Harper Lee Quotes
Hey, Mr. Cunningham. How's your entailment gettin' along?
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1960.
Primogeniture is the system where property is inherited from the father to the first born son. At the time women could not own property unless they were widows. It is the basis of most aristocracies. See {627010} for an American view of primogeniture that was stated a little earlier.
This was an effort to keep Asian immigrants—who were ineligible for citizenship under the racist Federal laws though the 1930s from competing with American farmers. Many of the Western states also had laws or Constitutions prohibiting Asians to not only own land but also forbidding them from even having long tern leases on land. The Japanese in California were so successful that in the 1920s that state passed a version of Asian land ownership prohibition. The Supreme Court at the time actually ruled that this kind of discrimination was legal. A French alien could own land but not a Japanese. The loophole however was that many Japanese short term tenant farmers who had saved enough money to buy land, had children who were born in the United State and hence where citizens. The land was purchased by the citizen children. California however went so far as to make it illegal for a Japanese person to be a guardian of his minor children if the children were born in the United States, but that law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
There are many who wish for such a simple adoption procedure today.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
A fief was an estate of land and people. The man who had the title to the fief was obligated to raise troops from his estates and lead then at the command of the King. Women, under English law could not inherit a fief—it went to the oldest son. However, once the military element of fiefdom was eliminated, Johnson saw no reason why women should no longer inherit feifs and the titles that went with them.
Nelle Harper Lee was an American novelist best known for her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee published only two books, yet she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature. She also received numerous honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird.
