Wallace Altered U.S. Politics

By Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Sept. 15, 1998

George Corley Wallace will be remembered as a man who transformed American politics, historians say.

The former Alabama governor, who died Sunday at age 79, first gained fame by opposing federal efforts to end racial segregation in Southern schools. But it was his populist presidential campaigns -- especially his 1968 third-party run that split Democrats and thereby helped elect Republican Richard M. Nixon -- which historians say forever changed the national political scene.

"I think Wallace was a wake-up call to the people about the threat of centralization of government," Emory University historian Donald Livingston said yesterday. "Wallace could see [Lyndon Johnson's] Great Society taking off, and he blew the whistle on it and it resonated with people all over the country."

Mr. Wallace's opposition to the federal government, which he said was run by "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals," was adapted as the "revenue sharing" program of Mr. Nixon's administration, and lives on in Republican rhetoric as "block grants" for welfare, Mr. Livingston said.

"Wallace really was articulating the older American notion of federalism," he said. Although Mr. Wallace later mended fences with blacks in Alabama, his initial opposition to the civil rights movement will always "demonize" him for liberals, Mr. Livingston said.

"Race relations were and still are very complicated matters in the United States, but people try to approach them with very simplistic ideologies and slogans," he said. "I think Wallace is a symbol of just how complicated that situation can be."

"It's kind of hard to be neutral on the governor," Michael Hill, professor of history at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., said yesterday. "Most people either love him or hate him. During his prime, Wallace was either a man you loved or you hated."

It was Mr. Wallace's gift of oratory that did much to make him loved or hated. "Wallace's power began in rhetorical innovation," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch wrote in 1995, crediting Mr. Wallace with "coining new expressions such as 'forced busing' and 'big government,' which were anything but common cliches 30 years ago."

Even the governor's opponent during the civil rights era, Martin Luther King Jr., recognized Mr. Wallace as an able orator. "He just has four speeches," King said in 1963, "but he works on them and hones them, so that they are little, minor classics."

Mr. Wallace's ability to sway an audience also impressed "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," Mr. Thompson described the first time he attended a Wallace rally, in Milwaukee. Blue-collar factory workers in the audience praised Mr. Wallace as "the real thing ... he don't beat around the bush."

The speech was "a flat-out fire and brimstone performance" during which Mr. Thompson said he "had a sense [Mr. Wallace] had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert."

If Mr. Wallace's effect on listeners was mystical, his put-downs of hecklers were memorable. In his 1996 book, "Dixie Rising," New York Times reporter Peter Applebome recalls being a student at Duke University in 1968 when he attended a Wallace presidential rally in Durham, N.C.

"A bunch of us snotty, privileged, suburban college kids went," Mr. Applebome wrote, recalling that some of his friends began "loudly heckling Wallace with the standard litany of 'sieg heil' and 'fascist,' in the process playing to perfection the arrogant, elite foils Wallace delighted in using to incite his crowds."

Mr. Applebome remembers Mr. Wallace's retort: "'I heard some of them four-letter words you hippies been using over there,' he sneered in our direction, waving his arms in disgust. 'Too bad you didn't know some others like B-A-T-H and W-O-R-K.'"

Such incidents seem humorous 30 years later, but Clyde Wilson, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, said Mr. Wallace transformed American politics.

"I think in order to really appreciate Wallace, you have to be old enough to know what the national debate was like before he came on the scene," Dr. Wilson said. "The usual practice of American politics is to avoid all serious issues, and yet Wallace was willing to bring up serious issues and tell the truth about them."

"In fact, the Republicans have been running and getting elected on the issues he raised ever since the 1960s," Mr. Wilson said. "He actually changed the national debate more than anybody has since World War II."

© 1998 News World Communications, Inc.

Click Here to RETURN to Robert Stacy McCain Essays

r.s.mccain@worldnet.att.net