Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  When the 1962 race finally began, he momentarily crumbled. Suddenly, just after his second campaign had gotten under way, he couldn't remember the names of his closest advisers. He began to be haunted by the notion that his campaign had run out of money. On a Sunday afternoon in a Montgomery hotel room, a few friends finally persuaded him to enter the hospital. “We slipped him down a back stairway after dark,” said Harper. “The collar of his coat was turned up, and the brim of his hat was pulled down so nobody would recognize him. He looked like a dead-end kid.” He was confined for only a few days. Some of his associates quickly rummaged up twenty thousand dollars, and one of them took the money to Wallace's hospital room, walked in without knocking, and without a word, in a motion like a planter flinging out seed, threw the money across the bed. Wallace, the reports are, simply stared for a moment at all the bills scattered over his sheet, and then bounded nimbly to the floor and started dressing. The following evening, after delivering a state-wide television address, he was on the phone until three the next morning checking reaction all over the state.

  Wallace now, in 1962, was thrown into a confrontation with his old political mentor, Big Jim Folsom, who-seemingly indestructible and eternal-had massively bestirred himself to try for a third term. It was Folsom that Wallace and his advisers assumed to be the formidable figure in the campaign, the candidate they would have to beat in the first primary and then in the runoff. In what was a final ritual of fratricide, Wallace proceeded systematically to complete Folsom's political annihilation-not head-on, not with a frontal assault, but by striking Folsom in those spots where he was already bleeding. Without mentioning Folsom's name, he launched what amounted to a temperance campaign, holding one of his first rallies in Folsom's home county on the same day Folsom was speaking in a nearby town, vowing that there would be no liquor in the mansion so long as he was governor, denouncing the state's liquor-agent system, a patronage policy. After his rally in Folsom's home county he was approached by a man in coveralls who said, “I'm hearin' you don't drink yo'self,” and Wallace answered quickly, “No suh, I don't drink and no member of my immediate family drinks.” At graduate speeches he would advise students, “Now, you don't have to drink to be a man or a lady.” He even had it advertised about that, when he had written to the Grand Ole Opry requesting an entertainer for his campaign, he had stipulated they send him a teetotaler. Wallace, in addition, promised he would sell the state's two yachts, a reference to Folsom's expensive style of living while in the governorship.

  Then, on the eve of the first primary, Folsom made his legendary television address, indignantly scuffling with aides who tried to restrain him from going on camera, and when the voting was finished the next day, he was gone. Instead of Folsom, Wallace now faced in the runoff a personable and vigorous young state senator named Ryan DeGraffenried, scion of an old aristocratic family of Tuscaloosa, an articulate moderate on segregation and a reluctantly committed Democrat. DeGraffen-ried's emergence as the runoff opponent caused a ripple of concern among Wallace's aides. Presenting as he did the alternative of measured, responsible, sober resistance to the federal government as against Wallace's reckless and flaring defiance, he could be expected to gain support from power structures that would have been neutralized in a campaign between Wallace and Folsom.

  But such were the times in Alabama that to be moderate was to be demolished. “By 1962/' says one Wallace aide, “folks understood the Supreme Court decision of 1954 would put colored kids in their schools. They didn't really understand that in 1958. Patterson just educated them for us.” Alabama was still innocent of the consequences of point-blank defiance, and Wallace was an enthralling, giddy, irresistible temptation. He vowed he would place his body in the door of any schoolhouse ordered to integrate, and before long DeGraffenried was left protesting the honesty and aggressiveness of his own segregationist beliefs.

  Wallace's style had improved as well. “This time,” says one veteran Wallace aide, “he wadn't using them big words like 'e-la-ted' and 'mechanization.' He was speaking their language this time. Like, I remember the time he first called Frank Johnson a low-down, carpetbaggin', scalawaggin', race-mixin' liar. The crowd liked to went wild. People started advising him he ought not to be talking about a federal judge that-away, it wadn't dignified, but we told him to stay with it. Got to where, later in the campaign, ever time he started coming up on that line, the folks'd start punching and poking each other and grinning and all, waiting for him to get to it. Once he put in 'pool-mixin' just to see how that would sound. He liked to work around with things like that, and we'd watch the crowd reaction. There'd be a bunch of farmers standing around at some little crossroads, and you knew he'd scored with something when you saw them just kinda quietly nod their heads. Or even better, when you'd see those hands coming out of those coverall pockets to clap, out from behind those coverall bibs, you knew he'd reached them. Those folks don't take their hands out from behind them bibs for much they hear. It's got to be something special. So when we'd get back in the car with George and start out for the next place, we'd tell him where the hands had come out of the pockets and say, 'You wanna stick with that one, now… '”

  At times he would use a plane, landing in cow pastures and even cornfields. And gradually, as the inevitability of his victory became clearer, the campaigning became something else, something larger: a commemoration, a processional both of memory and anticipation; a long and luxurious celebration of final arrival, imminent consummation; but conducted still without pageant or finery, exactly faithful-as if deviation, now with it so close, would spoil or maybe even revoke it-to the simple, plain, inauspicious, persistent manner that had brought it about. He had to keep everything the same, had to keep doing everything the same way-maybe just holding his breath a little now, but that's all- until the last minute, until it came about.

  “You couldn't even see some of those places we were stopping at,” says one of his old aides. “Anyplace they had three buildings, he'd go into a store and get a can of sardines and some crackers, or maybe some Vienna sausages, and then sit down on a drink crate with a bottle of Big Orange and talk to the folks that gathered. We got lost one time out in the country trying to find this school he was supposed to speak at, and while we were riding around lost, he spotted some men putting up lights on these utility poles. He said, 'Stop a minute, let me get these fellas,' and jumped outta the car. He had to go across this big deep ditch to get to them, but he didn't hesitate, he went right on down into it, disappearing clean outta sight for a second, and then he was coming back up the other side-he flowed in and outta that ditch like a hound chasing a rabbit. Then he stood at the bottom of that utility pole-he had those fellas treed, all right-until they climbed down and shook hands with him. We'd stop at another place, and he'd see this mechanic under a car, he'd go over and tap the fella on the leg until the fella came up to see what was bothering him, and then he'd shake his hand.”

  Toward the closing days of the campaign he began softly murmuring to his aides as they drove from rally to rally, “You know, I think we got this thing won. Yessuh. I think we got it won…”

  The night of the election, sometime after it had become apparent that he would receive the largest number of votes of any gubernatorial candidate in Alabama's history, he disappeared from his campaign headquarters in Montgomery. His staff finally found him in a small diner a few short blocks down the street from the capitol, perched on a stool at the far end of the counter under bleak and flickering lights, disposing of a charred hamburger steak lavishly splashed with ketchup.

  The governor's mansion is a vast white-columned hulk built in 1900 by a Confederate general, filled with slightly forbidding Victorian furniture of velvet wines, maroons, yellow ochers, and moss greens, with marble fireplaces and enormous gold-leaf mirrors and friezework done by French artisans, its drawing room complete with piano, its long dining room presided over by a somber portrait of Robert E. Lee. Wallace and Lurleen moved in with nothing but their
clothes. The night of the inaugural ball, he put on a tux for a while but finally looked out the front door at the guests still chattering and milling over the lawn under the lanterns, turned to Lurleen, and said, “How much longer you reckon these folks are gonna want to stay? I gotta turn in. You can tell them I said just to go ahead with everything, but to 'scuse me.” He then made his way upstairs, swiftly got into his pajamas, and by nine-thirty was asleep.

  As governor, Wallace proved to be, aside from his racial aberration, essentially a Populist. In this sense, his administration was an extension of Folsom's, a projection of his own days in the legislature.

  He built fourteen new junior colleges and fifteen new trade schools, initiated a $100 million school-construction program and a free-textbook policy. He pitched into the largest roadbuilding project in the state's history, devised plans for new nursing homes and medical clinics, and introduced an ambitious act to keep all the waterways of the state twinkling clean. And the proportion of Alabama citizens-338 out of every thousand- participating in public welfare programs at the end of his term was exceeded by those of only one other state, Louisiana. One of Wallace's old Folsom allies admits, “His economic programs surpassed the fondest dreams of every liberal in the state. He did what all the Populists have always dreamed of doing.” Judge Roy Mayhall, a loyalist Democrat who was once chairman of the state party executive committee, maintained in 1966, “Wallace is the most economically liberal politician I know of. He's more liberal than Johnson, I tell you-more liberal than Folsom or Kennedy ever were. We owe per capita in this state twice what we ever owed. And we have to pay more interest on it, because it's not a general state obligation which entails all the state's revenue-a general state obligation has to be voted on, but Wallace hasn't submitted a one of these bond programs to a popular vote.”

  A Northern reporter once proposed to Wallace that, though he generally had the image of a conservative, most of his programs really seemed rather liberal. Wallace eyed him for a moment, not suspiciously, but with just a special alertness. “Whatcha mean, now? If you askin' me-well, of course, I'm not one of these ultraconservatives. They against everything. The only thing they for is the dollar, that's all they want to conserve. Well, that's not me…” During the 1966 governor's campaign, he declared, “They talkin' about yo guvnuh borrowin' money to build roads and bridges over this state. Well, whatever it takes, we gonna build those roads and bridges. And they talkin' about all the other money we spent. Well, spendin' money for the blind and crippled and elderly and disabled-that's what we spose to do. That ain't no giveaway, that's easin' sufferin', that's heppin folks. Yessirree, and I'll tell industry, 'We'll borrow five million dollars more and build you a bridge straight up in the air if you want.'”

  Actually, he is a somewhat altered incarnation of the Populist mentality. Though he entertains the old Populist notion that “cities do something to people-really do-makes 'em mean, or something,” he vigorously set about industrializing the Alabama countryside as soon as he became governor. After a paper mill was built in a little town only some twenty miles from Montgomery, it wafted, on particularly muggy mornings, a squalid scent all the way to the capitol, and Wallace, when asked once about the odor, replied, “Yeah. Sho does smell sweet, don't it?” Also, the larger share of his taxing programs-on cigarettes, beer, sports events, automobile tags and gas-have fallen on the “common folks” to the benefit of big business in the state.

  While governor, his style as a day-to-day administrator was somewhat fitful and distracted. One of his aides allows, “He don't like to fool around with work. He likes contact with people.” A former state senator under Wallace declares, “He was a miserable man trying to sit down there and run that office. He'd go out in the hall and shake hands with anybody he could find rather than have to sit behind that desk. Of the three governors I've known, Wallace knew the least about actually running the state.” Wallace himself admits, “I'm a policy man. I can't sit down and work out problems. That's what you have people around you for.”

  Pleas for stays of execution afforded him a special anguish. Glenn Curlee remembers, “When he had to make a decision on these capital-punishment cases, it really upset him. He'd walk up and down his office chewin' that cigar and sayin', 'I don't know-I just don't know.' Then he'd rationalize a little by sayin', 'You know, it ain't me pullin' that switch, it's the jury.' Then he'd start repeatin', 'I don't know.' Finally, he'd call the warden and talk to him a little bit, sayin', 'Yeah, but this here's a man's life. We tellin' a fella he's got to die.' Then he'd hang up and ask somebody if the federal courts had done anything. He'd stay right by that phone till the last minute, and we'd try to make him feel better about it, but he'd keep starin' at that phone and sayin', 'Yeah, but I could stop it.'”

  There were eventually mutterings of corruption during his administration. The state paved a road to the farm home Gerald bought shortly after his brother took office, and a number of Alabamians cite the fact that one of Oscar Harper's brothers was selling all the gravel to the state for road construction and that a florist who was a Wallace partisan suddenly went into the asphalt-mix business when Wallace became governor. Later, his finance director, Seymour Trammel, and Gerald were caught in even gamier shufflings, Trammel going to jail, Gerald somehow extricated after Wallace huddled with Nixon on an airplane in 1971.

  Despite these awkward little episodes, it was widely conceded that he would have become one of the most beneficial stewards ever to preside over Alabama if it had not been for his mutation into racism.

  Shortly before Wallace was inaugurated, he informed a group of state senators one evening, “I'm gonna make race the basis of politics in this state, and I'm gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” One of his old allies from the Folsom days later approached him with the suggestion, “You know, with all these Klan bombings and shootings and all, you got a great opportunity now, just going in, to condemn all that stuff as not a matter of segregation or integration, but just as a matter of law and order.” Wallace's reply: “Well, I've gotten sick and tired of that kinda talk. The folks have already heard too much hollerin' about law and order.”

  Even before the inauguration, static began crackling between Wallace and the attorney general elected with him, hulking, rusty-haired Richmond Flowers, a former Folsomite from the southern Alabama town of Dothan, not far from Wallace's own county. On inauguration day Flowers issued a statement shortly before Wallace's inaugural address: “The officers of this state must stand up for their people. But the people of this state must discern and distinguish between a fighting chance and a chance to fight… To defy the same federal arm that speaks for America to Castro, Khrushchev, and Mao Tse-tung, to preannounce that any decision concerning us that is contrary to our likes will not be heeded, is only a chance to fight and can bring nothing but disgrace to our state, military law upon our people, and political demagoguery to the leaders responsible.”

  Flowers now explains, “I had already realized he was gonna make the Big Hate campaign for the next four years. All those legislators who'd been seeing him between the election and the inauguration to talk about legislation came away saying all he'd tell 'em about was the Big Hate. So I made my little ole statement, and when he heard about it, he said I was a demagogue.” Through the crises that followed in Alabama, says Flowers, “The Justice Department kept telling me, 'You're the bright light down there, see if you can't do something with him.' So I'd go to him and say, 'Look, George, you gonna be whupped all through the courts. And when you're whupped in the courts, the Klan's gonna come out on the streets and the killing's gonna start. You know that's what's gonna happen.' But, hell, he didn't want peace. George'd tell me, 'Damnit, send the Justice Department word, I ain't compromising with anybody. I'm gonna make 'em bring troops into this state.' That's exactly what he told me.”

  So the metamorphosis was complete. In abandoning himself to the immemorial dark obsession of Southern politics, he was as much a casualty of that o
bsession as Folsom. Shortly after returning from the war, Wallace had confided to a Sunday-school teacher in his church in Clayton, “You know, we just can't keep the colored folks down like we been doin' around here for years and years. We got to quit. We got to start treatin” em right. They just like everybody else.” But only two years later, when he decided to run for alternate delegate to the 1948 national Democratic convention, his campaign cards read: “Unalterably opposed to the nomination of Harry S. Truman and so-called Civil Rights Program.” He seemed to mesmerize himself with his own posturing. “He made himself believe what he had to believe out of political necessity, out of that inordinate ambition of his,” says one of his old associates from the Folsom days. “He used to be anything but a racist, but with all his chattering, he managed to talk himself into it.” The day he took office was bleak, gaunt, and stunningly cold, and Wallace, improbably attired in hickory-striped pants and a cutaway coat, blared in what was one of the most incredible inaugural addresses given by a Southern governor since Reconstruction: “This nation was never meant to be a unit of one, but a unit of the many … and so it was meant in our racial lives. Each race, within its own framework, has the freedom to teach, to instruct, to develop, to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial station … but if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the Communist philosopher, then the enrichment of our lives, the freedom for our development is gone forever. We become, therefore, a mongrel unit of one under a single all-powerful government. And we stand for everything, and for nothing… Today I have stood where Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom… Let us rise to the call of the freedom-loving blood that is in us… In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, 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!”