WALLACE'S ARMY: THE COALITION OF FRUSTRATION
CONSIDER his image. On the platform, his head barely rises above the bulletproof lectern he takes with him everywhere. On the TV screen, he comes over as a cross between Flem Snopes and Huey Long. An uninspired orator, with a set, almost unvarying speech, he seems intentionally to mangle his syntax and mispronounce words. Yet he is the only presidential candidate in the fall of 1968 who could be called charismatic.
Consider his campaign. It is perhaps the most amateurishly organized drive that any serious candidate has mounted in modern American history. In many cities, it is impossible to find his campaign headquarters. In others, like Louisville, there are as many as three, each competing for funds and attention. Not one member of his staff has had previous experience in national politics. By contrast, Eugene McCarthy's "children's crusade" was a model of efficiency and professionalism.
Consider George Corley Wallace himself, the dour little Alabama demagogue who has influenced the entire 1968 campaign, defied the two-party system and raised the specter that no one will be elected President on Nov. 5. Though the odds against him are very long indeed, he could conceivably become the 37th President of the U.S. "We could be elected," he says. "It is not an impossible dream."
Eight months ago, Hubert Humphrey could confidently say of Wallace: "I don't think he's going to rustle up many cattle." Now, surveying the depleted Democratic herd, Humphrey takes every opportunity to excoriate Wallace as "the apostle of fear and racism." Richard Nixon has been saying for weeks that Wallace had "peaked" and would soon go downhill. Recently, however, he has found cause to attack Wallace and the "third-party kick" directly. "Do you want to make a point, or do you want to make a change?" he asked a crowd in Flint, Mich., last week. "Do you want a moment's satisfaction, or do you want to get four years of action?"
If the polls are any indication, about one out of every five voters--something like 14 million Americans--will choose the moment's satisfaction and pick Wallace and General Curtis LeMay, his running mate, next month. Fervent Wallaceites may, of course, decide at the last minute that a vote for their man is a wasted ballot and switch to either Humphrey or Nixon, but there is no evidence that this will happen. Thousands echo the opinion of Charles Gutherie, a cement finisher from Los Angeles: "You take Nixon and Humphrey and shake 'em up in a bag and they come out the same--a couple of namby-pambys who are going to keep giving our money away to other countries while they let a bunch of punks run wild in this country." Says Noble Olson, a Cincinnati civil engineer: "Nixon maybe is the better of two evils. But I am through voting for the better of two evils."
Smoldering Distrust
As in 1964, when he made his first presidential bid but dropped out of the race after Barry Goldwater was nominated, support for Wallace's American Independent Party is concentrated in the South, where Gallup gives him 38% of the vote, more than he gives either Nixon or Humphrey. But strong Wallace sentiment is found in every other section as well. He is on the ballot in all 50 states. (The Supreme Court may knock him off in Ohio, however.) Forums in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids were S.R.O. when the former Governor appeared, and large crowds turned out for motorcades in such Northern strongholds as Chicago and Jersey City. About 20,000 ignored chill weather last week to hear the standard Wallace spiel on Boston's historic Common, which once was as far from Dixie in attitude as the other side of the moon. "They were really packed in there together," Wallace exuberantly told reporters. The other two candidates "would be proud to draw such a crowd."
Nixon or Humphrey would be even prouder to evoke the empathy and enthusiasm that Wallace so often arouses. With the campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy scarcely more than memories, the onetime bantamweight boxer is the only contender left who attracts such spontaneous support. Just as antiwar sentiment found expression in McCarthy, says Historian James MacGregor Burns, "the smoldering distrust among urban whites" is finding its voice in Wallace.
Though Minnesota is by no means a Wallace stronghold, 47 of 50 people who attend a volunteer firemen's party in Rockville are wearing Wallace buttons. In nearby Richmond, bowling is a little slower because a zealous pin setter takes time out to slap a Wallace sticker on each ball before he returns it. In the parking lots of auto plants outside Detroit, row after row shows a near-solid line of Wallace bumper stickers. White workers complain bitterly that management has forced them to remove Wallace emblems from their lunch pails.
At the big Buick factory in Flint, a poll of 8,000 members of United Auto Workers Local 599 showed that 49% will vote for Wallace, 39% for Humphrey, 12% for Nixon. Alarmed, labor leadership has quietly dropped its usual pre-election drive to register all union members, and is concentrating instead on black neighborhoods, where Humphrey can count on solid, if unenthusiastic support. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Committee on Political Education (COPE) has distributed thousands of pamphlets documenting Wallace's consistent antilabor record in Alabama. Few members seem to read them or note that COPE rated the Vice President a 100% supporter of labor when he was in the Senate.
Sinking Feeling
Blue-collar workers make up a large proportion of Wallace's supporters, and he has a special hold on the less educated and the less affluent. He attracts the union member who fears for his seniority, the homeowner who is afraid that Negroes will lower property values in his neighborhood. He voices the unease of the housewife who does not want to see her child bussed to an integrated school, of the middle-aged who are outraged by student protest, of the ten-hour-a-day man who is upset by welfare programs and feels that Negroes are too lazy to work. Often the Wallace supporter, typically a central-city resident, feels that he is not understood by the suburbanite who does not have to worry about racial violence and crime in the streets. Indeed, many in the Wallace constituency have eminently reasonable complaints, even if they are not always recognized by liberals or the policymakers in Washington that Wallace derides. The lower middle class is hurt by crime, high taxes, inflation and the other ills of the 1960s. It cannot comprehend why, and has a sinking feeling that its world is falling apart.
White policemen and firemen are solidly for Wallace. He, in turn, lavishes praise on them. "I don't see how the police restrain themselves as much as they do," he said in Cleveland last week. "If they could run this country for about two years," he has said at other times, "they'd straighten it out." They might even straighten out Alabama, which last year had the highest murder rate in the nation.
His appeal is not entirely limited to the lower middle class, however. Wallace draws some support from propertied and professional people. Most of his contributions, officially estimated at $70,000 a day, come in small bills at rallies, at $25-a-plate dinners, and in checks through the mail. Affluent backers pay $500 and up to join Wallace "Patriots' Clubs" and lunch with the candidate when he comes to town. In Dallas last month, Wallace dined with such "plain folk" as Mrs. Nelson Bunker Hunt, daughter-in-law of Oil Billionaire H. L. Hunt; Paul Pewitt, who has a $100 million fortune from Texas oil and Idaho potatoes; and M. H. Marr, an oilman worth about $10 million. However much money he has, the average Wallace booster is what Political Analyst Samuel Lubell calls a "recent getter," someone who has worked hard for what he has and is fearful of losing it.
Almost all Wallaceites believe that there are simple solutions for complicated problems. In his platform, released this week--just 22 days before the election--he says that if peace negotiations fail, he would solve the war by turning it over to the generals. Law and order would be maintained by eradicating an "unexplainable compassion for the criminal evidenced by our executive and judicial officers and officials." He would seek an amendment to the Constitution that would require the Senate to reconfirm "at reasonable intervals" members of the Supreme Court and federal appeals courts.
His followers all have their own complaints and their own reasons for believing that Wallace can help. The addition of LeMay--Wallace's Agnew, in the view of many critics--will probably add to his appeal, particularly with those who are frustrated by the war. The general's inspection trip to Viet Nam this week will doubtless help Wallace's effort to convince voters that he has a grasp of world affairs--and, in fact, last week's speech on foreign policy before the National Press Club in Washington was reasonably restrained and cogent.
Who Will Be Hurt More?
Nixon has always conceded Wallace Mississippi, Louisiana and, of course, Alabama. He gave up Georgia some time ago. Now he is seriously concerned about his chances against Wallace in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and North and South Carolina. Kentucky and Virginia, once considered promising for the G.O P., are less than firm. No one in either of the major parties gives Wallace even an outside chance of carrying any state outside the South.
No one can tell at this stage where or how the Wallace role will affect the major parties, but it could tip the balance in several key states. In Texas, where a Democratic poll puts Humphrey a notch ahead of Nixon, Wallace at present has 26% of the vote. In Missouri, also a tight race, he has 22%. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Humphrey, according to the Democrats, is also slightly ahead, Wallace pulls 15% and 12%.
Which of them will he hurt more? Strategists for both parties would dearly like to know, though at the moment Nixon's lead appears so commanding that even a large Wallace vote may not affect the outcome. Certainly Nixon could count on most of the Southern states if Wallace had sat this year out. Certainly Humphrey could depend on union support in big industrial states if Wallace were not in the race. "Originally," says Al Cella, Humphrey's chairman in Massachusetts, "the assessment was that Wallace would not cause much harm because this is a 'Democratic' state. That view has changed. Humphrey is in very serious trouble here."
Two-Way Wash?
In the big states, many suburban and rural conservatives, certain Nixon people in any other year, are choosing Wallace in 1968. In New York, Wallace thus seems to hurt both parties about equally. Nixon believes that this holds true for the country at large; the Wallace vote, in his view, comes down to a "wash" for both parties. No one likes to contemplate what would happen if Wallace won enough states on his own to deny either of the other candidates a clear majority of 270 votes in the Electoral College. Though this is still highly unlikely, Wallace nonetheless constitutes a very real threat to the stability of the electoral process and indeed the future of the two-party system. If he does prevent both Nixon and Humphrey from gaining a majority, he might bestow his electoral votes on his preferred candidate and claim that he picked the President.
An end to the dominance of the two parties is, of course, his goal. A good part of his stock speech is an attack on the Democratic and Republican parties --with both given equal time and tirade. At some point, Wallace always notes that "both national parties have looked down their noses and called us rednecks--and I'm sick and tired of it." At another point, he declares that "both national parties ought to be for law and order. They took it away from you by kowtowing to anarchists." He adds: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between either of them."
What the Show Is Like
A combination of revivalist rally and Southern medicine show, Wallace's campaign is a curious blend of the old, old politics and the brand-new. It is certainly livelier than either of the other candidates'. To open a rally, there is "Sam Smith and His American Independent Party Band," a small combo with electrified instruments that churns out Nashville-style country music and leads the audience in a slow rendition of God Bless America. Then on come the Taylor Sisters, Mona and Lisa, two seasoned blondes who harmonize a couple of toe-tapping standards and belt out an anthem entitled Are You for Wallace? (to the tune of Are You from Dixie?).
Occasionally there are variations. A few weeks ago in Dallas, a white-haired, grandmotherly woman paraded around the hall in an ante-bellum dress of red, white and blue. In one hand she held the Stars and Stripes, in the other the Stars and Bars. She was greeted with cheers. There is even a George Wallace Waltz (copyright by Lyle Woodruff):
Stand up for America, red, white
and blue,
And vote for George Wallace,
he's fighting for you.
He will scatter the Commies and
pseudos like sheep;
So dance to the George Wallace Waltz, my sweet . . .
After the entertainment, out steps George. He is generally introduced by Aide Dick Smith, one of about 40 traveling Wallace staffers, all of whom (except for Tom Turnipseed of South Carolina) are from Alabama. A weekly-newspaper editor from York, Smith gives a brief, effective warm-up talk, while Wallace girls, dressed in dark skirts and white blouses, pass up the aisles with yellow contribution buckets. When Smith and the girls are finished, Wallace marches up to the lectern.
The talk rarely varies in content, but the format does. Wallace simply chooses from his compendium of evils as they come to mind. "Now I want to say something about Viet Nam," he will say by way of introduction, or "Let's talk about law 'n' order." While the crowd is cheering, he will often spit quickly and inconspicuously into a white handkerchief.
Much of Wallace's appeal lies in personal contact. After each talk, dozens of Wallaceites line up patiently to shake his hand and say "God bless you, Governor," or "You're the only hope for America." The candidate acknowledges each message with a hand squeeze and a nod, occasionally saying "Thank y'all for heppin' us."
Ivory-Tower Pointy Heads
For a long time, "Mr. 'Umphrey"--as Wallace refers to the Vice President -- received more attention than "Mr. Nixon." Lately, because of Nixon's success at the polls, he has turned his fire on the Republican, who is credited with a variety of sins, from deceitfulness to being part of the Administration that sent troops to Little Rock in 1957. Last week there was a new charge in the catalogue. The reason Nixon is so far ahead in the polls, Wallace averred in Albany, N.Y., is simple: he controls the pollsters and manipulates public opinion with the help of the "Eastern money-interest crowd."
There are many reasons for Wallace's unique appeal, but his antipathy to "them"--anybody who is not "us"--is the chief one. While Wallace stoutly denies that he is a racist, "they" usually means the blacks. "They" also embraces Supreme Court Justices and bureaucrats in Washington, professors in colleges, and journalists almost anywhere. Wallace supporters feel that "they" have all taken too much control over their lives. In a curious way, the roots of the Wallace movement are entangled with those of the New Left. Both would welcome drastic change in institutions that seem aloof and unresponsive to their needs.
With a histrionic flair for the crude, sardonic image, Wallace lampoons all of "them," assuring his listeners that they themselves are just as smart as the people in positions of power. The bureaucrats who enforce school-desegregation guidelines "don't have enough sense to know how to get out of bed in the morning, so they have to write a guideline for us." Intellectuals are "overeducated, ivory-tower folk," or "pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle straight." He says: "Any truck driver'd know right off what to do at the scene of an accident, but you take a college professor, he'd just stand around lookin' and gettin' sick."
Few in Wallace's audiences believe what they read in the nation's newspapers or magazines. Though he is usually amiable with newsmen in private, Wallace nurtures this general distrust by deriding reporters and editors as "sissy-britches intellectual morons." When he does come up against the "pointy heads," it is almost always the man from Clio, Ala., who triumphs over the products of Cambridge, Berkeley or New Haven. Usually more adroit than his questioners, Wallace either evades tough questions or answers them with a half-truth about his record in Alabama. Few outside the state know enough to dispute him. A sample: "My wife received 87% of the Negro votes in Selma in the general election." Mrs. Wallace did indeed receive that percentage of Negro votes in the general election, but her Republican opponent was also a racist and many Negroes were running for local offices on the Democratic ticket. She had received virtually none in the more important primary, when Negroes had a choice.
Surefire Footage
When confronted with hecklers, many of them college students or teachers, Wallace can be masterful. Though he sometimes loses his temper, most often he orchestrates the shouts of the protesters with chants from his own audience, working both groups up to a fever that occasionally erupts in violence, making surefire footage for the evening TV news shows. "They on our payroll," he cracks about the hecklers.
"When I get through speaking," he will tell them, "you can come up here and I'll autograph your sandals." Or: "There must be a barbers' strike around here." If nothing else works, he can usually provoke an angry reaction with the remark: "Now, let's talk about race." However it is started--and provocation is not often necessary--there is almost always a commotion, often ending in fistfights or clashes with the police. His point is made. Since the beginning of this month, Wallace's language has become increasingly blunt; and his audiences, ever more ferocious, have responded in kind. In Pittsburgh this month, white youths in the crowd confronted black demonstrators with screams of "Who needs niggers? Who needs niggers?"
Hecklers may realize that they are helping him, even as Wallace claims, but this does not deter them. "You have to show that there are people against him," is the reasoning some give, or "Nixon has already won." More and more, they shout four-letter words or make obscene gestures. Their signs, at least, are original, ranging from CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT to SIEG HEIL, Y'ALL and WEIRDOS FOR WALLACE.
In a real sense, Wallace has been practicing for this campaign all his life. The grandson of a country doctor, he had readymade constituents. Many of the men in Harbour County who carry the first name Wallace were delivered by Dr. Wallace, a well-remembered, rigidly pious man who rode a horse every day until he died in 1948 at the age of 80. George was always closer to his grandfather than to his father, George ("Sag") Wallace, a sickly, angry man who tried his hand--without any success--at farming. Sag was more successful at courthouse politics--he was once chairman of the county board of revenue--and young George can at least credit him with his own vocation.
When Sag died in 1937, George's mother, Mozelle ("Bitsy") Wallace, a high school music teacher before she married, moved to Montgomery. Today she is secretary to the director of the state bureau of preventable diseases. A fiercely independent woman, she hardly ever sees or talks with George or his sister and two brothers any more. "Of course, somebody's gonna get George sooner or later," she told Marshall Frady, author of the critical biography Wallace. "I've accepted that. He's gonna get it. My only consolation is, when it happens, he'll be doing the only thing he's ever cared about doing anyway."
Anything, with Ketchup
There is, in fact, nothing else for George but politics and the pursuit of power. Food has no interest for him: he will eat anything, so long as it is smothered in ketchup. He is never without a cigar, but he cannot say what brand he is smoking at any given moment. He does not drink: alcohol, he says, "wastes your physical and mental energy." His dress is nondescript: always a white shirt and a faintly iridescent black suit. He has no hobbies and no interest in material possessions (he claims assets of $77,000). Aboard his campaign plane, he spends most of his time staring stolidly out the window, neither reading nor talking.
The private Wallace seems virtually emotionless. Always busy, he spends little time with his four children (Bobbi Jo, 23; Peggy, 18; George, 16; and Lee, 7); his late wife, Lurleen, reportedly once nearly divorced him as a consequence of his neglect. Yet in his anxiety to maintain a power base for his presidential bid, he did not hesitate to run her for Governor in 1966 (she died of cancer last May).
A B-29 flight engineer with the rank of sergeant in World War II, Wallace still receives an allowance for "nervous disability" from the Veterans Administration; despite constant air travel on his campaigns, he has a phobia about flying. Before going to war, he had received a law degree from the University of Alabama, and in 1946 he won election to the state house of representatives; in 1952 he was elected a state judge. He made his first, unsuccessful, try for the governorship in 1958. His opponent, John Patterson, had taken a harsher line on race, and Wallace learned a lesson. "They out-niggered me that time," he reportedly declared, "but they'll never do it again." They never have. Alabama today comes close to being George Wallace's personal satrapy, much as Louisiana was Huey Long's in the 1930s.
One Man's State
Alabama, a historically backward state, scarcely inched ahead during Wallace's regime. With a 4% sales tax and a low property levy, its tax structure is biased against lower-income workers. As Governor, Wallace sponsored a law providing that corporate income taxes can be raised only by constitutional amendment. He did raise spending greatly, but only by floating huge bond issues and obtaining massive grants for highways and education from the despised Federal Government.
In some respects, Alabama under Wallace became a police state. The climate of order, even today, is such that the FBI has to stand constant guard on the home of Federal Judge Frank Johnson, a notably liberal jurist. Wallace's contempt for his own state's constitution was clear when he ran his wife for Governor, in clear violation of the spirit of a clause that prohibited him from succeeding himself. His disregard for federal authority was memorably displayed in 1963 when he "stood in the schoolhouse door" to bar a Negro girl and boy from enrolling in the University of Alabama.
Neo-Know-Nothings
Though Wallace bears a certain stylistic resemblance to the Populists of the 1890s, to whom he is often compared, Yale Historian C. Vann Woodward notes that the Alabatnian lacks entirely the Populists' positive approach. Mostly small farmers, the Populists had specific, rational proposals to curb the excesses of big business and finance. Wallace's philosophy was more accurately foreshadowed by such extremist groups as the Anti-Masonic Party of the 1820s, which felt that it was fighting a godless conspiracy, and the American Protection Association of the 1890s, which saw itself taking a stand against foreign infiltration. The Ku Klux Klan, though its tone and methods have been far more violent than Wallace's, shares his anti-Negro feelings. Wallace's most recent ancestor was the McCarthyite syndrome of the 1950s; it, too, exaggerated the very real dangers of Communism and transmogrified Communists into all-purpose villains.
Perhaps the best historical parallel is offered by the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just as the Wallaceites are trou bled by the migration of rural Negroes to the cities, the Know-Nothings were disturbed by the influx of foreigners, most of whom were Irish and German Catholics. A major aim of the movement was to bar Catholics from public office. Officially titled the American Party--as is Wallace's in some states--the Know-Nothings briefly held a balance of power in several state legislatures in the mid-1850s. In Massachusetts, they even had a majority. The high-water mark of Know-Nothingism was 1856, when former President Millard Fillmore, running for the presidency under the party's banner, polled 22% of the vote. The party split over slavery, however, and almost immediately fell apart, many members joining the new Republican Party.
Like the movements of the past, according to Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset, Wallace's American Independent Party is essentially a voice for "the sense of frustration of millions of Americans." He adds: "It is a movement of the adherents of religious and secular fundamentalism."
Some scholars have compared George Wallace's movement to Nazism and Fascism. German-born Professor Hans Morgenthau, perhaps extrapolating from his own country's unhappy past, identifies the Hitler and Wallace movements as representing "the revolt of the lower middle classes against the modern age." C. J. Burnett, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the third-party leader in two words: "Adolf Wallace." Such comparisons are as simplistic and misleading as anything George Wallace himself has hurled at his opponents. The Wallace phenomenon is disquieting enough in its own terms; it does not have to be equated with a political horror that arose in totally different ways and under totally different circumstances.
The Alabamian himself grows furious at the Hitler parallel, reminding his younger critics that "I was fighting Nazis before you were born." Which is, of course, true. Social Critic Michael Harrington writes that he would not call Wallace a fascist, but believes that his movement is one of the closest things to Fascism this country has ever known. "Society has certainly become worse when it is legitimate to voice racist thoughts," says Harrington.
In large measure, George Wallace is, as Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles says (quoting Tolstoy), the product of a "series of accidents, a coming together of various events." The war in Viet Nam is one of the chief accidents, acting as a catalyst for many others. Wallace supporters--like many other voters--cannot comprehend why the U.S. cannot whip the North Vietnamese, and they feel aggrieved at the burden the war has placed on their pocketbooks.
The war has also contributed to the rise of the New Left, which not only directly helps Wallace with its heckling but has nourished as well the malaise of the nonhip majority. "The New Left holds the majority of society in contempt," says Paul Goodman, once a radical youth hero. "They are concerned with their own gut issues, but they pay no attention to the majority's gut issues. And this rouses fear and anxiety on the part of the majority. If the New Left had a program for the majority, Wallace would get only the lunatic fringe."
Other "accidents" are Lyndon Johnson, who has raised a crisis of confidence that causes many of his countrymen to distrust their Government, and Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, whom many voters regard as products of an unresponsive party sys tem. The final accident may have been the murder of Robert Kennedy. Though he stood 180DEG apart from Wallace on issues--it is hard indeed to imagine two men more diametrically opposed--Kennedy gave many current Wallace adherents the same feeling of strength, honesty and plain pugnaciousness that Wallace does. "Bobby went to faceless people and talked to them and made them feel that they had a champion leading their cause against an entrenched Establishment," observes David Carley, a liberal leader from Wisconsin. "Without his positive program, they're quite willing to turn around now and vote their doubts and frustrations and fears. Wallace is just the leader for that."
Where Will Wallace Go?
In the course of more than 150 interviews with Wallace supporters across the country, TIME correspondents discovered that many would have voted for Kennedy before Wallace. To a lesser, though still significant degree, many others said that they would have preferred Eugene McCarthy to Wallace.
Important as next month's vote is, far more important is what happens to the movement in the future. Traditionally, the two-party system in America has been so strong and capacious that third parties could be absorbed into one of the two major parties. Abraham Lincoln might not have been elected President in 1860 if a large number of Know-Nothings had not been taken into the new Republican Party. Much of the Populist program, which included the graduated income tax, eventually was enacted by the Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson Administrations.
The same fate could overtake the American Independent Party. It is debatable whether Wallace could field the candidates for Congress, the statehouses and the courthouses who could form a major party. (A number of Southern officeholders might, however, leave the other parties for the A.I.P.) The war, too, will eventually end, and either Nixon or Humphrey may be able to regain some of the trust lost by Lyndon Johnson. Historian Harry Jaffa, one of Goldwater's advisers, argues that, as a conservative President, Nixon might "defuse" the potential of the right in the '60s, just as F.D.R. defused the far-out left in the '30s. Another charismatic leader--Edward Kennedy could be one --might also lure many of Wallace's disaffected followers back into the political mainstream.
Still, the centrifugal forces disrupting the U.S. are stronger than at any time since the Civil War. Wallace has succeeded in doing what no one else has ever managed: he has brought together into a single party large segments of both the lower middle class and the far right. Members of the John Birch Society and a score of other groups of the radical right, who until now have clashed in intramural squabbling, have found common cause and respectability in Wallace's camp.
Indeed, many of the people who have flocked to Wallace are so disenchanted with normal politics that they may never be brought back. In a weird doppelgaenger effect, they mirror the radicals of the left--who may, in time, find their own party and their own George Wallace. The genius of the American political system has been that, unlike those of Europe, it has kept right and left from polarizing into separate, warring parties. This may no longer be true. "We might well end up with a multiparty system," warns Barry Goldwater, a Nixon supporter, in the current National Review. "Given our present Constitution, this could mean disaster for America."
The possible paths the movement--and the political system--might take within the next few years are almost limitless. Wallace probably has no clear-cut program for the future. "Naw, we don't stop and figger," he told Author Frady. "We don't think about history or theories or none of that. We just go ahead. Hell, history can take care of itself." There are few, however, who doubt that Wallace, whatever his fate in 1968, will be trying for the presidency again in 1972. A few weeks ago, after staring out at the Rocky Mountains from his campaign plane, George Wallace turned to a reporter and remarked: "Just think, some day I'm going to be President of all that."
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.