Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  She seemed to be constantly, rigidly afraid that she was going to do something wrong, make a wrong move, blurt out the wrong thing. She drank coffee obsessively and manfully, and after becoming governor she also began to smoke raggedly, incessantly, carrying her pack of Benson & Hedges in a demure cigarette case in her hand wherever she went. “We been worrying about it a little bit,” said one of Wallace's aides. “She really ought to cut down on some of them cigarettes. Why, when she goes to make a speech, she's stubbing out a cigarette when she gets up to talk, and as soon as she's done, as soon as she's finished shaking hands, she's grabbed another one out of her pack, and she's lighting it up.” She was brittle and tautly on guard before newsmen, and Wallace's people carefully shielded her from political interviews and dialogues. It was as if, having been a private and nonpolitical person for most of her life, she was simply accustomed to delivering the direct and flat-footed truth and had not yet mastered the calm, intricate minuet of evasion and equivocation and sanctitude at which natural politicians are more or less born adept. “She ain't all that sharp,” Wallace allowed, “but she can take care of herself.” She read all her speeches. Her own political notions are a dutiful one-dimensional duplication of her husband's-in sum, rather on the order of an essay on states' rights that might be entered in a local high-school contest sponsored by the UDC. In fact, she seemed puzzled that anyone would inquire into her political beliefs. Asked once what figures in history had made the greatest impact on her, she answered, after a long pause, “Well, I suppose the women of the South who fought such hardships and tried to hold things together back during the War Between the States, and that period afterward.” A little later, asked what books had been most important in her life, she replied, “Well, I suppose those stories on women of the South and the hard role they played back during the War Between the States and Reconstruction…” Visibly uncomfortable as she was with conversations that had to do with anything other than her family and the business of running a household, she did not want to attend the conference of governors that President Johnson called in the spring of 1967, and Wallace had to reassure her. “Now, honey, they not gonna ask you to stand up and give your ideas about Vietnam or the balance of payments; all you got to do is just sit there and listen, that's all.” Left, then, with little more than a figurine to analyze, some of the press, most notably the women's magazines, indulged in wry little smiles about her dress and drawl, and Wallace affected a politically effective indignation about such stories. But for her part, she maintained a brave, if slightly baffled, cheerfulness about the articles: “It's all just a part of politics.”

  There hung on the wall of the breakfast room at the mansion, right behind her chair, a small framed legend which says, “She Hath Done What She Could.” The speculation that she might prove more assertive than her husband or his advisers ever reckoned on, while irresistible, was really rather fanciful. She was not so naive a girl as to forget it was her husband who put her where she was, that the people elected her as a stand-in for him, and that without him she would have been absolutely lost and helpless in the office. What's more, if she had tried to take over the show after her election, it would have struck the people of Alabama, not to mention herself, as surpassingly unladylike. Finally, such a stunt simply wasn't the nature of the woman. She submitted to everything, surrendered even herself to her husband's furious public passion, much as an evangelist's or missionary's wife might, after so many years, finally surrender herself to attend her husband's lonely and obsessive communion with God, thereby accepting forever her own diminishment.

  Whatever, the fact that she was the governor, and not Wallace, left Wallace in a state of vague nervousness. He called off the customary inaugural ball because, a friend declares, “He didn't like the idea of not being right smack in the center of the spotlight, of having to act as the escort for the new governor- he told everybody it was a racial thing, that he didn't want any nigguhs showing up and dancing with Lurleen, but that wasn't it.” Not long after her election, says Glenn Curlee, “I told him, 'George, you better start sleepin' with that woman.' He said, 'Yeah. Wouldn't it be a helluva note if she run me off?' Back when he was governor, every time she'd call him up at the office, he'd say, 'What the hell you want? I'm busy now, don't be botherin' me.' But he's even talkin' sweet to her on the phone now.”

  Wallace emerged from the succession crisis-his closest brush ever to oblivion-miraculously revitalized, and in the process, he completed his personal appropriation of Alabama.

  Not only did he assimilate virtually the entire governmental structure of the state (the appointive terms of most state agencies are constitutionally phased to spread over several administrations), but he eliminated the last vestiges of any political opposition. The senators who had frustrated his hopes of a succession amendment met with unanimous political extinction. Some of them simply did not offer for reelection; those who did were demolished by Wallace candidates. The capitol was left absolutely clean of them.

  One of those senators was a mild, balding, bespectacled farmer named Charlie Montgomery, from Greene County, in the Black Belt, who had placidly supported most of Wallace's other programs. When he unexpectedly balked on the succession matter, says one of his former fellow senators, “he was considered a traitor back in his home area.” It was known to Wallace's people that Montgomery at one time had a critical drinking problem and had been maintaining a fragile abstinence for only a year or two. “Seems like they picked out Charlie to bear down on more'n anybody else,” says his former colleague. “Wallace people started contacting his family, his neighbors, and all these people started calling him all hours of the night. About the middle of the succession debate, Charlie started drinking again. Two days before the final vote, he came to me and broke down and cried, and told me what Wallace's people were doing to him back in Greene County. The last day of the fight, he was absolutely, totally blind drunk. He could hardly talk.” A few months later, back in Greene County, Montgomery shot himself to death in his home.

  Kenneth Hammond, the senator who delivered the last-day speech charging that Wallace was following “the same cycle as Adolf Hitler,” also found, when he returned home, that “friends would give you these various looks, empty stares-you could tell when you walked into a place they had just been talking about you.” He offered for reelection anyway, and was trampled. With a kind of desperate irreconcilability, as if unable to accept that Wallace had actually made him an exile in his own community, Hammond ran for mayor of his town-a village of some 460 people in the mountain vastness of northeastern Alabama- and managed to win that. But there remained about him an air of pent rage. A thick, burly thirty-five-year-old man with light thinning hair, usually wearing a black windbreaker and nursing a cigar stub with a match, he careened defiantly among his townsfolk, seeming to have abandoned all caution and discretion, talking loudly about Wallace along the sidewalks and in his family's small dry-goods store as gunfighters talked recklessly and heedlessly in frontier saloons about sheriffs they knew they were going to meet someday in the middle of the street. His parents quietly feared for him. He lived, with his parents and his wife and two small children, in a white-columned galleried house built in 1845, set on a high knoll under massive trees and surrounded by a white picket fence. One wintry May afternoon-it was a chill and sunless and blowy spring afternoon- he sat in his kitchen, a plain and bare room with a high ceiling which seemed to lend itself to long talk and coffee in such weather, and declared, “Naw, I didn't fear for my safety during the succession thing. I wadn't about to get any trouble from anybody. During my lifetime, I've left many a whupped one over this state. When Trammell was making all these promises to me in his office, he said, 'Kenneth, if I'm not telling you the truth, you can beat my ass-I know that.' Naw, my danger's now, while everything's quiet. Wallace knows I'm just a redneck sitting up here without a law degree. But even so, they couldn't really get to me, except to kill me. Horton, now, he's the biggest cattleman in this part
of the country, all they would have to do is slip in there and poison his ponds at night. But three men pick me up and follow me whenever I get in Montgomery these days. If I announced against Wallace for governor, I'd either be killed or put in Kilby prison. The next man that runs for governor in this state, two things he can't do: get in a helicopter or get in an airplane. It's all a game of chicken, California style. Me and Wallace, we're on a collision course. I'm gonna see him ground down-I mean, ground down, so he won't ever get up.” He paused. “If I didn't have my family, there are times-you know? I'd just flip my wig.”

  It has been one effect of Wallace's complete appropriation of Alabama to create a scattering of such desperate men who, seeing no hope of defeating Wallace inside the state, are separately maneuvering, with assorted feverish schemes, for support from outside the state, from parties who might have an interest in neutralizing Wallace. Wallace's one-man rule has created a vacuum inside Alabama which politics, no less than nature, abhors, and that vacuum has engendered a dizzying variety of opportunities for his enemies to sign themselves on, to become the agents for, important outside interests. It's something like Cuban exiles clamoring for the patronage of the American government with the promise they can accomplish the destruction of Castro. Curiously enough, most of these hopes revolved, not around President Johnson, but around Robert Kennedy, who, it was reckoned, stood to gain the most from his demise.

  The men engaged in these maneuvers ranged from Hammond, who would have offered himself as a gubernatorial candidate in the form of a political human bomb, to Richmond Flowers, attorney general under Wallace, who was obliterated along with everyone else when he ran for governor against Lur-leen. Flowers still gamely insisted, “I thoroughly intend to run again.” The outlook was glum for him, though. He conspicuously identified himself with the ambitions of the newly registered Negro voters in the state and the dreams of the white liberal minority when he ran for governor, and though it earned for him substantial support from Kennedy interests and a spot as runner-up in the primary, he probably erased himself as any serious factor in future campaigns. He maintained an office in a Montgomery office building only a few floors above Wallace's own presidential campaign headquarters. There he received occasional visitors-Northern lawyers and politicians, African exchange students, sometimes reporters. He tended to dress somewhat like a Mississippi riverboat gambler; a soft dove-gray suit and a gray shirt monogrammed on the pocket with maroon thread, a satiny white tie, a white silk handkerchief stuffed in his coat pocket, a diamond tie stud and gold cuff links bearing the Alabama seal. He has pale blue eyes and sandy hair parted in the middle after the fashion of the twenties, and a dainty impish way of ending his anecdotes-“Bull Conner's always been a tool of the Big Mules up there in Birmingham. He's a two-hundred-dollar-a-month man. All he wants, they give him crackers and a drink above the train station, he's happy”-by fingering his tie, with his little finger raised, and snapping his head to one side.

  He himself happily proposed, “We all got our human frailties, you know”-a phrase that seems to be a popular admission along all those who emerged from the Folsom years, including Wallace. At the least, people in Alabama tended to look on him as a flagrant opportunist: before his political reincarnation as Alabama's most significant and gallant liberal, he achieved some state-wide fame as a teller of Negro dialect jokes. But Flowers maintained, “My opinion began to change first as I got into the legalities of the matter. The more I got into it, the more I realized there was no moral basis for Alabama's resistance. It was just as wrong morally as it was legally.” With a kind of doughty optimism, he managed to extract encouragement from Lurleen's shattering victory: “The number two, three, and four candidates combined to get forty-two percent of the vote. That's an indication we haven't got far to build. There's a place for a man of reason, and I'm gonna be that man on the scene until some other individual has guts enough to stick his head up. I'm stronger today. I've hit the bottom, and I'm comin' back.” But not long afterward, unhappily, Flowers was discovered in some money-mustering irregularities which deposited him in the tank.

  The likelihood, though, is that the possibilities for any other kind of leadership in Alabama were preempted even before Wallace. Also among the politicians snuffed out by Lurleen's election was former governor John Patterson, the man credited with initiating the state's shrill segregationist politics. He has been forgotten as swiftly as he flared and now lives quietly in Montgomery in peaceful irrelevance. In his law office one afternoon not long after the campaign, he made the surprising confession, “In fifty-eight, now, I was the champion of segregation, because there just isn't any way to run as a liberal in this state and get elected. That's all there is to it. I couldn't be what I wanted to be. You were either for the white folks or the nigras. If you didn't appeal to prejudices, you'd get beat. It was something you just had to live through. Nothing disappointed me more than having this millstone hanging around our necks. We were just born with it, and we can't get it off. During my administration, because of this millstone, Alabama was deprived of the opportunity to have any voice in national affairs. We were just too hot on the racial matter. But even when I was attorney general, I knew we were just fighting a delaying action. I had to keep my tongue in my cheek on some of those cases we argued before the Supreme Court. It wasn't anything more than a delaying action, but it looked good in the headlines. Those nigra lawyers knew their constitutional law better than anyone. A lot of times, you didn't want a decision, because you knew which way it'd go. I guess you gotta give the devil his due: if it hadn't been for some of these outside factions like the NAACP and Martin Luther King, the nigras just wouldn't be where they are now. Sure, my views have moderated. There's nothing that would please me more than to see the nigras have equal opportunity to develop the state. You just can't defend any system that treats one group of citizens different from another group. When you allow the nigra to participate in government, you can demand that he obey the law and stay off the streets, but deny him participation in government, and you can't make any demands on him atall. I never in my life believed in segregation because one race is different or better than another. How can anybody seriously defend the accusation that nigras are inferior?”

  One former state official lamented, “I just don't know of anyone left of any political significance with the will to fight George now.” Even the state's two U.S. senators evidenced a profound reluctance to antagonize him, and his own manner toward them was faintly contemptuous and imperious: he was heard on the phone barking irritably to Senator Lister Hill that he expected from him quick and hearty support on Alabama's school-guidelines defiance if he, Hill, hoped to preserve his political health in Alabama. Only a few months later, Hill announced he would not run for reelection.

  He singlehandedly isolated Alabama from the national Democratic party. In 1962, through a long January night in a Birmingham hotel, he persuaded the state party executive committee, composed mostly of national loyalists, to alter its rules to allow him to run his own slate of unpledged Democrat electors who would be free to withhold their votes from the national nominee and cast them for someone else: namely, Wallace. “After that,” says a party loyalist, “it was like watchin' a freight train go by.” Wallace's maverick slate defeated the loyalist slate by a margin of almost six to one, and the national Democratic party was devastated in Alabama. “They didn't spend one dime down here in 1964,” declares another loyalist. “What could they do? Hell, their man wasn't even on the ballot, Democratic congressmen were swept out of office right and left, and took eighty years of seniority with them. George Wallace busted the Democratic party in Alabama. The only political organization in Alabama right now is George Wallace.”

  There is a Republican party in the state, but it exists only at Wallace's sufferance. The fact is, the campaigns between Wallace and the Republicans have been largely conducted on the common premise of who could do the most damage to Washington, who disliked the administration the most
thoroughly-politics in the state having been reduced to a singleminded competition of ill-tempered enmity against the federal government. Wallace's executive secretary, Cecil Jackson, ruminated with some gratification, “It's just a tough situation now to distinguish between Republicans and Democrats here. Everybody in the state thinks the same way, and people feel the same way.”

  Indeed, if there was to be found anywhere in the United States during the Sixties a totalitarian society, it would have been the state of Alabama. Whether the condition was Wallace's personal handiwork or whether he merely served as a political accomplice, the truth is that the state was transformed, during his administration, into a psychological and ideological monolith, more insular and intransigent than even Mississippi in that the popular mentality was given consistent and undistracted political articulation-the final deep foxhole of the South. It would seem that what Wallace managed to do was convert the Folsom revolution-the immediate and personal involvement of the masses in the politics of the state-into a kind of popular totalitarianism: the Folsom revolution simply set the stage for this in the manner that some divines like to imagine that the Roman Empire existed to facilitate the propagation of Christianity.

  In any event, the racial conflicts of the sixties and the solitary apostolic histrionics of Wallace left Alabama with a single provincial vision of itself in the nation and the world, and a single ruthless expectation for unanimity-not only in ideas but also in habits, in morality, even in dress: most youngsters in Alabama classrooms regarded any deviation from short hair and neatly pressed clothes as a sign of perversion. The archaic specter of the unkempt beatnik still hovered over the state and conglomerately connoted everything sinister of the Alabama mind: communism, miscegenation, dope, illicit sex. It was a mentality cultivated not only in the pulpits of Alabama but also in the schools: it pervaded everything. A Montgomery editor was shocked during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign when his five-year-old son informed him, “I'm not gonna vote for Richmond Flowers, because he's that man that'll make you change color.” In public restaurants, any out-of-state visitors who fell to chatting casually but critically of Wallace and his policies would suddenly find people at tables around them turning and glaring with venomous mutterings. There was a general psychology of martyrdom, or at least harassment, which Alabamians actually seemed to savor. They cherished visions of their persecution. After a restaurant fire in Montgomery in which some twenty-six persons perished, it was announced that investigators from a fire-inspection firm in Boston would be journeying down to examine the rubble, and one lady phoned a local radio talk-show to suggest, in a high thin voice, “I just wonder had it not been Alabama, if these people from Boston would have been sent down here…” As recently as 1966, the then Alabama superintendent of education, Austin R. Meadows, composed a remarkable philosophic essay which he mailed as an inspirational epistle to educational and political figures all over the state. Some of its observations: “ 'Segregation' is a perfectly good word… The Lord set aside or segregated fruit from the apple tree in the Garden of Eden from Adam and Eve… Matrimony, the most sacred of all bonds for man and woman, is the highest type of segregation. In matrimony, husband and wife bind themselves to cleave to one another, even to the extent of forsaking all others if necessary… Segregation is the basic principle of culture. The good join together to segregate themselves from the bad… Animals, in many instances, join their own kind to defend themselves by numbers against other animals that would destroy them without such segregated bond. Birds of a feather truly flock together. Wild geese fly across this continent in a 'V formation, but they never join any other flock of birds. The wild eagle mates with another eagle and not with any other bird. Redbirds mate with redbirds, the beautiful bluebirds mate with other bluebirds, and so on through bird life…”