George Wallace


By Ted Bryant
Birmingham Post-Herald

Politics in 1958 and 1962 was a
considerably different game from the one
we see in the 1990s.
And when it came to playing the game, a
snarling, cigar-chomping man from
Barbour County would have been the
captain of anybody's all-star team.

Once in a long while comes a politician
who dearly loves politics for the sake of
politics, whose life revolves around
politics, who loves political power but lives
to campaign more than to govern.

He has no problem asking friends,
acquaintances or even total strangers for
campaign money. He is thrilled with the
prospect of adoring if unruly crowds.

His voice slashes at the establishment like
a rapier. He can easily spot a subject
unpopular with the public — the press or
the federal judiciary, for example.

Such a man was George Corley Wallace,
born in the year of Alabama's 100th
birthday, 1919, and the only person ever
elected governor of the state for more than
two terms.

He ran six gubernatorial campaigns,
including the one he lost in 1958 and the 1966
race in which he
successfully ran his wife, Lurleen, for one
term, abbreviated by her
death 16 months after taking office. He was
personally elected to four terms.
He lost only one campaign in the state,
a 1958 Democratic primary
defeat by John Patterson, who took a stronger
stance on the race issue. No one would
ever do that to Wallace again.
The most bitter of those campaigns was
undoubtedly in 1970, when
Wallace defeated Albert Brewer in a Democratic primary runoff.
Brewer had become governor after Lurleen
Wallace's death and was by far the most
moderate candidate on the race issue.
The easiest campaign came in 1974, two years
after Wallace was shot in an attempted assassination;
he had only a virtually unknown state
senator to oppose him.

After sitting out a term, a physically
debilitated Wallace came back to
win one last term in 1982, defeating
then-Lt. Gov. George D.H. McMillan Jr. in
the Democratic runoff and Montgomery Mayor Emory
Folmar, a Republican, in the general election.

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