Political theory and practice

Three men publicly declared their intentions to run the first time for public office within hours of each other, one in Massachusetts, another in California, and the last in Alabama: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace (1919-1998), and despite his four presidential campaigns the latter, Wallace, has all but disappeared from the popular consciousness. The evidence is celebrations of anniversaries reported to television and the shelves of bookstores. Kennedy and Nixon appear now and again in those places. Pigmies (journalists) till occasionally try to hack a byline out of Kennedy or Nixon. Scholars continue to evaluate their achievements in monographs. The fiftieth anniversary of this or that has commanded television time. Hits on the internet are millions for Kennedy and Nixon.
But George Wallace, though in the time he preoccupied both Kennedy and Nixon, and commanded headlines around the world, is now all but forgotten except to specialists in American regional politics. Moreover, later in life, outwardly Wallace executed a 180 degree turn in his public persona and went from a fire-eater to a grand old man. Who was George C. Wallace?

He was the oldest son in a comfortable family, though its fortunes had declined in the previous generation, along with millions of others when the Great Depression hit. George completed high school and graduated from the University of Alabama with the help of the G.I. Bill of the (later despised) federal government.
He was small, and often called ‘Little George’ rather than ‘George, Junior. ‘ If that irritated him, he found an outlet for any resentment in Golden Gloves boxing. He did well in that as a bantam weight. More than once knocking out an opponent. As one coach said, George did not want to win the fight, he wanted to hurt his opponent. Trying to teach him to score points for a technical victory had no effect. George did not want to score points, he wanted to deck his opponent, draw blood, and have KO recorded. The pugnacity he showed later was there from the beginning.
He had served in the United State Air Force in the Pacific War and flew nine missions in a B-29 over Japan. He was the flight engineer for the large and complicated airplane. While the Japanese defences were weak sometimes it only took one hit to bring down even one of these super fortresses. In addition, the distances, the weather, the fatigue of the crew on 16-hour flights in combat conditions, and the temperamental nature of the aircraft combined to produce 5% losses on every sortie; if 500 planes took off for a mission, 475 made it back. Each plane carried 11-crewmen and so that meant 275 deaths. Yes, deaths because when the planes went down, whether over Japan or open water, all hands were lost. Air-sea rescue existed but the vast expanse of the Pacific ocean over a 6,000 mile course made recovery a million-to-one shot.
On at least one flight Wallace’s handling of the engines, the fuel flow, the oil pressure, the hydraulics saved the plane from disaster. Later he secured an honourable discharge despite some dubious behaviour. (From the details in these pages I rather think he served in the same unit as my father, likewise from the South, but there the similarity ends.)
When the war started Wallace knew he had to serve in order to secure his future political ambitions. And he had political ambitions that were articulated from about 15 years of age. He earned a place as an intern in the Alabama legislature and declared that one day he would be governor. Many a boy and today many a girl has done something like this. Few of them, however, conducted the kind of campaign he did to secure that internship. In early summer when school was out his father drove him to the capital, Montgomery, and young George laid siege to the legislature like Grant before Richmond. He had already written a stream of letters to every member of the legislature explaining his exceptional merits for one of the very few internships available, pledging to serve above and beyond the call of duty. Once in Montgomery he presented himself at the door of one legislator after another and talked his way into most. He slept at least one night in park and gave his suit an undergraduate iron, i.e., he slept on it. His father left him to his own devices. For the first but not the last time, Wallace wore down his adversaries and he got an internship. He loved it, and did do twice the work any of the others.
The man was something of a loner despite coming from a family of five children. He could keep to himself for days at a time, as he often did during this internship and later in the Air Force, but if he was with other people he was garrulous, excited, nervous, twitching with energy, and talking, and talking, and talking nothing but politics as one contemporary after another says, though what politics he talked from fifteen onward is not clear.
What is clear is that he had a burning ambition and politics was the field. The two defining poles of Southern politics were (1) hatred of the North (Federal) government because of the Civil War and Reconstruction and (2) white superiority at the cost of black oppression. The former meant that the federal government was the real enemy, though the largess from FDR’s many programs was quickly pocketed in the South, it was nothing more than overdue compensation for the great evils the North had visited on the South. Suitably encoded for contemporary sensibilities, we hear the same motifs today from the Tea Party and its media service, Fox News.
Leaving aside the details, which are thoroughly documented and dramatically presented in this book, from the beginning Wallace was a hollow man.
Wallace had a gigantic need for recognition which translated into an unquenchable ambition for political office (even before taking the oath of office as governor the first time he referred to running for president ‘next year’) that combined with his belligerent temperament. To serve that ambition he would cheat, steal, and lie while denying everything. His defiance of the federal government on civil rights was – it is abundantly clear – contrived to lock-in the white vote for his ambitions. He had no interest in the constitutional or legal aspects of the dispute. Nor did he seem to have any personal animosity to blacks. As Hitler never personally harmed a Jew, so Wallace never harmed a black person. Racism was necessary to win and he would not be out done in that. No sir! If racism got votes, he would talk racism day-and-night. Against such singleminded determination, the federal government wobbled. The Kennedy Administration wanted compromise not confrontation but Wallace wanted confrontation (before the television cameras) and not compromise of even the most cosmetic kind.
Wallace promoted the mayhem of Selma and the maelstrom of Birmingham. The descriptions of the bomb, the razor, poison, the truncheon, C-4 teargas (which is toxic), the torch, the shotgun, the knife, the pistol, the high-pressure firehose that broke limbs, the baseball bat, and the snarling police dogs, and let us not forget the electric cattle prods were, as one French journalist said, worse than any he had ever seen in banana republics. Wallace was indifferent to the blood he had let, ever ready to blame someone else. His message was clearly understood by those whites who wanted to fight. The haters came out in force and Wallace privately invited the Ku Klux Klan to mobilise to the drive the blacks off the streets.
George Wallace. ‘Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!’
Before reaching for stereotypes about Alabama, it might be noted that in the 1920s a governor of this very same state, Oscar Underwood (1862-1929), sacrificed his political career, including his own presidential ambitions, to confront the Klan. Equally, Wallace’s immediate predecessor in the gubernatorial chair, Jim Folsom was an advocate, albeit inconsistently, of racial accommodation. Wallace’s constituency was always a minority but it was an intense minority that he had identified, legitimated, recruited, mobilised, and unleashed with the full support of the state government and the connivance of some of Alabama’s Washington representatives and senators. I said ‘recruited’ because there is evidence that some of the perpetrators had flocked to Alabama from other states to seize the opportunity to crack skulls.
Wallace had found, as did another Southern midget, Alexander Stephens (1812-1883), that crowds were bored when he talked about states’ rights but responsive when he went in for race-baiting. What was am ambitious man to do, but play the race card? It was the only card in the deck.
Having just read some of the Robert Penn Warren’s essays written at the same time as Wallace was at his pinnacle it is hard to believe these two Southerners came from the same planet.
While Wallace ranted and raved at the evils of the federal government, he continued to receive and bank his monthly check for his war wound. War wound? His discharge was based on his unfitness for further duty due to mental instability, i.e. combat fatigue. For that disability he received a part-pension for the rest of his life. Imagine what an opponent as unscrupulous as Wallace himself would have made of that fact.
Wallace had a retentive memory and he made a point of remembering people he met, because they might be useful later, but he had no rapport with them, unlike Huey Long. They were assets to be catalogued not people whom he could help. Long’s faults are encyclopaedic but he never played the race card. There is a coldness at Wallace’s core, which is also evident in this relationship with women, including his ever loyal wife, Lurleen. So seldom did he see his children that she wondered if he would recognise them in a crowd.
In all he served three discontinuous four-year terms as governor, and his wife, Lurleen, served one four-year term as his surrogate. As to Wallace’s change of heart after his own ordeal, the author is sceptical. Wallace’s injuries were terrible and left him in constant pain. But after so many years and so many lies, perhaps the one person who believed his lies was George Wallace. The author gives very short shrift to this period in Wallace’s life which I took to be a silent comment on Wallace’s credibility.
Reading this book brought back those times to me, and it was disturbing to recall those days of the news each night of blowing up children in churches, burning to death families at the kitchen dinner table, the murder of university students in the street, a woman beaten to death with baseball bats by five men in a town square.… Worse, the culprits in many cases were well known, and some openly bragged of their deeds, others were on-duty police officers. Looking back, it beggars belief. I had no wish to see ‘Selma.’ The original was enough for me.
The author goes to remarkable lengths to be even-handed and let the facts speak for themselves. They do.
Dan Carter
Presidential campaigns. Wallace’s strategy was to produce an indecisive election, i.e. no candidate with majority of electoral votes, and throw the (s)election of the president into the House of Representatives as prescribed by the Constitution at the time. There a combination of Southerners with some Northerners from blue-collar constituencies might give him enough votes to wangle a Vice-Presidential selection, and from that base the next time he would be the leading contender for the top job. It is not as crazy as it sounds.
1964. Wallace entered and campaigned hard in three Democratic primaries, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland, and did well. That ended the supposition he was a regional politician with no appeal outside the deep South. After dropping out, privately he offered his support to Barry Goldwater in return for the Vice-Presidential place on the Republican ticket. Goldwater declined. LBJ swept all before him.
1968. Wallace ran as a third party candidate with Curtis ‘Bomber’ LeMay. Richard Nixon won but he feared that Wallace would split his vote. Once again Wallace let it be known he would accept the Vice-Presidential slot on first the Democratic and the Republican ticket. This messages were ignored. He got ten million votes, carried five deep South states with forty-five Electoral votes. This was his high tide. He seems to have taken votes from blue collar workers in the North who might have otherwise voted for Hubert Humphrey and from Southern rednecks who might otherwise have voted for Nixon.
1972. Wallace entered the crowded Democratic primary field and won Maryland, Michigan, as well as Florida. Once again he approached Hubert Humphrey through an intermediary about the Vice-Presidential slot and once again Humphrey did not respond. While Wallace got votes, George McGovern’s campaign was more astute at getting delegates, and there was never a chance Wallace could win, but he could certainly be a spoiler. Nixon was delighted to see him in the Democrat chicken coop but worried he might bolt once again and run as a third party candidate. Many calculation were made. Among McGovern’s campaign staff were Bill and Hilary Clinton. Then that weirdo shot him. HIs assailant sought fame and barely knew who Wallace was. One weirdo too many.
1976. In a wheel chair he entered another crowded Democratic primary field but had little impact and dropped out quickly. He was allowed to address the convention, but he was a shadow of the rabble rouser he once was, and his effort to play the elder statesman was lame. Jimmie ‘Who’ Carter won and won again, the nomination and the election.
Footnotes to Wallace
Hatred and fear, these win elections. This was the lesson the Republican Party took away from the Wallace experience it has gradually make its own since. To paraphrase a Republican campaign analyst in 1968, find out what they fear, find out what they hate, and play to those and only to those. If white blue-collar workers fear that lower-paid blacks will take their jobs, play that card. If white middle-class suburbanites fear blacks will move into the neighbourhood and lower real estate values and mix races, play that card. ‘Playing the card’ means articulating these fears for them in a way that is socially acceptable but unmistakeable — code it — so that they can say it and in so doing realise they are not alone. This crystallised into ‘The Silent Majority’ which was hardly silent and probably not a majority, but it was a brilliant conceptualization. People motivated by hatred and fear will go to the polls and vote. Wallace’s campaigns both in Alabama and in northern primaries brought many hundreds of thousands first-time voters to the polls in general or primary elections. That campaign manager used other examples and expressed them much more forcefully than I have done in deference to the PG-17 rating of this blog.
Demeaning accounts in press. The resentment that Wallace bore toward the North and its surrogate, the federal government, is easy enough to understand when reading the contemporary press accounts of him, his followers, and his campaigns quoted here. The ‘New York Times,’ ‘Time Magazine,’ CBC-TV News, all struggled to find a slot into which to place them, and they settled on the easiest one to hand. Drawing on their knowledge of the South from reading Al Capp’s ‘Lil Abner’, the pigmies of the Fourth Estate labelled them hillbillies, rednecks, hicks, yokels, and rubes. The early descriptions of Wallace on the campaign trail in North reek of condescension and deprecation. Everything about him was described as though he were a specimen in a jar, his wristwatch, his haircut, his finger nails, these were all subjected to the journalistic acid test, namely, can I get a byline out of this?

This is a lengthy and detailed biography of one Jeremy Thorpe (1929-2014). Jeremy who? He served in the British parliament for twenty years (1959-1979) and was leader of the Liberal Party, 1967-1976, until a spectacular fall from grace. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he was a scion of the upper middle class of his time and place, reared by nannies, sheltered and seldom disciplined. His mother doted on him as the only boy in the family to the occasional resentment of his two older sisters. Jeremy was fifteen when his father died, and thereafter the money slowly ran out.

When German bombing threatened in 1939 his parents sent him (and the girls) to the United States, where he spent three years in middle school. There he found the environment freer with more emphasis on individuality than the conformism stressed at home. He was neither athletic nor bookish. He had a ear for music and accents, playing the violin quite well (sometimes in public) and mimicking teachers to the amusement of his peers. That combined with a theatrical bent, though he did not act in school plays. He craved to be the centre of attention, dressing to catch the eye, making grand entrances, and saying things to surprise or shock. This is all rather like most adolescent boys, but he did not grow out these but cultivated them as he matured. By the same token he was considerate of others, egalitarian in manner, one who looked to the future and not the past, gregarious, optimistic, and energetic, this latter being, I have always thought, an essential for anyone in politics. His American experience left him with a lifelong commitment to the Special Relationship across the Atlantic.
He had powers of concentration and a retentive memory. He would have made a good barrister, one who could absorb a brief inside out, as they say in chambers, if only he concentrated on it. If someone told him about a book he took it in, and made it his own, so that later if he told someone else about the book, it sounded as if he had read it himself. He focussed on people and he was good at remembering names. When he talked to someone – a duchess at a soiree or a dustman at a political rally — he locked onto them as if, for those moments, they were the most important people in the world. He did not fidget and look over their shoulder for someone else more important to whom to talk. These are assets in campaigning. But he was not particularly adept at debating and if challenged on a point by either the duchess or the dustman he was likely to escape with a quip or laugh.
Much influenced by family friend Lloyd George’s example, he committed himself to the Liberal Party nearly in cradle and never wavered from that though by the time he entered politics, it had been nearly extinguished. His mother was a dyed in the wool Conservative who held an elected office the local shire council, but she was unstinting in her support for his ambitious, and perhaps always hoped that he, like others who started out as Liberals, Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson, would change. He spent his years at Oxford pursuing impressive offices, ending as president of the Oxford Union. He was a very poor student and barely completed the law degree and only passed the bar examination on a second or third sitting thanks to the great effort of a chum to prepare him. He was an indifferent barrister, best at appealing to a jury’s emotions and completely unaware of points of law or court procedure, with no grasp of detail, as more than one judge said. His real interest was always politics.
While a student he campaigned often for Liberals in General and By Elections. When he was old enough, rather than vying for one of the very few safe Liberal seats, which might have been possible due to retirements, he picked a rock-ribbed Conservative constituency that had not voted Liberal in two generations, and set to work and seven years later he was elected. The man had application.
He made little money from law, but when ITV was born he applied for a job there and become the host for a popular science program. In an age when all television was live to air, he was just the man, an easy manner, a ready smile, a quick wit, an adroit ability to segue over cracks in the proceedings. He became a reporter on international news and went to Africa for the independence celebrations in Ghana, and he kept travelling and reporting as the Empire converted itself to the Commonwealth. He met and befriended many of the leaders of the emerging nations in Africa, and did his best to explain their causes to his audience in Great Britain. He had a career in television for some years while still practicing law, when there was client, and working in the constituency. Television gave him exposure but very little money. He practiced law in the constituency, too, at cut rates to establish himself. For years he wore his father’s clothes to save money but that also made him seem a dandy from another age that appealed to his sense of theatre, and he lived at home with his mother in Surrey from which he travelled on British Rail to London and North Devon, the constituency, and in all those hours on trains, he chatted up one and all, some of whom recognised him from television and he lapped that up. The man loved an audience. The first time he ran in North Devon he doubled the previous Liberal vote and lost. Four years later he doubled it again and won.
When Jo Grimond retired as Liberal parliamentary leader, Thorpe became leader of the ten Liberals in the House of Commons. Though the Liberals were then a tiny party in electoral terms they retained an elaborate party organization from the days when they were a governing party, councils, assemblies, committees, and boards in profusion. Thorpe proposed changes to streamline that but those who sat on those councils, assemblies, committees, and boards resisted, though they did next to nothing to promote the Liberal cause in the electorate. He then did the next best thing and ignored them. He had three jobs: member of parliament, barrister in London, and travelling correspondent for television, and now leader of a parliamentary party. It was too much even for him, and he quit the law which brought in less money than the cost of the chambers.
In politics he was a vigorous champion of human rights, at the forefront of many campaigns against apartheid in South Africa and the rebel regime in Rhodesia. He also espoused equality for women and recognition of homosexuality in British legislation. He likewise advocated British entry into the European Community. The high water mark of his career was 1974 when the Liberal won 20% of the vote and in the consequent hung parliament, the prospect of a coalition government arose. The Labour leader Harold Wilson wanted another election, not a coalition. Edward Heath, the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister conferred with Thorpe, but Heath refused to consider electoral reform, i.e., proportional representation, ending that brief episode. Sound familiar? In 2010, for those who have not been paying attention, the Liberals entered a coalition with the Tories and for their trouble were obliterated in the 2015 British election to the benefit of the Conservatives.
Bust of Thorpe in the House of Commons.
In this period Harold Wilson, first as leader of the Opposition and then as Prime Minister, encouraged the Liberals because they siphoned most of their votes from the Conservatives. Accordingly he always treated Thorpe well, invited him to events, praised his speeches, allowed him some patronage to distribute, enacted legislation that gave tax benefits to those who contributed to the Liberal Party, sent cars to pick him up…. By contrast Edward Heath found Thorpe a poseur of no substance, and could hardly abide him and made no such efforts to court him or the Liberal Party. What a triumvirate! Heath the detail-minded plodder, Wilson the wheeler-dealer, and Thorpe the razzmatazz showman.
Ted Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, and Harold Wilson.
The few people who remember Jeremy Thorpe today most likely recall the debacle that ended his career in 1976 when his name was regularly in 30-point type on newspaper screamers at every tube station in London and throughout Great Britain. He was a homosexual at a time when homosexuals in important positions were, in addition to the social, religious opprobrium, and illegality, were regarded as security threats thanks to Guy Burgess. Added to the animal satisfaction, in Thorpe’s case there was the added appeal of the secrecy, melodrama, and theatricality of secret homosexual liaisons. Such was his discretion that even well-known homosexuals who knew him did not realise he shared their orientation, though in time he became less and less discreet. The author gives quite a compelling account of how homosexuality meshed with Thorpe’s personality without descending into the prurient details of an ABC interviewer. Though a good number of people came to know of his homosexuality over the years, including the police and security services, they turned a blind eye but I am not sure why because as Liberal leader he had access to security and defence briefings. There many boyfriends and they came and went. But one of them, Norman Scott, plagued him for years and years and years. Asking for money, bragging to others of his hold on Thorpe, writing letters to Thorpe’s mother, appearing at Thorpe’s parliamentary office. Scott was by all accounts mentally disturbed though he was good looking and could be personable in short bursts. Thorpe tried for years to find a niche for him, securing a number of jobs for him while giving him money. Scott soon wore out his welcome at the jobs and came ever back to Thorpe for more, and more, and more. He even denounced Thorpe to the police who duly noted the allegation and ignored it, noting that Scott had spent time in more than one asylum.
In 1976 Scott’s life was threatened by a man with a gun who killed Scott’s dog. Did Jeremy Thorpe have anything to do with this…well, there is the mystery? He resigned as leader, very reluctantly, under great pressure from his parliamentary colleagues. Three years later there was a trial for conspiracy to commit murder and Thorpe was one of four arraigned, and it all came spilling out in every last detail. It was a feast for the carrion of the media and every morsel was chewed, belched up, and chewed again. His legion of friends and admirers melted away. The men involved, apart from Thorpe, were dubious characters and with chequered histories. Several were accomplished and repeated liars, and should they now be believed? In the end they were acquitted and Thorpe tried to turn that into a victory, but in the course of the trial a great deal had come out of the tube that would not go back. He ran again for parliament and lost….
In the midst of this sage with Scott, Thorpe married a women who knew his homosexuality but like many others found him engaging, and she enjoyed the glamor or Westminster, lunches at the Palace, trips to exotic Africa, and so on. Moreover, they shared intellectual interests in art and architecture. Many observers have since said that he changed as a result, became less theatrical, more relaxed, more confident. Thorpe timed his surprised wedding to upstage a coup against his leadership in the party, and it worked a treat. She was killed in a car accident two years after marriage and he went into a stunned silence for a year and a half. Emerging only occasionally to perform his public duties. He did re-marry on similar terms and this women stuck with him through the ordeal of the trial.
The book is lively and replete with incidents and colourful characters but at 600 pages the detail is so great, the names carpet bombed that I was lost most of the time. The pages are dotted with endnotes to sources of the assertions made and events reported, and replete with asterisked explanatory notes on the characters at the bottom of every other page or so. The author worked on this study over a 25-year period, interviewing everyone and anyone who knew, saw, worked with or against Thorpe, including Thorpe himself. It is all very dense. The length might also seem disproportionate to Thorpe’s achievements. As far I could tell, despite his many pronouncements no cause, no legislation depended on his advocacy his voice, vote, or his action. On the other hand, had he been silent or opposed these matters, then perhaps their progress might have slower. And he was one of the founders of Amnesty International, a tireless advocate for European union, and an effective publicist for the British Commonwealth as a model of cooperation. Even more impressive is to know that many of his most compelling speeches were unscripted.
In common with most contemporary biographers, Bloch says nothing at all about religion in Thorpe’s life, though I expect his parents were churchgoers and he must have been, too, as a child and boy. Not quite, there is one reference half way through within wife died and Thorpe spoke of the spirit living on.
There are a lot of might-have-beens in Thorpe’s story. Had he joined Conservative or Labour he would certainly have made it to the front bench and perhaps leadership. Had homosexuality not been illegal and socially unacceptable, he would have perhaps been even more successful as Liberal leader, because hiding his life as a homosexual must have drained a great deal of energy and concentration from his day job, and hiding it finally undid him. Had he followed the advice of several friends to call the bluff of his nemesis and get it over with once and for all even that meant going public, he might have weathered it.
Michael Bloch
The book delivers on the potential seldom realised in the biographies of showing that the boy fathered the man. The traits, attitudes, postures, affectations of young Jeremy formed the man he became. Indeed it does that explicitly and effectively.