by Jon Meacham
At the same time, despite his public protestations that he is only an Alabama segregationist, what Wallace has been encountering in the violent demonstrations that have greeted him as he has junketed over the nation has been the same instinct he venerates in cabdrivers and dirt-farmers, “that tells you when you can trust somebody and when you can’t.” If a Birmingham steelworker or a country barber in Marengo County “knew Castro was a Commie just by instinct,” so do Negroes and most liberals know “by instinct, just by looking at him and hearing him talk,” that Wallace is a racist. Segregation is necessarily predicated on racism, and it doesn’t have to be of the malevolent variety—it can be Wallace’s kind of faint amicable contempt. Racism, fundamentally, is the persuasion that there is an innate, generic, permanent difference between the races in all the traits that describe humanity. Actually, Wallace himself once confided to a reporter in the lobby of a Cleveland hotel, removing his cigar for a moment to whisper behind his hand, “Let ’em call me a racist. It don’t make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what’s gonna win this thing for me.”
The simple prospect that his candidacy could impinge upon the system to the extent of throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives (with giddy swiftness the outrageous becomes the possible and then the probable) can only make more acute the cornered mentality among America’s disenchanted and estranged. “By God,” muttered a young liberal after one of Wallace’s campus appearances, “this could be the time. Just because all the others have missed before—the Know-Nothings, Joe McCarthy, Goldwater—that doesn’t mean they’ll keep on missing. This could be it. He might be the one with the right combination.” The desperate outbursts of violence that attend his wanderings about the country leave one with the uneasy feeling that alienations, not only racial but also intellectual, have reached the point in our society where the potential for revolution is more palpable than ever before.
Actually, Wallace could be only one reflection of a general shattering of the American society, a disintegration into fragments. The American mystics—such as Norman Mailer—are unintelligible to the sturdy American Boy Scouts like Ronald Reagan and Billy Graham. Lyndon Johnson could never understand Timothy Leary or Allen Ginsberg. Stokely Carmichael could never understand Roger Blough. The efficacy of dialogue seems to be waning, and with it a sense of the American community. It’s like a new Tower of Babel. Nothing seems to mean anything anymore except action. For Wallace, talk is finally not for the purpose of communication, explanation, or persuasion, but just another form of action: rhetoric. Action is all. The unsettling thing about his candidacy now is that it will tend to reduce America’s disaffected, those who view him as an omen of a wider mentality, to a reliance on the same brute processes.
In this sense, Wallace represents the dark side of the moon of the American democracy—the tradition of direct popular violent action in community crises. He belongs fundamentally to the vigilante ethic, with certain apocalyptic overtones, and the potential in any social crisis for violent confrontation and climax enthralls him. One autumn evening in 1966, driving back to a Birmingham hotel after a shopping-center rally, he sat in the back seat of his car, gesturing in the glare of headlights behind him. “Nigguh comes up to a white woman down here like they do up North, tryin’ all that stuff, he’s gonna get shot. Yessuh. Or get his head busted. That’s why we don’t have any of that business down here. They know what’s gonna happen to ’em. They start a riot down here, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks, now!’ Let ’em see you shoot down a few of ’em, and you got it stopped. Bob McNair, guvnuh over there in South Carolina, he’s one of them nice fellas, you know, he don’t go for that kinda talk—like Carl Sanders over there in Georgia. Now, I like Carl, I don’t know whether he likes me particularly or not, but I got nothing against him. But he’s one of those nice fellas wantin’ to moderate everything. But, of course, he found out you can’t do that. Like ole Ivan Allen over there. Knocked him offa that car, you know, those rioters, when he was tryin’ to talk to them. They oughtta done more than that. Hell, we got too much dignity in government now, what we need is some meanness. You elect one of those steelworkers guvnuh, you talk about a revolution—damn, there’d be shootin’ and tearin’ down and burnin’ up and killin’ and bloodlettin’ sho nuff. Steelworker wouldn’t have to think about it—he’d just go ahead and do it. Anyway, I been tellin’ folks for years, you ask if I hadn’t, that there’d be fightin’ in the streets one day between rightists and leftists, between whites and blacks. Hell, all we’d have to do right now is march on the federal courthouse there in Montgomery, take over the post office and lock up a few of those judges, and by sunset there’d be a revolution from one corner of this nation to the other. We could turn this country right around.”
It has become Wallace’s conviction—more than conviction, visceral sensation—that he exists as the very incarnation of the “folks,” the embodiment of the will and sensibilities and discontents of the people in the roadside diners and all-night chili cafés, the cabdrivers and waitresses and plant workers, as well as a certain harried Prufrock population of dingy-collared department-store clerks and insurance salesmen and neighborhood grocers: the great silent American Folk which have never been politically numbered as the Wallace candidacy promises to number them. His candidacy poses questions about what illusions we may have been under about the American public. There’s no doubt he has sensed a subterranean political consciousness congenial to him. In The Earl of Louisiana, A. J. Liebling suggests that “if Hoover by some disastrous miracle had been reelected in 1932, Huey [Long] might within two years have crystallized around himself all the discontent, rational and irrational, in the country. . . .” In this time, if there is an ominous conspiracy underway in the United States, it would be the silent massive suspicion of a conspiracy which threatens home, job, status, the accustomed order of life. And Wallace’s variation of Long’s coalition of frustration is a “fusion” of the working man with the large industrialists and tycoons of Mid-America. “We got part of it already,” he declares; “we got the workin’ man, and now we’re gonna get the other part of it—the high hoi-polloi. They gonna come around, you wait.” Indeed, when he has appeared before large groups of industrialists, the receptions have been robust. At a patio party recently in New Orleans’ French Quarter, an oil millionaire from Dallas allowed, “I’d vote for him in a minute, and give him all the money I could, if I just felt I could trust him—if he wouldn’t wind up getting tamed by Washington like Lester Maddox over there in Georgia. I’m a Republican, but I’d love to support him, and every one of my friends—oilmen, fellows in wheat—feel the same way.”
Nevertheless, the man himself seems hopelessly implausible as a national political figure. For one thing, he looks on the entire world as merely an extension of Barbour County, Alabama, where he grew up—full of chillun and folks, some of them liars and cheats and no-counts, most of them decent people minding their own business, whose interests are simple and who are polite to each other, but with a certain measure of orneriness and villainy going on, the best answers to which are Barbour County’s kind of commonsense solutions. In an age of freeways and high-rise apartments, he seems a whimsical anachronism: his are essentially village sensibilities.
More than anything else, he is a consummate political and cultural articulation of the South, where life is simply more glandular than it is in the rest of the nation. Southerners tend to belong and believe through blood and weather and common earth and common enemy and common travail, rather than belonging, believing, cerebrally. The tribal instinct is what they answer to. That is part of the reason why the most recent incarnations of the Boston Abolitionists—those gaunt, tense, electric youths from the snows of the North and the seasonless hothouse clime of Californ
ia who, lank hair falling over ethereal faces, ventured into Negro neighborhoods in Alabama and Mississippi—were not only incomprehensible but also faintly repulsive to most Southerners. They were tinged with the perversion of having subjected life to ideas. Any politician like Eugene McCarthy, with his diaphanous abstractions, would be impossible in the South. The region is ruled by humid passion, and a fine old-fashioned sense of sin. There is a lingering romance of violence, a congenital love for quick and final physical showdowns. Not just the filling-station attendants, the cabdrivers and deputy sheriffs and beauticians and tabernacle evangelists, but also Rotarians, bankers, teachers, the urbanites of Atlanta and Charlotte, stockbrokers and reporters who have moved away to the cities of the North—virtually all those born in the South have about them, to a certain degree, that air of an immediate and casual familiarity with violence, a quality of loosely leashed readiness for mayhem. Even those Southerners who come from large cities—although, say, having martinis in some expensive New York restaurant, surrounded by Continental waiters and chandeliers—seem to have emerged from another dimension where the days are fevered and dreaming with honeysuckle and wisteria, from a different and more passionate play of life, a slow, sensuous, easy, lyrical, savage marriage of man and earth. They carry with them the sense of another landscape—primeval mountains, scruffy pine hills populated with mules and moonshiners, cottonland as level and limitless as the sea, fierce skies—a land where winters are only a dull and sullen hiatus with a pale ghost of the sun passing through vague chill rains.
Wallace is a direct product of this society where things—be they theories or institutions or political machines—do not count for so much as passion and people. Accordingly, he operates outside the conventional political wisdom. There has been an almost childlike naïveté about the way he has undertaken to run for President. One afternoon shortly after his wife’s election as governor, he sat in his office and calculated, almost as an afterthought, the financial strategy for his whole national campaign, scribbling on the back of a memo pad with his ball-point pen: “Let’s see, we got better’n $380,000 when we went into three states back in ’64, three goes into fifty about seventeen times—don’t it?—yes, and seventeen times $380,000 that oughtta be—that’s $6,460,000. That oughtta be enough.” In fact, he seems to regard formal political organization with a vague contempt, as a sign of political effeteness, an absence of vitality—as if he is already naturally blessed with what political organization exists to create. His simple directness is, at once, part of his absurdity and part of his genius.
“Power comes from the people,” he declares, “and if my health holds up, I’m gonna change things in this country. Anyway, I don’t have a single thing to lose, and everything to gain.” Indeed, there is surrounding him an uncanny aura of limitless possibility, of adventure, of incredible prospects—a feeling that anything is possible. The sheer hope, the happy half-reckless presumption of his candidacy for the highest office in the land, gives one the sense that the demonic is still at work in human affairs, even in this age of computers and slide rules and pundits and public-relations task forces: that life and politics, after all, are simply larger than arithmetic. Accordingly, his candidacy is a reminder that anything, including the unthinkable, can happen in a democracy. In the same way that he went into the 1964 Northern presidential primaries in touch with potentials that no one else seemed to be in touch with, he has proceeded this time from absolutely nothing—not precedent, rumor, or normal political equations, polls, press, or the patronage of the American establishment—but merely from his own clear sense and vision of the democratic possibilities for himself. For him to have aspired seriously to the presidency right now, in this age—or even to have expected to figure importantly in the election—has required more originality, audacity, optimism, and dauntlessness than has ever been required of any other significant presidential candidate in this nation’s history, including Huey Long.
In the final analysis, whatever becomes of him in the months ahead, it seems probable that George Wallace will be recorded as the greatest of the American demagogues—the classic of his species. That is true not only because of the magnitude of the rapport he has already invoked in the country (television having enlarged the stump to the size of the continent), but because of his own nature as a politician and a human being. He is really more elemental than Huey Long; it is quite beyond him, for instance, to take a case of whiskey up to the top floor of a hotel and come back down six weeks later with Every Man a King. He doesn’t think about it all enough to write a book about it. He is more essential than that. Abstractions do not really exist for him. “He doesn’t ever talk about purposes, causes, destinies, anything like that,” says one Alabama politician. “He differs from every other politician I’ve ever known in that respect.” Wallace himself cheerfully allows, “Naw, we don’t stop and figger, we don’t think about history or theories or none of that. We just go ahead. Hell, history can take care of itself.” In this rude sense, he is the most existential politician in the country today. He seems empty of any private philosophy or persuasions reached in solitude and stillness. He is made up, in mind and sensibilities, of the clatter and chatter and gusting impulses of the marketplace, the town square, the barbershop. His morality is the morality of the majority. “The majority of the folks aren’t gonna want to do anything that ain’t right,” he insists. He is the ultimate product of the democratic system.
Not only are abstract ethics alien to him, but he entertains a particular antipathy to people who live and act from them. It’s something like the Dionysian principle applied to politics. “Hell, intellectuals, when they’ve gotten into power, have made some of the bloodiest tyrants man has ever seen,” he maintains. “These here liberals and intellectual morons, they don’t believe in nothing but themselves and their theories. They don’t have any faith in people. Lot of ’em don’t really like people, when you get right down to it.” (His own vision of man is the old vision—man is perpetually embattled on this earth, his state fixed and imperfectible, composed of natural wickedness and natural virtue in a balance that can never really be altered, poverty and grief and injustice and conflict irrevocable parts of his lot. “Life’s basically a fight,” declares Wallace. “People have to go out and make a livin’, have to fight snow and cold and heat and natural disasters. People enjoy fightin’. That’s the way folks are. . . .” Accordingly, he operates on the most elemental assumptions about the nature of the human species, such as: “Nigguhs hate whites, and whites hate nigguhs. Everybody knows that deep down.”)
His political mystique of “the common folks” reduces everyone to a simple and almost biological common denominator. While standing at the edge of a crowd waiting to speak at a 1966 rally, he declared to reporters, “When the liberals and intellectuals say the people don’t have any sense, they talkin’ about us people—they talkin’ about the people here. But hell, you can get good solid information from a man drivin’ a truck, you don’t need to go to no college professor. The fella on the street has got a better mind and instincts than these here sissy-britches intellectual morons, like the editor of The Birmingham News, for instance. He’s just one man, that’s all he is. You take this fella here—” Without taking his eyes from the reporters, he reached out at random and pulled over an elderly man, dressed in coveralls and an old army field jacket, with a light frosting of beard on his cheeks. “—this fella here, he’s one man too, just like the editor of The Birmingham News. He weighs just as much as the editor of The Birmingham News—” The man listened with a mute, bashful pleasure and an awkward little grin while Wallace held on to his elbow. “—he’s got eyes and ears and a mouth just like the editor of The Birmingham News. He’s got a mind, too—fact, he’s got a better mind. And the editor of The Birmingham News has got just one vote, like this fella here. So who is the editor of The Birmingham News? Folks like this fella here know just by instinct, just by havin’ lived with folks, more’n all the newspaper editors an
d professors up yonder at Harvard will ever know. Any truck driver’d know right off what to do at the scene of an accident, but you take a college professor, he’d just stand around lookin’, with his hands in his pockets and gettin’ sick.”
As a private person, Wallace himself is curiously vague and weightless. He seems only marginally and incidentally aware of home and family, food and friends, the gentle comforts that bless the lives of ordinary men. One of his oldest associates declares, “Whenever he comes over here to eat, he’s just not conscious of anything except the people around him. He knows where the ketchup and the milk are, but that’s all. Because he’s only here to keep on talking to somebody. He never knows what he’s eating because he’s too busy talking—it could be filet mignon he’s eating, it could be hamburger, it could be the end of his tie, he don’t know. Just that whatever it is, he wants to put ketchup on it.”
Neither does money interest him. His one luxurious indulgence, reports a Montgomery businessman, “is having his fingers manicured downtown at the Exchange Hotel Barber Shop by Edna Taylor.” What money arrangements have been necessary in past campaigns have been quietly attended to by aides, out of his sight, out of his knowledge. Finance, high or low, leaves him wretchedly bored anyway; as one observer has noted, it would seem he never got beyond decimals.
He seems to exist in a constant state of energy and ebullience that never vanishes altogether but simply flares and pales. It’s as if, at the instant in his childhood when he comprehended what he was going to do, time simply ceased for him, and he began to exist in the same tense charged moment—the absolute fact of his destiny, a condition of will that was quite outside time.