Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

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 “with the

tense urgency of a squirrel,” in the memorable description of one

biographer, Marshall Frady. Another reason was that his message worked

among disaffected whites everywhere, not just in the South.

Wallace’s political radar had picked up signals that Rust Belt workers and

urban white ethnic Americans from Boston to Baltimore felt grumpy about

black students in their neighborhood schools and black competitors in the

workplace. He cleaned up his language, but he used an expurgated list of

demons — liberals, Communists, the Eastern press, federal judges,

“pointy-headed intellectuals” — to tap out in code words an updated

version of his fire-hardened message from the Heart of Dixie. It was race

and rage.

This blend of color prejudice and economic grievance appealed to enough

voters to win him more than 13 percent of the popular vote and five states

in the 1968 presidential election.