The Politics of Rage

George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics

by Dan T. Carter

600 Pages / 6.00 x 9.25 x 1.20 in / 40 halftones, 1 line drawing

Paperback

9780807125977

Published: February 2000

$35.00

BUY

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Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace’s story with a look at the politician’s death and the nation’s reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of “the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics.”

Dan T. Carter, Educational Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at the University of South Carolina and former president of the Southern Historical Association, is the author of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History; From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994; and When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, winner of the Avery O. Craven Award.

Carter’s life of Wallace is, by long odds, the finest of those written about the Alabamian- who-would-be-president; indeed, it is one of the finest political biographies of this or any other year. . . . A superb social and political history of Alabama and the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s. ~Los Angeles Times Book Review

Carter builds a compelling, well-documented argument to the effect that Wallace’s presence catalyzed the emergence in the late 1960s of a ‘New American Majority on the foundation of the conservative South.’ . . . A stimulating political biography, solidly researched and vividly presented. ~New York Times

Carter has captured the essence . . . in an easily readable, remarkably insightful biography of both Wallace and ‘Wallaceism,’ recreating how the man and his movement ‘to stand up for America’ reshaped the language and limits of today’s American political system.” ~Philadelphia Inquirer