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Carter, Dan T..
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics 
. Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 2000. P. 81-96The Moral Compass of AmbitionWhenever Lurleen could arrange a baby-sitter, the two friends wandered down tothe nearby Choctawhatchee River for a late afternoon of fishing. (WalJace couldnot abide long quiet hours sitting, watching a cork in the water.) In the mornings,when Mary Jo took her break, Lurleen would walk across the backyard to thehigh school, and they would sit in the tall-ceilinged teacher's lounge with cups ofcoffee and talk. Encouraged by her new friends, Lurleen brushed up hershorthand and typing and successfully applied for a job as part-time secretary tothe county superintendent of education. She earned less than twenty-five dollarsa week, but gained a sense of accomplishment and some degree of financialindependence. For the first time, she even hired a black woman to help with thechildren and the chores.Despite his apparent exile in a backwater judicial circuit, her husbandremained in the thick of state politics. In later years, Wallace would seek tominimize his close ties with the liberal Big Jim, but in 1953 he showed littlehesitancy at broadcasting and exploiting those connections. When Folsom askedhim to run his South Alabama campaign for the upcoming gubernatorial election,Wallace assured him that he was already "spreading the Folsom gospel in theseparts.Although at the height of his popularity, Folsom remained vulnerable on twocounts: whiskey and corruption. State newspapers-as well as politicalopponents--hammered away at the sorry record of petty (and not so petty)thievery that had marked his first administration and they reminded Alabamiansof several bouts of public drunkenness as well as an arrest for driving under theinfluence during his first term.But voters ignored the "Iyin' newspapers," and readily accepted Folsom'sgood-natured dismissal of the charges. His mother had taught him how to handlesuch childish accusations when he was a boy: "If they throw mud at you," Folsom
 
said, "don't try to wipe it off or it'll smear. Just wait until it dries and it'll fall off byitself. Unspoken was a second maxim: go on the offensive and an opponent'scharges are soon forgotten.In four months of hard campaigning, Wallace learned the nuts and bolts ofbuilding a following. He saw how Folsom devoted as much attention to theragged farmer-as to the well-dressed businessman. When someone sent in fiveor ten or even two dollars, it was just as important to write a warm and personalresponse as to acknowledge the hundred-dollar or two-hundred dollar donor:each had the same number of family members and friends. Above all, Folsomtaught Wallace the role of spectacle and entertainment, the necessity to convincevoters they were part of an important crusade. "Make no small plans," Folsominstructed, "they have no magic to stir men's blood.”A few flickering films remain of the 1954 race. They show just how hardWallace tried to duplicate Big Jim’s folksy platform rapport, a blend ofexaggeration, hyperbole, ridicule, and a kind of "country sarcasm" that mockedhis enemies. By nature combative and aggressive, Folsom's South Alabamacampaign manager could never successfully mimic the relaxed style of the bigman from north Alabama; when Folsom was taking the hide off an opponent, hemanaged to make it sound like a good-natured teasing over the backyard fence.Still, even an awkward Wallace could bring a crowd to its feet. At a hugerally toward the end of the 1954 campaign he repeatedly mocked Folsom'sopponents for their complaints that Big Jim was not "dignified and refined." In1950, the "so-called 'decent and dignified' administration moved onto Capitol Hill,"Wallace told his audience. "And let me tell you," he said, his arm waving in theair, "the first thing this so-called 'decent and dignified' administration did was toraise the taxes on the Little Folks." On May 4, Wallace told the cheering crowd,voters had the choice of turning to this "so-called 'decent and dignified'administration" or they could reelect Folsom. ''I'll take Folsomism!" he shouted.He deftly positioned himself into the limelight. One of Folsom's televisioncommercials led off with a plug for his political coordinator ("Original scrip [sic] by judge George Wallace"). Wayne Greenhaw, who became a well-known Alabama journalist in the 1960s and 1970s, remembered sitting at his hometown
 
barbershop with his father in the middle of the 1954 campaign when Wallaceburst through the door. He talked and talked and talked and "mostly talked abouthimself," recalled Greenhaw. "He probably didn't say ten words about jimFolsom." Back in their car, Greenhaw's father predicted, "That man's not going tostop until he's governor of Alabama.,,43Folsom's apostasy on race proved relatively unimportant in the 1954election since the campaign took place on the eve of the Supreme Court's Brownv. Board of education decision, which called for the end of segregation in thepublic schools. But during the next two years, the crowds stopped laughing at BigJim’s jokes about "moonlight integration."
THE angry revolt
of white southerners began in Mississippi. Within weeks afterthe court's decision in Brown, white business and civic leaders in the Delta townof Indianola ignited what would become an authentic grassroots uprising: theSouthern White Citizens' Council movement. Community based, but increasinglybacked by a well-funded headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi, the anti-integration movement swept through the Delta and across the Black Belt,westward through Louisiana and into Texas, and eastward as far as theTidewater of the Carolinas and Virginia. Its goal: "massive resistance" within theregion to any changes in the "southern way of life." Citizens' Councils silencedthe voice of moderate whites, coordinated the adoption of a wide range of stateand local anti-integration legislation, and forced southern politicians to back awayfrom even the most tepid support of peaceful compliance with the SupremeCourt's decision.In Alabama the Citizens' Council movement initially had little supportoutside the handful of counties where blacks made up a substantial majority. Theeditor of the Montgomery Advertiser protested after Black Belt businessmen andlandowners threatened to fire their black tenants and workers if they made anyattempt to register to vote. The "manicured Kluxism of these White Citizens'Councils is rash, indecent and vicious," admonished Grover Hall Jr. "The night-riding and lash of the 1920s have become an abomination in the eyes of publicdecorum. So the bigots have resorted to a more decorous, tidy and lessconspicuous method-economic thuggery.
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