Wednesday, September 16, 1998

Wallace will be remembered as racial figure

Former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace left his mark on history as a politician of protest. When he was in his prime, there was no better stump speaker in politics. Put him before a friendly crowd and Wallace could play its emotions like a musical instrument. If a few hecklers were present, so much the better.

Those who know Wallace, who died Sunday at 79 more than a quarter-century after being struck down by Arthur Bremer, only through film clips from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s cannot begin to comprehend the appeal he had to people who suffered a generations-old inferiority complex, to people who feared and resented the overdue social and legal changes that swept through the South during his lifetime.

Of all the third-party candidates who have run for president since the Civil War, only one received more electoral votes than Wallace did in 1968. And that one - Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 - had the advantage of having been a former president. By also running well in Democratic Party presidential primaries in 1964 and 1972, Wallace worried national party leaders.

In later years

Wallace spent his later years denying that he had encouraged racial hatred by his resistance to the civil rights movement. He did it so convincingly that rural black voters voted for Wallace in enough numbers in the 1982 Democratic runoff to give him his last of four terms as governor of Alabama.

Wallace actually started in politics as a relative moderate on racial issues. But from the late 1950s until he was shot in 1972, the period when he reached the zenith of his career, Wallace rode and added to the tide of racial hatred that flowed across much of the white South. In his demagoguery, he was not much different from many other Southern politicians of his generation.

What set Wallace apart was his ability to gauge and shift with the tide of public sentiment. Most of the politicians who resisted the civil rights movement fell by the wayside as blacks began to vote in significant numbers and whites came to reject the overt racism those politicians represented.

But more importantly, Wallace remained a political force for so long because he never locked himself into issues and positions. His sharp political instincts led him to move on to new issues as old ones lost their popular appeal.

But as one looks back on his life, Wallace will always be standing at the schoolhouse door, trying to stop progress, trying to thwart integration, trying to deny others their rights as American citizens and their dignity as human beings. While it is better that he recanted than if he had not, the harm he did has a long existence.