The Fighting Little Judge: The Life and Times of George C. Wallace

by Jeffrey K. Smith

For over a quarter century, George C. Wallace dominated the political scene in Alabama, like no other politician in the state's history. On four separate occasions, he was elected Governor, and also orchestrated the election of his wife to the Governorship.As an ardent segregationist and advocate of States' Rights, Wallace exploited the fears of racists and secured his power base.Wallace also made forays onto the national political scene, running for President on four separate occasions. Running as the nominee of the American Independent Party in 1968, he won more popular and electoral votes than any third party presidential candidate in history.Wallace was gunned down by a would-be assassin at the height of his national popularity, in May of 1972. Paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, he suffered from unremitting pain for the remainder of his life. After his near death experience, Wallace made an astounding turn around on matters of race, and eventually became an ardent supporter of racial equality."The Fighting Little Judge" is a concise biography of George C. Wallace; one of the the twentieth century's most colorful political icons. It chronicles his rise, fall, and redemption. Reading with the fast paced plot of a novel, the book is both educational and entertaining.

Genres: Biography

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in 2016, I played with the idea of reading biographies of various populists, for obvious reasons. William Jennings Bryant, Huey Long, and George C. Wallace were the three figures who leapt most to mind. Although George C. Wallace is principally known for his symbolic stand in the schoolhouse door to stop the integration of the University of Alabama, he came into politics through the old Democrat tradition advocating for poor, rural Alabamians, and populism would be his mainstay. The Fighting Little Judge is a surprisingly fair biography of Wallace’s life in politics, one that reveals Wallace as a consummate political animal, striving for power from his teen days on.

Mention the name Wallace and the schoolhouse door image instantly comes to mind: defending segregation in the name of States’ Rights is what brought him national attention, fueling four presidential runs. When he began in politics, though — as a page on Goat Hill, serving the legislators — Wallace was more concerned with serving poor Alabamians in general. He rose from poverty, working his way through university at a variety of odd jobs, and later served in the military. Smith writes that Wallace was offered OCS training, but declined on the basis of politics: he believes Wallace suspected a common soldier would do better in the polls than someone wearing brass on his shoulders. After the war, Wallace became a judge, the first step that would lead to him moving further in Alabama politics and ultimately becoming governor four different times.. He joked that he liked running for office more than he liked working in office, and the amount of time he spent running for president while living in the governor’s mansion reveals how true that was. It was a strike against him in one race, as the opposition declared that they would be a full time governor, not a part-time one.

It’s that vote-chasing that got Wallace in trouble and established his reputation as a bitter racist, a man who his haters half-expected to show up wielding a pitchfork or a whip. Judging by his personal behavior, Wallace exhibited no hatred for blacks. Indeed, when he served as judge, he frequently admonished white attorneys for not giving their black counterparts the respect due a member of the Bar, and Civil Rights attorney J.L. Chestnut commented that Wallace was the first member of Alabama’s legal community to address him as “Mr. Chestnut”. Wallace made an observation — long before he was shot — that life is too short to hate, an insight curiously close to MLK’s own saying about hatred being too heavy to bear. His first attempt at running for governor saw him being attacked by the KKK on the grounds of being too his lenient on black defendants in court, and too soft on the segregation question. (He was endorsed by the NAAACP.) Realizing that fighting for segregation was extremely popular among his base, though — presumed superiority over poor blacks being the only social thing poor whites had going for them — he flung himself into becoming Mr. Segregation. And it worked: the more he harped on the dangers of losing segregation, the more abuse he threw on the government and the intellectuals up north, the more popular he was. It was a Malthusian gamble, exchanging his soul for power. “When I talked about roads and schools, they listened,” he commented, “And when I mentioned the race issue they hooped and hollered.” Segregation was bundled with States Rights — resentment over the increasing role of the central government in people’s lives, a delayed reaction to how the New Deal had changed the relationship between DC and its subjects — and the fear of communism. The latter aspects must have surely been a large part of his appeal, too, since he was popular in states that had no race issue at all by the simple fact they were racially homogeneous. Interestingly, though, when in a different context like a formal debate, he would defend segregation on ‘rational’ grounds, pointing out that black-only schools created more opportunities for black educators, or that mixed-race football matches often created problems with racial fights between fans.

As readers may know, Wallace’s presidential ambitions and his role in the national spotlight ended in 1972, when a man who wanted to be an assassin of somebody (Nixon or Wallace, whichever was easier) shot the governor multiple times. Wallace would be paralyzed and live the rest of his days in pain, though astonishingly he ran again for governor and won. (The sympathy vote helped, one supposes: when he lost his first governor’s race it was against a man whose father had been murdered by the Dixie Mafia.) Wallace’s life definitely went downhill in the late 60s-70s: his first wife Lurleen died, his second wife left him after he was shot, and he’d been reduced to a man who could not only not feel his legs, but couldn’t control basic bodily functions. Getting shot was evidently a come to Jesus moment, though, as he began appointing blacks to office in Alabama, and continued to do so until the late seventies when he declined to run for a fifth governor’s term. Following his effective retirement, he became much more religious, and reached out to make amends to men like John Lewis, the Civil Rights activist who was beaten in the Selma to Montgomery march.

Smith ends the book by evaluating Wallace’s life and work and morals, commenting that while the governor always ran on populism, he didn’t actually do much in that realm. One of his contemporaries was interviewed and when asked to sum up Wallace’s role as a politician, the man replied: “George C. was good at winning elections.” Wallace was not a dedicated administrator, and appeared to devote more attention to rewarding his supporters with contracts and positions than making radical changes to impact the lives of poor Alabamians, black or white. Being absent while running for president didn’t help, of course. And yet…he must have done something, because rural/poor white boomers I know still speak with fondness about “George C”, and when I started researching on my own I found that he was responsible for the rapid expansion of trade schools and community colleges, highway-building, healthcare access, and so on. He also gained more of the black vote in every election he ran in: never compelling numbers (35% was the peak), but always more than could be expected from Mr. Segregation.

This was a fascinating volume to read, completely compelling for me as an Alabamian and a historian who has to wrestle with my state’s past every day. This is my first dive into George C.’s life, so I can’t comment too much on the facts: when the book intersected with my own specialty (Selma history), I noticed both good and bad. Smith correctly puts the site of Bloody Sunday as a quarter mile from the Edmund Pettus Bridge (contra the moronic media myth that marchers were attacked “trying to cross” the bridge), but he attributes the death of Reverend James Reeb to a deputy sheriff, which is baffling. There were four men involved in the beating of Reeb, and none had any connection to the sheriff’s office. (Reeb was a Unitarian Universalist minister who came to Selma in respond to King’s call for clergy, and within two days of arriving had gotten himself fatally beaten.) There’s also a…fantastical assertion that, following Wallace’s shooting, Elvis Presley met with him and offered to pay for an assassin to knock off the perpetrator: Wallace admonished Elvis not to ruin his career with violence. That sounds…all kinds of unbelievable, to be frank, and I’ve searched for anything to back it up but to no avail. Even so, I was impressed by its evenhandedness: Wallace is an easy man to villify, but Smith presents him as the messy man he was: a man driven by ambition strong enough to undercut morality, but ultimately shaken by the decisions he made. Quite good, I’d say.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very basic biography of a key player in American politics in the 1960s. Everybody knows George Wallace as the segregationist Governor of Alabama who ran for President as a third party candidate in 1968 and won enough electoral votes to influence the outcome of the election. The man who never stopped campaigning was felled by an assassin's bullet in 1972 which left him paralyzed and in pain for the rest of his life, yet he still made another attempt at the presidency in 1976 and was twice re-elected Governor. Politics was a consuming passion for Wallace for which he was even willing to sacrifice his marriages and family life. The author's writing style was very elementary, almost to the point of being juvenile. I actually had to check a couple of times to make sure I wasn't reading a young adult book. He kept referring to Wallace as "George C." throughout the book which seemed rather childish. He also needed to do a better job of fact checking as he described a couple of incidents in Wallace's life that were blatantly untrue. One in particular was an incident during the 1976 campaign where Wallace was supposedly dropped while in his wheelchair which caused him to fall on top of a State Trooper and break his leg. The author claims the incident was recorded by television cameras yet there is no evidence this incident ever occurred. Wallace did break his leg during the campaign but it happened while in physical therapy. The lack of footnotes and references made it impossible to check the author's sources.