George Wallace on the Stump
Goodman, Walter
AFORTNIGHT BEFORE George C. Wal lace visited Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a rally in his pursuit of the Presidency, there was looting in the city's Negro areas. Several hundred youths roamed...
...That brought a laugh from the audience, and he got another big laugh when he remarked, "What you need is a good haircut...
...I could of guessed you were from Indiana U.," a burly, crew-cut man told one of the antiWallace youths after the rally...
...He reported, with emphatic approval, that the city's police were on order to shoot to kill looters...
...WALLACE...
...There were several attempts to grab the cardboard sign from his hands, and a couple of men with battery in their eyes were held off by uniformed guards...
...Several hundred youths roamed the streets, breaking the windows of white-owned stores and throwing rocks at policemen...
...One man loudly affirmed that he was not descended from the apes, and no one within earshot evinced any surprise...
...the emphasis among the Wallaceites, however, was not on the values which we are upholding in Vietnam, but on the moral deficiencies of our so-called allies who not only are not supporting us, but are actually trading with our enemies...
...At one point, hundreds of people on the main floor were on their feet, shaking fists at the lone protestor and screaming "OUT...
...Why don't you all rent the house tomorrow night...
...It may be that the driver thought he had deduced my political leanings from my destination and was trying to please me...
...He was a booster of Fort Wayne, and as we drove along, he pointed out the two new bank buildings and the big Sheraton hotel under construction, the new luxury apartment houses ("everything anybody could want"), the site of a proposed cultural center, the shopping center with 57 stores under one roof...
...Lacking education, they lack hope of beating the game, and what is left but bluster...
...As to Vietnam, the prevailing view was one of truculent isolationism...
...It is not just racial prejudice that draws them to George Wallace: it is survival...
...And he observed that the police have most trouble in colored areas: "I'd like to have somebody explain that to me...
...For those moments the hatred was electric...
...Too in articulate to develop a rhetoric of powerlessness of the sort that intoxicates the New Left, they look to Wallace to do it for them...
...His discourse went on, almost uninterruptedly, for the 30-minute drive from the motel to the Memorial Coliseum where the rally was being held, and it assumed a certain man-to-man quality of plain speaking...
...He had been through this before...
...You're a typical spoon-fed socialist...
...My cab driver was much better represented than my motel clerk...
...There were proportionately few young people, and they had the look of the gas station, not the campus...
...He was not as mild as the clerk...
...They cheered and cheered...
...Yet another, who wore a glittery little American flag beside the Wallace button on her glittery dress, explained how the Constitution of the United States, which had been created by men under the direct guidance of God Almighty, was being subverted by the Supreme Court...
...It seemed to this boy that they were being unreasonable...
...The motel clerk, who was getting ready to enter the University of Indiana in the fall, was a mild youth, who could not bring himself to use the word Negro...
...he asked...
...She spoke for States Rights, and testified that the North had in fact lost the Civil War...
...There is the enemy of the policeman and the fireman and the electrical worker whose opinions nobody in Washington asked for, of the good Baltimore cab driver who knew long before the New York Times discovered it that Castro was a bad man...
...The college-bred upsetter of custom and decency, the fancy gentleman who from an unassailable sanctuary tells ordinary folks where they have to send their children to school and who is going to live next door—there, and not the poor simple, misled Negro, is the enemy...
...movies and swimming pools were open to everybody...
...As it happened, the first two Fort Wayners I had occasion to talk with—a young clerk at the airport motel and the cab driver who took me to the evening rally—were Wallace fans, and both, with just a little prompting, gave "the racial thing" as the main reason for their support...
...OUT...
...He told me that the recent disturbances had been confined to the city's Negro sections, and added: "That's the beauty part...
...They had it good in Indiana, which, after all, was not the South...
...the insistence on school bussing he saw as a case of "you give the colored a finger, they want your hand...
...The outburst was still on the minds of Fort Wayne's citizens when Wallace came to town on August 17...
...Wallace confirms their faith that they have more common sense and common manliness than the professors and bureaucrats, that they are more American than all those funny-looking, funny-sounding people who are constantly calling for changes that can only further demoralize the nation and further jeopardize their own shaky positions...
...The same example was put forward by the taxi driver, a very talkative little man with a border-state accent into which a scent of the South occasionally drifted...
...WALLACE: QUIT POLITICS AND GO BACK TO BEING A TRUCKDRIVER...
...Everyone's attention at length came to bear on one well-built youth, clean-shaven and not particularly long-haired who stood his ground up front with his RACIST GO HOME sign raised high...
...As the outstanding example of their unreasonableness, the clerk cited their demands that their children be bussed from their school in the inner city—"It's a real nice school"—to schools in white communities...
...The speaker left no doubt which alternative he preferred...
...I rented it tonight...
...Where a rally for Joe McCarthy was like bingo night at the parish house, this was a fundamentalist picnic...
...As if to lay to rest any doubt as to the nature of the enemy of this congregation, he appeared among them incarnate...
...So warm were our relations by the end of the journey that he parked his cab and accompanied me into a restaurant near the Coliseum, introduced me to the hostess and impressed upon her my need for quick service so that I could be at the rally by eight o'clock...
...with, "We're glad to have you folks here...
...Any war against Communists is, to state the obvious, good and just...
...These, he pounds home, are the powers, effete and insidious, who are hamstringing our GI's in their efforts to beat the Communists in Vietnam and hamstringing our cops in their efforts to keep down unruly Negroes and unwashed traitors in this country...
...A pair of Negro youths held a sign that affirmed WE SHALL OVERCOME GOV...
...especially on the minds, and the lips, of his supporters...
...Still, it was what these thousands of Fort Wayners wanted, needed...
...Me, I graduated from the school of hard knocks, boy...
...now, in Wallace's social populism, they are the bureaucrats and professors and other people who hold down big jobs and use big words...
...where a Goldwater meeting was a convention of homeappliance franchisers, this was a Veterans of Foreign Wars clambake...
...What wonder that the flag is mocked and that perverts take over the streets...
...each time Wallace began to speak, the young man put it to him in a voice that carried through the auditorium, that he was a liar and a dirty racist and ought to go back to Alabama...
...He was worried about the depreciation of houses in nice neighborhoods when the colored moved in—"a man who paid eighteen thousand for a house can only get twelve thousand for it...
...They hold border jobs and can only mutter in the bars at night over having to work beside blacks and watch limp-wristed punks with degrees in engineering and business administration get promoted over them...
...The law and order George Wallace celebrates is the kind that will stand before the schoolhouse door, and it has awakened the hope among his followers that, through the cops or the soldiers or other simple, virile fellows unspoiled by degrees, they may yet regain control of things...
...W W ANDERING AMONG the 7,000 people who had gathered at the Coliseum, a modernistic barn more accustomed to the reek of basketball than of politics, was like tuning in a medley of themes from every Far Right extravaganza of the past quarter century in America...
...He evidently liked this comment and repeated it a couple of times...
...But the cheers came when he said, "After November fifth, these anarchists are gonna be through in this country...
...Wallace works on their desperate consciousness of being pushed aside...
...Finally, after the youth, still holding his now ragged cardboard as high as his arms would reach, walked down the center aisle and took a seat close to the platform, Wallace had the police escort him out of the auditorium...
...If you give them something nice, that's not enough for them, they want what you've got...
...Their boos at the appearance of the candidate were lost in the ovation, and Wallace himself, dark-haired and surprisingly slight, quietly greeted their cries of "GO HOME...
...it was always "they": "Wallace doesn't want to do anything bad to them, to hurt them...
...Here was the enemy, and despite mollifying words from the candidate, voices began yelling back, "Sit down and shut up...
...It is no small band that troops behind the American Independent party in 1968 —though how big it will be depends on what happens in our cities before November and how low a campaign Richard Nixon feels he must wage...
...It was an audience of the blue collar and the soiled white collar, and it parted slowly with its dollar bills and change when the cutely outfitted Wallace girls tripped down the aisles...
...A score or two of students, mostly white and from the University of Indiana, were on hand, and as the band played a jazzed-up version of Old Man River, they raised handwritten placards: RACIST GO HOME...
...P P OPULISM in America has thrived, when it has thrived, on a deeply felt sense of being abused by powerful and remote forces...
...Behind George Wallace is a part of America at bay...
...It is they who have given the Negroes ideas, making them dissatisfied even in the heaven of Fort Wayne...
...unemployment was low, and the big companies like Magnavox and International Harvester employed hundreds and hundreds of them...
...In Indiana, where he got a third of the votes in the 1964 Democratic primary, and elsewhere in the North, George Wallace has directed his appeal to people on the line...
...SHOULD A MADMAN HAVE A-BOMBS...
...He had only the one speech and he had given it too many times...
...One woman called forth the shade of Alger Hiss and another recounted the villainies of the United Nations...
...My motel clerk, though the son of a bail bondsman, will probably pass through his Wallace phase in a couple of years, but my cab driver is trapped...
...AFORTNIGHT BEFORE George C. Wal lace visited Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a rally in his pursuit of the Presidency, there was looting in the city's Negro areas...
...He left peaceably to cheers, howls, and catcalls, and the speech proceeded, but the memory of this protesting student and his kind hung over the rest of the evening like an unexorcisable spirit at a revival meeting...
...The thing to do, ran the consensus, is to get out "honorably" and bring our boys home, or else unleash the military: "If we can't get out, we ought to just blow up the whole place...
...Just as there were no big or even middling personages on the Wallace platform (not even the odd state legislator or maverick ex-con gressman who used to adorn Henry Wallace's platforms), so there were no fat cats in the audience...
...They live in border neighborhoods and don't have the money to fly to the suburbs...
...His hated image ran through Wallace's speech, not only in the form of the unwashed demonstrators who would lay down in front of no more cars if they ever laid down in front of President Wallace's car, but in the form of the bureaucrats at the Department of HEW whose briefcases President Wallace was going to throw into the Potomac, the guideline writers with pointed heads, the editors in their ivory towers looking down on the peasants, the millionaires with their machinating taxexempt foundations, all the sophisticated folks and liberal judges and preachers, the whole elite cult in Washington and on college campuses that have no use for the average man...
...It was beyond him why people in a city where "the colored can sit anyplace they like in any park" should behave so belligerently, and he was pretty sure, from personal contacts ("I know a lot of colored"), that outside agitators, probably Communists, were at work...
...Once these forces were the banks and railroads...
...Wallace delivered his one liners forcefully enough, now and then falling for variety's sake, into a homely drawl, but the talk lacked spontaneity...
...He chided the demonstrators a bit as the yelling continued, suggesting that the TV cameras get a picture of them because that was why they had showed up...
...The clerk's father was a bail bondsman—"He gets them out of jail"—and he too was a Wallace supporter...
Vol. 15 • November 1968 • No. 6
