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After Wallace
The 1986 Contest for Governor and Political Change in Alabama
By Patrick R. Cotter, James Glen Stovall The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2009 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8727-3
CHAPTER 1
The Dominance of George Wallace
To talk about Alabama politics during the second half of the last century is to talk about George Wallace. He dominated the political arena of the state for almost three decades, holding an almost mystical grip on a substantial portion of the state's electorate.
For those who opposed him, Wallace represented the dark side of American politics—a demagogue who played on the people's fears and prejudices with simple answers to complex problems. He symbolized southern resistance to integration, vowing "Segregation forever!" in his 1962 inaugural speech, standing in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama in 1963, and failing to protect marchers in Selma from the onslaught of state troopers in 1965.
For many others throughout the state and nation, Wallace was the little man who stood against the encroachment of the federal government and who voiced their frustrations at the "pointy-headed bureaucrats" and "limousine liberals."
No matter how he was viewed, Wallace actively participated in the turbulence of American politics in the 1960s and early 1970s, and as much as any other politician, he symbolized the violence to which it succumbed. The most lasting image of Wallace has him lying in a parking lot in Laurel, Maryland, the victim of an assassin's bullet, another of America's political leaders cut down by a random insanity that stalked the nation.
Often forgotten in these varying images is the fact that George Wallace was first and finally an Alabamian. Wallace never forgot this fact. For all of his activity on the national scene, he always tended the political fences at home and maintained a dominance in state politics that ensured his survival. In fact, while his national image may have remained unchanged, his ability to shift with the changing Alabama electorate demonstrated his extraordinary acumen as a politician.
BEGINNINGS OF A POLITICAL REIGN
George Corley Wallace was born on August 25, 1919, in Clio, Alabama, a small farming community in southern Alabama's Barbour County. Politically, the Alabama into which Wallace was born was solidly Democratic. As every student of the region's history knows, in the years following the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the decline of the Populist Party, each of the southern states developed a one-party, solidly Democratic electoral system. Election laws that disenfranchised large segments of the population, particularly black citizens, and social taboos against supporting Republicans, the party of Lincoln, Emancipation, and Reconstruction aided in both the development and maintenance of this one-party politics.
During the era of the Solid South, Democratic candidates throughout most of the region repeatedly won elections at all levels of government by large margins, often with little opposition. This was certainly the case in Alabama. Between 1922 and 1954, no Republican candidate for governor in Alabama gathered more than 27 percent of the vote. No Republican was elected to Congress from Alabama during this period. Nor did Republicans ever hold more than a handful of seats in the state legislature.
V. O. Key described the electoral politics of Alabama during the period of the Solid South as featuring a considerable degree of multifactionalism, personalism, and disorganization. "Alabama has not been dominated over a long period by a single well-disciplined machine," Key reported. "Nor have there been in recent years well-organized competing machines. Political factions form and reform. Leadership in statewide politics tends to be transient. New statewide leaders emerge, rise to power, and disappear as others take their place. Voters group themselves in one faction and then in another in the most confusing fashion." Overall, Key concluded, the state's "political process appears as a free-for-all, with every man looking out for himself."
However, Key also noted that occasionally the state's disorganized politics would transform itself into a rough form of bifactionalism. When this occurred, the state's electoral politics involved intense conflict between the progressive and agrarian interests of northern and southeastern Alabama against a coalition of more conservative Black Belt planters and "Big Mule" industrialists and financiers of Birmingham and Mobile. Two parallel lines divided the progressives from conservatives in this alignment. Conservatives were staunch supporters of racial segregation and opponents of active government, especially when it came to questions of government services and the taxes needed to pay for them. Progressives, while generally not pro-integration, were less concerned about segregation and more in favor of active government and its ability to provide services such as good schools, health care, and roads benefiting the common citizen. As conditions and candidates changed, followers of one side of this semi-organized conflict would replace supporters of the other side in office.
In the years immediately after World War II, Big Jim Folsom best personified the progressive tradition of Alabama politics. Folsom was the state's governor from 1946 to 1950 and from 1954 to 1958. He called himself the "little man's big friend" and sought to marshal the forces of government to help lower-income groups. His personality and programs engendered fierce loyalty to him as a politician—a loyalty that was eventually overcome by his weakness for alcohol and his less than staunch segregationist stands.
As Wallace began his political career, he clearly positioned himself within the progressive tradition of Alabama politics. His grandfather was a prominent physician, but his family was not prosperous. Throughout his career, Wallace made good use of his humble beginnings. He soon recognized the advantage of remaining on the side of the "underdogs" and the "outs." He refused to join a fraternity when he attended the University of Alabama, and he remained a noncommissioned officer when he was in the army. He was an assistant state attorney general, state representative, and circuit judge in the 1940s and 1950s.
He made his first run for governor in 1958. The campaign involved the usual list of state issues such a funding for education, industrial development, health care, and state pensions. What was somewhat new to the campaign agenda in 1958 was the issue of race. For the previous half-century in Alabama and throughout the South, serious candidates had uniformly expressed support for racial segregation and the maintenance of white supremacy. What campaign debate was generated by the race issue during this period concerned which candidate was most likely to maintain and reinforce the status quo of segregation.
The politics of race, however, had changed by the beginning of the 1958 campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools encouraged efforts to integrate the University of Alabama. The Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 had brought the issue home to Alabama, and the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the crisis over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, also altered political calculations concerning race.
In the midst of this shift in the political winds, a new way of running for office was beginning to emerge. Big Jim Folsom's campaigns transformed the way Alabama candidates sought votes. Instead of the traditional methods of traveling from county courthouse to courthouse asking for support from local political leaders, Folsom organized rallies in towns throughout the state where he could speak directly to voters. These came about with the help of "new" technology in the form of reliable cars, paved roads, and improved sound systems. To attract crowds to these rallies, Folsom provided not only political talk but entertainment in the form of country-and-western music.
Other candidates, including Wallace, quickly copied Folsom's campaign techniques. Wallace began his 1958 campaign with a rally in Ozark, Alabama, a small town near his home. The weather was so cold and wintry that one of the entertainers, Minnie Pearl, wore long underwear under her dress. Miss Cornelia Ellis, Jim Folsom's niece and a future Mrs. George Wallace, was also in attendance. She offered to sing a song she had composed but was not allowed to because she was not a member of the appropriate union.
The cold weather also forced Wallace to shorten his campaign kickoff speech. Still, he managed to outline several themes that he would continue to promote through many of his political campaigns. First, like each of the thirteen other Democratic candidates who entered the contest, Wallace said he would maintain segregation. What was different in this campaign was the style Wallace said he would use to maintain segregation. Unlike in his later campaigns, Wallace called for moderation and conciliation. He said he would maintain segregation "without violence or ill will." Further, he asserted, "with fairness, dignity and firmness, we can preserve our way of life." Finally, "we must never resort to maliciousness, violence or ill will—that will only compound our problems," he said.
A second theme was states' rights and the increasing intrusiveness of the national government. Speaking of the Civil Rights Commission's efforts regarding voting rights, Wallace told the crowd, "You have enough good and honest people right here in Ozark to decide on matters such as that and you sure don't have to rely on any imported federal and district judges."
Wallace presented himself as the candidate of the average citizen. He promised help to Alabamians in areas such as roads, schools, pensions, and jobs. Later in the campaign he said that if elected he would champion the cause of the "little income people."
Wallace lost this initial bid for the governorship to Attorney General John Patterson. Contemporary accounts of the campaign suggest that a number of issues were important to voters during the primary and runoff campaigns.
These included:
• The public's unhappiness with the Folsom administration. Wallace was a former campaign and legislative leader for Folsom, while Patterson had investigated corruption charges against members of the Folsom administration.
• Crime. Patterson had become attorney general in the aftermath of his father's assassination by gangsters in his hometown of Phenix City.
• Race. During the runoff campaign, newspapers reported that the Ku Klux Klan supported Patterson.
Most post-election analysis suggests that of these issues, race was by far the most important. After the votes were counted, Wallace is reported to have sworn that he would never be defeated on the race issue again.
Four years later, Wallace ran again and this time was elected governor, leading the field of seven candidates in the primary, and then defeating state senator Ryan DeGraffenreid in a runoff. In the four years between 1958 and 1962, Wallace's positions did not change, but his political style did. Wallace promised to stand in the "school house door" to prevent the integration of the state's schools. Further, he declared that "As governor of your state I will stand strong for segregation. Some people say you are too strong, but how can you be too strong in what you believe? There is no middle of the road. You are either for it or against it."
Regarding the national government, Wallace said, "We have the sorriest federal court system in the world. They're telling us who we're going to live with, who we're going to swim with, who we're going to play with, who we're going to eat with. They're trying to run the country by their own rules and I'm sick and tired of it, and I'm sure you are too."
In looking out for common citizens, Wallace said he would do more in education and pensions. He would also stop wasteful spending by the state government. To illustrate this concern, he said that if elected he would sell the state yacht, which was now being used by "big shots" "with high connections, who ate thick steaks, drank free liquor" and were "taken for free rides in the moonlight."
TURMOIL, FAME, AND REPUBLICANS
During Wallace's term, the civil rights movement not only brought turmoil to Alabama but also brought the news media. Wallace quickly became a nationally recognized figure as a segregationist and launched a brief but highly effective bid for the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination. Before withdrawing he received 34 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin primary, 30 percent in the Indiana primary, and 42 percent in the Maryland presidential preference primary.
Back home, the Alabama constitution prevented Wallace from succeeding himself, and he was unable to persuade the Alabama senate to allow a referendum to change this provision. Ryan DeGraffenreid's death in an airplane crash in early 1966, however, created a political vacuum within the state. Wallace soon moved to fill this opening, presenting his wife, Lurleen, as a candidate for governor.
Testifying to Wallace's popularity in the state, Mrs. Wallace won a majority of the vote in the Democratic primary, despite the presence of nine other candidates. Unlike in earlier years, however, the campaign did not end with the primary. Instead, for the first time in decades, the state's Republicans seriously contested the gubernatorial election. The GOP's candidate, Jim Martin, had almost defeated veteran U.S. senator Lister Hill in 1962, and then had won one of the state's congressional positions in the 1964 Goldwater landslide.
The presence of a potentially serious Republican gubernatorial candidate reflected the political changes that were occurring throughout the region, including Alabama. In particular, at the national level, the era of the Solid Democratic South was ending. In his two campaigns, Dwight Eisenhower easily exceeded the vote received in Alabama by most previous Republican presidential candidates, winning about 35 percent in 1952 and about 39 percent in 1956. Richard Nixon did even better in 1960, receiving about 42 percent in his race against John Kennedy. In the 1964 election, Barry Goldwater carried the state for the GOP, winning almost 70 percent of Alabama's vote.
Similarly, in congressional elections Republicans won three of the state's eight congressional seats in 1964 (in 1986 they still held two of these seats). In 1980 the Republicans elected their first U.S. senator, Jeremiah Denton, from the state in more than one hundred years. (As we will see, Denton's reelection bid became part of the story of the 1986 gubernatorial contest.)
A SHIFT IN THE ELECTORATE
Not only was the partisan outcome of Alabama's presidential and congressional elections changing, but so was the size and makeup of its electorate. The 1965 Voting Rights Act and a number of other actions occurring in the 1950s and 1960s removed many of the barriers to voting in Alabama. As a consequence, the percentage of African Americans registered to vote within the state soared. Many white Alabamians also took advantage of the new requirements. Altogether, turnout rates, as percentages of the voting-age population, in Alabama elections about doubled between elections conducted before and after the Voting Rights Act.
Accompanying these electoral changes was a shift in the position of race as an issue in Alabama politics. As noted earlier, in the days of the Solid South, candidates pledging their unqualified support for segregation and white supremacy were a common feature of Alabama elections. However, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the resulting massive increase in the number of African-American voters, the politics of the race issue changed. No longer did any serious candidate campaign as a defender of racial segregation. Instead, many office seekers openly began to seek the support of the growing black electorate. This was particularly true of Democratic candidates. The reason for this was that once they entered the electorate in large numbers, African Americans became an important and loyal element within the state's Democratic Party. A spring 1986 University of Alabama survey, for example, found that about 85 percent of black citizens in the state were Democrats, while only 6 percent identified themselves as Republicans. (That survey found a more even distribution of party identification among whites. About 35 percent of white citizens said that they were Democrats, while 30 percent identified themselves as Republicans.)
The disappearance of segregationist candidates did not mean that race had become a non-issue. Instead, at least according to some observers, race remained a central, if not the central, issue in state and national politics, but one that was often spoken of indirectly. In particular, it is argued, racial opinions affected the views of white voters on a number of apparently non-racial issues such as crime, taxes, or states' rights. Talking about such issues is, in the minds of many white voters, really a discussion of race. Thus, according to this view, a politician's promise to "get tough on crime" is seen by many voters as a pledge to protect the social, economic, and political position of whites.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from After Wallace by Patrick R. Cotter, James Glen Stovall. Copyright © 2009 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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