Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker’s Weblog, with picture not just the link!

Picture shows James James E. “Big Jim” Folsom, the progressive governor of Alabama, the linked story compares with Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Malcom Gladwell in The New Yorker, ‘The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of southern liberalism’. Warning, The New Yorker puts up a subscription firewall to stories after a couple of weeks.

Gladwell takes a good look at the political context of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a widely read novel often set at school (in Britain as well as the USA) and known to many as a film starring Gregory Peck (all of the below comes from me rather than Gladwell, except where he is explicitly referenced). The title of his essay refers to the extreme localism of Alabama politics, where elected positions…