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Neo-Know-Nothings
Though Wallace bears a certain stylistic resemblance to the Populists of the 1890s, to whom he is often compared, Yale Historian C. Vann Woodward notes that the Alabatnian lacks entirely the Populists' positive approach. Mostly small farmers, the Populists had specific, rational proposals to curb the excesses of big business and finance. Wallace's philosophy was more accurately foreshadowed by such extremist groups as the Anti-Masonic Party of the 1820s, which felt that it was fighting a godless conspiracy, and the American Protection Association of the 1890s, which saw itself taking a stand against foreign infiltration. The Ku Klux Klan, though its tone and methods have been far more violent than Wallace's, shares his anti-Negro feelings. Wallace's most recent ancestor was the McCarthyite syndrome of the 1950s; it, too, exaggerated the very real dangers of Communism and transmogrified Communists into all-purpose villains.
Perhaps the best historical parallel is offered by the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just as the Wallaceites are trou bled by the migration of rural Negroes to the cities, the Know-Nothings were disturbed by the influx of foreigners, most of whom were Irish and German Catholics. A major aim of the movement was to bar Catholics from public office. Officially titled the American Party—as is Wallace's in some states—the Know-Nothings briefly held a balance of power in several state legislatures in the mid-1850s. In Massachusetts, they even had a majority. The high-water mark of Know-Nothingism was 1856, when former President Millard Fillmore, running for the presidency under the party's banner, polled 22% of the vote. The party split over slavery, however, and almost immediately fell apart, many members joining the new Republican Party.
Like the movements of the past, according to Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset, Wallace's American Independent Party is essentially a voice for "the sense of frustration of millions of Americans." He adds: "It is a movement of the adherents of religious and secular fundamentalism."
Some scholars have compared George Wallace's movement to Nazism and Fascism. German-born Professor Hans Morgenthau, perhaps extrapolating from his own country's unhappy past, identifies the Hitler and Wallace movements as representing "the revolt of the lower middle classes against the modern age." C. J. Burnett, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the third-party leader in two words: "Adolf Wallace." Such comparisons are as simplistic and misleading as anything George Wallace himself has hurled at his opponents. The Wallace phenomenon is disquieting enough in its own terms; it does not have to be equated with a political horror that arose in totally different ways and under totally different circumstances.
The Alabamian himself grows furious at the Hitler parallel, reminding his younger critics that "I was fighting Nazis before you were born." Which is, of course, true. Social Critic Michael Harrington writes that he would not call Wallace a