Changing minds: George Wallace
The recent news that the federal government is planning to mount a legal challenge to the state of Arizona’s new immigration law is just another outrage in a long series of outrages by the Obama administration. Even though the state of Arizona is only trying to protect its citizens and enforce policies consistent with federal law, Obama and Holder have chosen to take it to task for doing so.
I am in agreement with the Arizona side in this particular dispute, as are the majority of the American people. But, although the situation is profoundly different in most respects, it sparked a memory of another battle between the federal government and a state, which featured a dramatic visual from my youth: the 1963 moment in which Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood in the doorway of an auditorium at the University of Alabama to block the federal-court-ordered entry of black students there.
It was a dramatic act of theater by Wallace, who knew his cause was doomed and the federal government would win; he ended up stepping aside. Later on, after a shooting had left him a lifelong paraplegic and chronic pain sufferer, Wallace had a conversion experience and became a born-again Christian, renouncing his former segregationist views and trying to right the wrongs he’d perpetrated.
It is a complex story, made even more complex by the fact that when Wallace had started out as a politician (and this I had not known before; I just learned it while doing research for this post), he was considered a racial moderate compared to those against whom he was running. He substantially hardened his segregationist views for political reasons, and it seemed to work for him, since he became a very successful politician. So in Wallace’s case, it may be that he didn’t have quite so far to go for his change experience as one might think.
I learned a few other new facts while researching this piece. For example, Arthur Bremer, the man who shot Wallace, had no political beef with him; he merely wanted to assassinate some public figure and become famous, and Wallace was a target of opportunity. Then, after Bremer’s diary was published as a book, it became the basis (in a fictionalized version) for the movie “Taxi Driver,” which later served as inspiration for John Hinckley’s shooting of President Reagan. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art.
I also learned that one of the two black students whom Wallace attempted to block on the steps that day was named Vivian Malone Jones. Jones, who died in 2005, had a career in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. One portion of her life story that engendered a bit of a lump in my throat was this:
In October 1996, she was chosen by the George Wallace Family Foundation to be the first recipient of its Lurleen B. Wallace Award of Courage. At the ceremony, Wallace said, “Vivian Malone Jones was at the center of the fight over states’ rights and conducted herself with grace, strength and, above all, courage.”
And, in a last, probably tangential, but rather strange twist, there is the following connection:
[Jones’s] brother-in-law is Eric Holder, the current U.S. Attorney General.
I heard one defender of the suit state that Obama believes that immigration issues are the purview of the Federal government.
To me that is the fallacy of the suit. Immigration is deciding how many people you are going to accept in the country; establishing a procedure and mechanism to process them; issuing the enabling documents to those people; and monitoring their status while in transition.
That is not by any stretch what Arizona is dealing with. They are trying to cope with people who are in Arizona, and only Arizona, without taking the first, or any step, in the legal process.
It seems so straight forward to me. Of course like most rational folks, I realize that the suit has nothing to do with legal issues, but is a political show for a specific audience.
Eric Holder the brother-in-law: once again, truth is stranger than fiction.
Thanks for the history lesson, Neo!
What you allude to en passant, and what many do not understand, Neo, is that Wallace (and others) stood for States’ Rights. In the Civil Rights era, as in the War Between the States, the fundamental issue was resistance to Big Government. In both cases, that cause was inescapably linked to racism, and was submerged by it. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not until 2 years into the war.
That is why it remains for me The War Between the States, not the Civil War.
This go-round, States Rights are linked to anti-immigration and anti-HCR. We Rightists (in both senses of the word) are doomed never to succeed.
Let us not forget it was Democrat George Wallace.
Tom:
The South had no objection to northern states’ rights being trampled on in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, where even if a black man was deemed a free man in a northern state, the law of the northern state was superseded by the black man having been a slave in a southern state. Not to mention the Dred Scott decision.
The South seceded because the slaveholders running the South saw that with the election of a President in 1860 without a single electoral vote from the South, the South could no longer dominate the political conversation. It was analogous to a kid taking his ball and going home when his side lost the game.
The common thread behind the Southern states supporting the Fugitive Slave Act and seceding was not states’ rights, but slavery.
Disclaimer: my family tree contains a Confederate Colonel, the son of a slaveholder, killed in the Civil War, and also one of John Brown’s followers, killed at Harper’s Ferry.
Gringo: you prove my point, ignoring States Rights while pushing the slavery issue as the root cause of the War.
Thank goodness one of your progenitors was on the right side! Mine were still across the pond.
Wow! Eric Holder! Now, I know the rest of the story.
Wow! Eric Holder! Now, I know the rest of the story.
Really! Neo’s channeling the late great Paul Harvey.
Tom:
You’re correct that it should be called the War Between the States. A true civil war involves different factions vying for control of the central government, such as in Lebanon in the 1980s, or Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. It is more likely to lead to neighbor vs. neighbor fighting, rather than armies slugging it out on the battlefield. The Confederacy never intended to conquer the Union and control Washington, DC. Lee’s invasions of the North were merely intended to bring the war to a close and secure Southern independence.
Still, the 1861-1865 war is commonly called the Civil War, so I will continue to use that term. Besides, it’s shorter.
Many people believe that the Civil War settled the question of the federal government’s primacy over the states. It’s true that the North crushed the South at that particular moment in time, but I don’t believe that it ended state’s rights once and for all. The federal government was never intended to have the outrageous power and dominance that it enjoys today, where the states are mere vassals of Washington. The Founders would be horrified to see the spectacle of the federal government actively trying to block border states’ attempts to defend themselves against a foreign invasion, or gulf states’ efforts to protect their shorelines from the oil well blowout.
The states simply must rein in the federal government. At a bare minimum, the following steps need to be taken:
– Repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments
– Eliminate all government employee unions
– Abolish all racial preferences in hiring and college admissions
I’m sure others can suggest additional steps that I have missed.
These steps will not completely solve our problems, but they will go a long way towards restoring the balance between the states and the federal government, and between the public and private sectors.
State’s Rights must triumph this time, for if they don’t, I believe that we will be doomed to experience the full panoply of statist horror, up to and including death camps.
“The South had no objection to northern states’ rights being trampled on in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, where even if a black man was deemed a free man in a northern state, the law of the northern state was superseded by the black man having been a slave in a southern state. Not to mention the Dred Scott decision.”
Those were also in response to laws passed at a federal level by the northern states, they were not done in a vacuum. In some sense it is equivalent to the southern slave owners justifying their actions by the revolt of their slaves – the revolts were *in response* to the actions taken against them.
We can argue if the laws were *unfair* and the southern states shouldn’t have fought them – that is a different idea (IMO those laws were not unfair in and of themselves, they were after all strengthening liberties to all). However when faced with increasing federal powers you have to use federal ones to protect what you want. Even now we see that – given the recent expansions of federal power the use of federal regulations/bills to curb it is the only real recourse and *is not* being hypocritical.
Sadly, as politics goes, it wasn’t simply slavery where the North was pushing either, we may have not avoided the civil war anyway but if that had been the only issue I suspect that something else would have been done. Many of the southern states that succeeded had already begun emancipation (the economy was moving away from it anyway) and many in the north would just have assumed to not go to war.
Again, similar to now – take any one single thing and while you would be opposed to it, it wouldn’t have you as angry as you are now. Take all of together and it does, however there is usually some single issue. For instance Health Care – the Tea Parties rally around it and got their start there but are not really confined by it. In many ways what we see now with the Tea Parties is what was going on then except it was more or less defined by where you lived.
Slavery became one of the central issues because it was the most contentious, but it was far from the only one. It also was one where the North had little investment in it and the South depended on it, much easier for someone with no liability to tell someone with a great deal they are doing it wrong. It wasn’t like the North treated the Africans better, they just significantly oppressed them in different ways (while free, they were free to do nothing and die of starvation or disease).
The same thing that was fought over then is still there – the north has the manufacturing and money, the south has land and natural resources used in the manufacturing, and the states west of the Mississippi River mix it up and do not take sides. The North resents the money that goes to the southern states and figure they own them, the south resents the northerners telling them what to do, and the western states go about their business.
Although, thanks to many of the Democrats policies the North is loosing the money/manufacturing and now is wanting both the power and money flowing *in* from the rest of the country. As time goes on I suspect that the north east US will have significantly increasing resentment, but if they decide to punish us all I suspect that no one will care and ignore them.
Another interesting twist in history is the life of James Meredith, a civil-rights hero whose contentious admission to the University of Mississippi led to the de-segreagation of that school.
Meredith went on to get a LL.B. degree from Columbia University (of Obama fame), and later became a stockbroker. He became increasingly conservative in his later years, and a registered Republican. He once accused liberal whites of being the “greatest enemy” of whites, and opposed the martin Luther King holiday.
I don’t agree with all of Mr. Meredith’s views, but he’s another example of a life with odd twists and turns. See this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Meredith
I spent a lot of time in that Alabama as a child, and what you have learned about George Wallace is true. For a perspective of what all this meant to good people of my generation as we grew up is encapsulated in the magnum opus of the Driveby Truckers. I love the South, and cannot listen to this without tears.
These boys go to your Leonard Cohen place here, Neo. Go. Listen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGi_jRYF6Sw&feature=related
Correction:
On my above comment, the sentence should read:
“He once accused liberal whites of being the “greatest enemy” of blacks . . .”
J.L.: Very interesting link about Meredith. I had not known about his later life.
Bet he’s not an Obama supporter.
Neo: Its amazing the odd twists and turns that a person’s life takes. Individual people are too complicated and multi-dimensional to fit into the simplistic frameworks of a Left that sees people only as “masses” “classes” and “groups.”
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There is a big difference between the Federal Government stepping in during the civil rights era and the current example of the federal government suing Arizona. Big enough that these comparisons cannot really be made.
George Wallace and the state of Alabama were defying the “law of the land” when they refused to acknowledge the Federal Government’s civil rights laws, and in fact they acted against the Federal Government when he standed in the door. That can be legitimately claimed as insurrection and gives credibility to the federalization of the Alabama National Guard.
Arizona, however, is not defying the law of the land and is instead enforcing it at the state level. I’m not a legal scholar, but I understand that is going to be the test for constitutionality in this case. If Arizona were changing the enforcement of the Federal law in any way, the law could be overturned. If it is only mirroring existing Federal law, then it should stand based on previous precedent.
A more clear example for comparison would be certain states’ refusal to enforce Federal drug laws, such as the ban on marijuana. Indeed, the attempt to legalize marijuana on a state level could, and should be challenged by the Federal government regardless of Obama’s position on the subject as this is a clear usurpation of Federal authority.
It would be ironic if it weren’t so tragic. This current administration has no legal consistency to it.
Daniel says:
George Wallace and the state of Alabama were defying the “law of the land” when they refused to acknowledge the Federal Government’s civil rights laws, and in fact they acted against the Federal Government when he standed in the door. . . .
Arizona, however, is not defying the law of the land and is instead enforcing it at the state level.
Excellent point, and very true.
In essence, the Obama administration is siding with those violating the law, rather than with a state that is trying to enforce the law of the land.
Daniel and JL: Yes, that’s why I wrote “the situation is profoundly different in most respects.”
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