- Jun 29
- 16 min read
George Wallace
Inaugural Address
for Alabama Governorship
January 14, 1963
Inaugural Address for Alabama Governor
Thank you Governor Sparks, Governor Patterson, Governor Barnett, Governor Dixon, Governor Folsom, Lieutenant Governor Hardwick, Lieutenant Governor Ellis, Lieutenant Governor Inzer, Lieutenant Governor Boutwell. Ladies and gentlemen, also members of the Alabama Legislature and the Alabama Judiciary and members of the Alabama Congressional Delegation, members of the Alabama Legislature and distinguished guests and fellow Alabamians, before I begin my talk with you, I want to ask you for a few minutes' patience while I say something that is on my heart.
I want to thank those home folks of my county who gave an anxious country boy his first opportunity to serve in state politics. I shall always owe a lot to those who gave me that first opportunity to serve. I will never forget the warm support and close loyalty of the folks at Sutton's, Store and Haigler's Mill, Eufaula, Beat 6 and Beat 14, Richards Cross Roads and Gammage Beat, at Baker Hill and Beat 8, Comer, Spring Hill, Adams Chapel and Mount Andrew, White Oak, Baxter Station, Clayton, Louisville and Cunningham Place, Hornes Crossroads, Texasville and Blue Springs where the vote was 304 Wallace and 1 for the opposition and the dear little lady whom I heard had made that one vote against me by mistake because she couldn't see too well and she had pulled the wrong lever. Bless her heart. At Clio, my birthplace and where I finished high school and Elamville. I shall never forget them. And may God bless those good people forever and I shall forever remember that Election Day morning as I waited, and suddenly at 10 o'clock that morning, the first return of a box was flashed over this state. It carried the message: Wallace 15; opposition 0.
And it came it came from Hamrick Beat at Putman's Mountain where live the great hill people of our state. May God bless the mountain man. His loyalty is unshakable. He'll do to walk down the road with. I hope you forgive me these few moments of remembering but I wanted them and you to know that i shall never forget. I wish I could shake hands and thank all of you in the state who voted for me and even those of you who did not, for I know you voted your honest convictions, and now we must stand together and move this great state of Alabama forward. I would be remiss this day if I did not thank my wonderful wife and fine family for their patience, support, and loyalty and there is no man living who does not owe more to his mother than he can ever repay, and I want my mother to know that I realize my debt to her.
This document appears in the Compendium: Chapter 22
Annotation:
George Wallace delivered his inaugural address as governor of Alabama, declaring his opposition to federal civil rights efforts and racial integration. The speech is most remembered for Wallace's pledge of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," which became one of the defining statements of the era of Massive Resistance to desegregation in the American South. The address symbolized the conflict between state resistance to integration and the expanding federal enforcement of civil rights protections during the broader Civil Rights Movement.
Author:
Transcript and Video Source: https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/records/id/468/
This this is the day of my inauguration as Governor of the state of Alabama and this day I feel a deep obligation to renew my pledges, my covenants with you, the people of this great state. General Robert E. Lee said that duty is the most sublime word in the English language and I have come increasingly to realize what he meant. I shall do my duty to you, God helping, to every man, to every woman; yes, to every child in this state. I shall fulfill my duty toward honesty and economy in our state government so that no man shall have a part of his livelihood cheated and no child shall have a bit of his future stolen away. I said to you that I would eliminate the liquor agent in this state and that the money saved would be returned to our citizens. I'm happy to report to you that I am now sending orders for several hundred one-way tickets and stamped on the of them are these words: "For liquor agents, destination out of Alabama".
I'm happy to report to you that the big freewheeling, cocktail party boys have gotten the word that their free whiskey and boat rides are over, that the farmer in the field, the worker in the factory, the businessman in his office, the housewife in her home have decided that the money can be better spent to help our children's education and our older citizens, and they have put a man in office to see that this should be done. And I can assure you that it will be done. And as I promised you in this campaign, no more liquor drinking in your governor's mansion. I shall fulfill my duty in working hard to bring industry into our state, not only by maintaining an honest, sober, and free enterprise climate of government, in which industry can have confidence, but in going out and getting it, so that our people can have industrial jobs in Alabama and provide a better life for their children. I shall not forget my duty to our senior citizens so that their lives can be lived in dignity and enrichment of the golden years nor to our sick, both mental and physical, and they will know we have not forsaken them. I want the farmer to know and to feel confident that in his state government, he has a partner who will work toward helping him raise his income and increase in his market. And I want the laboring man to know he has a friend who is sincerely striving to better his field of endeavor. I want to assure every child that this government is not afraid to invest in their future through education, so that they will not be handicapped on the very threshold of their lives.
Today, I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood and took an oath to our people. It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the confederacy, this very heart of the great anglo-saxon southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generation of forebears before us done time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth. I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say - segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
The Washington D.C. school riot report is disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice our children to any such type school system and you can write that down. The federal troops in Mississippi, Governor Barnett, and Governor Johnson, and distinguished citizens from that state could better be used in guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington D.C. where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ball game, and that in the nation's capital. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid than the people of Washington are walking in the White House neighborhood.
A closer example is Atlanta, Georgia. The city officials fawn for political reasons over school integration and then build barricades to stop residential integration. What hypocrisy. Let us send this message back to Washington by the representatives who are here with us today, that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man, that we intend to take the offensive and carry our fight for freedom across this nation, wielding the balance of power we know we possess in the southland, that we, not the insipid block voters of some sections will determine in the next election who shall sit in the White House of the United States. But from this day, and from this hour, and from this minute, we give the word of a race of honor that we will tolerate their boot in our face no longer, and let those certain federal judges put that in their opium pipe of power and smoke it for what it is worth.
Hear me, southerners. You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation, we call on you from your native state soil to join with us in national support and vote, and we know wherever you are, away from the heart of the southland, that you will respond, for though you may live in the farthest regions of this vast country, your heart has never left Dixieland. And you native sons and daughters of all New England's rock-ribbed patriotism, and you study natives of the great midwest and you descendants of the far west flaming spirit of pioneer freedom, we invite you to come and be with us, for you are the southern mind and the southern spirit and the southern philosophy. You are southerners, too, and brothers with us in our fight.
What I have said about segregation in the race for governor goes double this day, and what I have said,, too about some federal judges goes triple this day. Alabama has been blessed by God, as few states in this nation have been blessed. Our state owns 10% of all the natural resources of all the states in the country. Our inland waterway system is second to none and has the potential of being the greatest waterway transport system in the entire world. We possess over 30 minerals in usable quantities and our soil is rich and varied, suited to a wide variety of plants. Our native pine and forestry system produces timber faster than we can cut it and yet we have only pricked the surface of the great lumber and pulp potential. With ample rainfall and rich grasslands for our livestock industry, it is in the infancy of a giant future that can make us a center of the big and growing meat packing and prepared food industries and food marketing. We have the favorable climate, streams, woodlands, beaches, and natural beauty to make us a recreational mecca int the booming tourist and vacation industry. Nestled in the great Tennessee Valley, we possess the rocket center of the world and the keys to the space frontier.
For the trade which they develop in Europe built the great port cities of the East Coast, our own fast developing port of Mobile faces as a magnetic gateway to the great continent of South America, well over twice as large and hundreds of times richer in resources, even now awakening to the growing probes of enterprising capital, with a potential of growth and wealth beyond any present dream, for our poor development and corresponding results throughout the connected waterways that thread our state. And while the manufacturing industries of free enterprise have been coming through our state in increasing numbers, attracted by our bountiful natural resources, our growing number of skilled workers and our favorable conditions, their present rate of settlement here can be increased from the trickle they now represent to a stream of enterprise and endeavor, capital and expansion that can join us in our work of development and enrichment of the educational future of our children, the opportunities of our citizens, and the fulfillment of our talents as God has given them to us.
To realize our ambitions and to bring to fruition our dreams, we as Alabamians must take cognizance of the world about us. We must redefine our heritage, re-school our thoughts in the lessons our forefathers knew so well, in order to function and to grow and to prosper. We can no longer hide our heads in the sand and tell ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers is not being attacked and it's not being threatened by another idea, for it is. We are faced with an idea that if a centralized government assumes enough authority, enough power to dictate, to forbid, to require, to demand, to distribute, to edict, and to judge what is best and enforce that judgment upon us, its citizens, from one impeachable authority, then it will produce only good and it shall be our father and our God.
It is an idea of government that encourages our fears and destroys our faith, for where there is faith, there is no fear, and where there is fear, there is no faith. In encouraging our fears of economic insecurity, it demands we place that economic management and control with government. In encouraging our fear of educational development, it demands we place that education and the minds of our children under management and control of government, and even in feeding our fears of physical infirmities and declining years, it offers and demands to follow us through it all even unto the grave. It is a government that claims to us that it is bountiful as it buys its power from us with the fruit from its appropriation of the wealth that free men before it have produced and builds on crumbling credit without responsibility to the debtors - our children.
It is an ideology of government erected on the encouragement of fear and fails to recognize the basic law of our fathers that governments do not produce wealth. People produce wealth - free people - and as those people become less free as they learn there's little reward for ambition, that it requires faith to risk and they have none, as the government must restrict and penalize and tax incentive and endeavor, and must increase its expenditure of bounties, then this government must assume more and more police power, and we find we are becoming government-fearing people, not god-fearing people. We find we have replaced faith with fear and though we may give lip service to the Almighty, in reality government has become our god. it is therefore a basically ungodly government and its appeal to the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people the master of the people, to play a being God, without faith in God and without the wisdom of God.
It is a system that is the very opposite of Christ, for it feeds and encourages everything degenerate and base in our people as it assumes the responsibilities that we ourselves should assume. Its pseudo-liberal spokesman and some Harvard advocates have never examined the logic of its substitution of what it calls human rights for individual rights, for its propaganda play upon words has appeal for the unthinking. Its logic is totally material and irresponsible as it runs the full gamut of human desires, including the theory that everyone has voting rights without the spiritual responsibility of preserving freedom. Our founding fathers recognized those rights, but only within the framework of those spiritual responsibilities. But the strong, simple faith and sane reasoning of our founding fathers has long since been forgotten as the so-called progressives and liberals tell us that our constitution was written for horse and buggy days. So were the Ten Commandments. Not long ago, men stood in marvel and awe at the cities, the buildings, the schools, the Autoubahn that the government of Hitler's Germany had built, just as centuries before, they stood in wonder at Rome's building, but they could not stand, for the system that built them had rotted the souls of the builders, and in turn, rotted the foundation of what God meant that men should be.
Today that same system on an international scale is sweeping the world. It is the changing world of which we are told. It is called new and liberal. It is as old as the oldest dictator. It is degenerate and decadent. As the national racism of Hitler's Germany persecuted a national minority to the whim of a national majority, so the international racism of the liberals seek to persecute the international white minority to the whim of the international colored majority so that we are footballed about according to the favor of the Afro-Asian bloc. But the Belgian survivors of the Congo cannot present their case to a war crimes commission, nor the Portuguese of Angola, nor the survivors of Castro, nor the citizens of Oxford, Mississippi.
It It is this theory of international power politics that led a group of men on the Supreme Court for the first time in American history to issue an edict based not on legal precedent but upon a volume, the editor of which has said our constitution is outdated and must be changed and the writers of which some have admittedly belong to as many as half a hundred communist-front organizations. It is this theory that led this same group of men to briefly bear the ungodly core of that philosophy in forbidding little school children to say a prayer, and we find the evidence of that ungodliness even in the removal of the words "In God We Trust" from some of our dollar bills which was placed there like evidence by our founding fathers as the faith upon which this system of government was built. It is a spirit of power thirst that caused a president in Washington to take up Caesar's pen and with one stoke of it, make a law, a law which the lawmaking body of Congress refused to pass, a law that tells us that we can or cannot buy or sell our very homes except by his condition, and except at his discretion. It is a spirit of power thirst that led that same president to launch a full offenses of 25 000 troops against the university in his own country and against his own people when this nation maintains only six thousand troops in the beleaguered city of Berlin.
We have witnessed-- We have witnessed such acts of "might makes right" over the world as men yielded to the temptation to play God, but we have never before witnessed it in America. We reject such acts as free men. We do not defy, for there is nothing to defy since as free men we do not recognize any government's right to give freedom, or deny freedom. No government erected by man has that right. As Thomas Jefferson has said, "The god who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time. No king holds the right of liberty in his hands". Nor does any ruler in the American government, whether he be in Montgomery or Washington, D.C. We intend, quite simply, to practice the free heritage as bequeathed to us as sons of free fathers. We intend to revitalize the truly new and progressive form of government that is less than 200 years old, a government first founded in this nation simply and purely on faith, that there is a personal god who rewards good and punishes evil, that hard work will receive its just desserts, but ambition and ingenuity and incentiveness and profit of such are admirable traits and goals, that the individual is encouraged in his spiritual growth, and from that growth arrives at a character that enhances his charity toward others, and from that character and that charity, so is influenced business and labor and farmer and government.
We intend to renew our faith as God-fearing men, not government-fearing men, nor any other kind of fearing men. We intend to roll up our sleeves and pitch in to develop this full bounty that God has given to us to live full and useful lives and in absolute freedom from all fear. Then can we enjoy the full richness of the great american dream. We have placed this sign both have been placed "In God We Trust" here at this state capitol on this inauguration day as physical evidence of determination to renew the faith of our fathers and to practice the free heritage they bequeathed to us. We do this with a clear and follow knowledge that such physical evidence is evidently a direct violation of the logic of that Supreme Court in Washington D.C., and if they or their spokesmen in this state wish to term this defiance, I say then let them make the most of it.
This nation was never meant to be a unit of one but a united of the many. That is the exact reason our freedom loving forefathers established the state, so as to divide the rights and powers among the many states, ensuring that no central power could gain massive government control. In united effort, we were meant to live under this government, whether Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, or whatever one's denomination or religious belief, each respecting the other's right to a separate denomination, each by working to develop his own, enriching the total of all our lives through united effort. And so it was meant in our political lives, whether Republican, Democrat, Prohibition or whatever political party, each striving from this separate political station, respecting the rights of others to be separate and work from within that political framework, and each separate political station making its contribution to our lives.
And so it was meant in our racial lives, each race within its own framework has the freedom to teach, to instruct, to develop, to ask for and receive deserved help from others of separate racial stations. This is a great freedom of our American founding fathers. But if we amalgamate into the one unit as advocated by the communist philosophers, then the enrichment of our lives, the freedom of our development is gone forever. We become therefore. a mongrel unit of one under a single all-powerful government, and we stand for everything and for nothing.
The true brotherhood of America, of respecting the separateness of others and united in effort has been so twisted and distorted from its original concept that there is small wonder that communism is today winning the world. We invite the Negro citizens of Alabama to work with us from his separate racial stations as we will work with him to develop, to grow in individual freedom and enrichment. We want jobs and a good future for both races. We want to have to physically and mentally sick of both races, the tubercular and the infirm.
This is the basic heritage of my religion of which I make full practice, for we are all the handiwork of God. But we warn those of any group who would follow the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation that we will not surrender our system of government, our freedom of race and religion, for that freedom was won at a hard price and if it requires a hard price to retain it, we are able and quite willing to pay it. The liberals' theory that poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity is the cause of communism is a false theory. If it were true, the South would have been the biggest single communist bloc in the western hemisphere long ago. After the great War Between the States, our people faced a desolate land of burned universities, destroyed crops and homes, with manpower defeated and crippled, and even the mule, which was required to work the land, was so scarce that whole community shared one animal to make the spring farm.
There was no government handout, no Marshall Aid plan, no coddling to make sure that our people would not suffer. Instead, the South was set upon by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops. All loyal Southerners were denied the right to vote at the point of a bayonet so that the infamous, illegal 14th Amendment might be passed. There was no money, no food, and no hope of either. But our grandfathers bent their knee only in church and bowed their head only to God. Not for one single instant did they ever consider the easy way of federal dictatorship that amalgamation in return for fat bellies. They fought. They dug sweet roots from the ground with their bare hands and boiled them in the old iron pot. They gathered poke salad from the woods and acorns from the ground. They fought. They followed no false doctrine. They knew what they wanted and they fought for freedom. They came up from their knees in the greatest display of sheer nerve, grit and guts, that has ever been set down in the pages of written history, and they won. The great writer Rudyard Kipling wrote of them that "There in the Southland of the United States of America lives the greatest fighting breed of man in all the world." And that is why today I stand ashamed of the fat well-fed whimperers who say that it is inevitable, that our cause is lost. I am ashamed of them and I am ashamed for them because they do not represent the viewpoint of the majority of Alabamians or the people of the Southland.
And may we take note of one other fact, with all the trouble with communists that some sections of this country have. There are not enough native communists in the South to fill up a telephone booth and that is a matter of public FBI record. We remind all within the hearing of this Southland that a Southerner, Peyton Randolph, presided over the Continental Congress in our nation's beginning, that a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the Declaration of Independence, that a Southerner, George Washington, is the father of our country, that a Southerner, James Madison, authored our constitution, that a Southerner, George Mason, authored the Bill of Rights and it was a Southerner who said "Give me liberty or give me death", Patrick Henry. Southerners have played such a most magnificent part in erecting this great divinely inspired system of freedom - (video cuts out)
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