Dan T. Carter
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The GEORGE WALLACE, THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW CONSERVATISM, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS Second Edition Dan T. Carter LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Baton Rouge Copyrisbl elm, 2000 by Dan T. Carter 0ri{jinaIly published by SiIoon & Schuster lSU Press edition published by arrangemt::nl wah the author All rigblS ........J Manufaaured in the Unked States of America louisiana Paperback P.dkl<n, 1996; Seoond LouisWla Paperback EditI<n, 2000 09 08 07 06 05 001 03 02 01 00 5 ~ s 2 I Carter, Dan T. The politics of rage : George wallace, the origins of the new conservatism, and the tramfcrmation of American politics I Dan f. Carter.-2nd. ed, rev. Louisiana pbk. ed. p. an. Includes b;bUographJcaJ references and index. ISBN <>8071-2597-0(alk. paper) I.W21Iace, George C. (George Corley), 1919- 2. Govemors-Alabama-Blography. ,. Alabama-PoUtics and govemment-1951- 4. Conservatism-United Stales-History-2001 century. 5. United States-Politics and governmenr-1945--1989. I. Tille P330.'.W3 C'7 2000 976.1'06"092-dc21 IBI 1be paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability cl the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book lDngeviIy of the Council on Ilbracy Resources. e Chapter 10 "STAND Up FOR AMERICA" THE POLITICS OF ALIENATION STANDING IN TIiE January sun of an unseasonably warm Alabama day, Lurleen Wallace read her twenty-four-minute inaugural address-the longest speech she had ever given-in a firm, clear voice that showed how far she had come since she first mounted a speaker's platform in March of 1966.The new governor, elegantly dressed in a somber black cashmere suit with matching pillbox hat, vilified the "egg-heads" in Washington who "pro- claim to the world that 'God is dead'" and she promised to defend the people of Alabama against the "tyranny" of the United States government (which she compared to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba). Asa Carter had included several token references to Mrs. Wallace's "special concerns as a wife and mother," but these awkward insertions seemed only to highlight her husband's political ventriloquism. As she ex- coriated federal judges and Washington bureaucrats, the enthusiastic audi- ence, which filled the street in front of the capitol, interrupted her again and again with cheers and deafening applause. 1 Her celebration, like her husband's four years earlier, was virtually an all-white affair. Repeated choruses of "Dixie" played by no fewer than twenty-one of more than a hundred white bands drowned out the patriotic airs of the handful of black marching bands. For the first time in more than forty years, the new governor declined to host an official inaugural ball. A statement issued under Lurleen Wallace's name explained that it seemed inappropriate in the context of the escalating conflict in Indochina: "With "Stand Upfor America" 295 Alabama boys fighting in Vietnam, I consider money spent for an inaugural ball to be money wasted." One of her husband's friends dismissed that explanation. Wallace had "told everybody it was a racial thing, that he didn't want any nigguhs show- ing up and dancing with Lurleen." In reality, "he didn't like the idea of not being right smack jn the center of the spotlight, of having to act as the escort for the new governor.:" WHILEthe inaugural 'couple greeted guests at a series of small evening re- ceptions, two dozen Wallace supporters from across the nation gathered in a private dining room of Montgomery's Woodley Country Club for a strategy session called by Asa Carter and Jim Clark. Their agenda: how to coordinate support for Walla~e's unannounced but inevitable run for the White House in 1968.With their predilection for public mayhem, Carter and Clark seemed unlikely organizers for a national political campaign. carter usually kept a low profile as speechwriter, but he remained a man with an uncontrolled temper, often whetted by alcohol. Only months before Lurleen Wallace's inaugural, a drunken Carter had confronted a Montgomery city detective in a downtown restaurant and loudly threatened to "beat the shit" out of him if he did not stop investigating Klansmen suspected in the bombing of a local black church.P Ross Barnett and Leander Perez, veterans of the 1963 summit meeting chaired by John Synon, welcomed what one guest called a who's who of "super-patriot leaders," including William Simmons of the White Citizens Council, Kent Courtney, and a representative sent by Willis Carte, head of the Liberty Lobby and publisher of the anti-Semitic magazine American Mercury. Courtney, a former John Bircher, publisher of the Citizen, and head of the newly created Conservative Society of America, had embraced Wal- lace after Goldwater's defeat with the fervor of a man who believed he had found the nation's redeemer." The Woodley conference delegates represented the fringe of a growing network of right-wing organizations that had emerged in the 1950s:Joseph Welch's John Birch Society, the Reverend Carl McIntire's Twentieth Century Reformation, Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the Reverend Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade, Edgar Bundy's Church League of America, Dean Clarence Manion's Forum, and Texas oilman H. 1. Hunt's Life Line Foundation. In rallies, "seminars," sponsored radio and television broadcasts, and dozens of magazines and newsletters, they pro- moted the theme elaborated by Joseph McCarthy in his heyday: liberalism equaled socialism; socialism equaled communism; therefore liberalism was only two precarious steps away from a treasonous embrace of the Commu- nist menace. This syllogism formed the basis for the radical right's underlying '296 THE POLITICS OF RAGE "..I grand conspiracy theory. Communist victories came not because of Marx- , ism's ideological appeal or because of the Soviet Union's economic strength , and military prowess, but because Moscow's agents, operating at the highest ranks of the United States government and supported by millions of fellow- travelers and leftist dupes, maneuvered the nation toward surrender. Through the late 1950s, liberal activists ineffectually pointed with alarm to the rise' of what they called the "ultra-right"; their fears gained credibility when Robert Welch charged in 1960 that President DWight Eisenhower was a "dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy."? Sophisticated Americans seemed uncertain whether to be horrified or amused. William F. Buckley, Jr., the young guru of the respectable right, called for Welch's resignation from the society and warned conservatives to steer clear of the organization. A poll showed that more than two of every three Americans who held an opinion about the John Birch Society opposed the group.? The radical right, however, seemed to feed on the contempt of mainstream community leaders. In 1959, the six largest right-wing groups-Twentieth Century Reformation, the Christian Crusade, the Church League of America, Human Events, Americans for Constitutional Action, and the John Birch Society-reported total revenues of $1,300,000. By 1964, the same organi- zations had budgets of $8.4 million and mailing lists that reached millions of Americans.7 In its crudest manifestations, this "New Right" represented a return to some of the more unsavory aspects of American history: nativism, anti- Semitism, and overt racism. All the participants in the Woodley planning conference were racist defenders of "Anglo-Saxon civilization"; the majority were vicious anti-Semites. Asa Carter's attacks against Jews went back to the 1940s; as early as the mid-1950s, Leander Perez was blaming the "Zionist Jews" for the racial problems of the South. At one of Edward Fields's Na- tional States' Rights Party rallies, Perez repeated the neo-Nazis' claim that "Communism and Zionism are almost synonymous. They're un-American co-conspirators in the drive for integration as a means of destroying both our white Christian civilization and our power to resist communism. ,,8 If possible, Willis Carto represented an even more repugnant addition to the list of Wallace supporters. Born in the Midwest in 1926, Carto worked briefly as a collection agent in San Francisco in the 1940s before he found his calling as a propagandist for right-wing causes. By the mid-1950s, he had founded his own organization, "Liberty and Property" (later the Liberty Lobby), and he published a lively monthly bulletin appropriately titled Right. A decade later he would tum his efforts to disproving what he called the "myth of the Holocaust," but in the 1960s he understood "Blacky" (as he always referred to African Americans) to constitute the primary menace to Western civilization. Carto the Californian went far beyond Wallace the "Stand Upfor America" 297 southerner in his insistence that integration ("racial amalgamation") was the conspiratorial creation of an unholy alliance of Communists, Jews, blacks, and their allies and dupes in Washington, the entertainment industry, and the mass media.? Even before the Woodley conference, Carto, working with Asa Carter, had prepared a slick pamphlet headlined "Stand Up for America: The Story of George C. Wallace," which promoted the Alabamian as the only potential presidential candidate willing to confront "Blacky" and the liberal- Communist conspiracy which had seized control of the federal govern- ment.!" The Liberty Lobby mailed 175,000 copies to its subscribers and then made an additional 150,000 copies available to the Wallace campaign. In 1964, Carto had distributed ten million copies of a vehemently anti-Johnson pamphlet, "LBJ,a Political Biography." He promised to match that figure for Wallace. Boxes filled with "Stand Up for America" soon lined the shelves of the Wallace headquarters in Montgomery. Whenever supporters wrote from across the country to solicit his views on civil disorder or the Communist conspiracy, or to request membership information on the nearest Ku Klux Klan chapter, Wallace routinely enclosed in his replies a copy of the Liberty Lobby pamphlet as an "accurate expression of my thinking on these mat- ters." When a Detroit newsman reported that the Alabamian's top aides had worked closely with the unsavory Liberty Lobby, both Wallace and Carto blandly denied the connection.