Реферат: George Wallace Essay Research Paper Former Gov

that would help make him governor in 1962 as an all-out segregationist

with Klan backing. As Johnson later told the Alabama writer Frank Sikora,

Wallace had also established the tactical blueprint of his career:

“misleading the people of Alabama for the purpose of pursuing his

political career.”

Wallace, of course, did not see it that way. He described himself as

devoted to the economic development of his state and to advancing the

causes of limited government and middle-class values in national politics.

The reality was both uglier and more complicated.

In his four terms as governor, Wallace saw an era of unparalleled

corruption that operated through a crony system centered on his brother

Gerald, a lawyer who died in 1993. With the governor’s approval, Gerald

Wallace and his close associate, Oscar Harper, went into business selling

the state office supplies, printing, vending machines and building leases.

Gerald Wallace and Harper established an asphalt company with $1,000 in

capital. In a year and half, the infant company garnered more than a

million dollars in state contracts.

These unblushing accounts come not from political opponents, but from

Harper’s 1988 memoir, “Me ‘n’ George,” regarded as one of the best guides

to the inside dealing in Alabama’s capital during the Wallace years.

“Most people have got the wrong idea about how I made my money,” Harper

wrote. “They think me and Gerald are crooks.” Then he added: “That ain’t

true. It’s just that good deals kept popping up and I never was one to

turn a good deal down.”

As this comment suggests, Wallace’s first term was rowdy, even by the

standards of a region that had produced Gov. Eugene Talmadge of Georgia,

known as “The Wild Man from Sugar Creek.”

It is one of the paradoxes of Southern history that Alabama’s “Fighting

Judge,” by trying to revive the antebellum doctrine of states’ rights,