Wednesday, July 15, 2015

ESR's Steve Angell reviews "Go Set a Watchman"

A Review of
Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (Harper Collins Publishers, 2015)
By Stephen W. Angell



Harper Lee's new book, "Go Set a Watchman" (the title is from Isaiah 21:6), is her second published novel.  Her first novel, the highly acclaimed “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, some fifty-five years earlier.  “Go Set a Watchman” is set in the same fictional Alabama town as its predecessor, and it presents the lives of its characters twenty years later. However, “Go Set a Watchman” was completed as a manuscript some years before “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Lee’s editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, a Quaker by upbringing and education, was most impressed by the flashback scenes in “Watchman” and convinced Lee to expand them into a novel focusing on the earlier period in the characters’ lives, the result being “Mockingbird.”  There was never any discussion at the time, or indeed during Hohoff’s lifetime, of publishing “Watchman” too. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/books/the-invisible-hand-behind-harper-lees-to-kill-a-mockingbird.html?_r=0

From this historian's viewpoint, “Watchman” contains a penetrating and accurate portrait of the American South in the mid 1950s. It illuminates the important role of the Citizens' Councils (a more genteel version of the Ku Klux Klan) in the venomous segregationist backlash against the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision. It has a visceral immediacy in its portrayal of the white backlash to the Supreme Court (and to the Montgomery bus boycott of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.) that is not to be missed. Andrew Manis in "Southern Civil Religions inContext" has this to say about the Citizens' Councils: "The most extreme response of the white South [to Brown v. Board] ... was the rise and growth of the Citizens Councils. Founded in the summer of 1954 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, the Councils expanded into an areawide apparatus claiming 300,000 members. It propagated its message through a newspaper, regional television and radio shows, and large numbers of speakers..... The Citizens Councils contributed greatly to the South's growing alienation from the rest of the nation, ... [as] many Southerners came to refer to the 'government in Washington' as they would have spoken of a foreign power." (p. 24)


Monday, July 13, 2015

Reflections on Intermountain Yearly Meeting 2015

ESR student Tracy Davis of Durango Friends Meeting shares her thoughts about Intermountain Yearly Meeting's 2015 Annual Gathering in Haiku form:






Again, at Ghost Ranch

Intermountain had Meeting
joyous gathering



ESR alums
Now functioning as leaders
present together