The scene possessed a grotesque impropriety. At the tomb of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Ill., Alabama's George Corley Wallace, symbol of unregenerate Southern racism, reverently placed a wreath of red and white flowers. Said Wallace: "It's good to be in the land of Lincoln."
Lincoln land, along with many other areas in the North, seemed fertile ground indeed for Wallace's third-party candidacy. About 3,000 people greeted him at the airport in Illinois' capital city, many driving as far as 100 miles and waiting hours under a hot sun to hear him take out after "scummy anarchists" and pseudo intellectuals. In Springfield, Mo., he drew the biggest political crowd ever to assemble in the city square—more than 10,000 people. In Milwaukee, 5,000 filed into the municipal auditorium, along with 600 hecklers, to listen to Wallace's perfervid oratory. Nearly everywhere, he put forth a strident defense of the nation's police. "If they could run this country for about two years," he cried, "they'd straighten it out."
No Exaggeration. Wallace asserted that the two major parties are as close as -"Tweedledum and Tweedledee," since both are "owned by the Eastern Establishment." For 100 years, he said, "both parties have looked down their noses and called us rednecks down here in this part of the country. I'm sick and tired of it, and on November 5, they're goin' to find out there are a lot of rednecks in this country."
From every indication, Wallace is not exaggerating. A Gallup poll last week showed that millions of U.S. union members are turning to Wallace, with 50% declaring for him in the South, 12% in the rest of the nation. Humphrey's labor support has fallen correspondingly, to only 42%. Since Gallup began surveying union people in 1936, no other Democrat has ever done so poorly with blue-collar workers. There is a good chance, too, that union men—as well as the legions of other middle- and lower-middle-class people at whom Wallace's appeal is aimed—will be able to vote for him in all 50 states. Ohio, the last major holdout, was ordered by Associate Justice Potter Stewart to put the Alabamian's name on the ballot pending a hearing by the Supreme Court next month.
Equal Fire. Though Wallace had hitherto spent most of his time attacking Democratic liberals, last week he finally turned equal fire on the G.O.P. "If you vote the national Republican ticket," he told a Little Rock, Ark., audience, "you have thrown your vote away." In 1952, he reminded them, Republicans said "pretty things" to the South, but then appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court. "The national Republican Party, for the first time since Reconstruction, put the bayonet in the backs of the people of Arkansas." Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, he added, was an attempt to "con" the South into repeating the mistake.