The Politics of Rage

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George Wallace has been called "the most influential loser in American politics. " The four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate launched the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. Historian Dan T. Carter, prize-winning author of <i>Scottsboro</i> builds upon a decade of research to explain how Wallace transcended his regional parochialism to become the voice of the silent majority. Using newly available research materials on the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, Carter describes in sharp detail Wallace's pivotal role in shaping national politics from 1963 until the present. George Wallace was the Deep South politician who vowed "segregation forever," and first gave voice to a national backlash against Washington. Through the 1960s and 1970s, he sensed and then exploited the conservative reaction Americans have come to know by many names – white backlash, the silent majority, the alienated voter – and he made a generation of politicians dance to his tune. As early as 1963, Wallace sensed a growing mood of national discontent when he made his nationally televised "stand in the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama. Although he failed to block the admission of two black students, and national opinion leaders condemned his defiance of the federal government, over 40,000 viewers from across the nation flooded the Alabama governor's office with congratulatory letters and telegrams. Wallace first rocked the political establishment in 1964 when he entered the Wisconsin Democratic Primary with a $700 campaign fund and a "Wallace for President" committee consisting of three John Birchers and a Milwaukee housewife. Despite predictions he would draw less than five percent of the vote, one out of every three voters pulled the Wallace lever. As he took his campaign north, he abandoned overt racist appeals and called for a return to traditional American values: the sanctity of family, the centrality of religious beliefs, the importance of hard work and self-restraint, and the supremacy of local community values. In 1968 he formed the American Independent Party and ultimately drew the support of nearly fifteen percent of the electorate. By 1972, his political message had become mainstream: a quest for law and order, hostility toward welfare, tax breaks for the middle class, a contempt for "Washington bureaucrats," and a reliance on "common folks with common sense" rather than "pointy-headed pseudo-intellectuals" to chart a return to moral values. On May 15, 1972, a mentally disturbed unemployed Milwaukee janitor gunned him down in a Maryland parking lot as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination. He was paralyzed, and his national political career was effectively over. But before that shooting, he had dominated the campaign, winning primaries in Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Maryland, and Michigan and coming in a close second in Pennsylvania and Indiana. More than any other political leader of his generation, Wallace was the alchemist of the new social conservatism that reshaped American politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Richard Nixon was obsessed with destroying or manipulating the Alabamian, whom he blamed for nearly causing his defeat in 1968. Ronald Reagan, as <i>The New York Times</i> concluded, "sailed into the White House" on the "tide George Wallace discovered." And that same tide gave Republicans a smashing victory in 1994 and the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years