by Jon Meacham
“He don’t have no hobbies,” declares an old crony from Wallace’s hometown. “He don’t do any honest work. He don’t drink. He ain’t got but one serious appetite, and that’s votes.” It is the recollection of one official in Wallace’s home county that since 1947 there has been only one election in which Wallace’s name was not on the ballot for something. When he was a small child, remembers his grandmother, “He couldn’t bear to see anything thrown away. His grandfather would drop a piece of paper in the wastebasket, and he would fetch it right back out and say, ‘Well, Grandpa, this is some good. . . .’ ” And it’s as if he is still collecting scraps from his grandfather’s wastebasket, as if he were born with a compulsive, indiscriminate acquisitiveness. Shaking hands in a Birmingham shopping center during the 1966 governor’s race, he paused in the midst of the crowd before one man, holding onto his hand, and inquired earnestly, “Yes, now, and how is Faye? Now, she was in St. Vincent’s, wasn’t she? I meant to write her a letter—” He released the man for a moment and plunged both hands into his coat pockets, bringing up two thick fistfuls of business cards and folded envelopes, dog-eared, a bit soiled, covered with scribbles; he shuffled furiously through them, intent and absorbed, oblivious now of the crowd and everything else around him, until he found a vacant space on the back of one relatively fresh envelope on which he promptly scribbled yet another name and address, swiftly returning both handfuls to his coat pockets and seizing the man’s hand again. “Now, you tell her we gonna write her, heunh?” A lady from his hometown recalls, “I kept after him to see a friend of mine who was in the hospital, and he’d whine and grumble, ‘You know, I just hate to go anywhere nowadays, so many people want to shake my hand.’ But he finally agreed, and when we walked into the hospital room, a nurse made the mistake of telling him, ‘Some people down the hall would like to say hello to you, Governor.’ He looked at her real bright and quick and said, ‘Oh, yeah? Say there are?’ Before I knew it, he was right back out the door, running up and down that hall shaking hands with patients, some of them people flat on their backs who could hardly talk and probably wouldn’t even live until election time.” He has a way of showing up, unannounced and solemn and reverential, at funerals in remote places all over the state, slipping discreetly into a back pew of the church, and later at the graveside, after the burial, shaking hands, a commiserating singsong in his voice, with the family and friends of the deceased and the minister and the mortuary officials.
His voraciousness lends to everyone, indiscriminately, a certain dearness—invokes in him an automatic compassion and solicitude. “He don’t even like for us to talk about his enemies,” says one of his aides. “He’ll hear you cussin’ out some no-good sonuvabitch that everybody agrees is no good, and he’ll say, ‘Now, you wrong about that fella, he’s a good ole boy, you ought not to talk about him that way.’ ” It’s something like a miser’s fanatic abhorrence of waste, and it extends even to Negro voters. During one of his campaigns he told a group of Negro educators in a secret meeting on a Negro campus, “Now, when I get out here speakin’ to folks, don’t pay any attention to what I say, ’cause I’m gonna have to fuss at yawl a little. But I don’t mean any of it.” And during the 1966 campaign, as he was riding to an afternoon rally, a newsman in the car with him mentioned that one Alabama Negro leader had suggested privately that if Wallace would only give some small sign of amicability, make some token gesture, it was still possible that the Negroes in the state could gather behind him. Even though it was already obvious that Wallace would obliterate his Republican opponent, this piece of news caused him to snatch his cigar out of his mouth and peer sharply at the newsman: “Said they could, eh? ’Cose, they realize I couldn’t be meetin’ with them in public or anything like that. But, uh—what kinda sign you reckon they’d want?”
In turn, it seems impossible for him to believe that anyone could just simply and naturally not like him. “It bothers him no end to think anybody living is against him,” declares one of his old associates. “He’ll hear about somebody didn’t vote for him, he’ll worry over that fella, think about him, more’n he will his friends. He finds out you aren’t with him on something, he takes that to mean you’re against him altogether. He’ll sometimes call you around eleven at night and wheedle, wheedle, argue, argue.” When finally reduced to accept the mysterious finality of someone’s hostility, he and his people attribute it to some psychological defect in the person, to some peculiar and esoteric long-smoldering grudge, or to simple mental affliction—it’s a sad sign that the individual concerned has deserted the company of normal and decent folks, has forsaken the human race.
It was about 1964 that his passion began to embrace the entire nation. When he places long-distance calls, he is given to chatting with the operator first: “Honey, this is George Wallace—uh, guv’n’Alabama—yes, well, you know I’ve gotten a lot of support from you communications workers. I want to thank yawl, you folks been mighty good to me. You know, when I was up there in Wisconsin—” talking on until the operator finally, gently, suggests that perhaps she should put his call on through. “Well, thank you, honey. Now, you tell yo family hello for me, heunh?” Trying once to reach a political contact in Denver, he was connected by mistake with an anonymous bar somewhere in the outer reaches of Colorado, and he immediately engaged the bartender in a long and cozy conversation. An old but now disaffected comrade says, “You sit in his office, and he’s sifting through his mail all the time—you know, scooping it up with both hands, letting it spill through his fingers back on the desk, over and over again. He’ll pick up one letter, right in the middle of a conversation about something else, and say, ‘Look ahere, here’s a letter I got all the way from I-dee-ho. . . .’ ”
In Alabama Wallace has managed to pass the point of being just the most popular politician in the memory of the state. He has become a Folk Hero. Alabama, along with the rest of the South, has been changing into something more like the rest of the nation, and in the process, a particular devastation is being worked among its people. In his transition from the gentle earth to the city—the filling stations, the power lines, the merciless asphalt, the neon Jumboburger drive-ins—the Southern yeoman has acquired a quality of metallic ferocity. At the same time, the central fact about the South continues to be its defeat in the Civil War. There lingers a kind of mortal irreconcilability, an incapacity to forget—embarking on a kind of folk crusade a century ago, throwing everything into it, making a total commitment of honor and valor and hope and pride, it could not afford to lose: but it did. The malaise of spirit that disaster left behind has not been dispelled by the South’s transmogrification into an imitation of the North, and has only been deepened by its recent ten years of racial anguish. What Wallace has done in Alabama is assume the legacy of defeat, the burden of his state’s embarrassment before the rest of the nation, its lurking sense of guilt and pettiness, dread and futility. “They think he’s the greatest thing that’s ever come along,” snorts one Alabama judge. “He keeps tellin’ ’em, ‘You the children of Israel, you gonna lead this country out of the wilderness!’ Well, goddamn. We at the bottom of everything you can find to be at the bottom of, and yet we gonna save the country. We lead the country in illiteracy and syphilis, and yet we gonna lead the damn country out of the wilderness. . . .”
“I don’t have no inferiority complex about runnin’ for President,” Wallace announced in town squares all over Alabama during his wife’s campaign for governor. “I want you to know, when I go to the guvnuhs’ conferences, I don’t sit on the third row or the fourth row or even the second row. I sit on the front row, because I represent just as good and refined and cultured people as anybody else there. They talk like you and me hadn’t got enough sense to turn around. They say you voted ignorantly when you voted for me four years ago. But I want to let yawl in on a little secret. These here national politicians like Humphrey and Johnson and Nixon, they don’t hang their britches on the wall and then do a flyin’ jump into �
��em every mornin’, they put ’em on one britches leg at a time, just like the folks here in Chilton County. Earl Warren on the Supreme Court, he’s one of them big Republicans, and he’s done more against you’n’me than anybody else in this country. He hadn’t got enough brains in his whole head to try a chicken thief in Chilton County. I promise you, we gonna stir sump’n up all over this country, from Maine to California. We not powerful personally, it’s all you good people here in Chilton County. Why, when you go to Lima-Peru or Berlin-Germany or Geneva-Switzerland or even”—one waits, suspended, to see if it will come, and it does—“Paris-France, they’ve all heard about Alabama. This is the first time in yo history so many big politicos been worried about us. They say we gonna hurt ’em, and I’ll tell you sump’n: I wanta hurt ’em, ’cause they’ve hurt us long enough, and I’m tired of it. The Republicans now, they havin’ to meet in banks tryin’ to figger out what they gonna do about us down here. I’m not talkin’ about the good banks of Chilton County or Alabama, I’m talking about the Chase National and the Wall Street crowd. You know, they used to meet in little biddy banks to talk about us, but this time, we got ’em meetin’ in the biggest bank in the world talkin’ about you’n’me and what they gonna do about Guvnuh Wallace down here in Alabama. . . .”
The fact is, the rest of the nation has probably never been quite so real to Alabamians as it is right now. His forays into the North and the West, answering what most Alabamians had come to consider a sudden inexplicable conspiracy by the nation to torment them after leaving them in peace for nearly one hundred years, have caused them to rediscover America. There is an almost palpable sense of excitement and national involvement abroad in the state, even if it tends to be edged with belligerence. This has been one of Wallace’s accidental gifts to his people; he has, in this sense, enlarged their lives. Former governor John Patterson allows, “When Wallace was elected governor, the people in Alabama didn’t know the difference between a preferential primary and the real thing. What he’s done is educate ’em.” One of Wallace’s old boxing coaches asked a pair of newsmen: “Now, okay, I wish you’d answer a question for me. He’s running for President here. Everybody says he’s got to win something. Now, exactly, how can it happen? I mean, I’d really like to know.” It’s the same kind of wonder and dazed titillation the Hebrews probably felt on the shore of the Red Sea just after they learned it was going to open for them and then engulf their enemies. In cities and towns all over Alabama, people in restaurants during lunch hour are counting electoral votes, neglecting their desserts to make urgent calculations on wet napkins with ballpoint pens. One of Wallace’s aides admits, “All these little farmhouses stuck way out in the woods, they all got a TV set now, you know. When those folks see Wallace on there standin’ up to these big-city slick-hair boys, that’s not just him talkin’. That’s them on there. . . .”
In turn, Wallace’s own identification with “the folks” is almost sensuous, almost mystic. They are his only reality. He feels that without them he is nothing, and with them he is everything and cannot be intimidated. 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. It’s as if, when the time finally arrives for him to cease to be a politician, he will simply cease to be. His terror of being alienated from “the folks” is like the terror of not being able to breathe. Probably the most traumatic period of his life was the interval between the Alabama Senate’s startling refusal to permit him to succeed himself (late fall, 1965) and the spring primary that nominated his wife. The state Senate’s blunt defiance was the first serious political repudiation he had suffered since becoming governor, and through the long winter of doubt that followed, there was a vast silence from the people—a silence in which there occurred repeated little ominous intimations that he might be falling, might indeed have already fallen. The worst part of it was, he couldn’t really know—there was no final way to find out until the spring primary.
That harrowing winter even affected him physically. Seen lunching one February afternoon in the state capitol’s bleak basement cafeteria, he had the look of a small rodent that was slowly starving: the skin over his cheekbones and narrow forehead was taut, glazed, and yellowish, his ink-black hair was combed back long and thin and scraggly to the nape of his neck, there were hollows behind his ears like empty sockets, and in his eyes was a ragged despair. He waited fretfully for the others at the table to finish eating, tearing off shreds of paper napkin with his gnawed rusty fingers and wadding them into tiny moist pills which he arrayed along the rim of his plate. He kept working almost viciously at his teeth with a toothpick, his lips curled back in an unconscious snarl.
But when, in the spring, the decision was finally made to run his wife, he seemed restored, whole, even peaceful again. In a packed café one afternoon shortly after the start of the campaign, after exchanging hugs and kisses and ardent double-fisted handshakes—oddly suggestive of secret fraternity grips—with the sun-scorched ginghamed and khakied folk filing past his table, he turned back to his plate and speculated with some glee, savagely hammering out ketchup onto his hamburger with the heel of his hand, about what “those Anglo-Saxons” in the several counties in which Negroes were running for sheriff would do to any Negro who might be elected. “The Black Panthers talkin’ all the time about rev-o-lu-tion if one of their boys wins. A nigguh sheriff—the folks over there just ain’t gonna stand for any kind of stuff such as that. When those Anglo-Saxon people get stirred up, boy, they don’t mess around. Wouldn’t one of them nigguhs last thirty minutes if he was to have the misfortune of gettin’ elected.” He went on to express the hope that John Doar, frequent Justice Department emissary into Alabama, would be shot between the eyes before too very long. Later, after his hamburger and buttermilk, as he stood outside in his shirtsleeves in the warm May sunshine waiting for his wife to finish her short introductory speech, he seemed possessed of the high vivid exhilaration of someone who had just emerged from a long and dangerous illness.
Lurleen won the spring primary dizzyingly, drawing more votes than her nine opponents combined. The general election campaign began in the late fall, and though Lurleen technically was the candidate, it was more like a long celebration by Wallace of the reaffirmation of his existence. As one veteran Alabama reporter has noted, “He’s never quite so alive as when he’s out on the road again running for something. Each time, it’s like his own little personal Easter.”
The last week of that campaign began in soft October weather. The mornings were fine and bright and watery, just warm enough to produce a light dew of sweat on the upper lip. In the exhausted drab little towns where most of the rallies were held, the crowd would be gathered in a parking lot beside a brick store with a dimming inscription:
LEHMAN FURN. CO.
WARM MORNING HEATER
Drink
Royal Crown
Cola
and the hillbilly band on the flatbed trailer—pale youths, luxuriously coiffured, wearing twinkly, sequined black-and-gold suits with gold valentines running up their pants legs from black boots—would still be conjuring people out of the countryside with the lickety-split, devilish fiddle music, sawing them on out of the stores: farmers, filling-station workers, slippered women with their hair pinched up in curlers. The band would alternate spry gospel music with abject love ballads—forlorn, inconsolable, stricken, yelping, tragic, full of death, loss, violence, insanity, tears, night—which, with the arrival of the Wallace cars, would abruptly switch to rapid wheedling music while a large bell, carried from rally to rally in the back of a truck, would begin clangoring.
Wallace, in his faintly iridescent beetle-black suit, spurted out of his car, coming up on the first handshake with a slight dip, bending his knees, and then swooping upward, a flourish of body
jazz, and then moved along the edge of the throng while the band kept playing, he fidgeting with his cuffs and scuffing at the pavement with the toes of his shoes, like a fighter shuffling about in his corner before the opening gong. While Lurleen spoke, he huddled with the local candidates behind the platform, and people passing behind him gave him light pats on the shoulder, which he accepted, not even turning around. (At one stop, a small pack of young razorbacks stood near him and loudly observed, “He’s a rough-lookin’ little devil, ain’t he?” Wallace went over to them and, grinning, shook hands all around. “Glad to see you fellas out here today, heunh? Yawl doin’ all right?”)
When Lurleen stepped back to a spatter of applause, he would skip snappily up on the platform, take off his three-vent coat, and briskly roll up his shirtsleeves, once, twice, leaving bulky cuffs high on his biceps. Behind the microphone, his hipwork was fancy, vigorous, and vaguely obscene, with one blunt little paw constantly stroking the microphone stand: “These unidentified flyin’ objects people are seein’ outta airplane windows, they not flyin’ saucers, they these intellectual morons and national politicians havin’ runnin’ humanitarian fits about my wife’s candidacy down here. . . .” (Lurleen’s principal function in the campaign, besides her brief overture speeches, was to supply Wallace with a clipping or magazine from the pack she kept in her lap whenever he thrust his hand toward her—“See here, they got a picture of yo guvnuh in this magazine that goes all over this nation”—he flourishing the item and then swiftly returning it to her as he went on, she placing it back neatly in the battered packet in her lap and getting the next clipping ready and then sitting primly with her hands folded over it as she waited.) “The national press now, anything’s that bad about yo guvnuh, oh yes, they gonna run that. But anything good—why, you know, one national magazine had an article by a lady out in California during one of the guvnuhs’ conferences, called us Dogpatch folks down here ’cause of the way we dressed. Well, I want to tell you something, the woman that wrote that article, I wisht you had seen what she was wearin’.” Jubilant whoops from the crowd. “The Life magazine—yeah, I think they out here with us today, and the Newsweek and the Time, they all here—they wrote an article criticizin’ my wife for not goin’ to the guvnuhs’ meetings when we were out there in California. Well, of course, she wasn’t guvnuh then, and they had a program for the guvnuhs’ wives and they had conferences for the guvnuhs. But for the benefit of the Life magazine—and there’s some of ’em with us today—I just want to say that next year, after she’s elected guvnuh, she’ll go to the guvnuhs’ conferences, and I’ll go out with the guvnuhs’ wives.” There was another roar of guffaws, and one old-timer chortled to his friend, “Damn little rascal, he would too. He’d cut up a time with ’em.”
