Echoes

“...you know, I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes — and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about niggers — and they stomped the floor.” --George Wallace, reflecting on how he won in 1962 after losing in the previous cycle

Via AlterNet - they have an excerpt from a new book by Ian Haney-Lopez - "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class."(Oxford University Press, 2014).

The story of dog whistle politics begins with George Wallace. But it does not start with Wallace as he stood that inauguration day. Rather, the story focuses on who Wallace was before, and on whom he quickly became.

Before that January day, Wallace had not been a rabid segregationist; indeed, by Southern standards, Wallace had been a racial moderate. He had sat on the board of trustees of a prominent black educational enterprise, the Tuskegee Institute. He had refused to join the walkout of Southern delegates from the 1948 Democratic convention when they protested the adoption of a civil rights platform. As a trial court judge, he earned a reputation for treating blacks civilly — a breach of racial etiquette so notable that decades later J.L. Chestnut, one of the very few black lawyers in Alabama at the time, would marvel that in 1958 “George Wallace was the first judge to call me ‘Mr.’ in a courtroom.” The custom had been instead to condescendingly refer to all blacks by their first name, whatever their age or station. When Wallace initially ran for governor in 1958, the NAACP endorsed him; his opponent had the blessing of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the fevered atmosphere of the South, roiled by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision forbidding school segregation, the moderate Wallace lost in his first campaign for governor. Years later, the victor would reconstruct the campaign, distilling a simple lesson: the “primary reason I beat [Wallace] was because he was considered soft on the race question at the time. That’s the primary reason.” This lesson was not lost on Wallace, and in turn, would reshape American politics for the next half-century. On the night he lost the 1958 election, Wallace sat in a car with his cronies, smoking a cigar, rehashing the loss, and putting off his concession speech. Finally steeling himself, Wallace eased opened the car door to go inside and break the news to his glum supporters. He wasn’t just going to accept defeat, though, he was going to learn from it. As he snuffed out his cigar and stepped into the evening, he turned back: “Well, boys,” he vowed, “no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”

So instead of staying true to his own principles, and understanding that his constituency needed leadership to help move them forward with integration, and to learn some new things about how to treat people with respect and humanity, Wallace only learns how to win elections by appealing to the baser instincts of the tribe.

And the kicker - in case you were wondering why "those dumbass southern rednecks" get to run things? First, try to remember the south has no kinda corner on the market when it comes to rednecks; cuz second, in the week following the episode of Wallace trying to defy Washington:

More than 100,000 telegrams and letters flooded the office of the Alabama governor. More than half of them were from outside of the South. Did they condemn him? Five out of every 100 did. The other 95 percent praised his brave stand in the schoolhouse doorway.

So, more than 50,000 telegrams - many from Illinois and Massachusetts and Colorado and Oregon - came in to Montgomery saying "Yay, George" and "Way to go, Mr Wallace" and "We're with you".  These things do not go unnoticed by the people who help politicians talk us into handing them power.

Here's the Kindle link at Amazon: