H arper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” captures both the good and the bad in the American psyche.

Given the racism depicted in it, “To Kill A Mockingbird” might not be an obvious example of a literary work that exemplifies the American spirit and character.

Yet Harper Lee’s tale paints a warts-and-all picture of humanity as reflected in 1930s United States. It is hard to find a better American novel about the interplay of good and evil, of compassion and prejudice.

It was the first book that came to my mind when my opinion-page colleagues Linda P. Campbell and Sarah Pederson pitched the concept of the American Values project.

National affiliation does not mitigate the human capacity for evil any more than does one’s bank account, mailing address, religious affiliation or family tree does. But humanity also has infinite capacity for good. It takes hard work for the one to overcome the other, something that the children of lead character Atticus Finch discover by the book’s end.

In the short run of U.S. history – after all, at 230 years old, ours is a comparatively young nation – Americans have as a whole exhibited the sympathy and understanding needed for human compassion to triumph.

“Mockingbird’s” study in contrasts – black and white, rich and poor, educated and unlearned, gentrified and just plain folk – is as much a reflection of today’s America as it was a statement about the struggles besetting the nation during the Depression.

The fear, desperation and hatred in Harper Lee’s fictional Maycomb, Ala., may not seem as overt in the real world of 2006 America, but they’re still here. Listen to some of the disturbing rhetoric emanating about the immigration issue – and hear echoes of the Sarum bunch that gathered around the Maycomb jail, intent on a lynching, the night before the trial of the unjustly accused Tom Robinson’s trial was to begin.

But Atticus Finch also embodies America, then and now. This morally upright, absolutely consistent, overly optimistic widower teaches his children, Scout and Jem, to admire what is good in people and try to understand the bad.

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks,” Atticus says. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

The ability to see an issue from another’s perspective is a hallmark of the strong and confident, not a characteristic of the weak. That capacity is the signature of statesmen and diplomats who understand that “compromise” and “capitulation” are not synonymous, and that the road to peace is paved with respect for who people are and where they come from.

The title of Lee’s only novel speaks to the death of innocence.

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy,” says Miss Maudie Adkinson, the Finches’ neighbor and the children’s best adult friend. “They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Some say that the World Trade Center was America’s mockingbird, destroyed in the fiery 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington. It was the day when “everything changed.”

But everything will have changed only if Americans allow their fear to alter their collective national characteristics of generosity and compassion.

America is not a monolith; no nation is. Her people are as diverse as the names listed in a phone book.

But as Scout tells her brother, Jem, “I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”