ANALYSIS
George Wallace was a segregationist. He was the Alabama governor who blocked the schoolhouse door to stop integration. Wallace was a successful politician and a pro-union Democrat. He ran for president several times, winning 13% of the popular vote and five states as an Independent Party candidate in 1968.
Wallace was a populist with a talent for performative politics. And in this episode of History As It Happens, historian and Wallace biographer Dan Carter discusses Wallace’s lasting influence on American politics, at a time when right-wing populism has gone mainstream in the Republican Party.
There may be no direct lineage between Wallace and the prevailing, pro-Trump faction of the GOP, but important parallels demand our attention. Wallace claimed to stand up for forgotten, downtrodden working class Whites who were looked down on by the establishment and highly educated elites. He called for the restoration of law and order as American cities burned in the late 1960s. And he brought a hard edge that shattered the standards of decorum, as when he mocked hecklers or derided Communists, anarchists and hippies.
Mr. Carter, a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, said Wallace’s impact on today’s politics is overlooked at a time of frequent comparisons between Trumpism and the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe.
“He was a Democrat, but Democrats [today] certainly don’t want to claim him. His ideas may be closely linked to a later generation of Republicans, but they certainly don’t want to claim him in part because the GOP is very concerned about the charge of racism,” Mr. Carter said.
A key turning point in this story was 1968. Wallace’s success in appealing to the racial resentments of Southern Whites convinced some Republican strategists – as well as Richard Nixon – to adopt the “Southern strategy” and lure the region’s Democrats into the Republican column, Mr. Carter said.
Listen to the full episode about George Wallace and right-wing populism by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
