George Wallace

George Wallace: The Most Influential Loser

On the morning of 11 June 1963, a compact man in a dark suit planted himself in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama and read a proclamation on states' rights to a federal deputy attorney general. He had already lost. Kennedy had ordered troops of the Army's 2nd Infantry Division up from Fort Benning, and the two Black students at the centre of it, Vivian Malone and James Hood, would register that afternoon. Wallace knew every bit of this before he arrived. The point was never to hold the doorway. The point was to be photographed standing in it.

Clio, the Ring, and the Bench

George Corley Wallace Jr. was the eldest child of a struggling Barbour County farming family, born on 25 August 1919 in Clio, Alabama, and he learned early that smallness could be converted into force. He won Alabama Golden Gloves championships in 1936 and 1937 and carried a bantamweight's crouch into every room he entered afterwards. He graduated from Barbour County High School in 1937 and took a law degree from the University of Alabama in 1942, sharing classrooms with Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge who would later become his most useful adversary.

The war interrupted him and marked him. Spinal meningitis in early 1943 ended any hope of flying as a pilot and left permanent nerve damage and partial deafness. He retrained as a B-29 flight engineer, flew missions against Japan from the Marianas in 1945 under Curtis LeMay's Twentieth Air Force, and was discharged on medical grounds with a small pension for what the paperwork called psychoneurosis. He came home, won a seat in the Alabama House in 1946, and sponsored the Trade School Act of 1947 and the industry-recruiting Wallace-Cater Acts of 1951. On the circuit bench from the early 1950s, "the fighting little judge" was, by the account of the Black attorney J.L. Chestnut, the most liberal judge he had ever practised before and the first in Alabama to call him "Mister" in court.

The Lesson of 1958

That man disappeared in 1958. Running for governor with an NAACP endorsement against the hard-line John Patterson, Wallace lost badly, and told an aide he had been out-raced by his opponent and would never let it happen again. He later described the conversion with a candour that is more damning than any accusation: he had tried talking about good roads and good schools, nobody listened, and then he began talking in racial slurs and they stomped the floor. It was not a change of belief. It was market research.

Segregation Forever

He won in 1962 and took office on 14 January 1963 with an inaugural address written by Asa Earl Carter, a former Klan leader: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Five months later came the schoolhouse door. In private letters that year he wrote of Black Americans as "inclined to criminality" and warned that integration would leave the white race "deteriated to that of the mongrel complexity." He built a state trooper force with Confederate flag patches and an unconstitutional Sovereignty Commission to watch Alabamians.

The paradox of that first term is that its domestic record was not reactionary at all. He built fifteen trade schools, chartered the University of South Alabama, introduced free school textbooks, founded the community college system, raised teachers' pay by more than forty per cent, and became the first Southern governor to fly north offering tax abatements to corporate boards — drawing several hundred million dollars in new plants, most of them, the Encyclopedia of Alabama notes, low-wage.

Taking Alabama National

Barred from succeeding himself, he ran his wife Lurleen in 1966 as a placeholder; she took office in January 1967 and died of uterine cancer in May 1968, aged forty-one, having been kept ignorant of her own diagnosis for years. By then Wallace was a national figure. He had already taken at least a third of the primary vote in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In 1968 he ran as the American Independent Party candidate with LeMay on the ticket, told crowds there was "not a dime's worth of difference" between the two parties, promised that any anarchist who lay down in front of his automobile would be lying in front of his last, and carried five Southern states with nearly ten million votes. He remains the last candidate outside the two major parties to win pledged electoral votes.

Laurel, Maryland

On 15 May 1972, campaigning in a shopping-centre parking lot in Laurel, Maryland, he was shot four times by Arthur Bremer, a drifter whose diary showed he wanted fame rather than a cause. One bullet lodged in Wallace's spine, paralysing him from the waist down for life. The day after the shooting he won the Maryland and Michigan primaries; his campaign was finished anyway.

The Long Apology

The second half of his life was spent trying to unsay the first. He declared himself born-again, and in 1979 said flatly of the schoolhouse door: "I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over." Returning to office in 1982 he campaigned as an unembarrassed liberal on spending, took a third of the Black vote in the primary and the overwhelming majority of it in the general election, and in his final term appointed more Black Alabamians to office than any governor before him, including two cabinet members. In October 1996 he met Vivian Malone Jones privately, apologised, and gave her the first Lurleen B. Wallace Award of Courage. She said she had forgiven him. He died of septic shock in Montgomery on 13 September 1998.

Why George Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Wallace as a diagnosis of political instinct, not intellect, and the people who use it are mostly historians who loathed him. Dan T. Carter of Emory University put it plainly: Wallace "laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues," and "he was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students." The Huntsville Times traced Nixon's, Reagan's and Bush's anti-Washington appeals back to him. His biographers settled on the phrase "the most influential loser" in twentieth-century American politics.

The specific skill was audience-reading of an almost surgical kind: an ability to locate the exact resentment a crowd could not name and hand it back to them as language, then to feel the moment that language stopped selling and change it. Nothing he built lasted; the doctrine he invented outlived him in other people's mouths.

The counter-case is strong and should be stated. He did not invent Southern resentment, he metabolised it. The Encyclopedia of Alabama judges that he "may have governed the least of any Alabama chief executive," preferring campaigning to administration and leaving his departments to appointees, several of whom — including his aide Seymore Trammell — went to prison. He never solved education funding and refused property tax reform. And a talent exercised in bad faith, by his own admission, is closer to a con man's ear than to genius of any dignified kind.

Legacy

Wallace lost every presidential race he entered and won the argument anyway, which is the uncomfortable shape of his career. The realignment he sketched — working-class white voters detached from the New Deal coalition by grievance rather than economics — became the central fact of American electoral politics for fifty years. Alabama kept his name on community colleges and a tunnel; in 2020 several universities took it off their buildings. Both decisions were about the same man.