Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

especially abrasive way, a large portion of the country’s politics of

later years. Wallace was the first major political figure in his

generation to exploit the antipathy toward Washington that went on to be a

prime force in politics from coast to coast.

He was also surely the first in his generation to galvanize the white,

working-class voters later labeled as Reagan Democrats. And he was the

first nationally known politician of that generation to put such raucous

emphasis on race, crime, welfare and other issues that still loom large,

if less crudely, on the political landscape.

After he retired as governor, Wallace used interviews to push relentlessly

at the theme that he was the real inventor of Reaganism. Starting in 1979,

he also undertook a campaign of apology and revisionist explanation

intended to erase the word “racist” from his epitaph.

He argued that his early devotion to segregation was based on his reading

of the Constitution and the Bible and was misinterpreted as a racist

hatred of black people.

“I made a mistake in the sense that I should have clarified my position

more,” he said in his last term as governor. “I was never saying anything

that reflected upon black people, and I’m very sorry it was taken that

way.”

That Wallace died haunted by race is appropriate to his life story — one

of Faulknerian perversity embodying the old themes of guilt and a steady,

if clumsy, Snopsian aspiration.

George Corley Wallace Jr. was born on Aug. 25, 1919, in Clio, Ala., a

cotton town in Barbour County, where mule-drawn wagons were as common as

cars on the unpaved main street. His father was the wastrel son of a

beloved local doctor. His mother, Mozelle Smith Wallace, had survived

abandonment by her mother and a depressing girlhood in an Episcopal

orphanage at Mobile.