George Wallace Recordings

George Wallace
(1919 – 1998)

"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."  Those were the famous introductory words by George Wallace to the American people.

Born in Barbour County, Alabama on August 25, 1919, George C, as his parents called him as they hated the use of Junior was raised a Methodist.  During World War I, his father had dropped out of college to pursue farming due to the rising price of food.

Since the age of ten, Wallace had become fascinated with politics.  So much so that in 1935, he won a contest to become a page in the Alabama Senate.  It was at this time in his life that he predicted that he would one day be governor.  Well, to this date; George Wallace is the third longest serving governor having been in that office for 5,848 days.

A pretty good boxer in high school, Wallace went straight to the University of Alabama Law School in 1937.  It was here where he was acquainted with such people as Frank M. Johnson who later served on the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama from 1955 to 1979 and Senior Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 1991 to 1999, and George Chauncey Sparks who served as the 41st governor of Alabama from 1943 to 1947.  Wallace would earn his juris doctorate in 1942.

By 1943, Wallace was accepted into pilot training in the United States Army Air Force, but shortly after that he had contracted spinal meningitis which prompted him to use sulfa drugs to save his life.  Due to the illness, Wallace was left with partial hearing loss and permanent nerve damage, so instead he was trained to be a flight engineer.  Headed by General Curtis LeMay, ironically George Wallace's running mate in the Presidential Election of 1968, Wallace was part of the Twentieth Air Force who ran air raids over Japan.  He would reach the rank of staff sergeant and be discharged in 1945 due to medical grounds thanks to severe anxiety.  He would receive a ten percent disability pension for psychoneurosis. 

After the war, Wallace, a fairly moderate Democrat on the issue of race was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.  Two years later at the Democratic National Convention, Wallace was one of the few southern Democrats to not walk out in opposition to the Party's plank on civil rights.  He would become a judge on the Third Judicial Circuit in 1952.  Going back to his boxing days in high school he was known as the Fighting Little Judge.  It was here that he gained a reputation for fairness regardless of what the race of the plaintiff was.  It was also acceptable in the this part of the country and in this time in history to address black lawyers by their first name and white lawyers with Mister.  JL Chestnut, a black lawyer in Alabama at the time said of Judge Wallace, "Judge George Wallace was the most liberal judge that I had ever practiced law in front of.  He was the first judge in Alabama to call me 'Mister' in a courtroom."  However, and this seems more on the side of states' rights and not having the federal government coming in telling him what to do; Judge Wallace issued injunctions to prevent the removal of segregation signs in rail terminals and when it came to voter registration of blacks in Barbour County, Wallace blocked federal efforts to review those voter lists.

George Wallace decided to make a run for governor in 1958.  In 1901, the state constitution had what was called a disenfranchisement of the state's black voters and this made it possible for the Democratic Party to win virtually every time.  In the primary, Wallace, who was backed by the NAACP had a chief opponent in Alabama Attorney General John Malcolm Patterson, who was backed by the Ku Klux Klan.  Wallace would lose the nomination by over 34,000 votes.  After that defeat, Wallace realized why he had lost that election and decided to adopt a hard line stance on segregation to make a comeback in 1962.  A supporter during the 1962 campaign asked Wallace why the sudden 180 degree change on race to which Wallace replied, "You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened.  And the I started talking about the n-words (sic) and they stomped the floor."

While Governor Wallace was successful in bringing industry from the north by personally traveling to offer companies tax abatements to relocate to Alabama, and for expanding the community college system throughout Alabama, the think that is most remembered if his first term was blocking the entrance of the University of Alabama to keep two black students from desegregating the University in June 1963.  As a result, President John F. Kennedy had federalized the Alabama National Guard and dispatched Nicholas Katzenbach to have Wallace removed.  Two things happened that day, the University of Alabama had been desegregated and President Kennedy addressed the nation on the need for a civil rights bill.  He would not live to see its passage as he was assassinated less than six months later, but in his first Joint Session of Congress, President Lyndon Johnson urged the Congress to pass the civil rights bill as a lasting memorial to President Kennedy.  Lyndon Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, 1964.

To describe George Wallace's campaign in the Presidential Election of 1968, two statements sum it up best…"George Wallace laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s.  He was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students." Dan Carter.  In his 1998 obituary, John Anderson wrote of Wallace's campaign and its impact for the decades to follow,  "His startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters was not lost on Richard Nixon and other Republican strategists.  

First Nixon, the Ronald Reagan, and finally George Herbert Walker Bush successfully adopted toned down versions of Wallace's anti-busing, anti-government platform to pry low- and middle-income whites from the Democratic New Deal Coalition."  In a coalition of conservative and white supremacy groups like the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, and the White Citizens Council; planning for George Wallace's 1968 Presidential Run started on his wife's Inauguration Day as Alabama governor in 1967.  Running on the Independence Party ticket, there was hope that the 1968 Election would be thrown into the House of Representatives making Wallace a power broker to use that clout for southern states to have the power to end desegregation.  Nixon and the Republicans feared Wallace would split the Republican voters and give the presidency to the Democrats.  Humphrey and the Democrats feared Wallace would appeal to organized blue collar Democrats in the north like Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio.  To add more worry to Nixon, Wallace also ran on a similar law and order campaign.  Wallace's platform called for more generous payments for Social Security and Medicare.  When it came to the Vietnam War, Wallace felt that if it was not winnable by April 20, 1969, he would be pulling US troops out immediately.  To Wallace, spending money on foreign aid was like throwing it down a rathole.  As for a running mate, the original idea was to have former Baseball Commissioner and Kentucky governor Happy Chandler be that candidate.  When it came out that back in 1947 Chandler supported the hiring of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, the invitation was recinded.  The next candidate on the short list was Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  In the end, the running mate position went to four star Air Force General Curtis LeMay.  LeMay had a resume that went back to commanding George Wallace during World War II.  He helped bring about the United States Air Force in 1947 and was on the team with President John F. Kennedy in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  LeMay would make some controversial remarks about Vietnam and the use of nuclear weapons and as a result, the Wallace campaign was on a downward spiral.  By November 5, 1968, George Wallace won five southern states, 10 million popular votes, and 46 electoral votes.  This was not enough to throw the Election to the House of Representatives as Richard Nixon earned 301 electoral votes.

George Wallace would run again and win the Alabama giver ship in 1970 and make a second run for president, this time running as a Democrat against his two chief rivals; Senator Hubert Humphrey and Senator George McGovern in 1972.  On May 15, 1972, while campaigning in a Maryland shopping center, when 21 year old Arthur Bremer shot Wallace five times.  George Wallace, who was starting to get ahead in the polls had been paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

In later years; George Wallace would run again for Alabama governor in 1974 and again for the presidency in 1976.  By the 1980s, George Wallace became a Born Again Christian and renounced his segregationist views.  In 1992, Wallace had voted for George HW Bush and in 1996 for Bob Dole citing that Dole was a good man and that his wife, Elizabeth Dole was a Born Again Christian.  He died of septic shock on September 13, 1998 from a bacterial infection.