Racial Paternalism, Rawls, and the Rule of Law: Intruder in the Dust Part II

Last time out, I considered the thread of social obligations running through Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Today’s installment concerns whether doing one’s duty in an immoral system can lead to moral outcomes. The question is different from whether a person can be good in an immoral system. Rather, can a mostly immoral or unjust system permit moral outcomes if people respect the rule of law? What did “rule of law” in the Jim Crow South mean anyway? With Intruder in the Dust Faulkner acknowledged the changes coming to the South immediately following the Second World War. Certain characters in the novel made the case for a better paternalism, reflecting familiar patterns of white Southern liberalism at the time. Respectable Southern men would do their duty. Beyond that, they would commit themselves to justice only when pushed. Their interest in a just society governed by fairness among equals could only come on their terms, not by recognizing black Southerners’ ability to free themselves collectively, to act politically.

Around twenty years ago, Richard King mentioned that the book “helped establish a sub-genre of Southern fiction—the racial thriller.”[1] I would add that the subgenre includes courtroom melodramas like To Kill a Mockingbird or later, A Time to Kill and others. Together, novels like this contributed to a wider civil rights imaginary, where stories of white moral performance at the expense of black agency somehow live alongside stories of black people acting on their own behalf. In Intruder, Lucas Beauchamp calls in the debt owed him by Chick Mallison, but the political message is clear: white Southerners must change their society for themselves and for the Black Southerners in their midst.

The Rule of Law

A “system” here can refer to codified rules, or laws enacted by legislators in a state. These rules govern the activity of citizens, designating the boundaries for the exercise of liberties, assigning punishments for transgressions of those boundaries. Whether or not we agree that any such system is ultimately just, we can, for the moment, grant that it is legitimate when “the rule of law” exists. When citizens regard the laws and those who made them as legitimate, whether because they respect or esteem the process that led to those laws, or because the state can overawe them such that the penalties for transgressing the law are so great it makes little sense at all to break the rules, we can say that rule of law exists.

Political theorists refer to this largely neutral form of rule of law as “formal.” Modifying this idea, among the many features of the “just” or “near-just” systems that the political philosopher John Rawls outlined in his A Theory of Justice (1978) was what he described as “justice as regularity” with respect to the rule of law. He defined it as “regular and impartial administration of public rules.” Rule of law fails when administrators don’t apply the law correctly or when they misinterpret it in such a way that tilts toward one party’s interests or another.

Rawls yokes justice to fairness in the rule of law because, as he puts it, “a legal system is a coercive order of public rules addressed to rational persons for the purpose of regulating their conduct and providing the framework for social cooperation. When these rules are just they establish a basis for legitimate expectations.”[2]  If we don’t expect the regular, impartial (meaning fair) administration of rules, we can’t rely on one another because the proper boundaries for our liberties aren’t set.

In totalitarian states, just to contrast, fear and injustice become pervasive because coercive power is arbitrary rather than regular, and citizens are cowed by the absence of legitimate expectations anywhere. The state expresses this arbitrary administration of rules all the way down to neighbors and friends reporting one another or even meting out punishments on one another. No one knows when and where the other shoe will drop. In chaotic situations, on the other hand, there can be little expectation that rules will be followed by anyone, and so social cooperation breaks down.

Southern Paternalism

Faulkner does not depict a totalitarian society in Intruder, but a paternalist one governed by caste and class. This is so for a number of different reasons peculiar to the historical context, which I’ll come to after a bit. I’ll quote from the last post to highlight some basic problems in Faulkner’s novel:

Lucas has refused to tell his story to the authorities, because he knows well enough how Jim Crow justice works. A black man, carrying a pistol and found over a white man’s dead body is guilty. It’s evidence enough. These, Chick tell us, are the “facts” of the case, and a white person would be delusional in that time and place to disregard them…

Rather than bother with exhuming Vinson Gowrie’s body for confirmation, in his capacity as Lucas’ lawyer, Gavin Stevens plans to work out a deal where Lucas pleads to manslaughter, which he thinks the District Attorney will accept. Gavin doesn’t want to see Lucas lynched, but he has no plans to go the extra mile on his behalf. This is the respectable position, the one where sometimes innocent men, if they happen to escape ritual murder, go to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

For white Southerners in the age of Jim Crow, this kind of thing qualified as “justice as regularity.” It’s clear that white people could have “legitimate expectations” while black Southerners could not. The suspense heightens in the novel as white folks from the surrounding areas descend on the town square in anticipation of a lynching, a terrifying extra-legal act if there ever was one. The upholders of the rule of law don’t want that to happen, and for a time, they’re perfectly willing to take the customary way out among respectable middle class sorts, to commit an injustice by imprisoning Lucas.

Characters do the right thing only when pressed by the revelation that someone has moved Vinson Gowrie’s body from his grave and replaced it with another one. (The corpse moving hi-jinks only grow more complicated as the novel moves on.) Lucas could not have moved the body since he was imprisoned at the time. This evidence comes from the efforts of Chick, Ms. Habersham and Aleck Sander at enormous personal risk under cover of night. They return with the news, and only then do Gavin Stevens and Sheriff Hope Hampton take up the cause of exonerating Lucas. Yet they do take it up, and that amounts to something. According to a certain white Southern logic, one could read in their actions a heightened respect for rule of law in this society precisely because they question Lucas Beauchamp’s assertions of social equality. If only he had known his place, the mess wouldn’t have presented itself in the first place. Going the extra mile for someone you don’t think deserving of that effort best demonstrates your respect for duty and the rule of law. It’s classic paternalism.

The question here is whether this situation is extraordinary and singular, or whether these events somehow goad Hampton and Stevens to conceive of the rule of law according to a fuller sense of justice requiring its fair application among equals. Does the story have such suspense because it augurs deeper changes in social attitudes on the horizon for the South, or because Lucas is extraordinary for a Southern black man and Chick has a rare obsession with social debts?  Recall that Lucas’ sense of superiority stems from his birthright in Southern masterdom and not from his blackness. Recall that Chick’s shame and feeling of obligation stem not necessarily from his feeling that Lucas should have made claim upon his conscience, but from his gnawing shame and pride as a white Southerner who wants to be a man, to properly pay his debts. Yet the group of unlikely confederates, whatever their various motivations, do end up freeing Lucas.

Gavin Stevens plays the role of moral teacher for his nephew Chick, instructing him on the meaning of the events. The conscientious white Southerner must be the one to free Lucas and those like him to give black people equality under the law, “but it won’t be next Tuesday.” Northerners can’t do it with laws right away,

by the simple ratification of votes of a printed paragraph: who have forgotten although a long quarter century ago Lucas’ Beauchamp’s freedom was made an article in our constitution and Lucas’ Beauchamp’s master was not merely beaten to his knees but trampled for ten years on his face in the dust to make him swallow it, yet only three short generations later they are faced once more with the necessity of passing legislation to set Lucas Beauchamp free (152).

Southern white pride won’t permit Northern meddling. White Southerners must resist. The memory and lore of the Civil War and Reconstruction still haunts them. Northern meddling will mean disaster. Racists will come out of the woodwork from everywhere. Later on in the novel Gavin effectively predicts “massive resistance” to the Brown decision a decade before the fact, and then something resembling white Northern backlash in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, “a concorded South which has drawn recruits whether it would or no from your own back-areas, not just the hinterland but your fine cities of cultural pride you Chicagoes and Detroits and Los Angeleses and wherever else live ignorant people who fear the color of any skin or shape of nose save their own” (211).

In Theory of Justice, Rawls moves from his conception of a just rule of law as the legitimate expectations of rational persons by noting how this works on multiple levels, from an association organized for some purpose, a group of people playing a game, and all the way to the state. The differences there are important, obviously, in that the coercive power of the state is a great deal stronger than those of a local PTA meeting. States, after all, have ultimate coercive power either because of the monopoly that they hold on violence or because the state is the final arbiter in disputes, the holder of the laws of the land. Nonetheless, Rawls suggests that if citizens don’t have legitimate expectations about the regular administration of rules, it can have reverberations on multiple levels of social interaction, all the way down to the everyday obligations people have to one another.

So what are we to make of the rule of law and the social obligations that appear in Faulkner’s novel? The drama here is very old, played out again and again in U.S. history. It’s the drama of federalism, the problem of worlds within worlds, of systems within systems, of laws within laws. Gavin Stevens is worried that Northern laws and power will make it worse for black Southerners. They will endure as black people long have in Southern history, but “by that time divided we may have lost America” (199). White Southerners will have to redeem America or it will be lost. Ironically, they must also remain white Southerners to do it. But which rule of law will they accept in the offing? Paternalism can’t accept full recognition of the other. Who will rewrite Southern rules when the regular patterns and processes of the legal system would have saved Lucas Beauchamp from extra-legal murder only to consign him to prison? Is this a singular case or a bellwether? Faulkner is too slippery, too stubborn. We have no reliable way of knowing.

Rightly, Chick resists this logic, “But you’re still excusing it” (199). But Faulkner doesn’t give us much to draw from here. Change is coming, but Chick’s obligations to Lucas are deeply flawed by mixed motivations. Lucas’ resistance is similarly flawed owing to his singular birthright. As others have noticed, Faulkner never understood or even noticed the deep wells of resistance developing in his own midst, the power of a freedom movement coming into being from out of those parallel institutions created by black people under Jim Crow.  The deeper irony is that portions of this perspective survive in what might be called a civil rights imaginary, where for some, the needful myth of Atticus Finch’s heroism lives comfortably with stories about Rosa Parks.

[1] Richard H. King, “Lucas Beauchamp and William Faulkner: Blood Brothers,” in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Critical Essays on William Faulkner: the McCaslin Family (Boston, 1990), 237. I’ve drawn from some of the ideas in Richard’s essay for this piece, so my thanks to him for sending it my way.

[2] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard Belknap, 2005),  207.