Malcolm Gladwell

A Malcolm Gladwell article about Jim Folsom and To Kill a Mockingbird and mentioning someone from my comps committee?

I think I understand what Gladwell is saying, but he's chosen terrible examples to do it. For example, in discussing the famous court case, Gladwell asserts that Atticus Finch was making an argument using class-based prejudices to discredit the alleged victim.

We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

Problem: has their been a major southern politician since WWII that this works less well for than it does for Jim Folsom? The man became successful, after all, for his willing embrace of ultra-populist causes. They didn't call him the little man's big friend for nothing. Folsom didn't attack the poor as trashy; he urged them to demand more from their government.

And "the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended Folsom’s career" isn't really true. It was enormous corruption, his own well-publicized alcoholism, and the all-out attacks from the Alabama political establishment that ended Folsom's career. A comeback was already quite unrealistic for Big Jim before the civil rights movement and George Wallace came into the picture.

We could demand that Folsom had never made any concessions to racism or Jim Crow, and reject any apparently admirable traits he had because of his failure to totally devote himself to overthrowing an evil system. I don't think that's terribly realistic, though. Of the people who were actually capable of winning the Alabama governorship between 1945 and 1960, who would Gladwell have rather won? Who, of those actually possible, would have been better for blacks (or, for that matter, poor whites)?

The argument over race had risen to such a pitch that it could no longer be alleviated by gesture and symbolism—by separate but equal inaugural balls and hearty handshakes—and he [Folsom] was lost.

So, gesture and symbolism had no value in challenging Jim Crow? That's wrong, obviously so when one considers how much of Jim Crow was dedicated to symbolism and appearance.

And Folsom wasn't lost because he didn't understand the legal and social and political changes going on around him. He was lost because the time when a moderate liberal could win votes by appealing to large numbers of southern whites without enthusiastically embracing segregation came to an end.

And Atticus Finch. Gladwell criticizes (or says some people criticize him, or could criticize him -- he's vague as ever) Finch for being friendly toward his neighbors, despite their racism, and for his insistence that these people are wrong, not evil, in their hatred of blacks. I'm not quite sure how this is entirely worthy of criticism. Does Gladwell know anyone who is racist? Does he automatically assume that person is in every way evil? If so, that means (to throw out a number) two-thirds of all Americans had evil grandparents.

Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.

That's a fairly tall order, Mr. Gladwell, for someone living in Alabama in 1959. Risking life and livelihood alone is, apparently, not enough. Gladwell is not just saying that Finch's approach fails to advance civil rights; he seems to be saying that it's actively harmful. I don't know what to make of that.

That her father and the Sheriff have decided to obstruct justice in the name of saving their beloved neighbor the burden of angel-food cake? Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell.

Boo Radley saved the life of a small child and, in doing so, killed her attacker. Should it come to court, it is obvious what the outcome of a trial would be. He also has some sort of social disorder that makes it difficult for him to leave his home or interact with people (which he rather courageously overcomes to save the life of a young girl who has never been particularly nice to him). Assuming that a prosecutor would even take action against a man who killed an attacker while saving two children (and one wouldn't), in light of Radley's mental problems, the sheriff decides to falsify his report. This is unfortunate, not to be taken as an example. But it's only obstruction of the law, not obstruction of justice.

But I think I get what Gladwell is saying, or at least the point he is trying to make. A certain brand of vaguely-populist southern liberalism didn't sufficiently address the problem of racism in southern society. Where he goes wrong: using Jim Folsom as the best example of this, when Folsom was actually pretty good on racial issues, certainly better than was politically wise; trying to say that Atticus Finch had the same politics as Jim Folsom (!) or at least is somehow comparable in the way he addressed racial issues (!!); implying that class-based prejudices had something to do with this, although it's not clear what exactly, and saying that Folsom wanted people to embrace this class prejudice (!!!) instead of racism (!!!!).

Historically and logically, this gets a D. I won't even get into Gladwell's apparent acceptance of Klarman's backlash thesis or his (apparent) simultaneous, contradictory conviction that law-oriented activism was the only legitimate way to improve race relations in the South.