Mining America's Dark Regions
LEAMER, LAURENCE
Mining America's Dark Regions WALLACE By Marshall Frady World. 246 pp. $5.95 Reviewed by LAURENCE LEAMER Ford Study Fellow, University of Oregon A mean and grotesque portrait of George...
...Wallace's own identification with the 'folks' is almost sensuous, almost mystic," he writes...
...that we, not the insipid bloc voters of some sections . . . will determine in the next election who shall sit in the White House of these United States...
...The narrative moves with some of the tense urgency of the former Alabama governor himself...
...His language is a vibrant, forceful tool of communication...
...Between the covers the author's own portrait of Wallace is almost as ugly as the David Levine caricature...
...The mass media, too, have made the mistake of treating Wallace more as an unpleasant personality than a major political figure—though not with Frady's skill or accuracy...
...At the very least he understands the dark regions of the American heart better than anyone else...
...Wallace is especially good with students who have read or heard from their professors that he is stupid and uneducated...
...The governor sensed his unease: " T can assure you,' Wallace said quickly...
...regions much bigger than anyone but Wallace would have expected...
...Segregation forever...
...Frady quotes the familiar passage that ends, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the face of tyranny...
...He has "something of a dwarf's quick, nimble alacrity, as well as that peculiar suggestion of danger...
...A keen observer of political man, Wallace is correct...
...The people just don't like you journalists writing about my spitting in the wastebasket or Lester Maddox wiping snot from underneath his nose...
...When Frady pauses in his story, his insights are often astute...
...The Wallace movement is complex, involving far more than racism...
...When one realizes that the speech was made five years ago, it is difficult to consider Wallace a simple-minded racist or Populist...
...With the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, Wallace was the most important third-party candidate in the last 100 years...
...T don't blame people for not liking it, governor,' said Kennedy in an almost inaudible whisper...
...In capturing the words themselves, though, he often loses their effect...
...T don't like it myself.' " Wallace's political talents should be evident from that exchange, despite its seeming incoherence...
...The then Attorney General Kennedy had sought the meeting in the governor's office, and Wallace's staff taped the exchange...
...Frady has cut his Wallace to pieces, ugly yet recognizably human pieces, but he deals only peripherally with the ugly political aspects of the very large, very real George Wallace who campaigned for President across the country...
...For a moment the tough and implacable Robert Kennedy seemed off-balance and shaken...
...Wallace will not go away, and it is regrettable that, except for one campaign biography, Frady's "journalistic novel" is the only study of the third-party candidate...
...It would be unfortunate if Frady's vivid account of Wallace's personality led people to believe that the man and what he represents will wither away like the last flowering of some Southern perversity...
...Robert Kennedy experienced Wallace's shrewdness just before the 1963 University of Alabama confrontation...
...Wallace does talk at times like an illiterate, and Frady has a good ear for that speech...
...A vigorous 49, he was also the youngest of the 1968 Presidential candidates...
...Before such audiences he has been known to change jeers and hisses to silent nods of agreement...
...Anyone who has talked to Wallace and his supporters—and carefully listened to what they say?knows this will not happen...
...we get thousands of letters from Michigan and former Southerners in California, in Michigan—automobile workers . . . who say, "We gonna stand with you people in the South...
...The same speech included the following: "Let us send this message back to Washington by our representatives who are with us today, that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man . . . that we intend to take the offensive and fight for freedom across the nation, wielding the balance of power we know we possess in the Southland...
...5.95 Reviewed by LAURENCE LEAMER Ford Study Fellow, University of Oregon A mean and grotesque portrait of George Wallace—features warped in disdain and chin clefted with a swastika—is on the cover of Marshall Frady's Wallace...
...He doesn't know where he stands today...
...Frady's Wallace is "a stumpy little man with heavy black eyebrows and bright darting eyes and a puglike bulb of a nose...
...Frady treats a personality rather than a major political figure, and the reader may well come to think the two are identical...
...7 do not want to use troops . . .' "Kennedy replied crisply, 'I'm glad to hear that, governor.' " T mean to stand,' continued Wallace, 'as I said in the campaign for governor, because I believe we've got to wake the people of this country up to the fact that this business of the central government, every time you turn around moving in with troops and bayonets...
...Throughout the book this Wallace talks in the pure and simple language of the redneck: "Well, spendin' money for the blind and crippled and disabled—that's what we spose to do...
...I believe the people don't like it...
...For anyone not blinded by class snobbishness, the Alabaman is a compelling conversationalist...
...That ain't no giveaway, that's easin' sufferin, that's heppin' folks...
...Wallace must be observed and analyzed with all the objectivity and insight that journalism and social science can muster...
...In fact, what makes Wallace the ultimate demagogue is that, behind his indefatigable scrambling, his ferocious concentration, his inexhaustible ambition, there seems to lurk a secret, desperate suspicion that facing him, aside from and beyond his political existence, is nothingness—an empty, terrible white blank...
...And I say, Segregation now...
...He makes no attempt to detail Wallace's career, but manuevers his material with a novelist's freedom, writing prose rich in metaphor and freshly-minted adjectives...
...One can no more downgrade Wallace by calling him names than punish a masochist by whipping him...
...Frady's book presents the first published account of their revealing conversation...
...As one Wallace supporter said last November in California, "Thirty years ago the common man knew where he stood...
...I believe all over this nation...
...The people don't like it," Wallace warned one reporter last spring...
...Frady calls his impressionistic account a "journalistic novel...
...Probably the most significant speech Wallace ever delivered was his inaugural address as governor of Alabama on January 17, 1963...
...Segregation tomorrow...
...That would be a mistake...
...But Frady somehow does not convey Wallace's intelligence and shrewdness, or the dangers of his movement...
...They are his only reality...
...He feels that without them he is nothing, and with them he is everything and cannot be intimidated...
...Indeed, the book's success as a literary effort makes it a failure as journalism...
...Unfortunately, such insights are almost forgotten as one reads on, propelled through the pages by the novelistic plotting...
Vol. 51 • November 1968 • No. 21
