Alabama: 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).