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What holds the mind in the Wallace race, however, is the symbolism rattling around in the play. Wallace in the past has been accused of a mean and opportunistic depthlessness. Yet his career now opens upon unexpected dimensions of passion and forgiveness and redemptive possibilities. If Wallace is an opportunist, as every politician is, he has also displayed resources of courage and endurance and temperament and even of grace.
One recent night, George Wallace Jr. was riding up to Scottsboro—that resonant Alabama place name, home of the Scottsboro Boys—to give a talk to some Wallace workers at the courthouse. As the Cadillac sedan fired up the interstate from Montgomery in the dusk and into a soft Alabama night, George Jr. talked about his father. They are close. A few nights before his father was shot in Maryland, George Jr. had a dream in which just such a shooting occurred, except that in the dream, George Sr. died. George Jr., a poised, intelligent, decent young man with his mother's eyes and his father's eyebrows, who works as director of student finance at Troy State University, is 30 now. He has been giving political speeches since he was seven and his daddy stood him up on chairs so he could reach the microphone at political rallies.
Once in Michigan, George Jr. remembered, "I watched while my father just set a crowd on fire. Set them on fire!" Was that frightening? he was asked. A pause. "Yes." But then: "I thought to myself: I wonder why it takes a man from south Alabama to set these people on fire. Why isn't there a man from Michigan who can set these people on fire?"
George Wallace, the senior George, promises his people that he will never go out trying to set the rest of the country on fire again. "I already been shot outta the presidential race once," he jokes sardonically. Besides, he says, "everything I was saying in the '60s and '70s is now the conventional wisdom." It was never race at all, it was Big Government interference that was the issue, it was states' rights. That always sounded like a self-serving and morally evasive line. But maybe in the deeper levels of Confederate psychology, down in the almost pagan sources of Southern Scotch-Irish defiance, there is some truth in it. It is the truth of a profound sense of community, touchy and estranged and quick to take offense and to punish. It is essentially a tribal ethic. The tragedy of the South was that the honor of the white tribe came to depend upon the subservience of blacks.
But in a sense, the tragedy of race was secondary in the drama of George Wallace. He used it, when convenient. But when he ventured into the presidential primaries, it was the honor of the tribe of outraged Middle Americans that he was riding forth to rescue and avenge. It was Pickett's Charge across a vast suburban parking lot, and it ended in a bloody mess. But in a way it succeeded. The Reagan victory of 1980 was a vindication of Wallace's social conservatism, if not of his populist economics.
Driving back down from Scottsboro well past midnight, George Jr. turned in his seat with a small, inspired smile and said: "You remember The Last Hurrah? Well, in that one, at the end, Skeffington lost the election. Down here, we're going to have The Last Hurrah, with a twist. We're gonna win!"