"Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation for ever!" he proclaimed on first being elected governor in 1963. Wallace's appeal, though, extended well beyond the South. He voiced the alienation felt by blue-collar workers and suburbanites in the face of the upheavals of the 1960s.
"Send them a message," he urged in his campaigns for the presidency. "Them" meant the "pointy-headed professors who can't park a bicycle straight"; the "briefcase-totin' bureaucrats"; and "the beatnik crowd that run Washington".
Although Wallace failed to halt integration in the South, he detached a substantial portion of the blue-collar vote from the Democratic Party for a generation. At the same time his anti-Washington and anti-elitist themes were adopted by the winning presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
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