From Daily Telegraph:
George Wallace
Published: 3:10PM BST 15 Sep 1998
"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.
"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.
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