The reality was both uglier and more complicated.
In his four terms as governor, Wallace saw an era of unparalleled
corruption that operated through a crony system centered on his brother
Gerald, a lawyer who died in 1993. With the governor’s approval, Gerald
Wallace and his close associate, Oscar Harper, went into business selling
the state office supplies, printing, vending machines and building leases.
Gerald Wallace and Harper established an asphalt company with $1,000 in
capital. In a year and half, the infant company garnered more than a
million dollars in state contracts.
These unblushing accounts come not from political opponents, but from
Harper’s 1988 memoir, “Me ‘n’ George,” regarded as one of the best guides
to the inside dealing in Alabama’s capital during the Wallace years.
“Most people have got the wrong idea about how I made my money,” Harper
wrote. “They think me and Gerald are crooks.” Then he added: “That ain’t
true. It’s just that good deals kept popping up and I never was one to
turn a good deal down.”
As this comment suggests, Wallace’s first term was rowdy, even by the
standards of a region that had produced Gov. Eugene Talmadge of Georgia,
known as “The Wild Man from Sugar Creek.”
It is one of the paradoxes of Southern history that Alabama’s “Fighting
Judge,” by trying to revive the antebellum doctrine of states’ rights,
instead enabled the civil rights movement to reach its high-water mark.
The Birmingham demonstrations in 1963 led to the passage of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act. Two years later the Selma march led to the passage of the 1965
Voting Rights Act.
Despite these triumphs, it was a dangerous time for blacks and whites who
supported the civil rights movement. During the Wallace years, at least 10
people died in racially motivated killings in Alabama. Wallace and his
flamboyantly inept and drug-addled public safety director, Al Lingo,
responded mainly by disrupting the federal investigations into crimes like
the bombing that killed four little girls at the 16th Street Baptist
Church on Sept. 15, 1963.
Leaders of Alabama’s business and educational establishment, always
sensitive to the state’s image, came to regard Wallace as an
embarrassment. The governor himself was hurt and stunned when students at
his beloved alma mater greeted him with chants of “We’re No. 50,” a
reference to the cash-starved university’s academic standing.
But George Wallace was a creature of the storm who always had wind beneath
his wings, and that wind was the adoration of the white farmers and
factory workers and rural courthouse bosses who counted the votes and
doled out patronage.
They loved it when Wallace waved his cigar, flooded his food with ketchup
and said that the guy pumping gas at an Alabama crossroads knew more about
Communism than the State Department.
When a surprisingly strong anti-Wallace faction in the legislature refused
to alter the state Constitution to allow him a second term, Wallace put
his ailing wife Lurleen on the ballot in 1966. She won easily in a
heart-rending campaign that demonstrated the scope of his ambition. Only a
few weeks before her husband announced her candidacy, Mrs. Wallace had
surgery and radiation treatment for the aggressive intestinal cancer that
would kill her in 1968.
Political writers predicted that Alabamians would punish Wallace for his
cynical use of a sick woman. But he was only shifting gears. He reclaimed
the governorship in 1970 with the most flagrantly racist campaign of his
career, warning that his progressive opponent, Albert Brewer, was using a
black “block vote” to install a regime of federal oppression. With
Wallace’s clear approval, the Klan circulated fliers falsely accusing the
clean-living Brewer and his wife and daughters of sexual perversions and
miscegenation.
It was a historic election for Alabama in two ways. First, Alabama was
resisting the epochal progressive wave that swept the region in 1970 and
installed New South governors like Jimmy Carter in Georgia and Reubin
Askew in Florida. Secondly, Wallace openly committing himself to the
presidential race track.
By Wallace’s reckoning, his appeal to blue-collar voters outside the South
had “shaken the eyeteeth” of both major parties in 1968. Indeed, President
Nixon so feared Wallace’s disruptive potential in 1972 that he supplied
$400,000 to Wallace’s opponent in the 1970 campaign for governor. But
Wallace won with his racist attacks and his invitation to Alabamians to
“send them a message” by launching him toward the 1972 presidential race.
For a few months, Wallace was the hottest thing going. Gone were the
pomaded hair and the bargain-store threads. His stylish new wife, Cornelia
Ellis Snively, a niece of former Governor Folsom, decked out Wallace in
modish, wide-lapel suits and taught him to use a blow dryer. Wallace
talked less about race because he could afford to. His attacks on school
busing let conservative whites know where he stood.
As Wallace moved toward victory in the Florida primary, Nixon himself made
an anti-busing speech that was regarded as a tribute to Wallace’s growing
appeal. Wallace finished second behind Sen. George McGovern in the
Wisconsin primary and second to former Vice President Hubert Humphrey in
Indiana. Having established himself as a force in the Democratic Party, he
was topping the polls in the primary campaigns of Maryland and Michigan.
But on the afternoon of May 15, at an unnecessary campaign rally in
Laurel, Md., Wallace overruled the Secret Service and moved into a crowd
for a final round of handshaking. “Hey, George, let me shake hands with
you,” shouted Arthur Bremer. Frustrated in an earlier ambition to kill
Nixon, Bremer, had been stalking the governor for weeks. From a range of
three feet, the gunman shot Wallace three times, severing his spine and
paralyzing him for life. Bremer is now in prison in Maryland, serving the
63-year sentence given him in June 1972.
Although his presidential hopes ended, Wallace won two more terms as
governor by appealing to white loyalty and catering to the thousands of
new black voters whose franchise he had opposed. But Wallace now behaved
more like a pensioner than a chief executive. The constant pain from his
wound — “the thorn in my flesh” — limited his concentration and resulted
in a dependence on methadone and other painkillers. He became
pathologically jealous of his wife, Cornelia, who after a messy divorce in
1978 encountered her own problems with substance abuse.
Wallace’s hope to found a dynasty foundered when his son, George Jr.,
proved a querulous campaigner who could not progress beyond minor state
offices. Wallace married again to a failed country singer named Lisa
Taylor. That marriage, too, generated sour publicity before they divorced
in 1987.
He is survived by four children from his first marriage: his son, of
Montgomery; three daughters, Lee Dye and Bobbi Jo Parsons, both of
Birmingham, and Peggy Kennedy of Montgomery; two brothers, Gerald, of
Montgomery, and Jack, of Eufaula, Ala.; and several grandchildren.
Wallace won his last election as governor in 1982, but it was historical
revision, rather than running the state, that occupied his last years.
Starting in 1977, he began giving interviews in which he said that
political philosophy rather than racism was the motor of his career.
In a typical interview, he said: “The New York Times, the Eastern
establishment newspapers never did understand that segregation wasn’t
about hate. I didn’t hate anybody. I don’t hate the man who shot me. When
I was young, I used to swim and play with blacks all the time. You find
more hate in New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., than in all the
Southern states put together.”
As part of his rehabilitation effort, Wallace sought meetings with civil
rights figures like the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and
Rep. John Lewis, whose beating on “Bloody Sunday” at Selma galvanzied the
voting-rights crusade. Wallace made a well-publicized appearance at King’s
old church in Montgomery. Sometimes he even managed to use the magic words
“I’m sorry.”
After Wallace left office in 1987, Alabamians continued to support him
through a figurehead position at Troy State University. By the time he
died, Republicans had taken over the governorship, and Wallace’s main
legacy, a statewide system of trade schools, junior colleges, and small
four-year institutions, was regarded as a monument to educational waste
and redundancy that a poor state could ill afford.
One of his last public appearances was in the Spike Lee documentary “Four
Little Girls,” which tells the story of the 16th Street Baptist Church
bombing. In his interview, Wallace insists that his best friend in the
world was a black orderly. The obviously uncomfortable orderly keeps
trying to walk out of the frame only to be tugged back by Wallace. In
public showings, that passage of the film usually drew laughter.
So ended the public career that saw Wallace move from being the most
feared politician of his era to a pitiable relic. It is a career whose
moral arc seemed, in retrospect, utterly predictable and utterly of a
piece with the Faulknerian idea of racism’s ineradicable curse. At the
height of his powers, George Wallace denied any moral responsibility for
the violent acts that racked his state. And in his Bible-haunted state,
many insisted that a terrible judgment had been visited upon him.
Brandt Ayers, the liberal editor of The Star newspaper in Anniston, put it
this way: “The Governor we Alabamians knew was a man of primal passion:
sincere champion of the working class, cynical manipulator of their
resentments, a sorcerer summoning the beast in our nature, a man of deep
insecurities, tenderness, and finally, humility.”
He added, “When he came to my office in 1974 campaigning for governor, I
told him: ‘George, you always claimed to stand up for the little man, but
everybody knows that the real underdog is the black man. We stood up for
him. You didn’t. Why?”‘ He did not answer. He just looked down at his legs
for what seemed a very long time.”