The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics

by Dan T. Carter

Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and latter begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace's story with a look at the politician's death and the nation's reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of "the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics."

Genres: Politics, History, American History, Nonfiction, Biography, Race, United States

580 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Before his retirement in 2007, Dan Carter taught at the University of South Carolina, where he specialized in 20th century U.S. politics and the post-Civil War American South. He graduated from University of South Carolina in 1962 and completed his graduate work in history at the University of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1967. Prior to accepting his appointment to the University of South Carolina, Carter taught at Emory University from 1970 until 2000.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan T. Carter’s The Politics of Rage presents a harsh, penetrating portrait of George Wallace, the longtime Governor of Alabama and arch-villain of the Civil Rights Movement. Carter takes care to sketch Wallace’s background as a hardscrabble youth, amateur boxer (and drunken brawler), WWII pilot and irascible law student, showing how they molded a man of intellect, charisma and bottomless ambition. Where many, including "authorized" biographer Stephan Lesher take Wallace’s “conversion” from liberal to racist and back as an opportunistic abandonment of principles, Carter shows Wallace as privately holding racial attitudes that, while unremarkable for his time and place, were indeed depressingly bigoted by modern standards. Indeed, Carter’s portrait stresses Wallace’s lack of principle: he aped Big Jim Folsom’s moderation when it served him, then leaned hard into the backlash against Brown vs. Board to rejuvenate his career. He shows Wallace’s governorship as a mixture of carefully-staged theatrics (the chapter reconstructing the “schoolhouse door” confrontation is jawdropping), blatant corruption and authoritarian savagery, with Wallace unleashing state troopers on Civil Rights marchers and political enemies in furtherance of his fiefdom. Nonetheless, Carter also shows Wallace’s ability to adapt his message to his audience: charming Yankee college students, newsmen and blue collar whites with small government rhetoric and invective against elites and the media (who alternately ridiculed Wallace as a hick and underestimate his appeal); running several presidential campaigns (sometimes as a Democratic spoiler, in 1968 as an independent) playing to racial backlash and alienation during the tumultuous Sixties; finding Richard Nixon and the Republican Party co-opting his message in a more sophisticated, streamlined fashion that Wallace seeks to emulate. As for Wallace’s repentance, allegedly stirred by Arthur Bremer’s failed assassination attempt? While Carter doubts his sincerity, he argues that it ultimately doesn’t matter: a man stirring up hatred and inciting violence from deeply-held beliefs ultimately has the same effect as a cynical demagogue. He agrees with Lesher that Wallace’s campaigns had a deep, lasting impact on national politics; unlike Lesher, he frames it as a tragedy. For this, and other reasons, his is the far more compelling portrait.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Archie Bunker by way of Faulkner, Barry Goldwater by way of Hank Williams. Wallace reinvented American politics. He brought the South north. He is the most talented, most entertaining politician ever (besides Lincoln and Huey Long) and the most terrifying, a force of pure evil. Carter calls him "the most important loser in the 20th Century American politics."

His best rhetorical flourishes are still the bread and butter of Republican politics -- he invented the thing where you say the craziest right wing shit imaginable and then dismiss any other perspective as a creation of "the liberal media," He reinvented the racist discourse of state's rights for the Civil Rights era, speaking to his supporters in code about "busing," "beaurocrats," "professional poverty." He didn't talk about blacks and whites, he told a Northern union audience, "now what if you got a Chinese-Baptist who doesn't want to give up his union seniority to a Japanese-Congregationalist?"

He turned working class populist politics into ruling class politics. He connected Huey Long and Nixon. He did it by instinct, never stopping to ever once contemplate the notion that a person running for president four different times might want to articulate something resembling a political philosophy. He didn't need to. He was like a country singer, fleshing out primordial fears and dreams and hates by hitting the same few chords over and over, not just playing for "the folks" but seeing himself as their embodiment (when the Metropolitan Opera wouldn't play Birmingham because of segregated accommodations he said, "the only Opera the folks down here like is the Grand Old Opry anyway.") His rallies were like fascist tent revivals. The people of Alabama elected him governor four times. When he couldn't succeed because of term limits, he ran his frial sickly wife Lurleen ("you'd be a great candidate honey"). She won in a landslide and died in office.

He didn't have advisors. He had goons, bagmen, henchmen, neo-Nazi state troopers, Christian extremists, John Birchers, oil men who thought Nixon was a Commie dupe. He referred to his own supporters as "wackos" (one campaign aid in Montana said, "I didn't know how many psychopaths we had in this state until i opened a Wallace office".) Like all great Southern politicians he had an idiot brother who did nothing but drink, steal and fuck waitresses.

He used to call up journalists and say, "Hi, George here, just calling to kiss your ass some more." He said he'd run over Vietnam protesters with the presidential limo. During a campaign rally, while being pelted with rocks and tomatoes, he said, "I can see we got a few undecideds here today." He once told a black audience, "Now I'm gonna have to make a fuss about ya'll a little bit but you know that's just for votes." He asked students at Harvard, "How many of you support the Civil Right Act? [hands go up] How many of you have read it? [hands go down]."

Minnie Pearl sang at his rallies, so did the Oak Ridge Boys. Elvis loved him. Nixon rode to power on Wallacite ideas then tried to destroy him. Reagan, Dukakis, Bush and Clinton all had to roll through Montgomery and kiss his ring. His third wife was half of a country and western sister act called Mona and Lisa (he got Lisa). He was on his way to winning the 1972 Democratic primary when he got shot by a guy who got the idea to murder a big time politician while watching A Clockwork Orange (Arthur Berman, a Wilkes Booth meets Travis Bickel, right down to the shaved head). At the end he found God and all his enemies forgave him, even Coretta Scott King.

His life is like one-stop shopping for the carnivalesque in American politics.

This book is stolid and evenhanded and bland and too long, just the way I like 'em. Everyone should read Marshall Frady's 1968 bio, it's a classic. This helped me fill in some gaps and I might read Carter's other book about Wallace's influence up to 1994.

[Mary McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the first to understand the significance of George Wallace's political career, calling him "perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today." King went on to say, "I am not sure that he believes all the poison he preaches, but he is artful enough to convince others that he does."

Carter's definitive biography of Wallace is not exactly light reading, but it is a worthwhile slog, and invaluable for understanding Wallace's longevity as a politician and why his ideas and political strategies still have such currency today. Though members of the Tea Party movement may have toned down the race-baiting, their platform and rhetoric is straight out of the George Wallace playbook.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Men's hearts are concealed, but their actions are open to scrutiny. -James Boswell

“I used the race issue to get elected, like George Wallace and a lot of others, and if that’s wrong, that’s wrong. If you didn’t do that, you wouldn’t get elected. You might as well go home and forget it.” -Former Alabama Governor John Patterson in 2008.


There are some, particularly those politically disposed to do so, who view George Wallace as a tragic figure. A man who lost his wife to cancer, made four unsuccessful runs for President, nearly assassinated in 1972 and lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair and in constant pain, a man who some say (including Wallace himself) was forced by the politics of the day to say morally bankrupt and incendiary things to maintain power.
After reading this masterful biography by Dan Carter, I rather put myself in the opposite camp.
Wallace was in every respect a loathsome, petty, spiteful, insecure little man whose racist and violent rhetoric inflamed three decades of Americans and without a doubt contributed to the deaths of countless people.
Our first temptation whenever playing armchair psychiatrist with men like Wallace is to ask, why?
One however doesn’t need a psychiatry degree to answer this question in Wallace’s case. Power.
Wallace thrived on campaigning. He thrived on being able to buy the loyalty of others from his position in the governor’s mansion. And like all small and petty tyrants, he loved the attention.
And so the George Wallace of the early 1950’s had political ambitions but was not yet a racist demagogue:

“Defenders could cite numerous examples of George Wallace's racial moderation: his service as a trustee for Tuskegee Institute, his refusal to join the Dixiecrats in their walkout from the 1948 Democratic convention; his anti-Klan position in the 1958 gubernatorial election. Even critics agreed that he compiled an exemplary record for impartiality in his six years on the bench from 1953 to 1959. Every black attorney who argued a case in Wallace's Clayton courtroom was struck by his fairness and by his refusal to engage in the kind of first-name familiarity that most white southern judges used in dealing with black lawyers.”

All this meant nothing when he suffered a bitter defeat in his first run for governor to a man who ran a bitterly racist campaign against him. Wallace told himself and aides that he “would never be out-niggered again”.
He would be true to his word for the next two decades.
Wallace’s political ambitions didn’t merely drive him, they consumed him. Friends, family, common decency, all seemed to evaporate from his soul on that night he lost that first election.
In the years that followed, Wallace would, among other things, in the name of satiating his lust for power:

-Put his wife up for governor when he was term limited. Forcing her to campaign with him even when she was diagnosed wth cancer (a cancer he knew of but didn’t inform her of for three years to “not worry her”). Leaving her in pain in the hospital as he continued his campaign, and resuming it not long after her death.

-Threatening to institutionalize the mentally ill mother of a black honor student who wanted to enroll in the University of Alabama if he didn’t withdraw his application (he did).

-In a particularly sleazy bit of campaigning used later by George W. Bush against John McCain, he blanketed the state of Alabama with doctored photographs and leaflets of his gubernatorial rival’s pregnant daughters, claiming that the fathers were black (they were not). In addition to more photos of his rival’s head being superimposed on pictures shaking hands with Muhammad Ali and Elijah Muhammad.

-He presided over one of the most corrupt governships in the South, which was saying something, while settling petty political scores whenever he could:

“Over the years dozens of Alabamians felt the sting of the governor's displeasure. A Tuskegee bank president who criticized Wallace for closing the Macon County schools found state deposits abruptly withdrawn from his bank and given to a competitor, as did a north Alabama banker who called upon whites to extend the ballot to black voters. Moreland Smith, a Montgomery architect and supporter of the civil rights movement, was forced to leave the state when Wallace personally intervened to block commissions for his firm. The Boston-born bride of a young University of Alabama professor never learned that she had been refused a state civil service job because her father-in-law used his influence with the governor to bar her employment on the grounds that she was an "out and out integrationist."

When Wallace was shot and paralyzed in 1972 however, he found himself embraced in a wave of sympathy and a willingness of people to, if not forget, begin to forgive him. Wallace would soon embark on a kind of national tour of contrition where he called upon Civil Rights luminaries such as Rosa Parks and John Lewis, as well as local figures who he had wronged in his ascent to national prominence.
Yet even here, one wonders if this was just Wallace once again sniffing the shifting political winds. America had begun to move away from the bombastic and overt racism of politicians like Wallace in favor of kinder, gentler politicians like Ronald Reagan who politically were aligned with what Wallace preached but were savvier about how to present it.
That when Wallace met with Rosa Parks to apologize to her there were, unbeknownst to her, cameraman and photographers on the scene when she arrived perhaps says much about the true depths of Wallace’s contrition. Carter astutely observes as well that all this late life soul searching also coincided with one final run for governor (a race he would win with significant black support) in a state where blacks became an important constituency, as well as a lack of any real apology for more than 20 years of hate and bigotry.
Wallace’s “apologies” invariably devolved into the spurious claim that all he ever cared about was “states rights” adding that he was never really a racist but:

“I had to say and do things to get elected in Alabama that made it impossible for me to be President”

It is perhaps human nature to want to forgive. To want to believe that there is redemption possible even for the most evil of our species even if it means distorting historical memory to make it fit this desire. After all, if even George Wallace who stood in the schoolhouse door to block black children from going to school, accused civil rights leaders of blowing up their own church where 4 little girls died for the publicity, and nightly shrieked the most hateful and violent invective from the campaign trail, can be forgiven, there is hope for all of us.
Perhaps the answer to this dilemma lies in the words of John Lewis who when asked if he, who had been brutalized and nearly killed at Selma by Wallace’s police, could forgive George Wallace, answered. “Forgive, yes. But never forget”.


As an aside, I wanted to include a short speech given by a progressive Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan, shortly after the Birmingham Church street bombings. When reading for so long about such a cowardly, craven, and opportunistic man like Wallace, it is inspiring to read that men like Morgan had the courage to speak up and stand up to men like Wallace, even if it meant the end of their careers:

A mad, remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it."
Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.
A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child.
Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes.
And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder "Why?" "Who?" Everyone then "deplores" the "dastardly" act.
But you know the "who" of "Who did it" is really rather simple.
The “who” is every little individual who talks about the “niggers” and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and son.
The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter.
The "who" is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator.
It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren't really like they are.
It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.
It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence.
It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions.
We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say.
We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.
Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. . . .
Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city's "image." . . .
Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They have their 14 years in a leaderless city; a city where no one accepts responsibility; where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the "good people". . . .
Birmingham is a city ... where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.
And, who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.
What's it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States.
Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He was the most influential loser in 20th century American politics".

That is how author Dan T. Carter characterizes George C. Wallace of Alabama. He ran for president
four times, three for the Democratic nomination and once as an independent candidate. He exposed
an ugly underbelly of racism and xenophobia that came to fruition in the 2016. Anyone doubting
Wallace's influence in the body politic just take a look at this maniacal fetish for a wall that our
current president started and is exploiting.

Wallace was born in Barbour County, Alabama in 1919 and he was a pugnacious and scrawny youth
who first gained some local fame as a Golden Gloves bantamweight champion. But he settled for
law after graduating the University of Alabama. Service in the Army Air Corps and then election to
the State Assembly and as a circuit court judge. in 1958 he made his first run for governor and lost
to the Attorney General John Patterson who could not run for re-election as Alabama's constitution
barred governor's from seeking re-election.

So Wallace ran again and was famously quoted as saying he would never get "out segged" again.
No one would be a more zealous defender of racial separation and white supremacy than George C.
Wallace for years.

He came to national attention in his first year as governor, defying the Supreme Court and the
Kennedy administration standing in the doorway of his alma mater against the admission of black
students. Alabama was ground zero for the civil rights movement with the Birmingham church
bombing, the march across the Edmund Pettus bridge to Montgomery and there was Wallace snorting defiance. He became a hero to the Ku Klux Klan and their sympathizers, south and north.

At first planning to run against JFK in Democratic primaries, Wallace didn't lose a step and made
runs against LBJ surrogates in a few state primaries and made uncomfortably good showings.

One of the fascinating things I learned is that Senator John Sparkman of Alabama was practically
crapping in his pants at the thought of Wallace opposing him for Senator. It might have been a
logical step for most. But Wallace did not do that. He hatched a scheme to run wife Lurleen for
governor and he would continue the governing. Wallace could never see himself as a freshman
Senator with no influence and just one of a hundred. He had to be numero uno.

Lurleen Wallace became governor, but she was already suffering from cancer and served less than
a year and a half. By that time Wallace himself was already running as an independent candidate
for president. Unlike Strom Thurmond who was not on the ballot in 1948 in a majority of states
in his candidacy, Wallace made it in all 50 states. But the idea was the same, force the presidential
election into the House of Representatives so concessions about that nasty integration business
could be obtained. Wallace did carry 5 dixie states, but the presidency went to Richard Nixon with
no help from Wallace.

As a teen I remember going to a Wallace rally with a friend in 1968 at Madison Square Garden. The
entertainment and candidate came from Dixie, but the audience was urban ethnic except for the
few protestors Wallace deliberately in to use as a talking point to stoke up the rage. It was a frightening experience.

A man named Albert Brewer who was Lt. Governor became Governor of Alabama after Lurleen
Wallace's death. Although he was a Wallace supporter and Wallace publicly pledged not to oppose
him for a full term, he couldn't stay away. Despite a LOT of under the table help from the Nixon
administration Wallace ran and defeated Brewer in one filthy race baiting campaign.

Nixon saw Wallace as his number one threat to a new Republican majority. But that threat ended
when Wallace was shot in Maryland by Arthur Bremer. It might have been more merciful if he died
then and there. But he was paralyzed and his candidacy terminated anyway. By that time the one
term ban was lifted and Wallace sought re-election two a third term.

He governed from a wheelchair and after declining to run again in 1978 Wallace came back one more time for another term in 1982. By that time blacks voting and participating in the body politic at least in the Democratic primary was a fact and since there was no inducement to them
voting for the GOP Wallace actually made a lot of black appointments in his administration. Still
the stench of racism clinged to him up to 1998 when he died at that point a shadowy and forgotten
figure of the past.

His years in the wheelchair were no picnic. He suffered from a variety of ailments and was in a lot
of pain and his bodily functions to put it politely, sporadic and unexpected. Among other things
Wallace suffered from was increasing deafness and Parkinson's disease.

But his legacy has captured the Republican party. His was a most malign influence, but an influence that ought to be studied and learned from. Professor Dan Carter's book will be a great
teacher.

[Joseph Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most influential loser of the 20th century. The governor of Alabama that ran for president four times (1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976) and the man thay anticipated the rising conservative movement of the era. While little remembered by those under 40, or outside the south (save for his cameo in Forest Gump), George Wallace was quite influential despite never clinching the presidency.

The story of civil rights has its heroes (Rosa Parks, MLK, Malcolm X, etc.) But it also has its villains, and none was so central than George Wallace. He famously "stood in the schoolhouse door" in June 1963 to block the admission of two black students to the University of Alabama. He was governor during the chaos in Birmingham in the summer of 1963, culminating in the church bombing which left four black girls dead. In 1970, he openly stoked racial fears in Alabama during one of his governor races. If civil rights showed the march of progress, George Wallace represented the white backlash that sought to grind the movement in its tracks.

For some, Wallace was seen as a southern kook, but his appeal went beyond the Mason-Dixon line. In 1964, he stunned the political class by picking up a sizeable voting bloc in primaries of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. His best-known campaign was 1968, where he picked up 13% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of many southern states. By 1972, he was winning state primaries in the north. Although he toned down the overt racism, his anti-government message appealed to many people.

Wallace was shot in 1972, leaving him paralyzed. Afterward, he comes to a reckoning with his destructive past. He spends the final years of his life atoning for his sins, meeting with prominent black figures, and asking for forgiveness.

In Dan Carter's book, all of this is explored and more. Did Wallace truly hold the racial views he espoused in his early political career? What was the basis of his support in the north? Post-assassination, was his reckoning real? His main argument is that of all the battles George Wallace fights, he loses. The stand in the schoolhouse door was a losing battle, he lost all his presidential bids, but he managed to come out of them looking better. This theme is explored throughout the book.

The book is engaging, if a bit dense in parts. I recommend it for anyone who wants to see the origin point of the modern conservative movement. Or a biographt of an unlikable politican who remains important today. George Wallace might remind you of a certain prominent politican today in terms of some views and styles (keep in mind this book was written in the 1990s, before this character joins the national stage).

A fair warning, there are a lot of racical slurs (usually in quotes) that are said throughout the book, as one writing about a racist person would include.

[Tom Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review: “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics”, by Dan T. Carter. Published 1995, Simon & Schuster.
The use of the word “Conservatism” angers me. The politics being described are not the respectable sounding “conservative”. They are a supremely selfish cold-hearted “reactionary” philosophy. They are politics that violently oppose political or social progress or reform. For Wallace and his true believers, the social structure of the USA ought to be dragged back to the antebellum era, a time when blacks, browns, and women knew their place and with their heads bowed, submitted without question.
“Segregation Now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever”, the George Wallace quote that sums up his world view. Racism was the rotten core of his politics. It drove him and it won for him the governorship of Alabama. That office, in turn, provided the hyper-ambitious Wallace a launching pad for his presidential aspirations. Now that throwback Trump occupies the Oval Office, a historical review of Wallace takes on new relevance. Wallace never won his presidential campaigns of 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976 but all his Sturm und Drang was a big assist to Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump. Of course, Wallace had to contend with the fact that only three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, ruled television news. When convenient, they could easily close ranks and ignore him. They could be fussier in setting standards of decorum. FOX, and their wannabe imitators, have changed those dynamics. Nowadays “crude” rules. Trump has proven there is no bottom to the reservoir of hate in this benighted land. I never thought, “Grab them by the pussy” would be considered presidential language. Who knew? So, there we have two defining quotes, for the two most racist of our post WWII presidential contenders. One a loser, the other a “winner”.
The book gives an interesting account of the hardscrabble life of the Wallace family. In that regard, Trump and Wallace could not have been more unalike. As I read RAGE, I wrote notes – an attempt to aide my memory? – so that I could write some brilliant analysis of Carter’s THE POLITICS OF RAGE? Alas, I must answer in the negative. My copious notes were a feeble attempt to understand how we woke up one morning last November to find that a hapless, hopeless sham of a man, Trump, had become president-elect. Wallace proved that the potential for such a catastrophe had always been present. Was it FOX and the Republican sound machine, financed by the many billionaires that a regressive tax code helped produce, that finally put a grotesque over the top. Hate the blacks, hate the browns, hate the gays, the trans, the poor, the immigrants, the list seems endless. Can we say it now? Hate trumps love.
Can’t begin to say how much respect I have for the black men and women who marched against the corrupt political machines of the Old Confederate States. The book recounts many of the atrocities committed against them. Page 83, the stoning and assault against Autherine Lucy, who had on February 3, 1956, by order of the federal court in Birmingham, entered the University of Alabama. The ensuing riot by a crowd of three thousand students and local thugs succeeded in getting Autherine expelled. Wallace, at the time a circuit judge, made sure that the white citizens of Alabama knew that they had his full support. Other incidents included an assault against Nat King Cole on a Birmingham stage, the beating of civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth and the stabbing of his wife. These were but a few of the many outrages committed against the black citizens of Alabama. It goes without saying that the police themselves were members of the Ku Klux Klan or some similar hate group. For his personal glory, Wallace figuratively rode as leader of the mobs. Today’s racism may not be as overt, but the ugly sore is still present and made manifest by the actions of state governments and local police departments. I won’t rewrite the book. If you have doubts as to the pervasiveness of hate, THE POLITICS OF RAGE should erase them.
January 14, 1963, Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. He kept his constituents entertained by making the Kennedys his punching bag. A paragraph from page 109 illustrates his use of race-baiting to maintain his power, “He (Wallace) had stepped past an invisible line of hyperbole and fallen down a dark hole of the bleakest demagoguery. When a longtime supporter confronted him about his capitulation to the politics of race, Wallace shrugged. “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen,” he told Louis Eckl, editor of the Florence Times. “Then I began talking about niggers – and they stomped the floor.” By all appearances, they are still “stomping the floor”. Black Lives Matter speaks of an ideal, not of a reality. Sadly, I can’t help but feel that too many whites were offended by the very thought that blacks felt threatened. Those white folks then voted their anger, their rage, at the slightest affront to their sense of white entitlement. 1947 through 1965, there were over two hundred bombings across the deep south. The dynamite bombs targeted black churches, black places of business, and the homes of black families. Black communities were under siege. If you were black, you had no safe refuge from the KKK, the White Council or from any of the other heavily armed kooks espousing white superiority.
There was no effective state or local policing over these private militias. Many of the police were themselves members of the terrorist gangs. At the federal level, the FBI was commanded by the morally corrupt J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was more interested in digging up dirt on that commie pervert Martin Luther King than on protecting good citizens whose skin was of the wrong color. The yoking of godless Communism to the Civil Rights movement was used as a cover, an excuse, for the cops to riot and for the nefarious sub rosa activities of J. Edgar’s FBI. Today’s far right may have lost the Communist bogeyman but not to worry, for they have an excellent replacement in the dangerous Islamic warriors with their terrorist bombings and their sharia law. There may no longer be a commie hiding under your bed, but, sweet Jesus, there could very well be a goddamned Muslim or a scary black man ever ready to creep out from under and kill you while you sleep! You may have heard about it on FOX.
On the other hand, if anything is done to alleviate the bias against minorities, that action, no matter how innocuous, automatically becomes preferential treatment. This in turn triggers the white Christians to cry, “Persecution!” White men who are so white that they are orange are even more delicate in their sensitivity to any perceived racial injustice perpetrated against them.
From page 200, “He (Wallace) was never more comfortable than when he was on the attack. A second lecture tour in December and January across the Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, and the West Coast proved a success far beyond the most optimistic projections of the southerner and his staff. Halfway through the trip, Alabama reporters accompanying the governor did a quick calculation of his West Coast media exposure: three hours and fifteen minutes on commercial television special shows, an hour and thirty-nine minutes of spot news coverage, nearly three hours on educational television, and dozens of newspaper and magazine articles generated by 370 reporters who had appeared at scheduled news conferences. “To buy that much TV time in Los Angeles alone would probably take the entire State General Fund,” said one awed Montgomery columnist. “Wallace got it for nothing.” It nauseates me to think of the huge advantage today’s media gave to Trump over Hillary. The free promotion swamped anything his PACs could buy. To this day, mass media will not fess up to their culpability in putting such a totally unfit man in the presidency. They sniff that their pimping is not to be held accountable, because First Amendment and all that. As though anything so honorable had anything to do with it. In truth, they all played Judas to the Constitution.
Throughout it all, Wallace remained closely associated with fanatical white supremacists. Beyond the region of the deep south, progressives were shocked and dismayed on recognizing Wallace’s positive reception. Racism was far more ingrained in the American psyche than any from the left cared to conceive. As for the excited media, from page 209, “George Wallace…had certainly ignited the pack instincts of modern American journalism.” Again, we see a parallel with the Trump phenomenon during Campaign 2016. Outside of MSNBC’s Maddow et al., that television news pack mentality was even more pronounced. Thank God for the internet - and for net neutrality. I suppose that will be the next target. Can’t have any independent journalism giving people funny ideas.
From page 224, “By mid-October, Barry Goldwater’s reckless, shoot from the hip political comments had convinced most Americans the he was temperamentally unsuited for the presidency. As Lyndon Johnson put the question: Regardless of how you feel about civil rights or any other domestic issue, do you want this man to have his finger a few inches away from the nuclear button? Only in the Deep South did the answer seem to be a resounding yes.” This was before the days of 24/7 FOX NEWS, pre “Reality” TV, pre-Billionaires Rule. If anything, Trump’s comments proved him to be even less qualified than Goldwater for being Commander in Chief and yet, sixty-three million voters found him to be eminently qualified. God help us.
Page 240, “…Selma and Dallas County were the center of the White Citizen’s Council movement in Alabama in the 1950s and early 1960s. Blacks remained a powerless majority. More than fifteen thousand black men and women were of voting age in 1963; fewer than two hundred fifty had been able to place their names on the Dallas County voting rolls.”
Page 293, “I know you think I am crazy when I say he (Wallace) expects to be president,” Virginia Durr wrote her old friend Clark Foreman. “But he actually does. He thinks the race issue is going to become more and more the central issue [of American politics], and he is going to arouse hatred all over the whole country, and then pose as their savior.” Wallace had convinced whites in Alabama that everything they believed in was being swept away by an overbearing and oppressive federal government, that they – not the blacks – were the victims of oppression, Durr told her brother-in-law Hugo Black.
Sadly, the above excerpt is spot on. In fact, it sounds like the Republican game plan for 2016. Even worse, the plan succeeded. Racism may not have accounted for 100% of the victory over American ideals but it sure deserves the lion’s share. Here is a link to a prescient column by Matt Taibbi, September 4, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/... It would be hard to improve on Matt’s look into the future.
The most surprising story within the story of Wallace’s rise in the national scene is that of his long-suffering wife, Lurleen. Dan T. Carter does an excellent job in giving a heartfelt rendition of the trials and tribulations over her hard, early years with George. Years of impoverishment and grinding work. It is a very sympathetic depiction of her life and of her death caused by cancer. Whatever my reservations about George Wallace are, they have nothing to do with his admirable wife. A part of the story I knew nothing of. I was left with the utmost respect for the memory of Lurleen Wallace.
The early years were, for me, the most interesting, however, THE POLITICS OF RAGE offers the complete story of George Wallace, which was a very long story indeed. No matter what one’s opinion of the man is, it is undeniable that he played a major role in flipping the South from The Democrats to the Republican Party. There is a rather lengthy discussion of George’s relationship with Richard Nixon. For a political science junkie, this book is a must have for their shelves.
I am drawing this to a close. There is so much more to tell as the late sixties had a surfeit of turmoil. Vietnam, Civil Rights for all Americans, the rights of black voters, all had their battles in the streets. Except for Vietnam, and that war has been supplanted by Afghanistan, Syria, and only God knows where else, the other two battles continue. Again, my purpose is not to rewrite the book. I could make this twice as long but I think I have done enough penance.
It makes me ill to think how close we came to overcoming the regressive forces of the last fifty years by putting an admirable, qualified woman into the White House. We had hopes, we also had a venal media obsessed with the trivial, and government officials whose motives for their unethical actions we will probably never know. We now find ourselves once more contending with a five/four SCOTUS. A court tilted toward the Republican corporate view of America. Also, just to make matters even worse, we now have a “Justice” Department headed by a reactionary southern cracker.
Time for another inspirational quote. This one from page 367, “Richard Strout, the influential columnist for the New Republic, sat in an upper balcony…nothing had prepared him for the spectacle he encountered in the Garden (Madison Square Garden, New York) that night. “There is menace in the blood shout of the crowd,” he wrote to his readers. “You feel you have known this all somewhere; never again will you read about Berlin in the 30’s without remembering this wild confrontation here of two irrational forces.” The American “sickness” had been localized in the person of George Wallace, the “ablest demagogue of our time, with a bugle voice of venom and a gut knowledge of the prejudices of the low-income class.”
Not unlike George, Trump has a “gut knowledge” of the low-information voter. In his coarse language, Trump has a way of communicating with his rabble that has them “stomping their feet” for blood. Page 393 relates Wallace campaign tactics that are almost impossible to believe in their ugliness.
Speaking of blood, Dan T. Carter does an admirable job of introducing us to Arthur Bremer, the mentally ill loner from Wisconsin, who on May 15, 1972, shot Wallace three times at close range crippling him for life. The attempted assassination is morbidly fascinating if only for the strange ways fate plays out. Arthur Bremer wanted only to become famous. Bremer was the inspiration for John Hinckley, Jr.’s assassination attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Isn’t it wonderful how in this Land of the Brave, a mentally ill person doesn’t have a right to medical care but he does have the right to purchase all the deadly weapons he wants.
And with that final thought, good night.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took a while for me to get into this book on the "most influential loser in American politics". But once I did, I really felt like I was able to get an accurate portrait on George Wallace. You learn about his upbringing in the small town of Clio and how he met his first wife, Lurleen.

Much like Louisiana's Governor Earl Long, Wallace was a far more interested (and more dedicated) in the campaign trail as opposed to the family life. Wallace, whose liberal use of the "n-word" could sicken you, horrifically used the fear of whites to his political advantage especially when discussing issues such as voting rights for African-Americans, segregation and busing. On the national stage, he tried to de-emphasize his race baiting but found out he was a niche candidate.

Still he attempted to hide his racism by stating that he was not prejudiced, but instead a fighter for state's rights, an argument that is still used today by the more radical right. You see how the long-held Democratic South flirted with Dixiecrats before settling on Goldwater and Republicans to follow. Wallace's stranglehold on the Deep South struck fear into both Democratic and Republican candidates for President but Richard Nixon felt his presence the most.

The death of Lurleen Wallace in the second year of her gubernatorial career is highlighted and you do feel a rush of sympathy towards her throughout the book. Also touched upon towards the end is Arthur Bremer and his failed assassination of Wallace (though Wallace would be paralyzed and suffer from numerous ailments following) and Carter does a good job in molding Bremer's quest for fame to coincide with Nixon and Wallace campaigning.

"Politics of Rage" also focuses on the quest for equal rights by black Alabama natives (and nationally too) and the horrific racial conflicts that affected the nation. You also see the backwards company that Wallace kept with former KKK members such as speechwriter Asa Carter and guys like Bull Connor and Al Lingo.

I recommend this book to those interested in politics, the 1960s and civil rights. You will find a lot to learn.

[Kaleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A biography of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama during the Civil Rights era. The biography is also a lens to understand the political shifts in America during the 60s; the shift of conservative whites to the Republican Party and the death of the Democratic Party in the South.

Wallace lived a fascinating life. Alabama's constitution prevented the governor from running for consecutive terms, so he ran his wife as a puppet candidate. When running for president in 1972, he was shot in the back, paralyzing him for life. When his wife was diagnosed with cancer, the doctors only told him, and he kept the information from his wife for years. He was a slimy guy, a corrupt governor, and an unfaithful husband.

But of course, when you think George Wallace, you think racism. The 1960s brought out many racist politicians in the Deep South, but few were as virulent, ugly, or violent as George Wallace. His first run for governor was in 1958, an election he lost to a competitor who aggressively attacked Black people and integration. After his loss, Wallace promised "no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again." Throughout his political career, he distunished himself by his willingness to fight against Black people and Civil Rights.

Wallace embraced the violence that maintaining segregation required. Rhetorically, he called for violence, asking for a few “first-class funerals” and for "skinning heads" and "popping skulls." Many of his followers were willing to oblige. He had close ties with the Klan, including his own speechwriter, Asa Carter, who wrote the famous "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" line. He turned a blind eye to the violence perpetrated by racist extremists; bombings, lynchings, and murders were ignored or blamed on “troublemaking” civil rights activists. Wallace was always on the attack; even after the bombing of the Black church in Birmingham that killed four Black girls, he couldn’t resist but blame agitators and activists.

It’s not surprising that Wallace’s racism was able to succeed in the South. What is surprising is that Wallace had a (relatively) successful career in national politics, a career that succeeded in shifting American conservatism to the right nationwide, even though he never won any office at the national level.

Like almost every other Deep South politician of the time, Wallace was a Democrat. Southerners had fond memories of FDR, who lifted so many Southerners out of the crippling poverty of the Depression. Republicans, on the other hand, reminded Southerners of Lincoln and Yankee elitism. The Democratic Party was a big tent; racist Dixiecrats and Harvard-educated liberals, all in the same party. It’s an odd mix, one that doesn’t really make sense in the ideologically polarized political parties of today.

When Wallace ran for president in 1964, he did so as a Democrat, where he did surprisingly well. Wallace toned down some of the more explicit racism of his Southern campaigns. He began a populist appeal to the white working class, with racism as an ever-present subtext. He talked about law and order, states’ rights, freedom of association, and federal tyranny, all of which were a (not so subtle) reference to Civil Rights legislation and integration. 1964 was a blowout for LBJ, but for the first time in generations, the South had rejected the Democratic candidate and voted for a Republican, Barry Goldwater.

The real kicker was his 1968 presidential run. By then, integration was no longer seen as an exclusively Southern issue. Instead, the federal government took measures to end the de facto educational and residential segregation in the North. This led to a backlash among Northerners who had traditionally been strong Democratic voters; the ethnic working class, Catholics, and first-generation suburbanites.

In 1968, Wallace did shockingly well, winning the Deep South and 13.5% of the popular vote. Nixon won in 1968, but he was terrified at how successful Wallace had been. Nixon wanted to appeal to those same white voters, but without the explicit support of segregation that Wallace used. It was in response to Wallace that Nixon employed the infamous “Southern Strategy” to finally win Southern whites over to the Republican Party.

Nixon supported de jure integration, but promised voters he would resist any efforts to meaningfully integrate American society. He ran on “law and order,” attacked those who abused welfare, and “extremists” in the Black power movement. Nixon never publicly attacked Black people the way Wallace did, but he didn’t need to. It worked. Nixon would win in ’68 and ’72, and changed the racial and geographic makeup of American politics. The book argues that Nixon’s rightward shift on race happened to pull Southern whites away from Wallace.

Nixon’s method created new racial politics for the conservative movement after Civil Rights. Explicit appeals to segregation, like Wallace did, were taboo. But implicit references, coded language, and winks and nods towards a racist base were not. As the years went by, he apologized for some of his racist past and claimed to be a born-again Christian. Maybe it’s sincere, maybe it’s not. Regardless, he is one of the worst politicians I have ever read about. He was vulgar, racist, dishonest, and nakedly ambitious, doing whatever it took, including racism, to get elected.

Amazing book! Great look into the life of Wallace and the story of racist politics after the Civil Rights movement.

Quotes

Nixon did not have to make the racial connection any more than would Ronald Reagan when he began one of his famous discourses on welfare queens using food stamps to buy porterhouse steaks. His audience was already primed to make that connection.

He had stepped past an invisible line of hyperbole and fallen down a dark hole of the bleakest demagoguery. When a longtime supporter confronted him about his capitulation to the politics of race, Wallace shrugged. "I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn't make them listen," he told Louis Eckl, editor of the Florence Times. "Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor."

Without using the cruder vocabulary of traditional racism, George Wallace began his national career by skillfully exploiting those fears and hatreds. For the age-old southern cry of "Nigger, nigger," he substituted the political equivalents of apple pie and motherhood: the rights to private property, community control, neighborhood schools, union seniority.

…left the soft-spoken Vivian Malone as the only black student on the Tuscaloosa campus. Shortly after Hood's departure, an explosion blasted a crater in the street outside Malone's dormitory and an anonymous caller warned that the next explosion would be in her room. On November 18, Jeff Bennett drove to Montgomery to ask the governor to use his influence to stop the bombing. Wallace, said Bennett, had been less than responsive. How long, he demanded, was it going to take "to get the nigger bitch out of the dormitory?"

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Split the difference: I still think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a good band, but I change the channel for “Sweet Home Alabama.” For one, it’s massively overplayed, for another, Watergate wouldn’t bother my conscience, not because I voted for their fucking fascist governor but because I’m the son of McGovern voters, McGovern activists, thank you very much.

There’s a story of how George Wallace was a racial liberal before losing an election to someone who just screamed the notable anti-black slur (I’m fine not using it, but I hate using the “letter-word” formation like a child), and then vowed to never be out-slurred again. This is about half-true. He did lose his first election for Governor to a candidate with Klan support. And, more importantly, Wallace’s central drive always was power for its own sake, and, if historian Dan Carter is correct, power for the sake of gaining more power, always moving, always forging ahead, seldom even seeming to enjoy it.

Wallace was born into circumstances that were lower-middle-class by early 20th century Alabama standards and poor by most American ones, in the Alabama black belt. “Child makes the man” is always a risk in these big biographies, but Carter clearly did the legwork and everyone agrees: little George was a dynamo of energy and ambition, and did not have a lot of shame or honesty hedging him in, more or less from the beginning. Another way the old story is half-right: Wallace’s first real political mentor was “Big Jim” Folsom. Folsom was a back-slapping, mildly corrupt progressive in a certain Southern mold: he wasn’t going to seriously shake up the racial order, but he was going to try to materially improve things for the citizenry as a whole, including the black citizenry, and he condemned the more violent aspects of racism as a way of keeping Alabama poor and subject to the whim of landowners and big business interests. He made wry jokes about how there was plenty of integrating going on in Alabama, after dark. He was quite popular.

There’s a lot of back and forth about populism these days. It doesn’t help that some academic and political elites have chosen to make it the go-to term for everything they don’t like, from Corbyn to the alt-right, and it further doesn’t help that their critics have since insisted that whatever they think ur-populism is is never wrong and the elite critics only lump in “the bad kind” to discredit a threat to their regime. More heat than light! Let’s put it this way: Folsom can be seen to represent both the strengths and the limitations of a populist approach, defined broadly and generously as “advocating for the material interests and attempting to uphold and represent the cultural values of the common people in a given constituency.” Folsom did do some good things for the people of Alabama, building roads, schools, hospitals, etc. He also was crushed after the Brown v Board of Education decision came down, and “massive resistance” to school desegregation became the order of the day throughout the South. The last straw was a picture of him having a drink with black congressman Adam Clayton Powell. He was out, and that whole generation of Southern populists, an under-appreciated support for the whole New Deal order (the literature shows a lot of how Southern racist bourbons supported the New Deal, and they did, with conditions, but so too did Southern populists), was out too. To me, that sums up much of the problem of populism: if it were that easy, it would have already happened. It isn’t, alas.

Whether or not he actually breathed the promise not to get “out-(slur)’ed” into the open air, Wallace from then on made his career in opposition to the black freedom struggle, and anything he could memetically link to it. We don’t need to rehearse how things went in Alabama, except to note that whatever has gone down into conventional history, things were likely worse. Birmingham was, for a while, the bombing capital of the world- an industrial town, there were many men there who knew how to handle explosives. Carter uncovers very, very short links between murderous klansmen and Wallace, including at least one meeting Wallace directly took with the National State’s Rights Party, an openly fascist goon squad that sought to prevent even notionally-integrated Alabama schools from opening up by having adult thugs attack the schools directly.

With all this massive resistance stuff, I always wonder… what did they think they were going to accomplish? Integrated schooling is now the law of the land in Alabama just as it is Minnesota, and so is one-man, one-vote without poll taxes and so on. Except… well, you have to figure what at least some of this did was provide delay and cover. On the other side of the coin, Malcolm X used to say people would talk to King because they didn’t want to talk to them. There was a dynamic where figures like Nixon, and eventually Reagan, seemed like more palatable versions of Wallace, better attuned to national audiences, knowing when to say the quiet part quiet… and in war, you can never underestimate the element of time. The period of chaos that came with massive resistance and all that came with it in the South gave southern white supremacists time to adjust, to figure out workarounds to maintain their power, so there was still a deeply unequal society with whites on top in the end. Would it have worked that way if the southern “moderates,” the deal-makers, had been in charge from the beginning, without the terror? I’m not sure it would.

There were points where it was easy to write Wallace off as an atavism, a figure of the old south risen to scare the country again (1995 would be one of those times, so credit to Carter he doesn’t take that tack). It’s a lot harder, post-Trump, but that was well down the line. The sense that the future was 180 degrees away from everything Wallace represented was a major factor in his ability to succeed, when he left Alabama to run in Democratic primaries for president, and then as an independent candidate in 1968. Wallace found that his message resonated in the north, especially when he broadened it to include attacks on bussing for integration, welfare programs, student protestors, anyone opposed to the Vietnam war. King discovered something similar, in the negative, when he went to Chicago and encountered hate as fervent or more as he did in Selma. This not only shows that Wallace’s politics, the politics of white resentment, had a future, but that its past wasn’t so remote as all that, either. Wallace was always a thoroughly modern figure.

Who knows how far Wallace could have gotten — probably not the presidency, but he could perhaps have thrown an election into the House of Representatives and make some kind of grubby 1876-style deal — if not for two things. The first was nominating Curtis LeMay, founder of the Strategic Air Command, as his VP candidate. LeMay talked about using nukes, which scared people, he talked about abortion being ok as population control (he was a population control/ecofascist psycho on top of it all), which offended people, and he was just generally weird and off-putting. This restricted Wallace’s ability to throw the 1968 election. The other was a would-be assassin, the guy Robert DeNiro’s character in “Taxi Driver” was based on, shot and paralyzed him during the 1972 campaign. That dude was an avant-la-lettre incel and had all the ideology of a magic 8-ball, but hey…

Wallace tried to clean up his act and repent some, towards the nineties, apparently. A hustle, or sincere? Who knows, and really, who cares? Carter doesn’t fall in love with his subject like a lot of biographers do. Wallace was an asshole who made his wife run for governor so he could be her puppet master (all she wanted to do was fish) and then abandon her for the presidential trail when she had the cancer that would kill her. He had admirable qualities, but not the redeemable kind- his humor and indefatigable work ethic mostly went towards advancing his own power and aggravating white supremacist violence. All around, a grim story, one that only gets grimmer reading it post-1995. ****’

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tell people about this book all the time; it articulates when and why the Republican party shifted so far right, which groups it appealed & rhetorically catered to now and then, and which politicians have been savvy (or cynical, or plain old opportunistic, depending on how you look at it) enough to take advantage of the split in American political ideologies as a means to power. The more I read about the 1968 election, the more I understand that it was the nexus of the progressive movement and that we've been sliding backward ever since then. Highly recommended!

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming into this book, I expected to read about a man who was little more than a monster--a politician who lived and thrived on the worst our country had to offer. Carter doesn't gloss over Wallace's truly horrible nature, but he does succeed at making this unfortunately important man into a human being. I felt like I left this book with a better understand of why Wallace took the path he did and, more importantly, why such a path was so successful in 1960s/1970s America. A difficult story about a complicated man delivered flawlessly by a gifted biographer.

[Kb · Rating 4 out of 5]

We want to make George Wallace an embarrassing footnote in American history, but reading this showed me how he used racism and grievances of white people to create the modern conservative movement that has elected Trump.

[AskHistorians]

Much more than just a biography of Wallace, this is a really interesting/important study of the origins of the "new" right.

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. My. God. So many times, page after page, line after line, I kept saying it. Audibly. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Because the political life of George Wallace used to be an American footnote, an admission that we could be, if we wanted to be, openly racist, hateful, violent, cruel, dishonest, manipulative, and brutally, arrogantly closed-minded. We could see the worst version of ourselves in a public figure, acknowledge that their behavior was outrageous and unacceptable, then ultimately lean toward those calmer, steadier, more patient and respectful leaders to manage our Founders' vision, their experiment in Constitutional government. But then came Donald Trump, a man whose early life was far different from Wallace, but whose political style, top to bottom, has been a terrifying mirror of the Alabama governor, with greater, more shocking, more popular and nationwide success, five decades removed.

Years ago, I shelved this book on my to-be-read list, then picked it up in the aftermath of the 2024 Election, seeking to understand Trump and his followers, this human embodiment of exhausting, never ending rage, and our collective embrace of it. I was trying to put my finger on the shifting pulse of America as I thought I knew it. But it didn't take long to find myself deep within the vile, hot-tempered brain of George Wallace, seeing far more parallels to Donald Trump than I would have originally believed possible. Here was a man--not Trump, but Wallace--who treated women like trophies (or with contempt), who was married three times, who grew up in communities where the manipulation of elections was "a patriotic virtue," who described minorities with horrifying obscenities and literally stood in the doorway of a university building to block racial integration, who defied the Federal government to the point of arrest and got praised for it, who ran for president at least three times and won enough states to be taken seriously, who was eventually shot and wheelchair-bound, earning him even greater sympathy, even among the minorities he once maligned. Experts called him dangerous. They called him a demagogue. But more unsettling is that Wallace voters grew with each passing year, even when he didn't win, because he knew how to frame every argument, every attack, every issue through the lens of a busy people who always needed someone to blame for their discontent, and trusted that he would fight these enemies, even if these enemies were neighbors, friends, and family members, even if these enemies weren't really enemies, but targets made by Wallace himself.

If you need to understand the politics of rage, if you're having a hard time trying to understand the success of Donald Trump, despite every cold and callous absurdity, this is a pretty great start. Because here, in this book, you can disappear from 2024, back into the 50s, 60s, and 70s, feeling like you've left the modern world, even if the world before was much the same, with different names and different faces. We are, it turns out, a nation born of eternal conflict, breeding endless contention, at war with our own ideas, going backwards as often (or more often) than we go forward, because we tell each other to hate each other, to be suspicious of each other, to believe that we are enemies.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what this nation is, but this book gave me so much to think about, no longer as a matter of history but as an issue of modernity. Because we are now living, whether we like it or not, in the Age of Trump, an age of rage, even among those of us who wish for peace and reconciliation.

[Kevin Camp · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Politics of Rage covers the life of Alabama governor George Wallace. Largely an afterthought these days, Wallace was a significant figure in American politics from the early 1960's until the end of the Seventies. He was the face of white defiance to integration and Civil Rights. Seeking power, Wallace callously exploited the Deep South's long-running antagonism towards Washington, DC. The candidate lost every fight he took on, but was idolized by many native Southerners for seeming to share their very own same sense of indignation and ample inferiority complex--whether he truly meant a single word that he said is still a matter up for debate.

Wallace used his bully pulpit to run as an independent in the 1968 Presidential election. He polled surprisingly well, but still finished a distant third to Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Wallace ran again four years later, in 1972, but the candidate was shot and severely wounded at a campaign stop in suburban Maryland. Wallace never fully recovered from his injuries, which would plague him for the rest of his life. Aware that his national ambitions had passed, after the 1976 Democratic primaries had concluded, the Fighting Judge ran for a final term as Alabama governor.

Carter pulls no punches. Wallace's sixteen-year stranglehold on state politics prevented many needed reforms from enactment. All that Governor Wallace really seemed to do, or for that matter, wanted to do was run for office, particularly for President. Alabama suffered considerably under his stewardship. A poor state with a regressive tax system, criminally unsafe and underfunded prisons, and dysfunctional state government deserved far better than Wallace provided.

Carter makes a compelling case that the Contract with America Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, dipped into Wallace's playbook to exploit fears and shamelessly manipulate voters. Donald Trump's campaign utilized similar strategies in 2016.

[Joe Keefhaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Here's another book that really enlightened me about events I thought I was understanding when they were occurring. I guess I didn't fully understand. It's difficult to determine how to remember George Wallace. The amount of hatred, ill treatment and violence Wallace heaped upon black people while he was governor of Alabama is startling and hard to forgive. Yet he served admirably on a bomber crew during WW2 and entered politics as sort of a liberal New Dealer. As a circuit judge, he was completely fair to black plaintiffs and defendants, and he always treated black attorneys just as respectfully as he did white attorneys. After being paralyzed and in constant pain from an attack by a would-be assassin, Wallace gradually mellowed. In his last run for governor, he received 90 percent of the black vote and appointed numerous black people to significant
positions in his administration. Later, he personally and directly asked for forgiveness from the people -- black and white -- he had harmed. He said his stand against integration was wrong, and he was sorry. Somewhat surprisingly, many of those individuals, including prominent blacks, took his apologies at face value and forgave him.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ignore the title, what little analysis Mr. Carter provides is trite and tepid and, from the perspective of 2023, almost quaint. But "The Politics of Rage" does provide an exhaustively researched biography of an extremely repulsive man, and for that, Mr. Carter deserves respect, maybe even sympathy.

I was a small child during the years of Wallace's greatest influence, so I grew up thinking that he was just another race-baiting relic of the Jim Crow era, Strom Thurmond in a wheelchair. It took awhile for me to understand that Wallace was THE race-baiting relic, the scourge of the Civil Rights movement, the butcher of Birmingham, the perpetrator of Pettis Bridge, however you want to label him. So, of course, I hated him.

But that was just politics. Mr. Carter provides plenty of reasons to loathe George Wallace as a human being: he was a crook, a philanderer, an absentee father, and just an all-around scumbag. He had moments of decency, that's why it took 53 years for someone to shoot him, but on balance, he was just a walking spittoon of a human being.

Not sure my life is enriched by that knowledge, but Mr. Carter sure worked hard to tell me.

[Michael Linton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book that was so fascinating in understanding his methods and approach that mirrored Trump's tactics. It also referenced two other books that I had bought while reading other books - the Great Republican Majority and The Paranoid style in American politics.

I am amazed how similar George and Trump was. George Wallace seems to have been forgotten. I barely knew anything about him except for his focus on segregation.

The book doesn't draw any conclusions if George really, truly was contrite in his older age after the shootings. It focused on his campaign tactics which wasn't about race at the time. Based on his horrible behavior as a father, husband, and leader, it's hard to conclude that he became a changed man. Perhaps, the shooting did change him. For example, he did appoint many black people in high ranking positions in his last run as governor.

The other thing about this book is it shows effective and simple his tactics were. And how it's timeless and it's just about finding someone for the voters to hate.

[Rickard Björnemalm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carter's book paints an interesting, unnerving and impressive portrait of Wallace as Carter links the resentment and rage which fueled Wallace continued appeal to angry white working and middle class voters with the emergence of a conservative coalition in the 1970s-1980s. The thread of resentment-based politics runs through Louisiana governor Huey Long, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan to Pat Buchanan, Newton Gingrich and, most recently Donald Trump. As Carter illustrates, Wallace is the link in the chain which hitherto has been overlooked. As our current political climate illustrates, the politics of rage continues to be ever present in US politics. As such, it is illuminating indeed to understand the rise and fall of the Alabama governor. His story can perhaps bring further understanding to causes and political outcomes of rage and resentment, and hopefully offer an understanding of its continued appeal.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The influence that George Wallace had on American politics is definitely scary. Something that the writer alluded to in the closing of the book provokes a thought. He was talking about how Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski traveled throughout the Soviet Empire during the last days of Communist rule, and he witnessed the social upheaval of the nation. People were afraid to change because they clung to the ideas of nationalism, racism and religious fundamentalism. Conservatives call themselves believing in the notion of "free markets" and everyone having the right to choose, but the policies that George Wallace pushed and the subsequent influence on the Conservative movement did not foster that notion of capitalism for everybody.

[Brian Prentiss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal read and incredibly timely. The parallels between Wallace and Trump, and the resentment both masterfully tapped into are remarkable. I often felt while reading Carter’s narrative and interpretation of Wallace that he could just as easily have been chronicling the rise of Trump and the flushing out of anger and latent racism during the 2016 campaign...and this book was written in 1995.

Not only was it a crystal ball prediction of the political landscape that would emerge 20 years later, it was an entertaining and enlightening read. Even after growing up in Alabama I found that there was a lot I didn’t know about Wallace and my home state.

[Doug Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. One of the best books I've read this year. The echoes of George Wallace in the politics of Donald Trump and the GOP reverberate strongly. Wallace thrived by exploiting the racism of Alabama whites, railed against pointy headed liberal intellectuals and experts, engaged in name-calling (commie, pinko fa**ots), attacked the federal courts, slammed the media and responded to civil rights unrest with appeals to law and order. Carter also deflates the story of Wallace's late life conversion, showing it to be overstated and based on faulty memories.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally I read a book in a few days, sometimes a few hours. This one took me months. The material was so ... intense, disheartening and depressing. I would read and then set it aside for a week to process. Extremely well written, Carter's research is impeccable. I actually think this should be required reading for high school seniors. It certainly should be read by everyone who works on any level of the political spectrum.

[Paul Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always thought of Trump as if George Wallace actually was nominated and elected as a major party candidate. This book just confirms it.

[Swillig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more history I read, the more I realize that our 21st century politics reflect the horrific upheaval of the ‘60s. The decade changed us as a country and, remarkably, continues to do so.

[papafawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

meticulous, insightful, and painfully relevant

[Tj Begg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting take on an infamous politician - very slow and too in depth for my taste

[Jackson Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A biography I didn't expect to enjoy so much, since I read it for class, but it was fascinating. Carter creates a wonderful profile of a horrible man. Recommended.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched and comprehensive. Astoundingly relevant to today's political situation.