From Demagogue to Democrat : An examination of one of America’s most dangerous populists : THE POLITICS OF RAGE: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.<i> By Dan T. Carter (Simon & Schuster: $30; 572 pp.)</i>

For those given to conversion narratives, the story of George Wallace usually runs something like this: Born poor but proud in backwoods Alabama, he entered politics as a committed liberal by Deep South standards; progressive on race and other social issues, he was defeated for governor by a race-baiting opponent in 1958, subsequently vowing to support “segregation forever.” When he ran for the Alabama governorship on that platform in 1963, he won, beginning a reign of power that was to last nearly two decades. But after being shot and paralyzed while campaigning for president in 1972, he underwent a Saul-type transformation (Laurel, Md., being his Damascus), repented of all past racial sins and made up with southern blacks from Jesse Jackson on down.

There is some truth to all this, and we can know just how much after reading Dan Carter’s splendid biography of America’s most dangerous Populist of the second half of this century. 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. The first unauthorized life of Wallace in some two decades, it is also a superb social and political history of Alabama and the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s, a study of certain ugly recesses of the white Southern mind and an examination of how Alabama’s fighting governor played yet another biblical role, that of a reactionary John the Baptist, preaching an anti-government gospel and preparing the way for more nationally electable conservatives, particularly Ronald Reagan.

What Carter, a widely respected Southern historian, captures most fully in describing Wallace’s early years is simply the meanness, toughness and sheer determination of the man. He came by the meanness honestly: His father--unstable, heavy-drinking and hot-headed--was a failure as a farmer in one of the poorest sections of a poor state. There was also a measure of gentility in Wallace’s past: His paternal grandfather had been a well-respected country doctor, and his mother taught piano. But Wallace took after his daddy, picking fights and playing tough. As a teenager he was interested in two things: boxing and politics. At the former, he became the 1936 Alabama Golden Golden Gloves bantamweight champion. In the latter, particularly after serving a session as a page in the state Senate, he was ambitious beyond reasonable expectation.

Nearly a Faulknerian character in the single-minded devotion to his “design,” Wallace determined early to become governor and set out to do whatever was necessary to accomplish that. After clawing his way to success in student politics at the University of Alabama (he took on the wealthy fraternity boys) and achieving a mixed military record in World War II (he served valiantly in combat as a flight engineer but near the end of the war, his nerves shot, he refused an assignment and left the Army in something less than glory), he won a seat in the state legislature.

Carter paints a largely unattractive picture of the young Wallace, nearly a comic picture at times. Overly earnest, persistent, opportunistic, ingratiating, he let nothing stand in the way of his political success. Although he married Lurleen Burns, who made him a very good wife, he was an inattentive husband (he had, Carter writes, viewed most women with “thinly veiled contempt”) and, when children arrived, an even worse father.

But politically there was much to admire in the young Wallace. A devoted follower of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he allied himself with Big Jim Folsom, the liberal Alabama governor, and soon gained a reputation as a good schools-good roads progressive and, besides, an exemplary member of the board of trustees of all-black Tuskegee Institute. He went back and forth on race over the next few years, breaking with Folsom after the colorful governor entertained Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in the governor’s mansion, but ruling fairly and dispassionately as a circuit court judge in cases involving blacks and remaining a national Democrat, endorsing Adlai Stevenson for president in 1956.

The wavering stopped in 1958 after he was defeated for governor because he had been too moderate on race. If he did not actually use a derisive term for African Americans--Carter believes he did--Wallace certainly meant it, and the change in his public behavior was immediately apparent. He turned his judgeship into a forum to fight civil rights laws, and when he ran again for governor in 1962 it was as a fierce champion of racial segregation. Shortly afterward, in 1963, he made his famous stand in the schoolhouse door, a sordid little anti-integration drama played out at the University of Alabama.

Wallace had “fallen down a dark hole of the bleakest demagoguery,” Carter writes. And he wasn’t finished. In 1964 and 1965 he aligned himself with white supremacists of the most virulent sort, and Carter leaves little doubt that the governor helped to create a climate that contributed to Bull Conor’s reign of terror in Birmingham and to the bombing of a black church in which four young girls died. This is how Wallace burst onto the national scene in the early 1960s, “his head cocked to one side, his lips twisted into a pouting sneer as he mouthed invective which veered between scorn and semi-libelous abuse.”

But in the mid-60s Wallace went national in a different way, packaging his racist politics as a “defense of states rights,” leading an attack on the federal government and presuming to represent the little man who was sick of high taxes, anti-war demonstrators and long-haired hippies. He held his own in national news programs like “Meet the Press,” and he even ventured onto Northern and Western campuses, often defusing vocal opposition with wit and sometimes even charm. Most important, he entered national politics, running in presidential primaries in 1964 (when Goldwater eventually stole his thunder) and, in 1968, running as an independent, capturing 58 electoral votes and throwing a huge scare into Richard Nixon. In 1972, running as a Democrat, he won primaries in Florida, Michigan and Maryland and was growing even stronger in mid-May when he was felled by a bullet to the spine fired by Arthur Bremer, a lone would-be assassin who really wanted Nixon but settled for Wallace.

Carter’s story--and Wallace’s--essentially ends there, at least as far as the political Wallace is concerned. Using a wheelchair and in constant pain (he still is, nearly a quarter-century later), he continued to go through the motions, winning two more terms as governor of Alabama and making a last pathetic run for the presidency in 1976. But his mark on the nation’s political life had already been made.

Carter’s thesis, approximately that of Stephan Lesher and other biographers, is that Wallace was “the alchemist of the new social conservatism”: He foresaw “the tide on which Ronald Reagan sailed into the White House.” Such is largely the case--and Carter also does a convincing job of showing how, before Reagan, Nixon was forced to turn right in 1968 and 1972 because of Wallace’s presence. But Carter tends to overstate the Alabamian’s national significance: There were forces other than Wallace turning Nixon rightward; we would have had Reagan even without Wallace; and American politics, in any case, would have been “transformed” in something of the manner it has been.

So much for the political Wallace, but the larger question Carter poses remains to be answered: Did Wallace, after his shooting, really change his feelings about African Americans? To what extent, in other words, can we subscribe to the conversion narrative? It is a matter of record that, by the mid-1970s, the governor had fallen into the habit of calling old adversaries, particularly black ones, and asking for forgiveness. Cynics said he was just angling for the black vote in gubernatorial elections--which he increasingly received--but I think it was more than that. Despite his tough exterior, Wallace had always been a curiously vulnerable figure, an emotional man given on occasion to trembling, even crying--and a man with a great need (as one of his enemies observed) to be loved. He was also given to high drama, and what was more dramatic--even higher drama than the stand in the schoolhouse door--than the radical conversion of the South’s most powerful racist of the latter half of the 20th century?

Conversion, in its way, was in keeping with all that had gone before.