The director John Frankenheimer recently told an interviewer that his three- hour made-for-cable film about George Wallace is not intended "to give people a history lesson." That's too bad, because Americans, by and large, are not known for their sense of history, even recent history. Of a thousand students who served as extras in a scene where Wallace speaks at Harvard, "most of them never heard of George Wallace," Frankenheimer told National Public Radio's Robert Siegel. Siegel asked if that didn't impose "an enormous responsibility. You are telling a lot of people . . . all they know about George Wallace." Frankenheimer replied that he was not making a documentary, but 'a dramatic story,' of a tragic figure."
Indeed, Frankenheimer's George Wallace, airing on TNT on August 24 and August 26, is so empty of context -- "history," if you will -- that viewers will be left to ponder just why they should be moved by an account of the one- time Alabama governor's rise, fall, and attempt at redemption. It's as if the Montgomery bus boycott, Little Rock, the freedom riders, the sit-ins -- all of which occurred before Wallace became governor of Alabama -- never happened.
Those viewers without prior knowledge likely will leave the film believing that Wallace began and ended with racism. There is no mention of how or why a man who had been the governor of a small southern state for less than a year managed to attract stunning numbers of voters in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. There is a single line devoted to Wallace's extraordinary 1968 third-party presidential campaign and scant reference to his powerful showing in the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries.
Instead, the movie focuses most of its attention on Wallace (a splendid Gary Sinise) rolling in the hay with his second wife, Cornelia (a nymphomaniacal Angelina Jolie), on fictional confrontations with his former mentor, Gov. Jim Folsom (a scenerychewing Joe Don Baker), and on the murderous inclinations of an invented character who supposedly represents the seething anti-Wallace hatreds of Alabama's blacks (an interminably weeping Clarence Williams III).
The script attempts to capture Wallace's appeal by having Sinise deliver the following speech: "They all the time tryin' to call me a racist. Hell, won't none of 'em understand yet? Race is why all those people out there come over to us. Without me ever havin' to say the word 'race,' people gettin' what I'm talkin' about. . . . The Kennedys ain't got no idea how the common folks feel about this race-mixin' question. When they start catchin' this mess up North, it's gonna southernize the whole country out there."
If Wallace and his supporters had been all about racism and nothing more, there'd be little reason to bring him up in 1997. The truth is more intricate and more edifying: George Wallace helped set the political agenda that dominates Congress and the White House today.
One need not minimize Wallace's racism to understand that his political strength reached beyond it. In his early years, he ruthlessly played on the fears and uncertainty among Alabama's whites over the crumbling of segregation, and he would be forever stained -- and properly so -- by his bellicose defense of an inherently evil system. But his extraordinary showing in three northern primaries in 1964 evolved from more than his opposition to the civil-rights bill pending before Congress (a position taken by mainstream candidates like Barry Goldwater and George Bush, among others). His popularity also stemmed from his denunciation of what he called "crime in the streets." Goldwater would adopt the Wallace crime issue as his own in the general election, thus beginning the Republican party's embrace of crime as an issue.
Wallace stormed back into national politics in 1968 with his astounding third-party campaign; less than a month before the election, a Harris poll showed him with more than 20 percent of the vote. That's when Richard Nixon lifted Wallace's crime issue lock, stock, and barrel, and made it the centerpiece of his TV ad campaign in the final month. Even Hubert Humphrey started condemning "anarchists" for domestic disruptions. One political observer complained that "there are three guys running for Sheriff of the United States and no one for President."
Wallace's brilliant 1972 campaign slogan was "Send Them a Message." It allowed him to tap deep pools of public distrust of growing federal intrusion into what many considered local or private matters, and he gave voice to widespread uneasiness about increasing crime and civil disorder that few in authority appeared willing to confront for fear of seeming illiberal.
Wallace -- and those politicians of both parties wise enough to adopt his central arguments -- offered most Americans an outlet for their pent-up resentments. They were troubled by a faraway war claiming more and more lives and treasure, but galled by the excesses of antiwar demonstrators who seemed to them privileged, pampered, and unpatriotic. They were stunned by incendiary urban riots and stupefied that the government seemed to placate the looters and arsonists. They sensed that the country was losing its moral compass, that drugs and crime and teenage pregnancies and abortion and pornography and strictures on public prayer were symptoms of a society coming apart at the seams.
At the same time, Wallace articulated the prevalent alarm over the concentration of too much wealth in too few hands, too much dependence on foreign capital and foreign sources of energy, too many "giveaways" to foreign governments while too many Americans "live under bridges [or] lie on grates in the winter to keep warm."
One need not accept any of those views to agree that they appealed to real concerns of real people -- not to mindless, unreasoning fears, racial or otherwise. And although many of those concerns continue to be arrogantly or ignorantly dismissed by some as mere racial "code words," every president from Nixon to Clinton based his successful campaign on some key elements of the Wallace political canon.
It is this, rather than the attempted obstruction of integration, that is Wallace's true legacy -- and this uncomfortable truth may underlie the preference of many political historians and commentators to pigeonhole Wallace as a racist. Over the years, many of Wallace's positions have become politically respectable -- among them, shrinking the federal bureaucracy, balancing the budget, strengthening local law enforcement, allowing parents freedom of choice among schools, and taxing the "super-rich."
The fact that Wallace was the spokesman for some of these views has allowed too many Americans to dismiss them as a cover for racism and to belittle those who hold them as racists manque. That kind of reasoning is every bit as anti-intellectual and demagogic as Wallace's own appeals to bigotry.
Stephan Lesher, author of a biography of George Wallace, is writing Birth of the Image-Makers: The Emergence of Marketing Mavens and Media Manipulators in American Politics, 18241840 (Harcourt Brace).