'Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation for ever!' he proclaimed on first being elected governor in 1963. Wallace's appeal, though, extended well beyond the South. He voiced the alienation felt by blue-collar workers and suburbanites in the face of the upheavals of the 1960s.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT This is a re-release of the 1997 TNT original movie “George Wallace.” It tells the story of the politically polarizing Governor of Alabama (Gary Sinise) and his controversial stance on racial integration in the 1950s.
'Send them a message,' he urged in his campaigns for the presidency. 'Them' meant the 'pointy-headed professors who can't park a bicycle straight'; the 'briefcase-totin' bureaucrats'; and 'the beatnik crowd that run Washington'.
Although Wallace failed to halt integration in the South, he detached a substantial portion of the blue-collar vote from the Democratic Party for a generation. At the same time his anti-Washington and anti-elitist themes were adopted by the winning presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
His own presidential aspirations, however, were ruined when he was shot and paralysed in 1972. Yet he ensured that no presidential candidate could afford to ignore the South, or the 'forgotten middle class'. The choice of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, two white southerners, for the Democratic ticket in 1992, was testimony to his enduring legacy.
George Corley Wallace was born at Clio, Alabama, on August 25 1919, the son of a dirt-farmer. He grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity, and in his autobiography, Stand Up For America (1976), recalled 'a sort of Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn type of life'.
He was educated at Barbour County High School, where he twice won the state's bantamweight boxing championship, and at Alabama University Law School. In the Second World War he served in the US Army Air Force, and saw action as a flight engineer on B-29 missions over Japan.
Afterwards, Wallace became assistant attorney-general of Alabama. But even while fighting in the Far East, he had been sending Christmas cards to future constituents. 'I thought it was real nice of this young fella,' recalled one farmer, 'so far away an' all, an' yet bein' so thoughtful, but I wasn't quite sure who this George Wallace was, and why he was writin' me. . .'
The appearance of Wallace in the fields - 'steppin' real smart an' lively across those furrows, already grinnin' and his hand already stretched out' - soon answered this conundrum.
In 1947 Wallace was elected to Alabama's House of Representatives, where he became the spokesman for the independent white farmers who saw the 'Big Mules' - the banks, the railroads and the cotton mill owners - as their adversaries.
To the Chamber of Commerce Wallace seemed 'downright pink'. He felt close enough to the national Democratic Party to endorse Adlai Stevenson in 1952; and in 1956 he seconded the abortive vice-presidential candidature of Senator John F Kennedy. In Alabama he supported the expansive and racially moderate governor, 'Kissin' Jim' Folsom. But they soon fell out. 'He never was right on the niggers,' Wallace declared.
When Folsom retired in 1958, Wallace ran for governor. After the Montgomery bus boycott (which had brought Martin Luther King to prominence), it was necessary to be a segregationist to stand a chance of election. Defeated by John Patterson, Wallace vowed that he would never be 'out-niggered' again.
He stood again for the governorship in 1962. At first it seemed that the contest, against Folsom, would be close. But Kissin' Jim appeared drunk on television; when he attempted to introduce his family, he was unable to remember the names of his children.
After his resounding victory in 1962, Wallace displayed little interest in government, concentrating rather on a charade of defiance that made Alabama the most reviled state in the Union. In June 1963 he refused to submit to a federal court order that two blacks be admitted to Alabama University, and even stood in the doorway to prevent them from entering.
President Kennedy 'federalised' the Alabama National Guard, and Wallace was forced to yield. But he had become a folk hero for millions of white southerners.
In 1964 Wallace made his first bid for the presidency, still as a Democrat. To the surprise of many he won 34 per cent of the primary votes in Wisconsin, 30 per cent in Indiana and 43 per cent in Maryland. And at the election that November he took note that, even amidst a Democratic landslide, President Johnson failed to win the South.
In 1965, when civil rights activists marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand negro voter registration, Wallace dispatched state troopers to beat them with billy-clubs.
President Johnson refused to call out the National Guard to protect the marchers, lest Wallace should become a martyr for state rights. Rather, Johnson sought to appeal to the populist strain in Wallace, suggesting infinite prospects for the first Southern governor to combine economic and social reform with racial harmony. 'If I hadn't left the room when I did,' Wallace declared, 'he'd have had me coming out for civil rights.'
Under the old constitution of Alabama, governors could not succeed themselves, and the state Senate had rejected Wallace's attempt to amend the document in his favour. So he made his wife Lurleen run in his place.
In 1966 she triumphed in the Democratic primary with more than half the vote. 'You're going to have to sleep with that woman again now,' remarked one of Wallace's associates. Wallace certainly became the new governor's 'No 1 Adviser'.
He had now abandoned his opposition to desegregation. Instead of crude references to 'nigras', he spoke of the 'bloc vote,' 'welfare chisellers' and 'law 'n' order'.
By 1968 such themes had acquired a national resonance. Wallace was the first prominent politician to recognise that, while the South was becoming more like the North, the North too was changing. Black migration to the big cities meant that Yankees were developing 'Southern' attitudes.
In 1968, Wallace ran for the Presidency as an American Independent. Armed with the organisational muscle of the Right-wing John Birch Society, and with a skilful campaign manager named Tom Turnipseed, he appeared on the ballot in all 50 states.
Wallace returned the liberal media's contempt with interest. Nor did he spare the political elite. 'Now you take a big sack and you put Richard Nixon in there,' he liked to say,'and you put Hubert Humphrey in there, and you put Bobby Kennedy, the blood-giver there, and you shake 'em all up.
'Then you put that socialist Nelson Rockefeller in there and you put in Earl Warren, who doesn't have enough legal brains in his head to try a chicken thief in my home county. You turn the sack over, and the first one that falls out, you pick him up by the nape of the neck and drop him right back in there, because there's not a dime's worth of difference in any of 'em, national Democrats or national Republicans.'
AFTER the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the ensuing riots, Wallace's support soared to more than 20 per cent. Student hecklers notably failed to deter him. 'If any demonstrator lies down in front of my car,' he boasted, 'then I'll make sure that it'll be the last car that he lies down in front of.'
In October 1968, however, Wallace's ratings began to slip, partly due to his choice of running mate. He had hoped to attract a well-known name - such as Colonel 'Finger-lickin' Good' Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, or John Wayne, who sent a cheque to the Wallace campaign, inscribed: 'Sock it to 'em, George!'
But the choice fell on his old commanding officer, General Curtis 'Old Ironpants' LeMay, who had subsequently become Air Force chief of staff. LeMay wanted to 'bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age'.
By election day in 1968 Wallace's support in the northern and border states had faded, and he won only 13 per cent of the national vote. Nevertheless, he had launched the most succesful third-party candidature of modern times and had carried the Deep South.
Lurleen Wallace died in 1968, and in 1970 Wallace defeated her successor, Albert Brewer, to win a second term as Governor of Alabama. The successor as Wallace's wife was Cornelia Snively - Jim Folsom's niece and a former water-ballet star.
President Nixon, determined to carry the traditionally Democratic South over to the Republican coalition, sought to woo Wallace's constituency by slowing down the pace of school integration. He was terrified that another Wallace third-party candidature in 1972 might cost him the election.
When Wallace decided to run in the Democratic primaries, some smelt a deal under which the Nixon administration had agreed to drop a grand jury investigation of Wallace's brother for campaign fund misdemeanours. Certainly Nixon believed that Wallace's decision not to run as an independent was the turning-point in his bid for re-election.
In many states, both north and south, the salient issue in the election of 1972, was the busing of white schoolchildren away from their neighbourhoods to achieve a better racial mix. Wallace lambasted upper-income liberals as 'those pluperfect hypocrites who messed up the schools in Washington and then moved out to Virginia'. He railed against 'social schemes imposed by anthropologists, zoologists and soh-see-ohl-oh-geests'. By criticising the tax breaks and charitable deductions available to the rich and to the big corporations, and by demanding tax cuts for middle-income groups, Wallace was able to win a dramatic victory in the Florida primary.
He went on to receive tumultuous receptions in Michigan and Maryland. But at a campaign stop in a Maryland shopping mall he was shot at close range by a lone gunman. Next day, while fighting for his life, he learned that he had won both primaries by stupendous margins. It soon emerged, though, that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Even so, in 1974 Wallace campaigned successfully for re-election as Governor, and seemed briefly, after Edward Kennedy's withdrawal, to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. But Jimmy Carter hijacked Wallace's anti-Washington constituency - while rejecting his racial baggage. Carter beat him by 34 to 31 per cent in the Florida primary. 'All they see are the spokes of my wheel-chair,' Wallace lamented.
His third term as Governor ended in 1979. His marriage had broken up the previous year: Cornelia accused him of 'cruelty and actual violence'; Wallace claimed that she had planted bugging devices in his bedroom. In 1981 Lisa Taylor became his third wife; six years later this marriage also ended in divorce.
Wallace, who had no hobbies and who seemed to live only for the campaigning season, stood once more for governor in 1982. The old populist touch was still there; when his opponents held a $500-a-plate fund-raising supper, he hit back with a $1 hot-dog lunch.
But he now campaigned vigorously for the black vote. 'The South has changed,' he declared,'and for the better.' He was elected with an overwhelming majority. At his 1983 inauguration, a black minister pronounced the benediction, and a black took the oath as a justice of the Alabama supreme court.
But Wallace now cut a sad figure. Carried around by his bodyguard, increasingly deaf, and often in terrible pain, he had a chiefly symbolic importance. After an impromptu appearance in Martin Luther King's old parish, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Wallace was wheeled slowly down the aisle to the strains of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, while black hands reached out towards him.
In 1985, two years before his final retirement, Wallace received Jesse Jackson at the Governor's mansion after a march from Selma to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the historic demonstration. An observer who saw them sitting together on the balcony drinking iced tea was reminded of 'a couple of old Confederate veterans reminiscing over their part in the great conflict'.
George Wallace had a son and three daughters by his first marriage.
Former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who built his political career on segregation and spent a tormented retirement arguing that he was not a racist in his heart, died last night in Montgomery, Ala. He was 79 and lived in Montgomery.
Mr. Wallace died of respiratory and cardiac arrest at 9:49 P.M., said Dana Beyerly, a spokeswoman for Jackson Hospital in Montgomery. Mr. Wallace had been in declining health since being shot in his 1972 Presidential campaign by a 21-year-old drifter named Arthur Bremer.
Mr. Wallace, a Democrat who was a longtime champion of states' rights, dominated his own state for almost a generation. But his wish was to be remembered as a man who might have been President and whose campaigns for that office in 1968, 1972 and 1976 established political trends that have dominated American politics for the last quarter of the 20th century.
He believed that his underdog campaigns made it possible for two other Southerners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, to be taken seriously as Presidential candidates. He also argued ceaselessly that his theme of middle-class empowerment was borrowed by Richard M. Nixon in 1968 and then grabbed by another Californian, Ronald Reagan, as the spine of his triumphant populist conservatism.
In interviews later in his life, Mr. Wallace was always less keen to talk about his other major role in Southern history. After winning his first term as Governor in 1962, he became the foil for the huge protests in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. destroyed segregation in public accommodations in 1963 and secured voting rights for blacks in 1965.
Continue reading the main storyAs a young man, Mr. Wallace came boiling out of the sun-stricken, Rebel-haunted reaches of southeast Alabama to win the governorship on his second try. He became the only Alabamian ever sworn in for four terms as Governor, winning elections in 1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982. He retired at the end of his last term in January 1987.
So great was his sway over Alabama that by the time he had been in office only two years, other candidates literally begged him for permission to put his slogan, 'Stand Up for Alabama,' on their billboards. Senators John Sparkman and Lister Hill, New Deal veterans who were powers in Washington and the national Democratic Party, feared to contradict him in public when he vowed to plunge the state into unrelenting confrontation with the Federal Government over the integration of schools, buses, restrooms and public places in Alabama.
It was a power built entirely on his promise to Alabama's white voting majority to continue the historic oppression of its disfranchised and largely impoverished black citizens. And it was snapshots of the peak moments of Mr. Wallace's campaign of racial oppression that burned him into the nation's consciousness as the Deep South's most forceful political brawler since Huey Long of Louisiana.
First, on Jan. 14, 1963, there was his inaugural address, written by a known Ku Klux Klansman, Asa Carter. In it, Mr. Wallace promised to protect the state's 'Anglo-Saxon people' from 'communistic amalgamation' with blacks and ended with the line that would haunt his later efforts to enter the Democratic mainstream: 'Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.'
Mr. Wallace's next signature moment came on June 11, 1963, when he mounted his 'stand in the schoolhouse door' to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Within days, it was convincingly reported that Mr. Wallace, fearing jail for defying a Federal court order, had privately promised President John F. Kennedy that he would step aside if first allowed to make a defiant speech.
Mr. Wallace's in-state critics denounced him for a 'charade' that embarrassed the state. But the cold splash of reality did not dampen his plans to use Alabama as a stepping stone to the national political arena and to the anti-Big-Government speeches by which he obsessively longed to be remembered by history.
Mr. Wallace talked of running for President in 1964 as a neo-Dixiecrat candidate. But he backed off when the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, came out against the bill that later became the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Mr. Goldwater's move undercut Mr. Wallace's trademark assertion that 'there's not a dime's worth of difference' between the two main parties on race.
After the election, Mr. Wallace regretted his timidity because he thought Mr. Goldwater had run a campaign of comical ineptitude, and when 1968 came around, he invented a party, drafted the eccentric retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay as his running mate, and began draining away the lunch-pail vote from Mr. Nixon.
One reason for his success was that Mr. Wallace always campaigned 'with the tense urgency of a squirrel,' in the memorable description of one biographer, Marshall Frady. Another reason was that his message worked among disaffected whites everywhere, not just in the South.
Mr. Wallace's political radar had picked up signals that Rust Belt workers and urban white ethnic Americans from Boston to Baltimore felt disgruntled about black students in their neighborhood schools and black competitors in the workplace. He cleaned up his language, but he used an expurgated list of demons -- liberals, Communists, the Eastern press, Federal judges, 'pointy-headed intellectuals' -- to tap out in code words an updated version of his fire-hardened message from the Heart of Dixie. It was race and rage.
This blend of color prejudice and economic grievance appealed to enough voters to win him more than 13 percent of the popular vote and five states in the 1968 Presidential election.
Tormented by Thorn In Flesh and Psyche
In the 1972 race, he was running even stronger in the Democratic Presidential primaries. He rattled the party's establishment with a second-place finish in Wisconsin and a rapid ascent in the polls. He also won primaries in Maryland and Michigan on May 16, but got the news in a hospital bed, having been shot and paralyzed on the day before the balloting.
The injury from Mr. Bremer's bullet became a 'thorn in my flesh,' Mr. Wallace later said, and the truncated campaign became a thorn in his psyche. He died believing that had he not been shot, popular appeal would have forced the Democratic Party to put him on the ticket in 1972 to keep Mr. Nixon from sweeping the Sun Belt and blue-collar enclaves in the Middle West and Northeast.
Mr. Wallace ran again in 1976. From the start, aides noticed that the applause dwindled once crowds saw his shiny wheelchair. Mr. Wallace noticed it, too, and in private he disputed friends who reminded him that Franklin D. Roosevelt had won despite crutches and wheelchair.
'Yeah,' Mr. Wallace told his confidant Oscar Adams, 'they elected Roosevelt, but they didn't watch him on television every night getting hauled on a plane like he was half-dead.'
The death of Mr. Wallace's Presidential dream came just before the Illinois primary, when he dropped out and endorsed a more modern Southerner with no segregationist baggage, Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia.
Mr. Wallace wanted to be remembered for his shining moment in 1972 and the Main Street themes he brought to prominence. Dan Carter, a professor of history at Emory University and author of the most detailed Wallace biography, 'The Politics of Rage,' supports the claim.
'It is difficult to conceive of what American politics of the 1960's, 70's and 80's would be like without George Wallace,' Mr. Carter said in a 1994 interview. 'I don't think there's a single issue that Nixon and Reagan talk of in terms of social issues that he doesn't get to first.'
In this view, Mr. Wallace's Presidential campaigns prefigured, in an especially abrasive way, a large portion of the country's politics of later years. Mr. Wallace was the first major political figure in his generation to exploit the antipathy toward Washington that went on to be a prime force in politics from coast to coast.
He was also surely the first in his generation to galvanize the white, working-class voters later labeled as Reagan Democrats. And he was the first nationally known politician of that generation to put such raucous emphasis on race, crime, welfare and other issues that still loom large, if less crudely, on the political landscape.
After he retired as Governor, Mr. Wallace used interviews to push relentlessly at the theme that he was the real inventor of Reaganism. Starting in 1979, he also undertook a campaign of apology and revisionist explanation intended to erase the word 'racist' from his epitaph.
He argued that his early devotion to segregation was based on his reading of the Constitution and the Bible and was misinterpreted as a racist hatred of black people.
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'I made a mistake in the sense that I should have clarified my position more,' he said in his last term as Governor. 'I was never saying anything that reflected upon black people, and I'm very sorry it was taken that way.'
That Mr. Wallace died haunted by race is appropriate to his life story -- one of Faulknerian perversity embodying the old themes of guilt and a steady, if clumsy, Snopsian aspiration.
Whetting a Taste For Underdog Politics
George Corley Wallace Jr. was born on Aug. 25, 1919, in Clio, Ala., a cotton town in Barbour County, where mule-drawn wagons were as common as cars on the unpaved main street. His father was the wastrel son of a beloved local doctor. His mother, Mozelle Smith Wallace, had survived abandonment by her mother and a depressing girlhood in an Episcopal orphanage at Mobile.
Like his father, George Jr. was quick with his fists and drawn to politics. Calling himself the 'Barbour Bantam,' he won two Golden Gloves titles while in high school.
As a 15-year-old legislative page at the Capitol in Montgomery, he stood on the gold star marking the spot where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy and where, by tradition, Alabama governors have taken the oath of office ever since. It was the seminal moment of his youth. Man and boy, George Wallace revered that spot, so much so that as Governor he ordered state troopers to encircle it so that a visitor, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, could not put a desecrating Yankee foot atop it.
It was in 1937, on the oak-shaded Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama, that George Wallace began to define what he would become politically. He arrived in the same shiny suit he had worn as a page in Montgomery, but Tuscaloosa was a congenial place for poor, ambitious country boys. And by tradition, it was a virtual boot camp for future governors and senators. Young Wallace won election as president of the freshman class.
He never won another student office, but his campaign to beat the fraternity machine with a coalition of independents and out-of-state students whetted his permanent taste for underdog politics.
The other leitmotifs of his Alabama career -- cronyism and betrayal -- emerged at the university. He acquired the hangers-on who staffed his later efforts, and he made an unlikely, but ill-fated friendship with Frank Johnson, a handsome law student from Winston County, a Unionist stronghold in northern Alabama that seceded from Alabama when Alabama left the Union. Mr. Johnson was a Republican, Mr. Wallace an ardent New Deal Democrat. Mr. Johnson joked about someday being a Federal judge and Mr. Wallace about being governor. But the big wheels on campus tended to dismiss Mr. Wallace's ambitions as comical.
For in those days, too, Mr. Wallace impressed people by his frenetic energy and tireless pugnacity rather than by any inherent attractiveness. He waited tables and drove taxis and slid through law school, cramming from borrowed books. Frank Johnson's wife, Ruth, was worried by Mr. Wallace's habit of chasing innocent high school girls, although she thought him more interested in the adoration than sexual conquest. Finally in 1943, at the age of 23, he decided to marry one of his naive admirers, a 16-year-old dime store clerk named Lurleen Burns.
It was wartime and Mrs. Wallace and their baby daughter, Bobbi Joe, born in 1944, followed wherever Mr. Wallace's flight training in the Army Air Forces took him. He shipped to the Mariana Islands as a flight engineer in the spring of 1945, assigned to fly bombing missions over Japan.
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The biographer Dan Carter found fellow crew members who remembered Mr. Wallace's barracks lectures defending segregation in Barbour County. 'I don't hate them,' Mr. Wallace was reported to have said. 'The colored are fine in their place. But they're just like children, and it's not something that's going to change. It's written in stone.'
Mr. Wallace had been through nine combat missions by the time the war ended. He was discharged with a 10 percent disability for combat-induced 'psychoneurosis,' diagnosed after he refused orders to fly dangerous training missions when his unit returned to California after the Japanese surrender. Years later, Senator Wayne Morse, Democrat of Oregon, disclosed Mr. Wallace's wartime psychiatric history. Mr. Wallace responded that unlike his liberal attacker, he could prove that he was 90 percent sane.
After the war, Mr. Wallace began climbing up the political ladder with remarkable speed. Using his Barbour County connections, he was named an assistant to Alabama's Attorney General in 1946. The next year he won election to the Alabama Legislature. He allied himself with the racially moderate populist Gov. James E. Folsom and prevailed on Mr. Folsom to appoint him as a trustee of all-black Tuskegee Institute.
As a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Mr. Wallace refused to join the walkout by segregationist 'Dixiecrats,' a move that placed him firmly in the progressive, racially moderate wing of a state Democratic Party that still had 'White Supremacy' emblazoned on its ballot emblem.
After this blooding in state and national politics, Mr. Wallace settled in as an elected district judge in his home county, serving from 1953 to 1958 and all the while laying plans to run for governor in 1958.
It was in the preparation of that race and its aftermath that Mr. Wallace committed two betrayals -- one personal and one political -- that blemished his reputation for life, but also gave him a generationlong stranglehold on Alabama politics.
The first came after 1958, when Mr. Wallace's surprisingly strong dark-horse candidacy failed. He had followed the tolerant racial line laid down by Governor Folsom and lost to John Patterson, whose devotion to massive resistance to court-ordered integration won him the following of the Ku Klux Klan. There were only about 5,000 Klan members, Mr. Patterson later recalled, but they helped him paper the state with campaign literature.
Later, Mr. Wallace, in a quotation whose authenticity he long disputed, was recorded as saying that no one 'will ever out out-nigger me again.'
Race Issue Is Played For All It Is Worth
Even if not literally true, the remark defined the strategy Mr. Wallace would use to ride to power. He started the very next year when his law school friend Frank Johnson, now a Federal judge with a strong civil rights record, ordered Mr. Wallace's court to surrender voter-registration records to the United States Civil Rights Commission. Mr. Wallace denounced Judge Johnson in public as a Federal dictator, but conspired secretly to avoid being jailed on Federal contempt charges by having a local grand jury surrender the records on his behalf.
Judge Johnson ruled that Mr. Wallace had used 'devious means,' but had nonetheless obeyed the Federal court order. Never one to be embarrassed by the facts, Mr. Wallace labeled Judge Johnson a 'carpet-bagging, scalawagging liar' who wanted to mount 'a second Sherman's March to the Sea.'
Mr. Wallace had lost a friend but gained a nickname, 'The Fighting Judge,' that would help make him Governor in 1962 as an all-out segregationist with Klan backing. As Judge Johnson later told the Alabama writer Frank Sikora, Mr. Wallace had also established the tactical blueprint of his career: 'misleading the people of Alabama for the purpose of pursuing his political career.'
Mr. Wallace, of course, did not see it that way. He described himself as devoted to the economic development of his state and to advancing the causes of limited government and middle-class values in national politics. The reality was both uglier and more complicated.
In his four terms as Governor, Mr. Wallace saw an era of unparalleled corruption that operated through a crony system centered on his brother Gerald, a lawyer who died in 1993. With the Governor's approval, Gerald Wallace and his close associate, Oscar Harper, went into business selling the state office supplies, printing, vending machines and building leases. Gerald Wallace and Mr. Harper established an asphalt company with $1,000 in capital. In a year and half, the infant company garnered more than a million dollars in state contracts.
It is one of the paradoxes of Southern history that Alabama's 'Fighting Judge,' by trying to revive the antebellum doctrine of states' rights, instead enabled the civil rights movement to reach its high-water mark. The Birmingham demonstrations in 1963 led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Two years later the Selma march led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Despite these triumphs, it was a dangerous time for blacks and whites who supported the civil rights movement. During the Wallace years, at least 10 people died in racially motivated killings in Alabama. Governor Wallace and his flamboyantly inept and drug-addled public safety director, Al Lingo, responded mainly by disrupting the Federal investigations into crimes like the bombing that killed four little girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963.
Leaders of Alabama's business and educational establishment, always sensitive to the state's image, came to regard Mr. Wallace as an embarrassment.
But George Wallace was a creature of the storm who always had wind beneath his wings, and that wind was the adoration of the white farmers and factory workers and rural courthouse bosses who counted the votes and doled out patronage.
They loved it when Mr. Wallace waved his cigar, flooded his food with ketchup and said that the guy pumping gas at an Alabama crossroads knew more about Communism than the State Department.
When a surprisingly strong anti-Wallace faction in the Legislature refused to alter the state Constitution to allow him a second term, Mr. Wallace put his ailing wife Lurleen on the ballot in 1966. She won easily in a heart-rending campaign that demonstrated the scope of his ambition. Only a few weeks before her husband announced her candidacy, Mrs. Wallace had surgery and radiation treatment for the aggressive intestinal cancer that would kill her in 1968.
Political writers predicted that Alabamians would punish Mr. Wallace for his cynical use of a sick woman. But he was only shifting gears. He reclaimed the governorship in 1970 with the most flagrantly racist campaign of his career, warning that his progressive opponent, Albert Brewer, was using a black 'block vote' to install a regime of Federal oppression. With Mr. Wallace's clear approval, the Klan circulated fliers falsely accusing the clean-living Mr. Brewer and his wife and daughters of sexual perversions and miscegenation.
It was a historic election for Alabama in two ways. First, Alabama was resisting the epochal progressive wave that swept the region in 1970 and installed New South governors like Jimmy Carter in Georgia and Reubin Askew in Florida. Secondly, Mr. Wallace was openly committing himself to the Presidential race track.
By Mr. Wallace's reckoning, his appeal to blue-collar voters outside the South had 'shaken the eyeteeth' of both major parties in 1968. Indeed, President Nixon so feared Mr. Wallace's disruptive potential in 1972 that he supplied $400,000 to Mr. Wallace's opponent in the 1970 campaign for governor. But Mr. Wallace won with his racist attacks and his invitation to Alabamians to 'send them a message' by launching him toward the 1972 Presidential race.
For a few months, Mr. Wallace was the hottest thing going. Gone were the pomaded hair and the bargain-store threads. His stylish new wife, Cornelia Ellis Snively, a niece of former Governor Folsom, decked out Mr. Wallace in modish, wide-lapel suits and taught him to use a blow dryer. Mr. Wallace talked less about race because he could afford to. His attacks on school busing let conservative whites know where he stood.
As Mr. Wallace moved toward victory in the Florida primary, President Nixon himself made an anti-busing speech that was regarded as a tribute to Mr. Wallace's growing appeal. Mr. Wallace finished second behind Senator George McGovern in the Wisconsin primary and second to former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in Indiana. Having established himself as a force in the Democratic Party, he was topping the polls in the primary campaigns of Maryland and Michigan.
But on the afternoon of May 15, at an unnecessary campaign rally in Laurel, Md., Mr. Wallace overruled the Secret Service and moved into a crowd for a final round of handshaking. 'Hey, George, let me shake hands with you,' shouted Arthur Bremer. Frustrated in an earlier ambition to kill Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bremer, had been stalking the Governor for weeks. From a range of three feet, the gunman shot Mr. Wallace three times, severing his spine and paralyzing him for life. Mr. Bremer is now in prison in Maryland, serving the 63-year sentence given him in June 1972.
Never-Ending Pain And Marital Trouble
Although his Presidential hopes ended, Mr. Wallace won two more terms as Governor by appealing to white loyalty and catering to the thousands of new black voters. But Mr. Wallace now behaved more like a pensioner than a chief executive. The constant pain from his wound -- 'the thorn in my flesh' -- limited his concentration and resulted in a dependence on methadone and other painkillers. He went through a messy divorce from his wife, Cornelia in 1978. Then she encountered her own problems with substance abuse.
Mr. Wallace's hope to found a dynasty foundered when his son, George Jr., could not progress beyond minor state offices. Mr. Wallace married again to a failed country singer named Lisa Taylor. That marriage, too, generated sour publicity before they divorced in 1987.
He is survived by his sister, Marianne Dauphin Montgomery; four children from his first marriage: his son, of Montgomery; three daughters, Lee Dye of Greenville, Ala., Bobbie Jo Parsons of Birmingham and Peggy SueKennedy of Montgomery; a brother, Jack, of Clayton, Ala.; and several grandchildren.
Mr. Wallace won his last election as Governor in 1982, but it was historical revision that occupied his last years. Starting in 1977, he began giving interviews in which he said that political philosophy rather than racism drove his career.
In a typical interview, he said: 'The New York Times, the Eastern establishment newspapers never did understand that segregation wasn't about hate. I didn't hate anybody. I don't hate the man who shot me. When I was young, I used to swim and play with blacks all the time. You find more hate in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., than in all the Southern states put together.'
As part of his rehabilitation effort, Mr. Wallace sought meetings with civil rights figures like the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Representative John Lewis, whose beating on 'Bloody Sunday' at Selma galvanzied the voting-rights crusade. Sometimes he even managed to use the magic words 'I'm sorry.'
After Mr. Wallace left office in 1987, Alabamians continued to support him through a figurehead position at Troy State University. By the time he died, Republicans had taken over the governorship, and Mr. Wallace's main legacy, a statewide system of trade schools, junior colleges, and small four-year institutions, was regarded as a monument to educational waste and redundancy that a poor state could ill afford.
One of his last public appearances was in the Spike Lee documentary 'Four Little Girls,' which tells the story of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. In his interview, Mr. Wallace insists that his best friend was a black orderly. He keeps tugging the obviously uncomfortable orderly into the frame. In public showings, that passage usually drew laughter.
So ended the public career that saw Mr. Wallace move from being the most feared politician of his era to a pitiable relic. It is a career whose moral arc seemed, in retrospect, utterly predictable and utterly of a piece with the Faulknerian idea of racism's ineradicable curse. At the height of his powers, George Wallace denied moral responsibility for the violence in his state. And in his Bible-haunted state, many said a terrible judgment had been visited upon him.
Brandt Ayers, the liberal editor of The Star newspaper in Anniston, put it this way: 'The Governor we Alabamians knew was a man of primal passion: sincere champion of the working class, cynical manipulator of their resentments, a sorcerer summoning the beast in our nature, a man of deep insecurities, tenderness, and finally, humility.'
He added, 'When he came to my office in 1974 campaigning for governor, I told him: 'George, you always claimed to stand up for the little man, but everybody knows that the real underdog is the black man. We stood up for him. You didn't. Why?' He did not answer. He just looked down at his legs for what seemed a very long time.'