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From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1964-1994, by Dan T. Carter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. xv, 134 pp. $22.95.
DAN CARTER, EMORY UNIVERSITY'S DISTINGUISHED CHRONICLER of the Southern past, delivered the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures at LSU in the spring of 1991. His three original lectures, the core of From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich, focus on the impact of Governor George C. Wallace and the race issue on American politics since the early 1960s. Carter added a fourth lecture or chapter to project his story through the 1992 Presidential campaign and the Clinton Administration's first two years. When the author prepared his Fleming Lectures, he was immersed in writing a definitive Wallace biography, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Not surprisingly, these two monographs' major topics and theses are quite similar.
In his latest work, in Chapter One, "The Politics of Anger," Carter analyzes the evolution of Wallace's racial appeals to voters, first in Alabama and then on a national stage. Wallace's 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, drafted by Klansman Asa Carter, ventured beyond the traditional Southern litany of segregation and states' rights. Wallace evoked fears of a future America, "a mongrel unit of one under a single all powerful government" whose liberal leaders adhered blindly to the "false doctrine of communistic amalgamation" (p. 3). In this seminal speech, Wallace employed evocative language which fused white Southerners' twin phobias of government-imposed racial equality and godless communism.
Like the Populists of the 1890s, Wallace supporters were deeply alienated and class-conscious. Wallace, a perfect "mimetic orator" (p. 7), probed the depths of his followers' fears and emotions and articulated their grievances with a language and style which they shared. Carter suggests that Wallace gradually moved from his fiery racist rhetoric to a "soft-porn racism" (p. 4) in which he fueled emotions without mentioning race. His "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" at the University of Alabama in June 1963 marked a watershed in his rhetoric and his political career. This nationally televised episode provided Wallace with the media attention he desperately craved and allowed him to portray his racial obsession as a...