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)
