George Wallace stirred up plenty of passion while he was alive. And even after his death there's considerable disagreement about the man and his legacy — from the segregationist governor of Alabama to the presidential candidate to the self-proclaimed changed man he was in his last year.
And the always-excellent "American Experience" defines the man as much as is possible, given his contradictions, in the two-part profile "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (Sunday and Monday, 8 p.m., Ch. 7).
It's the story of a man who started out as a Southern liberal and who sold his soul for power as an ardent proponent of states' rights — and in his case, that meant bigotry and segregation. (After losing to a hardline racist in his first attempt at the Alabama governor's mansion — he ran with the endorsement of the NAACP — Wallace himself began espousing racism and was subsequently victorious.)
It's the story of a man who lost his first wife to cancer and of his 1968 run for the White House as an independent and the assassination attempt that crippled him in a second run in 1972 and of his quest for forgiveness and redemption in his later years.
Paul Steckler, the show's producer/director/writer, suggested that the story of George Wallace is like "a Shakespearean tragedy to a certain extent."
"You have somebody who wants to do well . . . and finds himself unable to get elected governor and essentially sells his soul to become governor and finds out that in selling his soul he's able to get power beyond anything he ever dreamed possible," he said.
"Settin' the Woods on Fire" doesn't answer all the questions about Wallace because those questions don't seem to have any answers. And those interviewed on the program offer various points of view — like J.L. Chestnut, an African-American lawyer who knew Wallace since first appearing before him in court in the 1950s and spoke to him just three weeks before his death.
And Wallace told him, "You know that I didn't mean black folk any harm. You have to know that," Chestnut said. "And I said, 'Governor, you were talking about segregation, now and forever. You were talking about locking into place a system where only 150 black folk in my county out of 15,000 were registered to vote. . . . There were black and white water fountains, black and white restrooms. And you were talking about locking that into place forever.'
"And he said, 'Well, it was all a mistake.' And I said, 'It wasn't a mistake. You knew exactly what you were doing.'
"And he said he was of those times. That George Washington had his times, and Thomas Jefferson. And I said, 'Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson knew they were wrong.' And Wallace just hung his head.
"My own sense of that is that he knew it was wrong. He wished that he could have avoided it. It really wasn't what he wanted to be. But he was intent on gaining power at whatever cost."
It's an indication of just how divided opinion on Wallace was that Chestnut's own mother voted for him in one of his later runs for governor — and stood up in church and urged others to vote for him, too. "And I went out of the side door (of the church)," Chestnut said.
While some postulate that Wallace truly was repentant, others believe that he was simply trying to look repentant with an eye toward the legacy he would leave. Much to its credit, "Settin' the Woods on Fire" lets viewers decide.
"It would be real easy for us to write narration all over the place and say, 'This is this, this is this,' " Steckler said. "What we hope happens in this film is that people ask these questions — Can you make amends? What is his legacy? Is this legacy good, bad, whatever?"
And, while some might see Wallace as little more than a footnote in history, Steckler and some historians see him as one of the progenitors of today's political scene, with echoes in everyone from Pat Buchanan to George Bush to George W. Bush.
"In the late '60s, there was a transformation of American politics. We went from a liberal, Great Society-dominated politics to a politics, in the last couple of decades, which is much more conservative. And much of those lines are based on social issues," Steckler said. "And the father of this is not Richard Nixon, it's not Ronald Reagan — it's George Wallace."
Television editor Scott D. Pierce can be reached by e-mail at pierce@desnews.com