “constructive suggestions,” and that identifying class as a controlling factor in the Radley/Ewell incident is probably a mistake. Also that Finch’s courtroom defense is constrained by many factors that the Gladwell article is not taking into account.

But most of the commentary on Finch’s courtroom tactics are Gladwell quoting or paraphrasing “the legal scholar Steven Lubet.”

I thought Gladwell’s own argument is not primarily about what happens in the trial, but about Atticus’s view (and, perhaps, the book’s view) of the world, and especially of racial politics. I think it comes into focus here:

Here is where the criticism of Finch begins, because the hearts-and-minds approach is about accommodation, not reform. At one point, Scout asks him if it is O.K. to hate Hitler. Finch answers, firmly, that it is not O.K. to hate anyone. Really? Not even Hitler? When his children bring up the subject of the Ku Klux Klan’s presence in Maycomb, he shrugs: “Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan, but it was a political organization more than anything. Besides, they couldn’t find anyone to scare. They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass… . Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” Someone in Finch’s historical position would surely have been aware of the lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. Frank was convicted, on dubious evidence, of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan. The prosecutor in the case compared Frank to Judas Iscariot, and the crowd outside the courthouse shouted, “Hang the Jew!” Anti-Semitism of the most virulent kind was embedded in the social fabric of the Old South. But Finch does not want to deal with the existence of anti-Semitism. He wants to believe in the fantasy of Sam Levy, down the street, giving the Klan a good scolding.

In the middle of the novel, after Tom Robinson’s arrest, Finch spends the night in front of the Maycomb jail, concerned that a mob might come down and try to take matters into its own hands. Sure enough, one does, led by a poor white farmer, Walter Cunningham. The mob eventually scatters, and the next morning Finch tries to explain the night’s events to Scout. Here again is a test for Finch’s high-minded equanimity. He likes Walter Cunningham. Cunningham is, to his mind, the right sort of poor white farmer: a man who refuses a W.P.A. handout and who scrupulously repays Finch for legal work with a load of stove wood, a sack of hickory nuts, and a crate of smilax and holly. Against this, Finch must weigh the fact that Cunningham also leads lynch mobs against black people. So what does he do? Once again, he puts personal ties first. Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is “basically a good man,” who “just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, “It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.”

It seems to me he has a point here, even if he takes the criticism too far in a way that might be read as suggestive of a broader condemnation of Atticus Finch and of the book. I should add that I haven’t read the book since I was in the 9th grade, and I recall thinking it was fairly obvious and morally simplistic (in an oooh-scary-old-Boo-Radley-is-a-good-guy-after-all kind of way), but perhaps it does deserve revisiting with the benefit of the intervening years.

Gladwell’s last word is that, “A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama,” and I’m rather reluctant to follow him in suggesting that it in fact does not finally tell us about the world— but I wonder if he may have a point about its also telling us about the limitations of “Jim Crow liberalism,” which may be a mean way of saying the limitations of well-meaning moderation in the face of gross injustice.

I’m not a huge fan of the book myself, and though I have revisited it more recently than high school, I may take another glance at it soon. I think its best virtue is the simplicity with which the story unfolds, as narrated by Scout, and Lee’s elegant prose, even if both can but adorn a rather pedestrian lesson about Boo Radley. Still, that’s a child’s lesson to learn about the apparently deformed being in fact good, so I cut it some slack on that point.

I would agree that Atticus’s position and the effectiveness of his liberalism, such as it is, is very limited. But one doesn’t need several thousand words to say this. It seems that one needs only a sentence: Atticus loses the case, and Tom Robinson is convicted in a miscarriage of justice, goes to prison, and dies after attempting to escape. Lee isn’t lionizing Atticus’s effectiveness or even his liberality: he and whatever virtues (liberality) he has or political opinions (so-called liberalism) he holds fail to prevent a gross injustice. What’s more, I think readers get at once, through Scout’s narration and Atticus’s own opinions, the idea that this gross injustice results from the “structures” that underlie the town, since she’s learning about these structures over the course of the book. So, sure, Atticus is limited, and fails, and he lives under Jim Crow without destroying it.

To me, to turn this thin restatement of the book’s central premise into an extended argument about the book’s failure as a work of art, without any apparent awareness of this point’s already being plainly stated by the book itself, seems very lazy. It’s hard to understand how one could claim that Lee could even write this book without knowing very well that, whatever might be meant by the disingenuous (or perhaps just mean) phrase “Jim Crow liberalism,” it won’t get very far in the face of, well, the laws and norms that were Jim Crow. So why even write this article if you’re not going to say more than the book itself says, on its very face, and then just turn around and criticize it for not “telling us about life?” This just seems like an excuse to take some cheap shots at the easy target of Southern racism, without looking much at all at the work itself, let alone whatever is meant by Jim Crow liberalism.

Now, to respond to the more serious point of what I think Atticus may actually be saying, and leave Gladwell out of it. It seems like he might be doing two things in these referenced passages: trying not to scare his kids (there’s a lot of protection going on throughout the book), and trying to help them understand why particular people did particular bad things. I can’t say I agree with that mode of speech to children that would try to protect them from the horrors of the KKK. The answer to why apparently decent people commit horrible crimes, however, does seem like it must contain, on some level, the quoted account, although it certainly wouldn’t end with it. If you’re going to begin to understand people like Cunningham, which is necessary to start persuading them, you’re going to include something that looks like, “well, he does some good things, and then he can be persuaded to do very bad things.” To include this kind of thinking in your account, or your novel, doesn’t seem to me to let folks like Cunningham off the hook. I mean, Atticus does almost get killed by the lynch mob, in seeking to protect Tom Robinson from them.

Strange article. I think Gladwell is taking TKM to be the textbook of principled realism, and is complaining that it isn’t principled. I haven’t read the book, but it sounds from his synopsis that it’s a book about simultaneously standing up to and being compromised by “localism”, both of which are presented to the innocent narrator for examination. So, uh, yes, why doesn’t that tell us about the world? The whole story about Folsom is about someone who was replaced by extremists when the activists decided to move faster. That’s not to say that the activists were wrong, but it ignores the role of moderates in such situations. The “moderates” the West is rooting for in Iran are much more socially conservative than we can even imagine, and if they were any more liberal they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Your points, both hb & method, all seem valid to me, and I’m not sure I can see much deeper into the article without first returning to the book.

I feel compelled to explain that my reading of the article is in part informed by my having recently lived three years in Mississippi, and by my facing there much more realistically than I ever was able before a curiosity about how I might have felt and acted—which side I would have been on, really—if I had been a white man in Mississippi in the 1960s. Or, for that matter, in the 1860s. It’s a silly game to play with oneself, in a way, but it was sometimes hard to avoid.

I am able to feel with some confidence (and hope that I’m not only flattering myself) that I would have opposed slavery, that I would have favored civil rights and an end to Jim Crow; but beyond that, when it comes to methods? My present politics and sympathies are suggestive, certainly, but also important are matters of disposition, perhaps an inclination for caution and moderation. I suppose, in hindsight, that many people, including even Dr. King himself, were in many ways quite moderate and even conservative, and were merely made into radicals by the times. So who knows? But still, trying to reflect frankly and honestly, I can very easily imagine myself being quite like Atticus Finch— and after three years living in and reading about Mississippi, I am not all sure that this would have been the best, or even an especially good, way to be.

I think those sorts of imaginings have their place among the useful thoughts on ethics, Robbie, though of course they’re not without pitfalls. About Mississippi, in particular, I think it’s important to consider how radicalism would have had a more vivid meaning for a white man who’d grown up there and arrived at the 1860s or 1960s. Being a radical would have been come close to the etymologically primary meaning, since openly opposing slavery or segregation would have entailed wrenching out one’s roots from one’s richly deliberate home. (I think the South of that time, for many reasons, did in fact work harder at composing its society, at making and keeping its sense of home, than other regions and certainly than the sorts of places people my age largely have grown up in.) This act would have been exceedingly painful, more than I can really imagine, and it would have worked violence in more than one sense on oneself, one’s children, and that home. It would have been in service of a worthy goal, though it’s plausible to me that it mightn’t have been the right thing to do for many particular people, especially given the scale of the “structures” one would be attacking. It would have been a hell of a lot to ask of a man, is what I’m saying, and for some men, by the time they could reach an awareness of its being his moral duty, it would have been exceedingly difficult to uproot oneself. Perhaps Lee makes it a little too easy for Atticus, being a widower with two kids, but such are the circumstances men confront, and might make for good poetry.

No matter the possibility of radicalism, or its suitability, it’s certain to me that failing to counteract the evil in one’s home would forever stain, if not corrupt, one’s potential excellence. That’s not a circumstance unique to the South, however. No, it’s the lot of all men in all cities.