George Wallace Essays - George Wallace, Arthur Bremer, James Hood

George Wallace annon Former Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who built his political career on segregation and spent a tormented retirement arguing that he was not a racist in his heart, died Sunday night at Jackson Hospital in Montgomery. He was 79 and lived in Montgomery, Ala. Wallace died of respiratory and cardiac arrest at 9:49 p.m., said Dana Beyerly, a spokeswoman for Jackson Hospital in Montgomery. Wallace had been in declining health since being shot in his 1972 presidential campaign by a 21-year-old drifter named Arthur Bremer. Wallace, a Democrat who was a longtime champion of states' rights, dominated his own state for almost a generation. But his wish was to be remembered as a man who might have been president and whose campaigns for that office in 1968, 1972 and 1976 established political trends that have dominated American politics for the last quarter of the 20th century. He believed that his underdog campaigns made it possible for two other Southerners, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, to be taken seriously as presidential candidates. He also argued ceaselessly that his theme of middle-class empowerment was borrowed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and then grabbed by another Californian, Ronald Reagan, as the spine of his triumphant populist conservatism. In interviews later in his life, Wallace was always less keen to talk about his other major role in Southern history. After being elected to his first term as governor in 1962, he became the foil for the huge protests that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to destroy segregation in public accommodations in 1963 and to secure voting rights for blacks in 1965. As a young man, Wallace came boiling out of the sun-stricken, Rebel-haunted reaches of southeast Alabama to win the governorship on his second try. He became the only Alabamian ever sworn in for four terms as governor, winning elections in 1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982. He retired at the end of his last term in January 1987. So great was his sway over Alabama that by the time he had been in office only two years, other candidates literally begged him for permission to put his slogan, Stand Up for Alabama, on their billboards. Sens. John Sparkman and Lister Hill, New Deal veterans who were powers in Washington and the national Democratic Party, feared to contradict him in public when he vowed to plunge the state into unrelenting confrontation with the federal government over the integration of schools, buses, restrooms and public places in Alabama. It was a power built entirely on his promise to Alabama's white voting majority to continue the historic oppression of its disfranchised and largely impoverished black citizens. And it was snapshots of the peak moments of Wallace's campaign of racial oppression that burned him into the nation's consciousness as the Deep South's most forceful political brawler since Huey Long of Louisiana. First, on Jan. 14, 1963, there was his inaugural address, written by a known Ku Klux Klansman, Asa Carter. In it, Wallace promised to protect the state's Anglo-Saxon people from communistic amalgamation with blacks and ended with the line that would haunt his later efforts to enter the Democratic mainstream: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Wallace's next signature moment came on June 11, 1963, when he mounted his stand in the schoolhouse door to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Within days, it was convincingly reported that Wallace, fearing jail for defying a federal court order, had privately promised President John Kennedy that he would step aside if first allowed to make a defiant speech. Wallace's in-state critics denounced him for a charade that embarrassed the state. But the cold splash of reality did not dampen his plans to use Alabama as a stepping stone to the national political arena and to the anti-Big-government speeches by which he obsessively longed to be remembered by history. Wallace talked of running for president in 1964 as a neo-Dixiecrat candidate. But he backed off when the Republican nominee, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, came out against the bill that later became the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Goldwater's move undercut Wallace's trademark assertion that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two main parties on race. After the election, Wallace regretted his timidity because he thought Goldwater had run a campaign of comical ineptitude, and when 1968 came around, he invented a party, drafted the eccentric retired Air Force general Curtis LeMay as his running mate, and began draining away the lunch-pail vote from Nixon. One reason for his success was that Wallace always campaigned