Malcolm Gladwell Kills a Mockingbird
Posted on August 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »
The other day one of my colleagues asked if I’d read the latest Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker, “The Courthouse Ring—Atticus Finch and the Limits of Southern Liberalism.”
She liked it a lot.
About an hour later a friend e-mailed me and asked the same question. “Have you read Gladwell in New Yorker this week?” he wrote. “It’s execrable.”
(Or something similar.)
Gladwell writes about former Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom, and then he writes about Atticus Finch, and he decries them both as, essentially, accomodationist. His thesis:
A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.
This is an odd sort of article whose presence in the magazine I don’t entirely understand, except that its author can publish pretty much whatever he wants these days. It certainly compels the reader to reconsider one’s reading of To Kill a Mockingbird.
But is Gladwell’s interpretation of Atticus Finch—his critique of Finch—really fair? Or does he set up a straw man (two, if you count Folsom) only to tear it/them down? In other words, is his criticism of Finch based on a fair presentation of Finch, or one that excludes critical facts and information that Gladwell omits?
(And if so, does that have implications for Gladwell’s technique elsewhere?)
Curious to hear your thoughts, if you’ve read the piece.
13 Responses
8/10/2024 10:00 am
Folsom was a politician whose “schtick” was that he believed black Americans ought to be treated decently. Finch was a smalltown lawyer defending a black man on trial. The distinction makes all the difference. Folsom’s racial tolerance smells like vanity and, given his position, he can be tagged with the failure to attack the systemic nature of the problem. To look at Finch through the same lens is to miss the fact that his “localism” — his willingness, as Gladwell has it, to accommodate to local prejudices even as he abhors them personally — is intended to serve his client’s interest. If Gladwell were defending Robinson, he would, apparently, have used the trial as a soapbox to attack Jim Crow. What good would that have done? Of course, Gladwell also notes that Finch’s unsuccessful defense can be questioned on legal grounds. This is true. Among other things, Finch fails to object to Mayella’s testimony even after she refuses to answer questions and doesn’t object to his client being called “buck” or “boy”. Further, the heroic Finch defends his client by using one of the oldest tricks in the book in a rape trial: attack the morals of the “victim” (i.e., she “wanted it”). Indeed, this probably backfired, since the last thing a jury of Southern white males would want to contemplate is the possibility that a white woman, any white woman, could desire a black man. What I think this criticism misses is, first, the fact that this is a movie. Gladwell notes that the big enchilada in Finch’s defense is demonstrating to the jury that Robinson could not have caused the injury on the right side of Mayella’s face (and that her left-handed father might have) because Robinson’s left hand was crippled — ignoring the fact that he could easily have hit her crosswise. Watching the movie, though, one takes the point that Finch is doing his best to expose the real truth behind the whole event. This leads to a second point, which is that a criticism of Finch on moral and political grounds — the point of Gladwell’s article — cannot be supported by evidence that he was less than a stellar lawyer. Why do we love Atticus Finch? Because he was an idealized father figure, sure — gentle, calm, morally upright, tolerant, capable of real strength in the face of wickedness. But also because, by his admittedly “local” example, he offered a critique of Jim Crow prejudice that may have been more powerful in that town and at that time than any speech or sitdown or march could have been. It is easy, from Gladwell’s perch, to say how Atticus Finch failed the Martin Luther King test. That, in my view, is poppycock. Gladwell appears to have no real understanding of Southern culture beyond the archetypal characters he discerns in the film (and whose meaning escapes him). In my view, Finch should be celebrated, not burned at the stake of a glib and arrogant liberalism.
8/10/2024 10:05 am
Addendum: I think I misremembered right and left hand (and face) above; hopefully you take the point.
8/10/2024 1:30 pm
I have very strong feelings about Gladwell’s deeply silly piece, and will post them soon.
Anon above seems to have cribbed a couple thongs from commenters elsewhere but is basically on target.
Gladwell should stick to aggregrates leavened with anecdotes, and leave individual human beings to other disciplines.
SE
8/10/2024 1:32 pm
Oops, that should read ‘things,’ not ‘thongs.’. Thong-cribbing is a time-honored ritual tradition with which I have no quarrel.
8/10/2024 1:56 pm
Sure, I got some ammunition from a google search. You were doing the same, SE?
8/10/2024 7:25 pm
Zing! It appears that you are the rubber and I am, concomitantly, the glue.
In days of yore HL and I called it ‘inappropriate use of sources,’ and we said the hell with it.
8/10/2024 7:27 pm
Incidentally, Anon, it was a book first. Only later a movie.
8/10/2024 10:28 pm
Fascinating, SE, fascinating.
8/14/2009 7:18 pm
Here is my letter about the Gladwell piece. Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that it is in no small part about Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
—
Malcolm Gladwell attempts to generalize the lessons of the fictional courthouse of Maycomb County, and in doing so makes hash of both a great U.S. novel and U.S. criminal law. Neither of them asks onlookers to “swap one of their prejudices for another.” Novels and the court system both require us to judge individuals: individual deeds and individual credibility. This is why Finch’s summation to the jury does not appeal to any category of ‘white trash’ or ‘unreliable women’ but to the accusers’ specific “Appearance and conduct on the stand — you saw them for yourselves.”
Ignoring the fine-grained plausibility of the defendant’s story, Gladwell seems to recommend that readers and jurors purge themselves not only of prejudgment, but of judgment also. Such statistical thinking has no place in novels or in courtrooms: no attentive citizen may consider Tom Robinson (or anyone else, whether in 1935 or 2009) simply one member of the general category “black man in jail.” To ‘represent,’ in the U.S., means getting elected, not getting arrested.
Of course systemic problems often call for the great radical, who appeals to higher authorities — but “To Kill a Mockingbird” depicts a great liberal. Perhaps Finch is not a visionary, but his spiritual discipline saves him from Gladwell’s preferred reaction: “brimming with rage” at a predictable instance of injustice. His disappointment with the racist jury differs in degree, but not in kind, from his disappointment in a child sighting a black bird with an air rifle. Moreover, in this case he does not have to “design a defense,” as Gladwell perversely imagines, to activate sexist assumptions in the jury. He has his client tell the jurors the whole truth, including the potentially distracting mention of the Ewells’ incest, because he believes in the law: “There is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, … and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.”
Social systems — courts and courthouse rings — do indeed let us down, as Sheriff Tate recognizes in the novel’s closing pages. But despite Gladwell’s accusations to the contrary, Finch himself keeps the faith: he strongly opposes the sheriff’s plan to cover up Boo Radley’s vigilanteism. Wrongly, but steadfastly, he believes that both Tom Robinson and Boo Radley can withstand the judgment of society, and be vindicated in an orderly fashion. Such liberal faith, more robust than Gladwell credits, might never overturn a system — but to change “hearts and minds” is not nothing. Can a sociologist possibly understand?
Standing Eagle
1/30/2010 9:20 pm
Gladwell’s article is ridiculous. Finch’s principle defense in the trial was that there was no medical evidence to indicate that there had been any rape committed by anyone against Mayella. His probing of Mayella and Bob Ewell’s testimony was to discover why a charge of rape had been filed in the first place: the father had beaten Mayella for daring to kiss Tom Robinson, a black man. Finch is defending his client against FALSE WITNESS, a mortal sin, in addition to a crime, in case Gladwell has forgotten.
4/7/2024 9:28 pm
Haha, you nerds. Thanks for the homework help.
5/16/2013 8:39 am
I shared an excerpt with High School Freshmen for their analysis. Most replied with “Doesn’t Mr. Gladwell know that Atticus was talking to a six-year-old when trying to explain the KKK and why we shouldn’t hate people?”
Yes.
Gladwell attacks Atticus for being too liberal in his views on racism, but cites Atticus’ discussions with his six-year-old daughter as proof.
5/13/2014 6:22 pm
Gladwell sounds like he didn’t even read the book atticus finch gave his all in his case because he knew that Tom Robinson is happily married and wouldn’t do that. Atticus Finch knew this was a lost cause because back then people were very racist. I completely disagree with Gladwell Atticus walked out of the courtroom ashamed and he told tom Robinson to wait for the appeal but that didn’t go well. Atticus Finch gave his all but knew he wasn’t going to win, but he had some dignity and hope that maybe just maybe there might be justice brought to Tom Robinson