Twilight of the Firebrand

By LANCE MORROW

The past has made an impression on Montgomery. The city's air reverberates with dead glories and brags, old rhetoric, old songs gusting out of the tribal ^ memory. The state capitol amounts to a sort of truculent shrine. A memorial to the Confederate dead stands on its grounds. "When this historic shaft shall crumbling lie," begins a grandiloquent inscription carved in the stone, "In ages hence, in woman's heart will be/ A folded flag, a thrilling page unrolled,/ A deathless song of southern chivalry."

Jefferson Davis stood on the west portico to take his oath as President of the Confederacy in 1861. George Wallace stood on the same spot 100 years later, took his first oath as Governor and promised, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! And segregation forever!" From where Wallace stood, one can look across the way and see Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the civil rights headquarters in the days of the bus boycott that began the long American journey.

King became a symbol of something. Wallace became a symbol of something else. Now King is a national holiday. Wallace is an extinct volcano, to tamper with Disraeli's phrase.

Last week Wallace's wheelchair was pushed into the old state house of representatives chamber. Fighting tears, Wallace spoke in a thin, pained voice. He talked about the Wallace era, about the long transit that Alabama made from the Depression to the Sunbelt. Wallace glancingly compared himself to Peter the Great and the apostle Paul. He announced that, at age 66, he will not run again for Governor. The long drama of his career will end. And so, symbolically, will an era.

The only violence that Wallace mentioned in his speech were the five shots that Arthur Bremer fired into his body in a Maryland parking lot in 1972. He did not mention the four black Sunday-school children bombed in a Birmingham church in 1963, or the way he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to keep blacks from going to class with whites. The omission was natural enough. That was long ago, and in some ways, it was in another country.

The drama of Wallace's era was often ugly. In full cry during the 1960s and early '70s, George Wallace set violent passions loose. But then, violent passions raged all over the American landscape in those days. The wildfire on the left set the right to smoldering. Defiant, depthless and charismatic, bristling with an animal vitality, Wallace knew the political uses of resentment, of powerlessness. He began by playing upon the psychology of race in the South, then, going national, assembled a constituency of the aggrieved, of Americans fed up with antiwar protest and long hair and Big Government interference and (paradoxically) the disintegration of authority. The whole American edifice seemed to be coming down.

Leading the forces of chaos were "pointy-headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight." Wallace became the Spartacus of an American class revolt against the elite and the chic and the powerful. He developed a fine dismissive snarl. "Send them a message," he said, in that thick, dark voice. Half an inch beneath the surface of his words there ran an undercurrent of menace. There was a backwoods defiance in the fire that lit George Wallace up. There was also something, more than something, of the opportunist and the demagogue.

Was it the opportunist in Wallace that eventually made his peace with Alabama blacks, and even won their crucial support in his last campaign? Or was it a matter of amazing grace? If slavery and all that followed were the American original sin, George Wallace ended his journey in the vicinity of redemption. It was a strange and moving American spectacle to see Wallace a few weeks ago receive an honorary degree from Tuskegee Institute, the blacks in the audience applauding him with a forgiving warmth. Wounded, in his wheelchair, subdued and sweet, he blew them kisses.