Editor's note: Paul Greenberg, former editorial page editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial and retired editorial page editor and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a series of editorials he wrote in 1968 on civil rights. Greenberg described the editorials during an interview once as being about the "need for understanding and the respect for the rights of others." We believe those sensibilities are worthy of review again, considering the racial protests and other turmoil in the country today. For that reason, we are republishing each of Mr. Greenberg's award-winning editorials over the course of several weeks, and we thank him for allowing us to do so.
In all, Greenberg submitted seven "exhibits" to be considered for the Pulitzer. This segment, which was submitted as "EXHIBIT 5," said: "The Commercial devoted considerable space in 1968 to George Wallace's influence on race relations, contending that Mr. Wallace as a candidate failed to measure up to Southern standards. More difficult, it tried to reason with those considering voting for Mr. Wallace, which it found a good deal more difficult than simply burlesquing George Wallace."
Pine Bluff Commercial, Sunday, September 29, 1968
An Appeal to Reason
We would like to address today's editorial column especially to those readers who might be considering casting their ballot for president of the United States in favor of George Wallace. We would like them to consider the reason for the appeal of Mr. Wallace.
SURELY it cannot be any experience that George Wallace brings to the great issues of war and peace, and to the awesome responsibilities that await the next president of the United States. Far from claiming any background in foreign affairs, he seldom ventures into the subject. When he does, it is in a primitive fashion. Like threatening to bring France back in line by demanding payment of her war debt, a debt that no longer exists. Most of George Wallace's comments about foreign affairs, infrequent as they are, are no better grounded than this one. We cannot believe that the basis for supporting George Wallace is any widespread demand that the leadership of the United States and of the Western alliance in world affairs be entrusted to the wisdom of George C. Wallace.
It is, then, his stands on the numerous and complex domestic problems of these times? Surely not, since not many people really know where George Wallace stands on farm policy, taxation, the economy, labor, the cities. And not many really much care. Doesn't it say something alarming about George Wallace's appeal that so many people should be attracted on such narrow grounds? Is his one issue enough? It is enough for a talented demagogue, perhaps, but for a president of the United States?
EVEN WHEN George Wallace talks about law-and-order, which is an issue for sure, the phrase turns cheap in his mouth. Because he is the same George Wallace who has pleaded guilty to contempt of court, who defied the supreme law of the land and threatened order, who only last week predicted a revolution if his demands were not met. Does this sound like a champion of law and order?
It might--if by law and order it meant ignoring the laws one doesn't like and ordering around anybody who gets in one's way. That's the kind of law-and-order that demagogues of both Left and Right always have preached, and preach today.
And there may be times when we are all susceptible to a base appeal. Before that first cup of coffee in the morning, one can almost understand the attraction of George Wallace. Or, if one is black, the attraction of some equal but opposite radical of the Negro race. The most likely explanation for the politics of rancour we are seeing today is that the whole, troubled country is in a bad mood.
Some may find it ironic, or anyway futile, to headline an editorial addressed to Wallace people An Appeal to Reason, since it is not reason but feeling, and often bad feeling at that, that accounts for so much of the Wallace boom. But one of the latest polls shows that something like 20 per cent of the American electorate is attracted to George Wallace; and we can't believe that 1 out of 5 American voters is immune to reason. Or even to second and better thoughts before November 5 is upon us.
Nor can we believe that so many Americans will, for very long, equate George Wallace with the salvation of America. The idea of George Wallace as the man who is going to save the rule of law in America is grotesque; he is not its saviour but a symptom of the defiance that threatens it today.
George Wallace doesn't have a program for the country, only oratory. He says a lot, but what would he do? What could George Wallace do as president against Congress, the courts, the laws already on the books, the rights indelible and still developing in the Constitution, the whole tradition of equal justice before the law?
ONE OF THE most revealing, and hopeful, aspects of the Wallace vote is that many of those who plan to cast it don't feel very proud about it. At least not proud enough to argue that George Wallace really ought to be the next president of the United States. Instead, they explain their vote for him as a gesture of protest.
We wonder: Is it right to vote for a man you don't really believe is worthy of the office? Haven't we all been taught that a citizen has a solemn responsibility to cast his vote as if it were the deciding one? Is that principle now outmoded? Is the thrill of protest worth clogging up a venerable and suddenly endangered electoral system? Is this the honorable, the responsible, the patriotic course?
AND FINALLY, we wonder if a vote for George Wallace really is a meaningful protest against the unsettling trends that beset this country. Have you noticed how similar the extremes of Left and Right tend to be? George Wallace, for example, keeps talking about those left-wing anarchists who threaten American institutions. But isn't he threatening quite a few himself? Like the Supreme Court and the Electoral College and even the very principle that has been the key to maintaining law and order in this country--that the Constitution and the laws of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land.
Consider that the crucial fight in American politics is not between the extremes of Left and Right. But between the middle--with its sense of proportion and its tolerance of dissent--and both extremes, with their mutual intolerance for the rights of those they dislike. And so maybe the best way to stand up for America, for a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, for a political system with justice and liberty for all, might be to reject the extremes. And to stick with still another old American institution that George Wallace threatens--the two-party system. Won't you consider it?
Mr. Wallace Goes Northern (no date)
No one can say George Wallace is just a Southern candidate for president now that his platform has picked up one of the favorite themes of big-city Northerners: Send the poor back where they came from, mainly the South. Mr. Wallace's language is more elevated, of course: The poor who can't be trained for jobs in the cities, he says, should be returned to "the less urbanized area from whence they came." And where of course they have been a drag on the economy all these years or it may be assumed that they would never have left.
A DECADE or so ago, before the great influx of the poor reached its peak in Northern cities, Northern spokesmen tended to be highly critical of the South's faults. Now that mountain whites and Delta blacks are pouring into the great cities, some of the fine words about brotherhood and social justice have melted away into the simple formula: Go back where you came from.
The simple economic truth is that the poor might not be much better off back home, either. Agriculture, or anyway profitable agriculture, requires technological know-how, too, these days. To quote the latest report of the Citizens Budget Commission, the poor moving into the cities are "people displaced by the technological revolution in agriculture and devoid of any marketable skills."
Certainly the South would not be much better off if the North continued to buy off its talented managers, teachers, and professionals in general while shipping the poor back.
Of course, if the poor could be kept on the South's back that might relieve big- city Northerners, with their delicate sensibilities, from the sight and fear of poor people. And with the most crushing part of the nation's poverty once again hidden away where it has been since the Civil War--in the South--then maybe Northerners could return to their old denunciations of Southern sins, instead of imitating them.
WHEN GEORGE WALLACE repeats this line, he proves that he is as capable of playing up to Northern prejudices as he is to Southern ones. We knew long ago that Mr. Wallace was adept at hypocrisy--when he ran on a law-and-order platform after defying the law in his home state, when he kept on denouncing crime in Washington while skirting the information that Alabama tops the nation in its murder rate. But till now we did not realize that George Wallace was equally smooth at Yankee hypocrisy.
Sectionalism for All (no date)
George Wallace is a sectional candidate all right, only he's versatile enough to echo the sectionalism of wherever he happens to be at the time. Up North, he's all in favor of shipping the poor back down south so they won't clutter up the neighborhood. Now having waved Old Glory around out West, he picks up the Starts and Bars for the South: "This is the first time in the history of our country," he told an audience in Fort Worth last week, "that we are solidified in our region all the way from Baltimore to Oklahoma City to St. Louis."
Well, it isn't exactly the first time. There was that time around 1860, when the hotheads convinced the rest of us that the South ought to secede from the United States of America, fire on Fort Sumter and such. And doggone if their basic appeal still isn't pretty much the same: "I ask you from the soul of the South," George Wallace said at Fort Worth, "to assert yourselves."
Hmm. First off, anybody who thinks that Fort Worth, Tex. is the soul of the South has no business being president of the United States and certainly not governor of Alabama, which has its own claims to that distinction. Second, voting for a politician whose experience on the national level is pretty much limited to demagoguery is not our idea of asserting one's manhood. Especially when said politician is not only experienced at demagoguery but talented at it.
GEORGE WALLACE is also out to stir Southern passions by saying that a common reaction to his campaign--namely, the sensible conclusion that he is unfit to be president of the United States--is directed at all Southerners. South of the Mason-Dixon line, Mr. Wallace says: "They are saying that you are not fit to be president"--which is where the truth leaves off and George Wallace begins--"because you are a Southerner." That last phrase is an invention of Mr. Wallace himself. With all the perfectly sound reasons for opposing George Wallace, there's no reason for anybody to bring up a specious one like that.