The first political figure actually to turn the rising tide of frustration to his advantage was not one of the traditional conservatives, but former Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace initially achieved national attention as a segregationist who attempted to block the integration of the University of Alabama. Beginning in 1966, however, his appearances in white working-class communities of the North suggested that his appeal went beyond the regional. In 1968 he ran as a third-party candidate for president. While Richard Nixon won the election, Wallace gathered 10 million vote.

Wallace

By Pete Hamill

Journalist Pete Hamill followed the 1968 Wallace campaign and reported on the appeal of the former Alabama governor in Ramparts, a magazine with new left sympathies.

At a bar munching sardines and crackers, a tall, lean man named Jim Lewis stared at himself in the mirror. He was wearing a plastic boater adorned with a Wallace-For-President bumper sticker.

"Sure, I'm for Wallace," he said, washing the sardines down with beer. "There ain't no one else but Wallace. He's the one, the only one who's sayin' he's really gonna change things in this country."

"You don't care for Humphrey or Nixon?"

"Just a couple of phonies. Couldn't change a gah-dam thing. . . "What kind of change are you looking for?"

"Everythin'," said Jim Lewis, who is a carpenter. "Get these long- haired scum in the colleges straightened out. Stop the gah-dam knee-groes from riotin' an' lootin'. Stop taxin' us to pay for people for not workin'. Let our boys win that war in Viet-Nam. Hell, any plain fool knows what we gotta change."

"What makes you think Wallace can change all of that?"

Jim Lewis slowly turned his head and squinted the way John Wayne has squinted in every movie he's ever been in.

They want change: the America they thought was theirs has become something else in their own lifetime, and they want to go back. Some of them have even been supporters of Robert Kennedy (a phenomenon first noted by Paul Cowan in The Village Voice), because they saw him as an agent of change; whatever America is in 1968, they want to change it and their instincts are true enough to tell them that Humphrey and Nixon will change nothing. So they have rallied to George Wallace, mainly because he says to them that change is simple. just change the man at the top and we can all return to a year like 1910, when there were harvests in the Fall and feasts in the Spring, when kids went swimming in the old swimming hole and played baseball and football and respected God, Flag and Country. Most of all they want to return to a time in America when you lived in the same house all of your life and knew everybody you would ever care to know on the street where you were born. Dismiss these people as racists and bigots if you will, but you would be a bit too glib. A lot of people attracted to George Wallace are just people who think America has passed them by, leaving them confused and screwed-up and unhappy.

"There's some days when I get up and read the paper and feel like I'm gonna go out of my goddarn mind," a farm implement salesman named James Quigg told me in Springfield, Missouri. "When is all of this gonna end?"

"This is the greatest country in the world," she was saying. "People used to be happy here. I'm telling you. Maybe in the Depression we didn't have much money, but nobody starved. And we made our own fun. We read books to each other or played Monopoly at night and once a month we all went to a show. Kids today got too much. They don't do anything for themselves. And ever since this civil rights business started people have been unhappy.”

Everywhere that Wallace went the speech was sure to go. In Little Rock and Milwaukee, in Springfield, Illinois, and Springfield, Missouri, in Cincinnati and Charleston. Only a phrase or two would change, and only the audiences were different. Wallace would stand before a cluster of microphones and cameras, his hands shifting from one pocket to another or stabbing the air for emphasis, and the speech would come rolling out-cocky, defiant, loaded with innuendo, sarcasm and country humor. The audiences were almost always filled with His People, and they would sing the national anthem and recite the Lord's Prayer and fill the plastic boaters with dollar bills when the Wallace girls came around, and some even signed the auto- mated pledges for larger amounts which would be billed to them long after the candidate had left town, even after his campaign had been settled forever at the ballot boxes. But they were willing to give because they were the believers and because when that was settled they could hear The Speech.

"I want to talk to yawl about dissent," Wallace says. "I believe in dissent. I myself am a dissenter. I agree with the right to oppose the war in Vietnam and the right of dissent." The audience is quiet, unsure of what's coming. "But I do not agree with your right to advocate and work for a communist victory in Viet-Nam! There's a difference between dissent and treason! [Roar From The Crowd] And any good cabdriver here in Springfield (Milwaukee, Columbia, Charleston] knows that! [BigRoar] So I promise you when I'm elected President and someone waves a Viet Cong flag or raises blood, money, or other things for the enemy, we're gonna throw him under a good jail someplace!"

To visitors freshly arrived, his views on Viet-Nam seem surprising; the popular image of Wallace, at least in the East, would lead one to believe that he is a Super-Hawk who is fully prepared to unload the hydrogen bomb on the yellow vermin of Southeast Asia. But he actually says something quite different.

"Now about Viet-Nam," he says, "I don't think we should have gone to our Western European allies and the noncommunist nations of Southeast Asia, and if we decided to go in there at all, we should have told them we would not carry the military and economic burden alone. That they would have to share equally, and if they were still not interested, I would cut off every dime of foreign aid and make them pay back every cent they owe us datin' back to World War One. [Big Applause] So I would go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I would ask them, 'Can we win this war with conventional weapons?' And if they said yes, I would make full use of the country's conventional weapons to quickly end this war and bring our boys home." This always brings a roar from the crowd. Wallace never says what he would do if the joint Chiefs told him the war was not winnable with conventional weapons. Some of his aides say that he would pull out "and to hell with it."

A lot of what he says on the other issues is reasonably mild. Even on law and order (or as he says it, "Lawn Awduh"). "The other two candidates-before the conventions I used to say they wasn't a dime worth of difference between 'em, especially on Lawn Awduh. Now I says they's not a dime worth of difference between them and me ... and I'm the original!" Wallace is against increases in welfare spending and poverty programs which he feels are essentially used to bribe slum dwellers. But he is also against creating a national police force. "I said facetiously that we oughta turn the country over to the police for two years," he will say. "Well, you all know what I mean. I mean that we should give the police and firemen just two years of being able to enforce the law,' without the Supreme Court standin' on their necks, and we could straighten this country out. We don't need new laws. All y'have to do is enforce the laws you got and if they [Read Blacks] don't obey them then throw them under a good jail some- place." This always brings a roar, and he follows it this way: "You know, if you were to be mugged or beaten or molested on the way home from heah tonight, the person that did it to you would be free before you got to the hospital. (Laughter] And on Monday they'd be charging some policeman with the crime!"

Wallace reserves his most withering scorn for those members of the federal bureaucracy who are charged with enforcing federal guide- lines on desegregation, open housing and equal opportunities. These are the guideline writers, a contemptuous creed of Americans who are only slightly worse than their allies in perfidy, the pointed heads Who Can't Park A Bicycle Straight. These people have clogged the country's laws with so much bureaucratic verbiage that "the anarchists and seditionists" have been running amok on the streets of America.

**********

MICHAEL NOVAK

Michael Novak, later known for his analysis of white ethnicity, captures some of the perspective and frustrations of the individuals who supported Wallace in 1968.

When the major candidates in an election year cry "unity!" it sets one to imagining the sources of disunity. It makes me think of Andy Restek, who runs the Texaco station in a Pennsylvania steel town. His brother Pete works in the mills. His other brother Steve, I think, is a manager at the local Sears or some other chain. In any case, I am told that all three Restek brothers are voting for Wallace this year. Why? I ask myself. And why do they hate the hippies so much, and praise the Chicago cops?

Andy Restek has two kids in college--one at State College, and one at the local branch of the University of Pittsburgh. He wipes the grease from his hands as he talks about them, and pushes back his heavy rimless glasses. He is rather proud that his children will all go to college-and a little ashamed to say that he is glad they won't be gas station attendants. He envisages Bob as a clerk in a bank (as he is, summers) and later as an officer; Bob's a pretty bright and impressive boy, with personality and presence. He hopes Sally will marry a nice solid fellow with sound ideas. Since Andy's parents came to America with nothing, he's rather passionately uncritical about the nation. He has a fairly comfortable house and nice lawn, a new Plymouth, and the youngest boy is a much touted junior halfback.

Andy served in Italy in 1944-45, and has served as an officer in the local VFW. He knows he has worked hard, and has succeeded. He lives in a better neighborhood than where he began, and he owns the station. He's been a good mechanic and has a lot of loyal customers. The neighborhood where his station is located, however, is run-down and the ugly houses that are not unoccupied (windows broken, doors boarded up) are inhabited by passive, silent blacks. There is no need to rehearse Andy's attitudes to blacks. "I'm no racist or bigot; it's only that. . . ." From that point onward he merely reports the evidence of his own senses, as his perception shapes that evidence: dirty, passive, strange, unreliable, careless. Andy points out that Harry Scott, the black man who works at the Esso station seven blocks away, has what it takes; he works hard, which only shows they can do it if they want, and proves that Andy isn't prejudiced. It's the majority of Negroes who are lazy that cause the trouble. Andy doesn't see any difference between the starting place of any black man and his own starting place. The only difference he perceives is one of initiative and brains.

Andy responds to Wallace, I suspect, because Wallace puts things exactly in the way Andy's experience has put them. Andy doesn't understand sociological or psychological or economic theories. But he catches the tone in which all those people on television or in the papers talk about such things. They don't say that they're out to destroy sound family values, or common sense, or tough, hard work and painfully acquired respectability. Educated people talk with a kind of code. They try to sound harmless, but you know they're trying to take your world from you. You can almost feel them screwing you; you see it in their complacent eyes. They know so much.

Andy trusts his own experience. He knows what he knows. And he likes his world, his home, his America.

He is very worried about Sally. He saw a picture of a longhaired boy in her wallet and threw her out of the house for several hours. He doesn't dare allow himself to think that she has been taking pot, but sometimes his stomach tightens. He tries to get her to cut her long hair and not to wear it straight, and hates when she merely tells him he's old-fashioned and doesn't respect his word as law. He blames himself for working too hard-American materialism, his pastor would say-and not being as strict with her as his parents had been with him. She would never have talked back to them that way. She hates church so much, and refuses to go to confession, that he knows there is trouble brewing. If she gets pregnant ... he can't allow himself to think that, and strikes out in fury at every manifestation of the kind of youth he despises: shiftless, dirty, uninhibited, smart-alecky, superior, aiding our enemies. The outrage he feels is so deep he can't understand how anyone in his right mind could not scream out in anguish at what is happening to America. He wants authority to tighten up, in part to assuage his own guilt for having been too soft with his kids.

He watches with trepidation the books Lb tt Bob brings home. Bob is majoring in Business Administration and Finance. But Andy is suspicious of some of the poetry and novels he brings home, and books with words like “humanism” on the jacket. In Andy's experience, humanism has been one of the code words for softhearted thinking, pornography, and the collapse of authority.

Andy’s brothers Pete and Steve largely agree. They grow bitter often when they get together. Their wives hate to hear them begin to talk politics. Even miniskirts—much as the men joke about them man-to-man--become for them one more symbol of the collapse of values. And Hollywood and television and the liberal reporters. The hometown newspaper is solidly conservative; but the lurid ads for the movies still announce the general sickness. It's just like the priests said. Secularism is the collapse of all decency and morals and authority. We need a man who talks sense and isn't softhearted about authority, to clean this country up from coast to coast. That way, we can all have the America we worked so hard to build, which gave us what success we have.

Andy Pete and Steve are all for the underprivileged, but (they say) let them prove themselves by work, the way we did. "Racism" and "bigot," they have come to think, are other code words by which the white-haired, effeminate Harvard men want to call the good people evil, and win the allegiance of the blacks for their own political and unstated purposes