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Anything, with Ketchup
There is, in fact, nothing else for George but politics and the pursuit of power. Food has no interest for him: he will eat anything, so long as it is smothered in ketchup. He is never without a cigar, but he cannot say what brand he is smoking at any given moment. He does not drink: alcohol, he says, "wastes your physical and mental energy." His dress is nondescript: always a white shirt and a faintly iridescent black suit. He has no hobbies and no interest in material possessions (he claims assets of $77,000). Aboard his campaign plane, he spends most of his time staring stolidly out the window, neither reading nor talking.
The private Wallace seems virtually emotionless. Always busy, he spends little time with his four children (Bobbi Jo, 23; Peggy, 18; George, 16; and Lee, 7); his late wife, Lurleen, reportedly once nearly divorced him as a consequence of his neglect. Yet in his anxiety to maintain a power base for his presidential bid, he did not hesitate to run her for Governor in 1966 (she died of cancer last May).
A B-29 flight engineer with the rank of sergeant in World War II, Wallace still receives an allowance for "nervous disability" from the Veterans Administration; despite constant air travel on his campaigns, he has a phobia about flying. Before going to war, he had received a law degree from the University of Alabama, and in 1946 he won election to the state house of representatives; in 1952 he was elected a state judge. He made his first, unsuccessful, try for the governorship in 1958. His opponent, John Patterson, had taken a harsher line on race, and Wallace learned a lesson. "They out-niggered me that time," he reportedly declared, "but they'll never do it again." They never have. Alabama today comes close to being George Wallace's personal satrapy, much as Louisiana was Huey Long's in the 1930s.
One Man's State
Alabama, a historically backward state, scarcely inched ahead during Wallace's regime. With a 4% sales tax and a low property levy, its tax structure is biased against lower-income workers. As Governor, Wallace sponsored a law providing that corporate income taxes can be raised only by constitutional amendment. He did raise spending greatly, but only by floating huge bond issues and obtaining massive grants for highways and education from the despised Federal Government.
In some respects, Alabama under Wallace became a police state. The climate of order, even today, is such that the FBI has to stand constant guard on the home of Federal Judge Frank Johnson, a notably liberal jurist. Wallace's contempt for his own state's constitution was clear when he ran his wife for Governor, in clear violation of the spirit of a clause