Mini-Review: The Politics of Rage

Artie Bremer wanted to kill Richard Nixon, only to find himself stymied by the layers of security surrounding the president. What’s a psychopath to do? Bremer was forced to set his sights lower; he picked as his target Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Upset by this turn of events, Bremer complained that shooting a governor would hardly win him the notoriety he craved. George Wallace was not just any governor. In “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics,” Dan Carter explores how a gawky country boy became America’s most polarizing politician.

Wallace was born to campaign. Blessed with a nose for power, he made the right allies early in his career, chief among them the colorful populist James “Big Jim” Folsom. Yet their relationship eventually buckled beneath the weight of the race question. As a circuit judge, Wallace was known for his courtesy toward black lawyers and clients, but things changed when he entered the arena. After losing a gubernatorial contest to a race-baiting opponent, Wallace famously swore “I will never be outniggered again.” He was true to his word. Four years later he swept into the governor’s mansion, defeating his former mentor Folsom in a campaign flavored by the sour tang of racism.

Race meant everything to Wallace. Unlike some southern politicians, who seemed to be putting on their racism in an attempt to smuggle economic populism through the back door, Wallace could talk of nothing but “Negro inferiority.” His attitude—a combination of condescending paternalism and ugly bigotry—seems a throwback to the old days of the pre-Civil War south. But, in a classic case of being the right person at the right time, Wallace’s rhetoric found a sympathetic hearing in the 1960s, as middle-class Americans began to fear their society was breaking apart under their feet.

His first presidential campaign, a quixotic run against Lyndon Johnson in 1964, introduced him to voters outside the south—and they liked what they saw. Wallace captured a quarter of the votes in Wisconsin, another quarter in Indiana, and nearly half in Maryland. Running as the American Independence candidate in 1968, the governor won most of the Deep South but failed to achieve his goal of throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Would he have been nominated by the Democrats in 1972? An interesting question, but Bremer’s bullet paralyzed Wallace and made the question moot.

In the long, dark twilight of his career, Wallace changed his segregationist ways and begged for forgiveness. Carter does not speculate as to the sincerity of this conversion. Nor does he spend much time on it—Wallace the civil rights activist is banished to the book’s epilogue.

Though I enjoyed Carter’s book, I found plenty quibbling material. His description of “the southernization of America” in the 1960s seems more a case of “the nationalization of the south.” The South was not exporting its poisonous brand of racism; indeed, racial tolerance was rising, albeit slowly, painfully, and with a good deal of bloodshed. Which leads to my second complaint. Carter depicts Wallace voters and conservatives in general as being infected by the southern virus of racism. Yet there was a degree of social disintegration in the 1960s; there really was a rise in national crime rates. Backlash politics was fed by more than racism. Acknowledging that fact would have made this a much stronger book.