By the end of September George Wallace had arrived in the polls; 21 percent of Americans were supporting the former Alabama governor for President, making him a credible third-party force in the race while his Alabaman campaign workers struggled to get him onto every state ballot in the country.

The brief defiance he had shown federal marshals attempting to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963 had earned Wallace notoriety and a reputation as a dangerous man, both of which he had attempted to exploit as a minor Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. Now he was back after spending four years honing his angry appeal; when Alabama’s restriction against successive terms threatened his re-election as governor, Wallace asked the people to vote by mail, then called a special session and demanded an amendment to the state constitution. With a speed that might have impressed the master manipulator Huey Long himself, the Alabama house capitulated in twenty seconds to Wallace’s demand. The state senate vote fell short, though, and Wallace- after making sure various choice projects were canceled in his opponents’ districts but failing to get the filibuster law changed by the state supreme court—talked his ailing wife, Lurleen, into running for his job instead. They campaigned together, and despite her reluctance on the stump and recent cancer surgery, Mrs. Wallace whipped all comers. George Wallace retained access to the governor’s mansion, as well as to state moneys and workers for his 1968 presidential attempt.

By the late sixties Wallace’s violent rhetoric seemed less jolting. He was one of a number of apocalyptic political characters—black and white—promising to “stir things up.” He set himself against the two national parties, whose nominees he called “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” He spoke vengefully on behalf of “common folks” and their children who were being bused as part of “social experiments” concocted by “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Wallace gave almost exactly the same fiery oration several times a day, but he seemed powerfully to mean it. Although he could confide to a reporter in Cleveland that “race is what’s gonna win this thing for me,” Wallace became a master of speaking in racial code as a national candidate. “He can use all the other issues,” marveled a former Alabama senator, “—law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights—and never mention race. But people will know he’s telling them, ‘A nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.’ ” Part of Wallace’s vivid bigotry came naturally to him, of course, but some had also been campaign bluster he adopted after losing his first governor’s race as an Alabama moderate when he vowed he’d “never be out-niggered again.” He had returned a slightly different man and, after victory, declared famously in his 1963 inaugural, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The 1968 campaign of his American Independent party found him pruning a little of what he had added,