Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov
politics. Calling himself the “Barbour Bantam,” he won two Golden Gloves
titles while in high school. As a 15-year-old legislative page at the
Capitol in Montgomery, he stood on the gold star marking the spot where
Jefferson Davis was sworn as president of the Confederacy and where, by
tradition, Alabama governors have taken the oath of office ever since. It
was the seminal moment of his youth. Man and boy, George Wallace revered
that spot, so much so that as governor he ordered state troopers to
encircle it so that a visitor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, could not
put a desecrating Yankee foot atop it.
It was in 1937, on the oak-shaded Tuscaloosa campus of the University of
Alabama, that George Wallace began to define what he would become
politically. He arrived in the same shiny suit he had worn as a page in
Montgomery, but Tuscaloosa was a congenial place for poor, ambitious
country boys. And by tradition, it was a virtual boot camp for future
governors and senators. Young Wallace won election as president of the
freshman class. He never won another student office, but his campaign to
beat the fraternity machine with a coalition of independents and
out-of-state students whetted his permanent taste for underdog politics.
The other leitmotifs of his Alabama career — cronyism and betrayal –
emerged at the university. He acquired the hangers-on who staffed his
later efforts, and he made an unlikely, but ill-fated friendship with
Frank Johnson, a handsome law student from Winston County, a Unionist
stronghold in northern Alabama that seceded from Alabama when Alabama left
the Union. Johnson was a Republican, Wallace an ardent New Deal Democrat.
Johnson joked about someday being a federal judge and Wallace about being
governor. But the big wheels on campus tended to dismiss Wallace’s
ambitions as comical.
For in those days, too, Wallace impressed people by his frenetic energy
and tireless pugnacity rather than by any inherent attractiveness. He