George Wallace Reconsidered

This piece was originally published at The Old South Repository.

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Those six words, burned into every high-school textbook, reduce George C. Wallace to a cartoon villain. They hide the inconvenient reality that the same man paved Alabama’s roads, built her community colleges, raised teacher salaries, and, in the twilight of his career, asked forgiveness from the people he once opposed. To dismiss Wallace outright is to miss the full story of twentieth-century Southern populism—a story that would be the backbone of GOP politics from Nixon to Regan to Trump.

Barbour County, Alabama, was no Camelot. Half Black, half White, and wholly broke, it was a place where a doctor was paid in chickens or peanuts if he got paid at all. George Wallace’s grandfather was that doctor, and young George tagged along on house calls down clay roads lined the shacks of sharecroppers.

This experience would shape the adolescent mind of George Wallace. He learned that poverty is stubbornly color-blind, and working families need a champion who spoke their language…plainly, proudly, and loudly.

Long before Wallace learned the machinery of Southern politics, those lesson learned on house calls hardened into an ethic. For Wallace government existed to yank ordinary people out of the mud, not to lecture them from ivory towers. Everything else Wallace did—Golden Gloves trophies, naval service, the University of Alabama law degree—was just sharpening the spear he intended to throw on behalf of the people of Alabama.

Contrary to the modern portrayals, early Wallace was Alabama’s moderate wunderkind. As a circuit judge he demanded that Black attorneys be addressed as “Mr.” and “Mrs.” in a courtroom despite the Jim Crow etiquette still common in Alabama. He was known by civil-rights organizers as one of the fairest judges in the Alabama.

His first gubernatorial bid in 1958 reflected that political ideology. Backed by the NAACP, Wallace refused to traffic in overt segregationist rhetoric. His opponent, John Patterson, ran a segregationist-friendly campaign and crushed him. The defeat convinced Wallace that morality alone wouldn’t deliver him the Governor’s Mansion. Populism—raw, cultural, combative—was the only way in.

Wallace’s makeover wasn’t a Saul on the road to Damascus conversion, rather it was a cold reading of the electoral map. The late fifties saw White Southerners dealing with the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings and the Eisenhower administration’s deployment of federal troops to Little Rock. Right or wrong, Whites in Alabama felt their heritage, their homes, and their way of life were under attack. The emotional center of Alabama politics had shifted, and Wallace, ever the pragmatist, shifted with it.

His 1962 campaign fused two elements:

• Cultural Defiance – “Stand in the schoolhouse door” became the indelible image, a promise that Montgomery would fight “Washington meddling.”
• Pocketbook Progressivism – New Deal-style economics for farmers, mill workers, and small-town merchants. Roads, schools, and paychecks were not afterthoughts; they were the heart of the pitch.

That mix of social conservatism linked to economic populism predates today’s political landscape by six decades (and in reality, back to the King Fish himself). Wallace made it work because he knew exactly why people were hurt and how to sell relief without sounding like a Harvard (Yankee) do-gooder.

The fire-eating rhetoric hogs the headlines, but the accounting ledgers tell a different story. During Wallace’s first two terms (1963-1967, 1971-1975) Alabama witnessed:

Critics called it “asphalt populism.” That’s fine; asphalt is what lets an ambulance reach a farmhouse in winter and a forklift reach a loading dock in summer. Progress does not always arrive in lofty prose—sometimes it arrives in blacktop and rebar.

By 1968, urban riots, Vietnam fatigue, and liberal scolding had cracked the New Deal coalition. Wallace smelled an opportunity. Running on the American Independent Party ticket, he targeted blue-collar voters North and South who felt mocked by campus revolutionaries and ignored by corporate Republicans.

Wallace’s 1968 presidential bid paired him with retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay. On paper it was a genius mix of populism and military gravitas: Wallace would rail against federal over-reach while LeMay, the architect of America’s nuclear deterrent system, symbolized unflinching strength abroad.

The ticket promised “law and order with no apologies,” a platform aimed squarely at blue-collar voters tired of urban riots and campus unrest. Although LeMay’s tough talk of using tactical nukes in Vietnam unnerved suburban moderates, the pairing still hauled in 13.5 percent of the national popular vote and 46 electoral votes and birthed a new political archetype…“the Wallace voter.” White, working-class, anti-crime, pro-union, and weary of cultural liberalism.

Underpinning Wallace’s fiery rhetoric was a sober conviction that communist subversion was not a phantom menace but a documented reality. From the Venona Project which exposed Soviet agents in Washington to the Castro-funded guerrillas in Latin America, the Cold War was saturated with genuine communist infiltration.

Wallace warned of communist infiltration at every turn: warning of communists hiding in labor unions, university faculties, and the federal bureaucracy. His call to audit textbooks, tighten internal-security screening, and keep the FBI well-funded resonated with Americans who had watched the Bay of Pigs, Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding at the U.N., and race riots that bore the markings of foreign influence.

At a time when Alger Hiss had only recently been unmasked and Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague, Wallace’s anti-communist vigilance came off less as paranoid and more common-sense than it does today.

Decades later, anyone could see Wallace’s mark on the Nixon campaign, the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s and from 2016 on the entirety of Trump’s base. He tapped a grievance that neither party establishment fully understood: the sense that America’s managerial class lived by one set of rules while lecturing everyone else about morality.

This idea can be seen most clearly through Wallace’s opinion on bussing. Wallace saw bussing as an attack on both middle and lower middle-class White and Black communities. He slammed the federal government’s policy of forced bussing by pointing out that it had no effect on the gated communities of the rich. They were free from the consequences of their decisions. It was rules for thee and not for me.

Despite the bad publicity, Wallace was ascendant, but on May 15, 1972, in Laurel, Maryland, Authur Bremer emptied a .38 revolver into Wallace’s abdomen.

Wallace survived, but shards of bone severed his spinal cord. He would campaign from a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The physical pain was excruciating; the political fallout worse—donors fled and momentum evaporated, and with-it Wallace’s Presidential dreams.

Suffering changes men. For Wallace it ignited a reconciliation project with Black Alabamians. Wallace went on to appoint Jimmy Jennings, a Black pastor, as a top aide, and met civil-rights leader John Lewis, saying “I was wrong.”

Many instead that this was mere optics and less genuine regret. It is more than likely that Wallace ever the pragmatist, new the times had changed that it was in the interest of Alabama that her population, both Black and White move forward.

But it is important to note that long before his public contrition, Wallace’s economic programs had already improved the lives of Blacks in Alabama.

• Community Colleges – Federal courts integrated them in the late 1960s; Black enrollment soared.
• Infrastructure – Paved roads meant rural Black farmers could bring their products to sale before they spoiled.
• Workforce Training – Skilled-trade certificates offered an alternative to field labor.

His policies by and large had always helped the people of Alabama regardless of race.

Civil-rights activist John Brown famously confronted his mother for voting Wallace. She replied, “Honey, I vote for who puts food on our table.” The line may upset liberal sensibilities, yet it captures the truth of politics: patronage is everything.

To understand Wallace’s popularity, one must understand the existential dread White Southerners felt in the mid-20th Century. They were not merely fighting to keep their communities segregated; they were grappling with:

• Economic upheaval—mechanized cotton and fertilizer drove sharecroppers off the land.
• Cultural humiliation—national media portrayed every Southerner as a backward bigot.
• Washington’s reach—federal judges voided state laws at every turn. Reminding them that States Rights were an illusion.

Wallace addressed these issues with surgical precision, promising, “I will not let them run over you.” To the average White Southerner this sounded like salvation for the South which had long been treated as the national punchline.

This context for those who find Wallace’s pro-segregation stance as the greatest sin will do little, but regardless, it shows that history, if it is to be useful, must understand the causes, not merely recite the crimes.

Wallace tied cultural grievance to economic improvement. The coalition worked until the national GOP copied the formula (minus the spending) and the Democrats ditched working-class Whites altogether.

Wallace’s late-life repentance did not win him higher office, but it softened racial tensions inside Alabama. Twenty-five percent of Black voters backed him in his final gubernatorial run—a fact that would seem unimaginable to anyone a decade earlier.

Wallace, love him or hate him, is one of the best Governors America has ever known. To erase him for his flaws leaves only flawless do-nothings. States aren’t built by saints alone. Wallace was “realpolitik” incarnate… the messy interplay of vice and virtue that actually shapes the political.

George Corley Wallace was no saint; saints don’t survive in Southern politics. He was ambitious, ruthless, and willing to exploit the fears of his electorate. Yet the score card of history does not lie… highways, schools, and economic improvement can’t be erased by a single line in a single speech.

Like it or not you can’t ignore the miles of asphalt under a thousand school buses, the trade schools, or the community college programs that help place graduates in Huntsville’s aerospace industry. Wallace did that.

To exchange one caricature for another is to choose ignorance twice.

Huey Long… George Wallace… Southern politics creates complicated men. Understanding them—faults and all—beats burning their memory at the stake and pretending the flames light the road of progress.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

John Slaughter

John Slaughter is a native Alabamaian. He is a graduate of Troy University, a Marine Corps Veteran, and an aspiring novelist.

View all posts