Through such ambitious clamoring, he managed to establish some notoriety in Alabama. Actually, at that time in the state- right after the 1954 Supreme Court school-desegregation directive-it did not seem so unusual that a circuit judge should be so excited, since almost every other officeholder, from city clerk to secretary of agriculture, was delivering himself of pronouncements sounding like Leonidas' charge at Thermopylae.
Now, as the gubernatorial race approached, he began spending his evenings at Watson's house typing speeches. Watson and his wife would leave him alone in the front parlor while they finished supper, and then, after watching television for an hour or so, they would bid him good night and tell him to lock up when he left. And after going to bed, the last sound they would hear before sinking into sleep would be his slow, patient, solitary pecking on the typewriter in their living room.
2
There were so many candidates in that 1958 campaign for governor,” says one Alabama politician, “that whenever they bumped into each other and started talking about the race, the first thing they'd say was 'Now, who all's running?'” At that time the Democratic primary was still tantamount to election, and that one-party situation tended to lend itself to spectacular free-for-alls. But in 1958 the herd was exceptionally numerous, and the placard competition for telephone poles became acute. One candidate recalls, “I had a friend who had stopped to put up a poster on a telephone pole over in the next county, and he was just starting to climb up the bank when this other car pulls up and a bunch of Klansmen pile out with posters for John Patterson. They roughed up my friend pretty good. Seems they wound up in a stapling-gun fight, and my friend came back with staples all over his forehead.”
Wallace made a spirited, if slightly tacky, beginning, purchasing one hundred and fifty surplus airplane wingtanks, lettering them, “Win with Wallace,” and mounting them atop the cars of supporters. “And everything,” says one aide, “-and I mean everything-was painted with Confederate flags.” Wallace also hit upon the idea of printing a comic book which illustrated, in primitively drawn panels of primary colors, spare of dialogue, his progression from an impoverished and mythical childhood behind the plow to the threshold of the most exalted office in the state.
One of those who attached himself to Wallace at this point was Oscar Harper, a businessman of obscure and varied interests with a predisposition for being in the general vicinity of politicians. He transported Wallace around the state in his Cadillac. “Whenever we'd pull up in a place for gas,” he remembers, “George'd be the first one to hop out, and he'd hurry right over to the station attendant to let him know that Cadillac wasn't his. He'd explain he didn't have nothing but an old six-cylinder 1952 Ford, He'd look at my Cadillac like he'd never seen one before, saying, 'Nice car you got there, Harper,' standing real close to the attendant, you know, asking him, 'You ever seen anything like that? You know, I ain't got nothing but a little biddy beat-up Ford…' Pretty soon, you'd of thought him and that Cadillac just happened to coincide from separate directions at that filling station accidentally at the same time. Then when it came time to pay up, he'd act astonished at the cost, carrying on about how he'd never heard of octane gas before, how all he used was regular gas and it didn't cost him more'n four dollars to fill up. He went into that production every place we stopped at.”
Whether it was studied or not, Wallace seemed as indifferent to dress while he was campaigning for governor as he had been while a judge. Another old crony remembers, “He didn't know one color from another. We were goin' over to Demopolis one day, and he was wearin' this ole blue-checkered shirt, and finally Oscar turned around in the front seat and asked him to give it to some nigguh to burn, said we'd buy him a clean white one. It took us awhile to talk him into it, but we finally did, and we bought him another shirt before we got into Demopolis.”
He was, in style at least, still a creature of Folsom, but there were certain odd boggles in that style during his 1958 campaign. One of his advisers recalls, “He was just usin' too big-a-words for some reason. Like, 'I am e-la-ted to be in this campaign.' I guess it was just one of those times he tried tinkerin' around with dignity and respectability and all that. He'd use 'mechanization' and 'modernization' a lot. Hell, it just didn't sound right, them big words comin' outa little Georgie Wallace. I don't know who it was put them big words in his head to tote around and use, but it sho was a mistake.”
There emerged ominous portents of something amiss, something awry, as Wallace toured the state. Among the moil of candidates was a young novice named John Patterson, whose father four years earlier had been gunned to death in an alley beside his Phenix City law office shortly after winning the Democratic primary election for attorney general on a promise to clean up that gaudily corrupt town. The murder had generally enraged the state, and in a hot flush of sympathy and vindication, the state Democratic executive committee dramatically appointed Patterson to take his father's place as attorney general. Not only did Patterson set out to avenge his father, but he speedily proceeded to have the NAACP banished from the state. But it was the emotional propulsion of his father's murder that carried him into the governor's race. Before he declared his candidacy, Wallace in his foraging over the state would be met by people who, as soon as they had shaken his hand, would mumble, “Uh-wonder if you have any idea whether or not Mr. Patterson is going to run.” When Patterson finally began campaigning, Wallace would sometimes arrive in a town just after a Patterson rally, and as one of Wallace's aides recalls, “There'd be people standing around with tears in their eyes. He finally turned to us once and said, 'I'm runnin' against a man whose father was assassinated. How'm I suppose to follow an act like that?'”
Wallace's staff still expected that he would emerge from the first primary as the front-runner and carry that psychological advantage into the runoff. But the night before the first primary, after a dinner for his campaign workers in a room above the Elite Cafe in Montgomery, Wallace confided, “Every one of you has been sayin' I'll be at the head of the pack, and every one of you is wrong. Patterson's gonna run first.” So it turned out: Patterson led Wallace by some thirty-four thousand votes.
Though the Negro has always been the central preoccupation of politics in Alabama, that preoccupation had been for the most part a tacit and sometimes modestly charitable one. Ironically, it was not Wallace but Patterson who changed the nature of that enduring preoccupation to a volatile, unabashed, brutal irascibility. It's possible that, four years now having passed since the Supreme Court's decision, Patterson was merely reacting to the temper of the times (the immemorial chicken-and-egg riddle not only of politics but also of history is to what extent a time creates its leaders and to what extent the leaders create their time). Whatever, in the runoff that followed the first 1958 primary, Patterson-fresh, trim, dapper, with bristling gray eyebrows and small pale, squinting eyes and a tight, meager little mouth-quickly established himself as the stridently irreconcilable segregationist, while Wallace, more by default than anything else, became the muted and circumspect segregationist. “We'd never had any Bilbos or Gene Talmadges here until Patterson came along,” says one Alabama political observer. “We'd always prided ourselves on being at least a little more polite and civil on those matters than our neighbors, and even enlightened sometimes. Patterson was a new departure for us. And I still think Wallace and the state both would have been entirely different if he had won that first time.”
Actually, the distinction between Patterson and Wallace was one of degree, but degrees count mightily in highly charged contexts, and that difference between the candidates became sharply defined when Patterson accepted the support of the Ku Klux Klan. Wallace, after a conference with his advisers, promptly issued a denunciation of the Klan-though he was careful, at the end, to add he didn't mean to imply that all Klansmen were bad folks. Nevertheless, it's the opinion of one of his oldest associates that “his heart was really in it. He had a genuine aversion to the Klan. He just, in some vague way, didn't t
rust them. Anything that's basically uncontrollable makes him feel a little uneasy; he'd just rather stay away from it, whether it's for him or against him.” After he made that move, Wallace found himself endorsed not only by the substantial Jewish minority in Alabama but also by the NAACP.
But at this juncture, all his efforts were just so much floundering in the face of the inevitable. Perhaps the most eloquent indication of the growing sense of calamity around Wallace now was that Billy Watson, the canniest and most grizzled political practitioner in either camp, who had already invested heavily of his own money in the Wallace campaign, contracted a case of the hives. But it still seemed Wallace couldn't bring himself to accept the fact that after so many years of concentration and anticipation and adaptations, after all the nimble and ingenious maneuver, after the unflagging expenditure of so much energy- after the sheer long integrity of his effort-he was now to be denied, betrayed by the happenstance of someone's father having been shot in an alley in Phenix City four years ago. Bill Jones, now chief liaison man in Wallace's national adventure remembers, “As the campaign was drawing to an end, he was out of money, everybody knew he was beat, but he just couldn't stop tryin'-I mean, seriously tryin'. He was speakin' at this rally one afternoon in a little north Alabama mining town called Carbon Hill, out behind this little store. It was in May, a real sunshiny day, but there was only a handful of folks there, and this little band was tootin' and squeakin'. I was sitting off at the edge of the crowd in a car with Lurleen, and all of a sudden- watchin' him goin' through all the motions of a speech energetic and excited like it all wadn't already lost-the two of us just started cryin'. Our eyes just blurred over.”
When the balloting was finished, he had missed by 64,902 votes. For a few days, according to one source, “he looked like a hermit who had just come out of the woods. His eyes were dilated, and he had this wild stare. He was talking wild-he was just pitiful.” He dropped out of sight for a brief while. Then, one evening a month or so after the campaign, he appeared at the Jeff Davis again, wan, a little thinner, with a quiet and almost peaceful air about him, and found his way upstairs to a smoky and clamorous room full of other politicians. Not long after sitting down among them, he suddenly announced in a flat and heatless voice, “John Patterson out-nigguhed me. And boys, I'm not goin' to be out-nigguhed again.”
Facing him now was a void of four years. “He just hadn't figgered on losing,” said Billy Watson, “so now he was caught in this kind of gap until the next governor's race; he was caught out in the cold.”
But before he went out into the cold, with only a few weeks left before the expiration of his judgeship, the U. S. Civil Rights Commission demanded to see the voting records of the counties in his circuit, and Wallace's instant reaction-like a last shrill cry, a last hectic gesture before he dissolved into invisibility for four years, to leave his image lingering in the public mind-was to appropriate the records himself and announce, “If any agent of the Civil Rights Commission comes to get them, he will be locked up.” Frank Johnson, Wallace's old college companion, was now a federal district judge in Montgomery, and it fell his lot to order Wallace to release the records. Wallace loudly refused and promptly found himself facing a contempt-of-court citation. That prospect gave him some pause, and he quickly summoned the grand juries of his circuit-by now, he had only a week left as circuit judge-and unloaded the records on them, after which he placed a casual evening call to the chairman on the commission's panel of inspectors and suggested that if the commission would just contact the grand juries now, he believed somehow they might get to see the records. But criminal contempt charges were filed against him anyway.
His parting theatrics had become more complicated than he had reckoned on, and he began to engage in certain private explorations himself. Not long before his trial was to begin, so the most reliable reports have it, he got into his car in Clayton one evening after sundown and drove up to Montgomery, arriving in the still, hushed empty hours of early morning. Parking his car in a closed filling station a block or two from Judge Johnson's home, he called Johnson from a telephone booth, saying he'd like to drop by for just a minute if he could. A few minutes later-a number of Wallace's friends claim, with a chuckle, that Wallace actually drove to Johnson's with a paper bag over his head-he materialized, with a soft polite tapping, at Johnson's back screen door, with Johnson supposedly receiving him in his nightrobe.
But whatever informal accommodation Wallace sought to strike with Johnson failed. Soon afterward, in court, Wallace pleaded guilty of contempt, but Johnson ordered him acquitted, with the icy remark, “George C. Wallace, after receiving actual notice of this court's order, for some reason judicially unknown to this court, attempted to give the impression that he was defying this court's order by turning said records over to hastily summoned grand juries in Barbour and Bulloch counties, Alabama… Even though it was accomplished by means of subterfuge, George C. Wallace did comply with the order of this court concerning the production of the records in question. As to why the devious means were used, this court will not now judicially determine…If these devious means were for political purposes, then this court refuses to allow its authority and dignity to be bent and swayed by such politically generated whirlwinds.”
Immediately after his acquittal, Wallace desperately insisted that he was guilty of contempt. “These characters from the Civil Rights Commission and the Justice Department were backed to the wall… This 1959 attempt to have a second Sherman's March to the Sea has been stopped in the Cradle of the Confederacy.” And four years later, when he began his second campaign for the governorship, he was still energetically calling Johnson “a low-down, carpetbaggin', scalawaggin', race-mixin' liar.”
During that interval between 1958 and 1962, he seemed in a kind of violent suspension, filled with a ceaseless and directionless fury. Politically there was nowhere he could turn: he had no appetite for Congress, and anything else would have been regression, diminishment. Though his name had been lettered on the door of his brother's law office in Montgomery, and though he did divert himself with a few cases now and then, Wallace was actually supported during this period by discreet donations from his townsfolk. Watson alone contributed fifty dollars a month. “He didn't have anything,” said Watson. “No law practice, no savings to speak of, nothing. Besides that, he couldn't take the time to bother about providing for himself, because he was too busy getting ready for the next time, so it just sorta fell on the rest of us to take care of him while he was doing it.” That four-year purgatory was like a long ghastly premonition of what would become of him beyond his political existence-a premonition which he sought to dispel with noise, energy, optimism, and sheer dauntlessness-and even now, when asked about those four years, he manages to avoid talking about them. “Aw, I practiced a little law, just messed around…”
At first he sat at home in Clayton and busied himself writing letters, in longhand, to the people who had helped him in the campaign. When that was done, it was still too early to start campaigning, so he spent his days at the square, talking to people. A Barbour County official remembers, “When it came time for lunch, rather than have to quit talking and go home to eat, he'd just grub him up a can of sardines and some cheese and crackers at the store and keep right on. Got to where he'd drop by my office every afternoon-he'd sit down in a chair and start up, and I couldn't get away. He just wouldn't stop talking. Finally, I got to where I'd say, when this lawyer in town, Crews Johnson, would stop by later on, 'Well, Crews, I got to go milk, I guess,' and get up and leave in a hurry, before Crews had a chance to say anything. Anybody else but George would have realized that, at three or four in the afternoon, nobody was gonna be goin' off to milk any cows. But George didn't even seem to notice there'd been a shuffle in his audience, he'd just switch over to Crews and keep on talking.”
People also remember seeing him during this time on the sidewalks of downtown Montgomery, standing in front of cafes and newsstands, looking a little haggard
and dingy and sour, grabbing people by the coatsleeve and talking to them with the fierce, blank-eyed, inexhaustible urgency of a street-corner evangelist. Whenever there was a convention in town, he would have a friend page him at the Jeff Davis-though he would sometimes be down in Clayton when they did. One former state official recalls, “You'd see him go into the Elite Cafe at least a dozen times every day. He was wearin' those little Buster Brown suits then, and he was shakin' hands every wakin' hour. He probably didn't even sleep. He probably just lay there in bed real stiff and still with his eyes open waitin' for it to be morning again when the folks would start comin' back out.” A prominent Alabama politician who had been one of the candidates in the 1958 governor's race recollects, “One Fourth of July-it must have been around 19 61-I took my family up to this cabin I have on Guntersville Lake to spend the holidays up there. It turned out that I had to drive back down into town for something on the afternoon of the Fourth. I had finished what little shopping I had to do, and was going back to my car, when who do I see coming down the sidewalk with a coat and tie on-shaking hands with everybody he can snatch, and no telling where his wife and family are, no telling whether they even know he's way the hell up here in the northeast corner of the state-but George Wallace. I just stood there for a minute watching him. And then I said, 'Good Lord. Good Lord … !'”
Wallace Page 14