Let George Do It

"Bedfellows," went the gag, "make strange politics." And so they did, with success so smashing that it surprised even Alabama's Governor George Wallace and his wife Lurleen.

The distaff device first occurred to Wallace (TIME, March 4) after he had failed in a strong-arm attempt to amend Alabama's constitutional provision barring him from a second consecutive four-year term. Instead, he decided to resort to the "technicality" of running his wife for Governor in the Democratic primary. A pleasant, ingenuous mother of four, she had married George in 1943 when she was a 16-year-old dime-store clerk and he was a 23-year-old law-school graduate driving a dump truck. Until Wallace made her a candidate, Lurleen had been a bashful Statehouse homebody--the role to which she would like to revert.

Postoperative Campaign. Nevertheless, as soon as she had recovered from an operation (appendectomy-hysterectomy) in January, George started dragging his better half from rally to rally. Day after day, week after week, she smiled shyly as George solemnly introduced her as "the next Governor of Alabama," then gamely repeated her one memorized speech (average running time: one minute). After that, George, who for campaign purposes was billed as Lurleen's $1-a-year chief-adviser-to-be after November, pranced to the lectern and ranted on and on about his achievements as Governor since 1963.

Anti-Wallace Alabamians started wearing buttons proclaiming I'M TOO OLD FOR A GOVERNESS, but no one was really fooled. Nor did Wallace make any pretense that Lurleen would govern if elected. "My record is running, not my wife," he said ungallantly. VOTE FOR LURLEEN AND LET GEORGE DO IT, urged the billboards. Bumper stickers on cars simply said VOTE WALLACE.

"Grow with Flowers." George figured that Alabamians would probably split their votes among the nine other Democratic contestants, giving Lurleen at best a plurality, thus forcing her into a runoff with the second-place candidate. He assumed that her opponent would be State Attorney General Richmond Flowers, 47, who alone among the candidates had made a vigorous bid for the state's swelling Negro vote. "I do not believe that the Negro is inferior," Flowers told eager Negro audiences. "I am a man of the law and, like it or not, I am going to follow the law. Every individual is entitled to, and shall gain, equal opportunities." Refreshing as those words might have been to newly enfranchised Negroes, they were heresy to Alabama's old-line whites. And when Martin Luther King began promoting a GROW-WITH-FLOWERS bloc vote among Negroes, Lurleen began to look like Joan of Arc to anxious white supremacists.

She wound up with a startling 399,024 votes, nearly twice as many as George had garnered solo in the 1962 primary. She not only trounced Flowers (who got 142,665 votes), but also shellacked such Democratic stalwarts as former Congressman Carl Elliott (with 64,262) and two ex-Governors, John Patterson (32,305) and Kissin' Jim Folsom (21,729).

New Target. Lurleen's triumph also deflated Alabama Republicans, who had hoped to capitalize on their state's 1964 splurge for Barry Goldwater and elect Alabama's first G.O.P. Governor since 1872. The favorite had long been Representative James D. Martin, 47, a segregationist--though of a subtler stripe than Wallace--who came within a 6,845-vote whisker of defeating longtime Democratic Senator Lister Hill in 1962. However, after George and Lurleen proved that two can win more votes than one, Martin has understandably become less eager to run.

As a result, Alabama Republicans last week were concentrating on a new target for fall: the U.S. Senate seat held for the past 20 years by John Sparkman. Though Sparkman faced no real primary opposition last week, he produced a lackluster showing. A likely Republican opponent for Sparkman in November is former Alabama State G.O.P. Chairman John Grenier, a Goldwater trusty who served as executive director of the Republican National Committee until December 1964, when he resigned under pressure from moderates who wanted to steer the G.O.P. back into mid-channel.

Promise & Change. Whatever the old-line white politicians chose to do statewide, local elections brought some able new Negro candidates to the forefront. Among the most promising: Fred Gray, 35, a Black Belt Tuskegee attorney, who seemed assured of an undisputable victory in his race to gain the state house-of-representatives nomination until a curious last-minute surge of votes for his white opponent forced him into a runoff; Lucius D. Amerson, 32, a candidate for Macon County sheriff, who led his ticket but faces a tough runoff; the Rev. Henry McCaskill, 40, a civil rights-preaching Baptist minister, who finished first for Hale County sheriff but without a majority over the field of four; and Clarence Montgomery, 59, a Mobile barber and a N.A.A.C.P. official, who made the runoff for nomination to the state house of representatives.

Clearly, as much as Alabamians might want to hold back history, even George for once could not do it.

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