GEORGE WALLACE - PERSISTENT PRESENCE

...The power of state government was thrown against them, and Alabama was the best at doing that, with state troopers to bludgeon demonstrators time after time, with unconstitutional "laws" that had to be beaten down, with the South's largest investigative force to spy on and build dossiers against the enemy...

...Shoot...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 319 Words mean little to Wallace but everything to the rest of us...

...He denies the reports that he directly ordered the attack...

...He lies...

...I watched once at a rally where the crowd was fired up to hear him speak, where preliminary speakers like old Governor Barnett and shrill Lester Maddox had stirred the people with standard racist rhetoric...

...He is still the carrier of the poison of the segregationistgovernor regimes that seeped into the nation's bloodstream and nearly killed it with Watergate...

...Wallace is noted for that monstrous piece of cynicism about the racial issue after being defeated the first time he ran for governor: a vow never to be "out-niggered" again...

...And the most dangerous tendency on the American Left is to listen wistfully to his spouting of the language of populism, and to seek in such a man, for whom the words mean no more than his racism did, the will o' the wisp of "working-class solidarity," to think they can do business with him...

...People were shocked," said one Alabaman who was associated with Albert Brewer's unsuccessful race for governor against Wallace in 1970, "when all that came out about Nixon's dirty tricks...

...It is chilling to read serious assessments of his chances, and disgusting to see James Reston cap off an interview with him by praising his "great" spirit...

...But just as the crowd responded at that rally in 1964, so whites across the South during the 1960s rampaged and murdered in response to their highest elected officials telling them that blacks were taking over under illegal laws promulgated by Communists...

...George Wallace got where he is in politics by an unprincipled, demagogic manipulation of the South's anguished struggle with racism...

...We can see him full in the light of Watergate—a poseur, a liar, an image manipulator, a slickster indeed, the poor man's (God help us) Nixon...

...Those segregationist governors were a motley crew, ranging from dumb old Ross Barnett of Mississippi to roguish Marvin Griffin of Georgia...

...One could compile a list of all the repressive and inflammatory actions he took in the name of racism during those same years, the most notorious the onslaught by Alabama state troopers against the demonstrators in Selma...

...But Alabama is still saddled with Wallace and so, to its peril, is America...

...Antipathy toward the press (among other democratic institutions) was part of all the segregationist regimes, and Wallace of course is noted for having carried it to the same extreme Nixon did...

...As Robert Sherrill pointed out in Gothic Politics In the Deep South, he did more for the cause of desegregation than any other Southerner...

...He said that men would follow behind Brewer campaign appearances and ask people, "Did he have any blacks with him...

...It is taken as a mark of absolution for him that some black politicians, no more principled than some white ones, endorse him...

...People in Alabama who are against him and watch him warily speak of him in that special hushed tone Southerners reserve for madmen and belligerent drunks: a mixture of pity and fear...

...Like Nixon, he believes in one thing only—his own political purposes...

...Government officials said this falls within a shadowy area of laws prohibiting corporate loans to candidates...

...Not so with Wallace...

...the chief, if not the only, beneficiaries of the present Court's rulings have been duly and lawfully convicted criminals, Communists, atheists, and clients of vociferous left-wing minority groups...

...A compatriot likened it to alcoholism and so asked, "Will Wallace run...

...We want no part of you...

...A mantle of sainthoodby-association settled upon him when a lunatic tried to assassinate him in '72, and some of that strange sort of respectability still clings to him...

...In reaction to the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, segregationists took over, and they perceived their enemies, blacks and whites who were for integration, as in a war...

...They are not traceable directly to him...

...318 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS He is a threat as a spoiler...

...Some of them believed in what they were doing and were that small degree better than Nixon, who believed only in his own political ends and used the awesome power of his office, including war power, for nothing else...

...Dirty tricks...

...He was almost cut down by the kind of objectless, random murderousness that his speeches inspire...

...It is the assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty...

...Now he's beginning to undergo a little scrutiny...

...When the crowd, responding not just to the words but to the animosity in the man, threatened to get out of hand again, he calmed them with an impromptu homily about God loving everybody, regardless of race or creed...

...He scapegoats...

...Some in 320 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Alabama say that the encounter with that blood-lust in which he has ever trafficked has taken some of the sting out of him, some of the cruel energy, and that this is the best hope he won't do well this time...

...THE RECORD of what he said and what his little people did during those sad, past years is all there...

...Yet after all we learned from Watergate, we—the press, other politicians, the public generally—treat him as though he were "just another politician...

...He postures...

...The New York Times ran a comprehensive report of what the Alabama Journal has been pointing out to no avail for years—that during his years in office his "little people" in Alabama have gone from bad to worse according to all the indices, including health care, employment, and income, and have been carrying the most regressive tax rate in the nation...

...One of the Montgomery Wallace-watchers described how he can continue to hold them while making overtures to more sane elements of the electorate...

...I know their ordinary decency, their capacity for kindness and generosity, their inherent humanity, and their bravery...

...We assumed our phones were tapped," said the man who worked in the campaign, "and carried on conversations designed to mislead...

...He has a corner on all of America's racist and Far Right voters and presumably can count again on support from all those rag-tag rightist and racist organizations the Anti-Defamation League listed as behind him in 1968...

...That is the sorriest part of his record...

...When time came for them to hear Wallace, he addressed himself entirely to the worst racist conditioning instilled in them by the Southern society that had betrayed them from birth, and he betrayed them there again, these people he calls his own...

...Yet others did not believe in what they were doing, which is the most frightening thing about the candidcacy of the lone survivor in office of that terrible gang, George Corley Wallace...

...He has no positive policies, only an inflammatory talent for vitriol...

...The middle class is demoralized and he is speaking to its frustrations, pointing out, with some correctness, that it is paying the freight for rich and poor alike...

...His grandstanding brought forth one landmark Federal Court decision after another...

...A Gallup Poll this spring showed 22 percent of the Democratic voters supporting him, the highest percentage among the scattering of candidates at that time...

...The rabid ones around here got upset with him when those blacks endorsed him...

...They included, when it appeared Brewer had a chance in the run-off, whispering campaigns against members of the candidate's family, dissemination of materials suggesting that Brewer's election would mean rule by blacks...

...But...

...I had wept to see them turned into a cowardly, murderous mob, and then I listened, sickened, to that skilled language of vitriol that he speaks, conveying not conviction, only a hard glee in the attack...

...I grew up among them, have lived all my life amid them...

...In Frady's account there is none of the torturous explanation that Wallace tried this time, after a reaction set in, that he meant the Allies never should have let Hitler take over...

...And there is the parallel with Nixon...

...Now Mississippi is rid of Ross, and a man who passes for a moderate there is governor today...

...That same fear grips the nation now...

...But Alabama has been warned against him all these years and still he wins there, and still the rest of the white South, even though electing its own progressive state governments, seems fatally fascinated with him...

...The Klan is said often to be the instrument of them...

...Was he drinking...

...But, as Myrdal pointed out, had Southern progressives raised the race issue, attempted to lead their people out of racism's deadly clutch, they might have prevailed...

...Instead the South got the segregationist governors and the nation its infusion of poison from them...

...A better hope is that America may find within itself the strength and decency to reject him because of what he is, to raise the record of his racist demagoguery against him, get rid of him with the same finality with which it got rid of Joseph McCarthy, and in the process get a bit more of its soul back...

...The Times also ran a detailed account of his dubious campaign financing, an arrangement whereby a direct-mail firm advances him the cost of mailings, sometimes at a loss...

...Is there going to be an election...

...race, more clearly than ever before, is indeed the American dilemma...

...And, the most frightening part of it, the kind of people he appeals to in the nation—malcontent poor whites, discontent lower-middle-class whites—are more numerous and in worse shape financially and psychologically...

...Frady's book contains an account of Wallace saying back then the same business about Americans having fought against the wrong side in World War II that so shocked a group of foreign journalists interviewing him this year...

...THE RECORD IS ALL THERE on Wallace and the story has been told again and again, including Marshall Frady's chilling book about him in 1968...

...The Kennedy administration allowed him to stage the scenario of standing in the schoolhouse door to block desegregation at the University of Alabama, a meaningless exercise except for its image-making value across the country...

...Another insight into his foreign-policy notions was his 1968 running-mate choice of Curtis LeMay, whose appetite for atomic war was soon discovered...

...In the South of the 1940s and early 1950s, progressive people tried to avoid the race issue, bent their will against its being raised in politics for fear of how viciously the white voters might vent their racism...

...and when the segregationist governors were declaring their ideological enemies as undeserving of human rights, they talked about "Commonists," too...

...His defiance spurred passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965...

...It is all there in the record...

...In Alabama, they blew up that black church, killing the four little Sunday School girls, shot to death a black voter-registration demonstrator in Marion, beat to death a white minister in Selma, shot to death a white woman demonstrator near there, shot to death a black demonstrator in Tuskegee, shot to death a white priest in Lowndes County...

...The attackers were not Klansmen, not the fanatic haters at the fringe of all American society, but decent folk, gathered there on a Fourth of July in the trappings of patriotic, bunting-draped, American democracy, wanting their ever-neglected self-interest spoken to...

...Said one of them: "He's been sitting up there attacking anyone he wants to without fear of reprisal...

...The other segregationist governors fell by the wayside when it became clear that they could not preserve segregation and had lied when they claimed they could...

...Get out...

...Of the just-enacted Civil Rights Law: "It is an act of tyranny...

...The same terrible principle that motivated Watergate controlled most of the region's state houses...

...These enemies had to be destroyed by whatever means necessary, and there were to be no restraints, least of all the United States Constitution...

...In his racial backtracking now he claims that he never opposed black people, merely resisted a big federal government "trying to run every detail of citizens' lives," and that may be technically true...

...WHAT IS HE UP TO this time...

...But then they got to thinking about it and said, `Old George really slicked 'em, didn't he...

...Why can't we find within ourselves the sureness to cry, enough...

...Still the same simple thing—running for office...

...No one can ever convince a Klansman in Indiana that Wallace is liberal on race...

...Wallace is better organized now than he was in his third-party adventure of 1968 and in his attempt on the Democratic party in 1972...

...Yet intelligent people today debate over whether his recent backtracking on the issue is genuine...

...Indeed, an integrationist was a Communist by definition, and worse things too...

...You don't know anything about dirty tricks until you've run against George Wallace...

...The toxin first appeared, interestingly, during the cold-war, anti-Communist witch hunts in which Nixon figured so prominently...

...Other periodicals, including New York, have hit at other aspects of his unsavory record, and the presumption is that the nation once more is warned against him...

...But since his purposes were purely political—that is, manipulation of imagery in the Nixon fashion— he was able to make each defeat seem a victory, a symbol of his valor against insurmountable odds...

...And: "I do not call the members of the United States Supreme Court Communists...

...You are unfit...

...All of a sudden two black men with a white woman walked into the grandstand and the people there, Wallace's little people, white people of my South, attacked them, slamming metal folding chairs down on their heads, trying to kill them...

...He never had any conviction about it to begin with, and so began backtracking when his national ambitions and the new voting strength of blacks in the South made it expedient...

...They are my people, too...

...When a true believer like old Ross Barnett had been given the same opportunity at the University of Mississippi, things got out of hand and a murderous riot ensued...

...He just loves to run...