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7 “Wallaceism is an insidious and treacherous type of disease” The 1970 Alabama Gubernatorial Election and the “Wallace Freeze” on Alabama Politics Gordon E. Harvey The 1970 Democratic gubernatorial primary election in Alabama is widely considered the nastiest in state history. That election saw George Wallace use the divisive and destructive politics of race to defeat Albert Brewer, who had assumed the governorship in 1968 after Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, succumbed to cancer in the middle of her term. After a relatively clean primary, Brewer outpolled Wallace 42 to 41 percent with a lead of almost 8,000 votes, although both fell short of the necessary 50 percent needed to secure the nomination. Brewer received virtually all the black vote while splitting the white vote with Wallace. In the runoff Wallace used race to destroy Brewer’s chances at winning, dashing any hopes that the state would move past the political intransigence that prevented it from addressing serious problems such as illiteracy and poverty. As Alabama’s political nadir, the 1970 election offers an excellent example of the destructiveness of race in politics. One of the last skirmishes in the struggle for the direction of Alabama’s Democratic Party, the race was the last best chance for the state to enter the new politically moderate, post–Civil Rights era in the South. The election also dashed a slowly growing impetus for reform begun by the moderate Brewer during his short tenure. In short, the 1970 election brought Alabamians to a crossroads at which they faced a choice to pursue the state’s past or its future.1 Although in 1970 it failed to offer a candidate in the gubernatorial election , the state Republican Party had enjoyed limited growth in the early 1960s. For Alabama’s nascent Republican Party, 1962 represented a coming out of sorts. The results of that year’s elections revealed cracks in the foundation of the state’s long dominant Democratic Party. That year George Wallace defeated the liberal James E. “Big Jim” Folsom and the moderate Ryan deGraffenreid to win the Democratic nomination for governor, a victory that assured him the governor’s chair. In that same election all of Alabama ’s incumbent congressmen won reelection, but Republicans were ¤nally competitive as Tandy Little became the ¤rst Republican elected from Montgomery to the state legislature since Reconstruction. Although more Republicans lost than won in statewide elections, their few victories were notable and their losses were more competitive than ever, not only in Alabama but across the region as well.2 Not all of Alabama’s Democratic incumbents had it easy that year. Lister Hill, the state’s senior U.S. senator, serving since 1938, faced the most serious challenge of his political career. Hill had sponsored such important legislation as the Rural Telephone Act, the Rural Housing Act, the Vocational Education Act, and the National Defense Education Act and was father of the National Institutes of Health, the Hospital and Health Center Construction Act (Hill-Burton Act of 1946). But in 1962 he barely survived a Republican challenge to his seat. Hill had long been associated with the New Deal and had succeeded in bringing to his impoverished state dozens of important government services and millions of federal dollars. He and his fellow Alabama congressmen were so closely associated with New Deal liberalism that in 1947 The Nation judged Alabama, then under Governor Big Jim Folsom, the most liberal state in the nation. Liberal Alabama congressmen such as Hill, Carl Elliott, Bob Jones, Albert Rains, and Kenneth Roberts were successful as long as race was not an issue. All this changed in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, which saw Dixie’s Democrats split from the national party over Harry Truman’s civil rights positions. Those politicians who had once sidestepped race as an issue in their service to the state were haunted by it and hunted for it. Remaining loyal to the national Democratic Party ensured that they could continue to funnel millions of much-needed federal dollars to the state, but race soon became a millstone around their necks.3 An embittered Hill never recovered from his narrow 1962 victory; he retired six years later (replaced by Wallace associate Jim Allen) and remained baf®ed by what he perceived as ungrateful Alabama voters clouded by the politics of race. His slim margin of victory over Republican Jim Martin, a Gadsden businessman, by 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent, a mere 6,803...

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