Posted on 07/28/2015 6:46:26 PM PDT by SJackson
To me, Atticus Finch, in Mockingbird, has always come across as conservative and not liberal. He treats folks with decency and respect. He has a right view of the rule of law. Even his view of public education is spot on. Read the excerpt from his closing argument below and ask yourself if anything like this could ever come out of the mouth of a liberal:
“One more thing, gentlemen, before I quit. Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cake than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of men.
“But there is one way in this country which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man equal of an Einstein, and an ignorant man equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human constitution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.
In that case, we need to have Greenpeace attack Nantucket...because...Captain Ahab, killer of whales, was from there! LOL.
Good point.
(Sometimes I wonder about Lincoln, though)
:-)
And to act as Capote’s “beard”
In the 50’s, most Southern liberals were segregationists.
Atticus Finch was also a patriot, a war veteran and owned a gun/rifle, which he used to kill a rabid dog in defense of a threatened child.
In 1935, Roosevelt hadn’t yet corrupted the Supreme Court so Finch would have had faith in that SC of the times which did stop some of FDR’s power grabs.
Unfortunately, Finch wouldn’t recognize that Clown Circus SC of today.
PS: Did meet Mary Badham, the young girl in the film. A very nice lady.
Interestingly, in the FBI Online Library of FOIA files, you will find W.E. B. DuBois around 1933 or so, denouncing the Communist Party USA in its attempts to recruit Negro members.
He told his readers that blacks should not become “cannon fodder for the Communist Party”. Unfortunately, due largely to his CPUSA wife Shirley Graham DuBois, WEB went over to the CPUSA and his declining mental health kept him there.
His son also was a red.
As for the SWP, it did recruit a lot of young blacks in the 1960’s, a few of whom are still in what is left of it.
Meanwhile, the head of the DC/VA Communist Party, Maurice Jackson, came out of the CPUSA’s “W.E. B. DuBois School of Marxist Studies” in DC, of which I, moi, me was a student until I left due to unmitigated boredom.
Interestingly, Jackson wrote much of the vaunted D.C. Statehood Party’s “Constitution” which leftist fools like Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, supported, along with Statehood Party leaders Marxist Julius Hobson, his red wife Tina, and the CPUSA’s top supporter, Josephine Butler.
Jackson now teaches Afro-American History/Studies at Georgetown University. Just goes to show you that if you are a traitor to America, you can always get a job in academia.
DuBois letter of application CPUSA
Communist Party of the USA
New York, New York
On this first day of October 1961, I am applying for admission to membership in the Communist Party of the United States. I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion, but at last my mind is settled.
In college I heard the name of Karl Marx, but read none of his works, nor heard them explained. At the University of Berlin, I heard much of those thinkers who had definitely answered the theories of Marx, but again we did not study what Marx himself had said. Nevertheless, I attended meetings of the Socialist Party and considered myself a Socialist.
On my return to America, I taught and studies for sixteen years. I explored the theory of socialism and studied the organized social life of American Negroes; but still I neither read nor heard much of Marxism. Then I came to New York as an official of the new NAACP and editor of The Crisis magazine. The NAACP was capitalist-oriented and expected support from rich philanthropists.
... Finally in 1926, I began a new effort; I visited the Communist lands. I went to the Soviet Union in 1926, 1936, 1949 and 1959; I saw the nation develop. I visited East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I spent ten weeks in China, traveling all over the land. Then this summer, I rested a month in Rumania.
I was early convinced that socialism was an excellent way of life, but I thought it might be reached by various methods. For Russia, I was convinced she had chosen the only way open to her at the time. I saw Scandinavia choosing a different method, halfway between socialism and capitalism. In he United States, I saw Consumers Cooperation as a path from capitalism to socialism, while in England, France and Germany developed in the same direction in their own way. After the Depression and the Second World War, I was disillusioned. The progressive movement in the United States failed. The Cold War started. Capitalism called communism a crime.
Today I have reached my conclusion:
Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.
Communismthe effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contributethis is the only way of human life. It is a difficult and hard end to reachit has and will make mistakes, but today it marches triumphantly on in education and science, in home and food, with increased freedom of thought and deliverance from dogma. In the end communism will triumph. I want to help bring that day.
The path of the American Communist Party is clear: It will provide the United States with a real third party and thus restore democracy to this land. It will call for:
Public ownership of natural resources and of all capital.
Public control of transportation and communications.
Abolition of poverty and limitation of personal income.
No exploitation of labor.
Social medicine, with hospitalization and care for the old.
Free education for all.
Training for jobs and jobs for all.
Discipline for growth and reform.
Freedom under law.
No dogmatic religion.
These aims are not crimes. They are practiced increasingly over the world. No nation can call itself free which does not allow its citizens to work for these ends.
W.E.B. Du Bois
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