Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  Wallace may have seemed an unlikely state representative, but he had already caught the serious fancy of Billy Watson- a political version of those gristled, quiet, unobtrusive, seemingly ageless and sourceless men whose lives, since their ancient and forgotten boyhoods, have been spent leaning along the track railings of breeding farms for racehorses.

  Born into a family of nine children, he was invested with no other name but Billy until he entered the Army in World War I, where he learned there weren't enough words in his name, so he decided to call himself William Winfred. After the Army he worked as a drummer over Alabama, peddling auto tires, incinerators, gas pumps (he sold the first plug of Bull o' the Woods chewing tobacco in the state). From that he naturally evolved into a drummer of political candidates. His formal business was a dry-goods store on the square in Clayton, but he dabbled in a number of other informal eclectic enterprises. He remained a bachelor until late in life, and when he eventually picked out for a wife the Barbour County Home Demonstration agent, he continued to be essentially a bachelor, childless, self-contained, as peripatetic as Faulkner's sewing-machine salesman, Ratliff-a droll and incorrigible hedonist, as humbly and casually mortal as stale cigars and bourbon in hotel glasses and money and election returns. He breathed as a Democrat. Once, at a Young Democrat convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, he began flourishing a fistful of bills, as he was wont to do in the presence of Northerners, and when someone finally twitted him, “With all that money, how come you're not a Republican?” Watson replied dryly, “Well, back there during the Depression, I was wearing shorts made out of guano fertilizer sacks. I have been a Democrat for thirty years, and now I'm fartin' through silk. I ain't about to change.” He had a calling card which he would present to strangers: one side read “W. W. (Billy) Watson (Retired)-No phone-No address-No business-No money,” and the other side read “The man who printed these cards for me said, 'Billy, since you have no address, no phone, no business, and no money, there will be no charge.”

  His calm level eye had paused on Wallace early. Watson, a well-seasoned campaign technician, was helping Barbour County's Chauncy Sparks in his race for governor, driving around with him over the state. “George was just workin' at little odd jobs there in the headquarters in Montgomery. But somehow he managed to push himself into the car with us-I turned around one day, and all of a sudden there he was in the back seat. Little later, we were in this hotel room in Montgomery, and George started tellin' Judge Sparks he wasn't gettin' out to the people enough. Judge Sparks just looked at him a minute, and then he said, 'Why, you not even dry behind the ears yet, and you come tellin' a man like me how to run a campaign. If you think you know more'n me, just what do you think I oughtta do?' George answered him real quick, 'Why don't you try jum-pin' outta an airplane without a parachute?' I nearly jumped outta my shoes. Nobody ever talked to Judge Sparks like that. But George got away with it.”

  Soon Wallace and Watson formed a casual but enduring alliance, both political and personal. “Think it was that second time he was runnin' for the legislature, he came to me and said, 'Watson, there's these two fellas I've promised two hundred and fifty dollars apiece to, they say they know some votes they can get with it.' I asked him who they were, and he told me, and I said, 'George, you know all they gonna do is get a crop with that money.' He said, 'I know that, but we got to give it to them. I already promised.' So the whole day before the election, I just sorta messed around over there at the courthouse, and them two fellas was sittin' right over yonder across the street in front of a filling station, leanin' back in their chairs and yawnin' like they wadn't thinkin' about nothin' in the world but how they couldn't wait to get home and get in bed. But they were watchin' every move I made, all day long. They were still stuck right there in those chairs when the sun went down. I just thought I'd make 'em wait for it as long as I could, at least make 'em work for it a little by havin' to wait a fairly long time. But I finally walked over there-them watchin' me now as bright as a dollar, but still not movin'-and I handed them the money. They tipped their hats and vanished. Best I can remember, they got themselves a right good crop.”

  From the beginning, what intrigued Watson was that George always seemed to take on jobs bigger than he was. “He was so small, maybe he figgered it made him bigger…”

  In no respect could it be said that Wallace is fashioned on the tragic scale, but looking at his early years in the legislature, one is left with a sense of exuberant promise subtly and inexorably corrupted. Many still remember him from those days as a dizzily gifted young man with an air of inevitability about him, winning and eager and dauntless, with instincts that were refreshingly simple and generous. But he also was possessed by a desperate and almost embarrassing political yearning-a yearning so extravagant that as soon as he arrived in Montgomery, he asked Folsom to appoint him Speaker of the House. “But he wanted to hep out everybody,” recalls a former state senator. “It was like he couldn't hardly wait to make everybody see he was for 'em. He identified with the common folks to a degree that you might have said he was almost in love with them. 'Course, it was the first time they'd ever elected him to anything.”

  He had not been in Montgomery long before he was described by one state newsman as “The Number-One Do-Gooder in the legislature,” and another pundit cautioned, “House members would do well to look more closely at these do-good bills that are siphoning off tax funds.” He presented a flurry of legislation-scholarships to colleges and trade schools for the families of disabled or deceased servicemen, additional social-security benefits for city and county employees, an antilot-tery bill, expanded old-age pensions, and provisions for mental hospitals and cancer-detection units. He even offered a “free hog-cholera-treatment bill.” He finally managed to pass what was probably his most significant piece of legislation, a provision for vocational and trade schools. “When we were in law school,” recalls his old classmate Glenn Curlee, “he'd see boys whose daddies were lawyers, but they just weren't cut out for it, though they were tryin' as hard as they could. They'd all flunk out sooner or later and be miserable. He said back then that when he got to the legislature, he was gonna build trade schools for those folks, and all the others who hadn't even been able to get into college.” When a capitol reporter finally asked Wallace exactly how many bills he planned to introduce, he replied that he had about fifty in mind. “He kept his desk so stuffed with that benevolent legislation,” says a capitol veteran, “that it lacked two feet of closing.” He exhibited a particular antipathy to small-loan companies. “I can tell you why that was,” said Billy Watson. “He'd been hunted by them boys himself. He got into a lot of tight spots with loan sharks, and there was one company that finally sent this big giant of a fella out to see him.” He also continued to serve, at one time or another, on the legal committee of the state tuberculosis association, the legislative committee for crippled children, and a regional council on mental health. But it was out of his other urgency, which was a part of the same passion, that he liked to operate as a loner. “When a legislator introduces a bill,” says one former House member, “he normally tries to get as many signatures on it as he can. But Wallace would introduce a bill with only his own name on it, and no others. He just wouldn't sign as a cosponsor for other folks' bills, and he wouldn't let any of them sign his.”

  When Wallace began his second term in the House under a new governor-Gordon Persons, a member of the state's business and political establishment whose politics were somewhat less lusty than Folsom's-a card on secret file in the governor's office bore this staccato rundown: “George Wallace. Supported most of Folsom's legislation '47 & '49. Energetic, ambitious, liberal, smart, probably will be hostile. Liquor habits: moderate. Women: Yes. Interested in legislation re Veterans, TB Hospitals, Welfare, Education. For appropriations, against taxes. Declined invitation to lunch at mansion.” Another anonymous legislative grading list at the time, reportedly circulated by the state Chamber of Commerce, gave him a mark of C, one of the l
owest, and added the comment: “Radical.” One member of Persons' administration recalls, “He was the leading liberal in the legislature, no doubt about that. He was regarded as a dangerous left-winger. A lot of people even looked on him as downright pink.”

  The fact is, when Wallace first arrived in Montgomery as a freshman legislator, he was simply a part of the Folsom phenomenon in Alabama-a rowdy, yelping transition in the stale establishment politics of the state, roughly equivalent to the advent of Andy Jackson and his backwoodsmen in Hamiltonian Washington in 1829. More precisely, the Folsom years in which Wallace had his political inception were a revival of the old Populist tradition, a quaint blend of the rural Protestant ethic and a fire-brand economic discontent, which fevered the decades between Reconstruction and the beginning of the new century in the South and Midwest. It was a hectic revolutionary coalition of the impoverished rural yeomen and a few sympathetic land owners pitted against the large landowners and merchants and bankers and petty capitalists of the Gilded Age, the industrial Bourbons of the New South, the railroad barons and textile magnates and transplanted Northern manufacturers, along with their glad, glib, homegrown apologists like Atlanta's Henry Grady, who regarded the whole thing as a socialist insurgency. More ominously, Populism at first included in its sympathies the lot of the Negro. But it was racism, shrewdly cultivated by the plantation owners, which was its final undoing in the South. It was also probably doomed from the beginning since it was essentially a nostalgia for the old agrarian ideal of a democracy of small farmers; in a sense, it was a case of the country against the city. It inevitably guttered out as a serious organized movement, but the memory still lingers in the South's dusty outback, and Folsom-and along with him, Wallace-directly derives from its spirit.

  In any event, the Folsom revolution in Alabama was profound-and has lasted. “You look at those people up there at the capitol today,” says one former state official, “and every one of 'em of any importance first broke into politics with Folsom, were involved in his administration one way or another.” In a sense, Wallace himself is merely the thickening of a plot, a story that began with Folsom. The huge and rumpled figure of that country-boy colossus has really loomed behind all that has happened since him. He was Wallace's patron saint, and if there is a tragic figure in Wallace's past, it would be Folsom. He was, in every respect, larger than lifesize: titanic of stature, with titanic energies, titanic talents, titanic appetites, titanic weaknesses. And it was out of his fall, out of the massive decay of his hopes and his vision-out of his corpse, as it were-that Wallace arose.

  For decades before Folsom, Alabama had been presided over by a succession of governors representing the state's power structure of Black Belt plantation owners, large industrialists, courthouse hacks, and local country-club gentility-a company described by Folsom as “the big mules.” Campaigns for governor were insular and sedate affairs, largely conducted in the back offices of county courthouses and corporations' executive buildings and city newspapers, with a unanimous lighting of cigars and hats placed politely on knees and then handshakes and rounds of bourbon-and-Coke. Candidates rarely emerged for any skin-to-skin popular campaigning.

  Folsom grew up in virulently political southeastern Alabama, not far from Wallace's home county-a great lumbering, galumphing youth, measuring six-feet-eight, with a size-sixteen shoe. He left college in the pit of the Depression and wound up in Washington with the WPA. Shortly thereafter, he wandered back down to Alabama and casually ran for Congress, twice- both times unsuccessfully. In 1942 he decided to enter the governor's race, and though here he found his true political dimension, he finished a distant second.

  In 1946 he tried again. This time the veterans were back from the war, returned quiet and thin and grave to the cities and small crossroads, still wearing their faded field jackets and fatigue caps like emblems of their enduring isolation, tokens of their refusal to be reassimilated with a mute and passive acceptance into the old society they had left. As Folsom stumped the state-accompanied by a string hillbilly band called the Strawberry Pickers and flourishing a cornhusk mop with which, he boomed, he would “scrub out that capitol up there in Montgomery”-the crowds he gathered were thick with those gaunt and silent youths in remnants of their uniforms. And he told them, “I ain't got no campaign managers. Yawl the only campaign managers I got. I don't want no others.”

  When he emerged as the front-runner in the first primary, there was a general state of high alarm among the establishment. They suddenly realized that Folsom not only had in mind reap-portioning the state legislature to weaken the power of the Black Belt, rewriting the state constitution, putting at least one paved road in every county, and distributing free textbooks, but also intended to repeal the poll tax. What's more, he had been endorsed by organized labor.

  “We Alabamians are not going to let radical interlopers come into our state,” bugled his run-off opponent, “and stir up disunity, and substitute strife and chaos for the fine and wholesome harmony and goodwill now prevailing. The people had their small fun in the first primary, but the time has now passed for clowning and hippodroming and putting on a medicine show.”

  Folsom, from the small junctions and village squares, answered, “They all satisfied with things as they are. They satisfied for Alabama to be way down at the bottom among the forty-eight states. They satisfied for Alabama people to make less. But they can't stop us by stirrin' up hatred and suspicion, and tryin' to divide race against race, class against class. We just finished fightin' a war against hatred and violence. So now we're startin' a good-neighbor policy right here in Alabama. The youth of the Alabama cities and towns who went forth to fight for their country in foreign lands are not going to be crammed back into the little niche they came from. They've had a taste of power from drivin' a tank and pilotin' a plane hurtlin' through space at three hundred miles an hour and whuppin' the world's best professional armies, and they gonna be the boss from now on, they the ones gonna write that new constitution up there in Montgomery…”

  He won by a margin of almost two to one. “Before that race,” Folsom liked to reflect afterward, “there were two cliques that would meet in Montgomery every four years. They'd pick themselves out two candidates for governor, and you could vote for one, or you could vote for the uther'n. That was your God-given choice. But ole Big Jim changed all that. Big Jim talked to folks in practically every city, town, village, hamlet, hill, and gully in Alabama, and he forced every other candidate from that time on to do the same, and that's when the governor's race in Alabama became democratic. We got it away from the moonlight and magnolias, and back to the one-gallus vote.”

  As it turned out, his administration was essentially a disappointment. In most of his larger hopes, including reapportion-ment and the repeal of the poll tax, he was frustrated by a legislature still dominated by the Black Belt-a cluster of counties across the southern part of the state whose rich black loam had made them the major slaveholding counties before the Civil War; they had clamored most stridently for secession, had resisted most bitterly the Populist movement, and have served as the source of most neosecessionist sentiments and policies since. Folsom did have the gratification of seeing his efforts to reapportion the legislature eventually vindicated by the Supreme Court- “and they handed down a unanimous decision,” he happily bays, “it wadn't just a half-assed decision.” But he was memorable as a governor, as one former legislator puts it, “because of his great heart and his great vision. If Folsom's vision and spirit could have been sustained in Alabama, this state-and maybe even the South-would have been spared the racial ordeal that came later.”

  In his Christmas message to Alabama in 1949, he declared, “As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity, all the other people will be held down alongside them. Let's start talking fellowship and brotherly love, and doing unto others. And let's do more than talk about it; let's start living it.” He was given to consulting with his Negro chauffeur, on long r
ides over Alabama, on matters of state. He notified his people, “Now, I've sailed the seven seas of this world, and seen the seven races of man, and I want to tell yawl something: there ain't a bit of difference in any of 'em, red, yellow, black, or white. All men just alike.”

  In 1948 he undertook to run for President, booming that he planned to cover the entire United States with TV As, and “I'm gonna send the professional soldiers in the government back to the departments where they know their jobs. Three good men in the State Department-one from the Cotton Belt, one from the Wheat Belt, and one from the mountains-with peace on their minds could straighten the world out in three months.” But not long after this announcement, a paternity suit was filed against him by an orange-haired divorcee from his home county, who claimed Folsom was the father of her two-year-old son. The suit was somewhat complicated by the fact that Folsom, whose first wife had died in 1944, had just married a vivid black-haired clerk in the Highway Department named Jamelle Moore-an effusive and cheerful girl just graduated from high school when Folsom first spied her in a crowd during a 1946 stump rally. “There she was, and I just thought, 'Ahhhh,' and when I finished my speech, I went down in the crowd and found her and took her to a place across the road and bought her a cold drink.” Folsom's marriage to Jamelle probably rescued him legally from the divorcee, but the scandal was politically awkward. “Folks,” Folsom tried to explain to his constituents, “you know my enemies been fishin' for Big Jim a long time, and they've used all kinda bait. Awhile ago, a friend told me, said, 'Big Jim, they gonna hook you this time, they fixin' to get an attractive blonde, and they gonna dress her up fine and put perfume on her, and they gonna throw her out and troll her past you.' Now, folks, you know what I told my friend? I said, if that was the way my enemies aimed to catch me, if that was the bait they were gonna use, they were gonna catch Big Jim every time!” Despite this sporting admission, Folsom failed even to win a post on the state delegation to the national Democratic convention, and his presidential notions, which were perhaps a bit whimsical to begin with, evaporated.