American Maelstrom by Michael Cohen

Author:Michael Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199777563
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

What you saw with George Wallace is generally what you got. There was little ambiguity or nuance in his political rhetoric, which was to be expected from a politician whose career would be sustained on an image of “telling it like it is.” Yet he was not without contradiction, perhaps none more glaring than the fact that in his first major, statewide campaign in Alabama for governor in 1958 he had been branded a racial progressive. The charge was not without foundation. As a circuit judge, Wallace had demonstrated occasional bouts of racial sensitivity, even calling black lawyers in his courtroom “mister.” He spoke out against the Ku Klux Klan and received an endorsement from the NAACP—in stark contract to his opponent, John Patterson, who boasted of his efforts as attorney general to fight the organizing effort of civil rights activists. Patterson swamped Wallace with charges that he was a racial progressive and nakedly racist appeals to white voters. Wallace’s response to the defeat would reshape his political career. It was the equivalent of “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” He told his aides on election night, “John Patterson out-niggered me. And boys, no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” For as long as he was a national figure he remained true to this statement.10

When Wallace finally won the statehouse in 1962, his inaugural address offered compelling evidence that he’d learned his lesson well. The new governor pledged to an audience that included few of the state’s 30 percent of black citizens “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” In words crafted by his speechwriter Asa Carter, a former Klan member, and dripping with the poisonous language of racial exclusion and prejudice, Wallace warned that just as “the national racism of Hitler’s Germany persecuted a national minority to the whim of a national majority, so the international racism of the liberals seek to persecute the international white minority to the whim of the international colored majority.” Six months later Wallace would make his defiant “stand in the schoolhouse door” at the University of Alabama. Before a national television audience he denounced the Department of Justice’s demand that the school be integrated as an “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion” on Alabama’s sovereignty.11

This losing fight turned Wallace into both a regional hero and a national caricature. Newsweek sniffed that he was “a corn-pone redneck big-man-in-Alabama but nowhere else.” The political establishment saw him as a creature of the South, representative of the region’s prejudices, resentments, and peculiar psychosis of victimization. When Wallace embarked on a speaking tour of elite universities in late 1963, including Ohio State University, UCLA, and Harvard, he was routinely met with catcalls and protests, but the response hardly deterred him. Indeed, his detractors discovered that Wallace could not be dismissed merely as an ugly caricature. He was charismatic, funny, and adroit at parrying attacks from protesters. During one question-and-answer session at Harvard, a black student asked him whether he would consider running for president with a black man.

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