Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  Perhaps the most melancholy aspect of Alabama's massive preoccupation under Wallace has been the toll it has taken in the vitality of the whole state community. Such a bitter obsession enervates any people, exhausts any society, and steals from the spirit of its citizens, narrows their lives. In Alabama, segregation acted as a great succubus. Former state senator Robert Gilchrist declared, “I once led a filibuster for seventy-two hours just for a resolution saying the Alabama Senate was for upholding law and order. That's what you have to do in this state now on a simple little decent thing like that-a seventy-two-hour filibuster. It cramps everything. Even efforts to change local option on routine little county housekeeping duties, they involve race- county option is opposed because of the fear the nigras might get a majority rule in the county. The hours of conversation and debate and energy wasted on this racial thing-why, I must have spent a third of my time in the legislature debating this question, instead of concentrating on creative and useful things for our people. But everybody-I mean, businessmen, preachers, teachers-they're talking about it all the time, too.”

  Another former state senator noted, “Anytime in history when civilization was the lowest, two groups have had to band together-the schools and the churches. But both of these groups in Alabama are gutless now. The preachers are intimidated by their congregations, and Wallace has used money to neutralize the teachers. He's combined the political theories of Hitler, Jim Folsom, and Huey Long. He's the greatest politician this state has ever seen.” Those dissenters left in Alabama-serious and sober men not given to hyperbole, many of them conservatives and segregationists-began to talk about the Wallace phenomenon in Alabama and the nation in terms of the Third Reich. One of them declared flatly, “Mein Kampf is the Bible of Alabama politics today. It's the textbook for the prejudice and propaganda. And when George starts nationwide, you just watch him. He'll pick an enemy-maybe a new one-and he'll run against that enemy.” Another simply remarked, “Hitler's vote, you know, was proportionately larger than Lincoln's. Mussolini was given a vote of confidence by ninety-eight percent of the Italian electorate.” Senator Hammond's speech on the last day of the succession fight no longer seemed quite as intemperate as it once did. A number of Alabamians took to carrying around books on Nazism, the most popular being Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. So acute did the sense of alarm and despair become among certain people that, at a party in a Montgomery apartment one evening not long after Lurleen's inauguration, a gentle, bespectacled, exquisitely civilized Montgomery dowager suddenly blurted, “I wish he were dead. I wish someone would kill him. He ought to die. He's awful, terrible. I would kill him myself if I just had the chance-I would.” There were tears in her eyes.

  Alabama belonged to him at last. He was all alone with the people, and they were all alone with him. But having accomplished this-and now in his attempt to enlarge awesomely the scale of his incarnation “of the majority of the folks”-he seemed to have acquired a peculiar air of final personal loneliness and isolation, as if he had withdrawn more and more into himself.

  When he was not foraging about the country, “he just stayed cooped up in that hot office in the capitol all day long,” his brother Gerald reported unhappily. “He's been gettin' lots of colds lately. He don't get enough sunshine and fresh air.” The governor's outer reception office-a large high room with slightly dingy yellow walls, furnished with busts and chairs and bookcases whose style seems to be nicked and cigarette-scorched Ancient Egyptian-was constantly filled with a babbling collection of politicians, admirers, tourists, and aides; in one corner, a legal assistant explaining to a visitor how segregation is even justified by evolution, though he doesn't happen to believe in evolution; in another corner, a capitol employee telling a bodyguard about the phenomenon of a seventy-four-year-old man whose forty-nine-year-old wife had just borne a baby-“He's just as jealous of her as he kin be. Seventy-four-years old. Says when he ain't on her hisself, his hand is, or his shotgun is close by”; a secretary glancing out of a window, “Huh. Looks like it wants to rain…”; another secretary talking over the phone in a loud bulging voice, “We gonna say, 'Congratulations and best wishes on your production of The Tempest.' Only, would you say the name of the play? Huh? All right, then-'which plays at Troy State tonight. I don't know, should we say production or performance? It's a play by Shakespeare, you know, I think. If it was being given for the first time, maybe we should say production, see, but since I believe it's a play by Shakespeare, maybe we should say performance, since this isn't the first time…” (One morning a gaunt and spectral Negro, elderly, dressed in a shabby coat with an open shirt collar, a Bible under one arm, strode suddenly into the office-which was filled with the usual assembly of courtiers, whispering in corners or leafing through the dentist's-office assortment of dogeared magazines- and, as everyone stared astonished and motionless, delivered himself of a five-minute tolling Zechariac denunciation of Wallace, his eyes wild and red, his long arm flailing. When he finished, he bowed formally to everyone in the room, gave a curt salute, and departed. It had been an unsettling materialization.)

  The governor's office is a long somber room full of dark wood, suggesting somehow the executive office of the president of a venerable but slightly seedy railroad, with gold-scalloped drapes and a sea-green marble mantel above a cold fireplace and wine leather chairs sitting around a massive conference table under a splendid crystal chandelier, and Wallace, occupying this room, stumpy and quick and chewing ceaselessly on a tattered cigar, in his dark shimmery suit and bulky Masonic ring and tab-collar shirt with buttoned cuffs sometimes double-secured with heavy ruby cuff-links, suggested perhaps a rugged little switchman or flagman who relentlessly made his way up to become head of the whole operation. Behind his vast desk, he looked not much larger than a midget, and it seemed he tried to answer all the deep and imposing space around him with a constant violent busyness. Talking to visitors, he would yank out a middle drawer in the desk and prop his foot on it, scrabble out a cigar from the box on his desk and unpeel it and lick it and quickly get it fuming, fumble up a letter-opener and tap it over his telephone and papers and then at a Boy Scout medallion suspended in a tiny hinged frame until he had it spinning madly, suddenly lean forward to spit into a wastebasket, lean back again and almost in one motion drop the letter-opener and snatch up a wooden gavel and proceed to jam it into his cheek and midriff, then balance the head of the gavel on his desk and twirl it with one hand while he picked up the letter-opener again and kept the medallion spinning at a blur. When he got a call, he would wedge the receiver between his cheek and his shoulder and continue chomping on his cigar while one hand worked the gavel handle into his side and the other shuffled the memos on his desk or tugged the lobe of his ear. He kept a meager and eclectic array of books on a table by his desk: a history of Alabama and an Alabama encyclopedia, a history of the International Longshoreman's Association called Men Along the Shore, a study of The Prohibition Movement in Alabama, 1702-1943, and an odd volume called The Formation of the Negro by an author with the last name of Lynch. Sitting on the marble fireplace mantel was a white plaster bust of himself, done by some female admirer, which vaguely resembled Cro-Magnon man. He also had a small framed color photograph of the last two Confederate veterans holding a proud if rickety salute to a lowered Confederate flag against a lonely cold blue autumn sky.

  The aides who surrounded him and insulated him were a disparate lot, each of them like some less pleasant and less engaging fragment of the man they all complemented.

  Cecil Jackson, Wallace's executive secretary then, was a generally humorless sort with a lean slack face and a perpetually anxious expression, who looked hauntingly like Robert Shelton; when he laughed, he pulled his lips back with a surprising swiftness and simply hissed. Wallace's chief legal aide, Hugh Maddox, a Baptist boy with an aversion to alcohol and the theory of evolution, wore the same dour, houndlike expression with the same stitched brow; both he and Jackson cultivated the careful gloom
of funeral directors. But Wallace's other aides seemed to share the curious childlike naivete that essentially characterized Wallace-as if they were all basically overgrown children being led by someone who was himself half child and half man. Ed Ewing, who served sporadically as Wallace's local press secretary, was an untidy heap of a man with a chubby cherub's face and small curling locks of brown hair, who lived in a constant state of harassment and aggrievement at the indignities endured by his boss at the hands of a hostile world; he spent one afternoon passing back and forth through Wallace's reception room with a clipping from a New England newspaper clutched in his plump hand which referred to a speed trap in Alabama named Ludowici. The town is really in Georgia. Ewing was convinced the mistake was malicious, and he was readying a letter to the newspaper threatening to sue. A reporter found Ewing one drizzling afternoon in late October during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign in a back room of Wallace's campaign headquarters in downtown Montgomery, elaborately snuffling with a bad cold as he bent over a well-thumbed copy of Esquire which contained a less-than-enchanted article about Wallace-the issue had come out the summer before, and seemed to be registering only now among Wallace's people, and Ewing was trying to figure out whether the writer of the article had been white or Negro. “We just been laughin' about it,” he professed. “I guess they thought it would make us mad or something, but it didn't.”

  Wallace's national liaison man was Bill Jones, a pleasant little cricket of a man in heavy bug-glasses who served off and on as Wallace's press secretary. He took a sabbatical in 1965 to run for Congress, and was defeated. More than any of the others, Jones seemed to live vicariously through Wallace, liked to lend him his own suits to wear, and derived a certain personal swaggering gratification from Wallace's political vitality. When asked once about the prospect that Wallace might not get the endorsement of Lester Maddox in Georgia, Jones chirped, “It don't make any difference, we gonna run slap over 'em all.” He recounted his own role in the melees that Wallace has provoked in appearances out of the state with flair and relish: in a reverent biography of Wallace, Jones wrote shortly after losing the congressional race that “most civil rights pickets are cowards and will not press their cause if they meet any resistance at all. I earned a Southern-type nickname during the [Indiana] campaign because I liked to test picket lines; many times to see how lively the sign-bearing crowd would be I walked into the line, stopped and disrupted the marchers. The nickname was 'Cotton-Pickin' Picket Plucker.'”

  Whenever Wallace ventured beyond Montgomery, he always carried with him a platoon of his oldest cronies, the more the better, and he didn't like them to get out of his sight. At the start of interviews in alien territories, he would glance quickly around the room and demand of his bodyguards, “Whur's Curlee? Go get him and have him sit in here with us awhile.” He needed to have them surround him as a kind of familiar and congenial weather, so that, in a sense, wherever he went he took his office with him; he was still in a Clio barbershop, the Clayton courthouse, a Montgomery cafe.

  After Lurleen's election, he made one last official trip to attend an interim session of the national governor's conference at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and for this excursion he was able to rummage up only Ralph Adams, his college boardinghouse companion whom he had appointed to preside over a state campus of his own. As the plane rose above the Montgomery airport, Wallace scurried from one side of the cabin to the other, plumping himself down in one seat to look out of its porthole for a long, silent moment and then scurrying across the aisle to gaze out that porthole, studying the earth below him. “Guess we're passin' over Putnam's Mountain now,” he said. “They the first box to ever come in. Nothing but real sho-nuff mountain folk up there. They were sixteen to nothin' for us the last time.” He reflected for a moment and then turned to Adams. “Make a note to invite those folks from Putnam's Mountain down to the inauguration.”

  Adams fumbled a pad out of his coat pocket, took out a ballpoint pen, and carefully transcribed that impulse. A small man, shaped something like a turnip, with a long lean neck, sun-chapped, protruding from collars that usually seem too large for it by the width of a finger, a lean slack face and a long nose, a sleepy tangle of gray hair, and narrow slightly hooded eyes, Adams rather resembles a snake-oil salesman. He has a way of talking with his head tilted back in mild suspicion, looking cunningly down the length of his nose and barely moving his taut thin lips. But he is, by nature, gentle and guileless and amicable, and becomes uneasily suspicious in the company of reporters and strangers only when he reminds himself that he should be. He does seem somewhat uncomfortable and even embarrassed in his position as a college president. He quickly explains, “You know, they want an administrator these days to run a college, they don't really want an academic man. I just leave all the professors alone down there, and that makes them happy enough.” Wallace arranged for him to get an honorary Ph.D., but Adams nevertheless submits, “An honorary degree is a lot harder to get. They say anybody can go to school and study and get an academic degree, but you have to have already achieved something, done something to get an honorary degree-to be recognized like that. Least, I look at it that way.” After his discharge, he tinkered around for a while in politics, then was recalled into the Air Force, serving for a while in the Pentagon. He was fetched back to Alabama by Wallace to head the state Selective Service system, and finally was appointed president of Troy State College. “Seems like I was in the Air Force one day and a college president the next,” he muses. Wallace sometimes accompanied Adams to national conventions of college presidents, trips on which Adams is wont to take his luggage, merely a paper bag with one shirt in it, one change of underwear, and one change of socks. Riding to a hotel in a cab once, Wallace declared, “Adams, damnit, man, you a college president now, got to dress better than you do. You wear them fifteen-year-old suits and you don't shave. Ain't you ever gonna become anything? You just can't be takin' your clothes around with you in a paper sack anymore.” One gets the impression that Wallace installed Adams in his exalted position in a moment of impishness, just as a prank to ruffle the academic community in general, to “take them down a peg or two,” as he is fond of saying, by showing them someone like Adams was as capable of being a college president as any of them. There's no doubt he derived great glee from the horror among the academic community when he named Adams to his post. In any event, Adams dutifully has pages in the college's annuals devoted to pictures of Wallace and tributes to his statesmanship, and the school newspaper is strenuously forbidden to criticize the administration, a policy that created an untidy furor once when a modest editorial of discontent was lopped whole out of the paper. Adams' professors also become periodically restive, but he endures all squalls with a serene imperturbability. Not surprisingly, he more or less concurs in Wallace's vague contempt for intellectuals, is of the opinion that professors spend too much time in the clouds, and happily supported Wallace's bill to ban subversive speakers from state campuses. For the most part, he also serenely endures Wallace's persistent tickled jests about his job. On the way to White Sulphur Springs Wallace sideswiped, his face bland, “Your wife figgered she was gonna marry herself a college presi-dent, didn't she, Adams? That's how come she picked you out, isn't that right?” Adams, smiling thinly, said, “That's right, guvnuh.”

  Then, when Wallace had disappeared into the flight cabin, Adams declared to a reporter on the plane, “Hell, I've seen political leaders all around the world. I flew the hump during World War II, I been all around the world, I've seen King Farouk, all of 'em, and I can tell you, he”-pointing toward the closed door of the pilot's cabin-“is a man of destiny. He's like Fiorello La Guardia.” Later, in the limousine that picked up the party at the White Sulphur Springs airport, Adams began enthusing about Wallace again to the state patrolman who was driving them to the hotel, leaning forward with his nose almost touching the patrolman's ear, until Wallace reached out with one hand to gently pull him back. “Now, Ralph. Ralph. You gettin
' carried away.” But Adams continued reciting Wallace's statesmanlike qualities, until Wallace finally began talking to the patrolman himself, his voice several notches louder than Adams'.