BLACK OR WHITE: The Politics of Race : JESSE: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson,<i> By Marshall Frady (Random House: $27.50; 552 pp.)</i> : WALLACE,<i> By Marshall Frady (Random House: $15; 272 pp.)</i>

Aside from being superior entertainment, Marshall Frady’s new biography of Jesse Jackson, perhaps our era’s most spellbinding political preacher, and his freshly updated biography of George Wallace, our era’s most masterful race demagogue, are hugely useful in the way they lay out for our inspection the split personality of this nation.

Contempt for blacks, the federal government, “elitist” bureaucrats, and “pointy-headed intellectuals” were the intoxicating bootleg products that came out of Wallace’s still. The elixirs peddled by Jackson were racial cooperation (his “Rainbow Coalition”) and economic hope (“Keep hope alive!”).

In the United States, those themes are hardly exceptional. But through the magic of their personalities, Wallace and Jackson have made the themes seem fresh. As rabble-rousers they set a new standard in political campaigns. And it was specifically the rabble they wanted to rouse. Wallace, in his malevolent assault on the political system, considered himself “the embodiment of the will and . . . discontents of the people in the roadside diners and all-night chili cafes, the cabdrivers and waitresses and plant workers.” Jackson, with trademark alliteration, boasted that his constituency was “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.”

Given their backgrounds when they entered national politics, their success has to be considered phenomenal. As governor of Alabama, Wallace did not have an exactly elegant reputation. He campaigned as a race baiter and his administrations had their share of graft and kickbacks. Jackson, a civil rights leader and activist, had lengthy experience with the internal bickering of movement politics, and he had spent years negotiating with Chicago politicians and businessmen to get economic help for blacks. But he had never run for political office before seeking the presidency. Both Wallace and Jackson were, in a sense, primitives--and they electrified the five presidential campaigns in which they were contestants.

Their influence has been considerable. Jackson was a veritable sorcerer in getting millions of blacks to register to vote and then turn out on election day. According to Frady, politicians like David Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor, and Virginia’s L. Douglas Wilder, the first elected black governor in the nation’s history, “were largely beneficiaries of Jackson’s own national campaigns and the vast black voter registrations he had galvanized.” Where other civil rights leaders had mainly sought connections with the affluent white community, Jackson pioneered in seeking a link between blacks and the white working class.

Yet these may not be his most important contributions. As Frady writes, Jackson “has been regularly belabored over the years for the absence of any demonstrable, substantive results of his ministry. But in the end, he operates in the interior regions of the heart, where pride and hope happen, which makes any sequence of effect between his efforts and their consequences virtually impossible to trace, to statistically measure and quantify. . . .”

As for Wallace, his hardball pseudo-Populism had been imitated to some degree, at some point in their careers, by most presidents and would-be presidents. He was governor of one of the poorest and most backward states when, almost casually and with only $800 in the kitty to start with, he entered Wisconsin’s 1964 Democratic presidential primary as a candidate against President Lyndon B. Johnson. Already known for his racist rhetoric (at his swearing in as governor that year, Wallace caught the nation’s attention with his promise of “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”) he was expected to win no more than 5% of the Wisconsin vote. He won a stunning 35%.

Wallace once told a reporter: “Let ‘em call me a racist. It don’t make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do.” Indeed they did. Running as a third-party candidate in the presidential election four years later, he won 10 million votes, or 14% of the total. And that was just a warm-up for the 1972 presidential campaign, which Wallace swept into like a tornado, rolling over 11 Democratic primary opponents with a 43% plurality in Florida. A lot of Yankees loved him, too; in Michigan, he got twice as many votes as George McGovern. He won the Maryland primary, but it was there that Arthur Bremer, a would-be assassin, put four bullets in Wallace, turning him into a paraplegic and for all purposes ending his national political career.

If Wallace’s success had been amazing, it was also a bit frightening. Here was a candidate who built a career on his ability to be a bigger bigot than all of his opponents. He did a lot of good in Alabama, building schools and hospitals. Yet he also said America needed “some meanness in government,” and he suggested that locking up federal judges would be a good way to start. As Frady recounts, his opponents sometimes feared for their lives--and yet millions of Americans saw him as presidential material.

But there is another side to America’s split personality, and it surfaced in the 1980s to embrace Jesse Jackson, a South Carolina native who, in his physical size, skin color and view of the world, could not have seemed more different from Wallace.

The Alabama governor was a womanizer, according to Frady, but a piker compared to Jackson’s “amatory musketeering.” (Jackson, ever the preacher, made this excuse: “When the Bible says Jesus went about doing good, didn’t say being good. Said doing good.”) Wallace did not suffer from an ego deficiency, but Jackson’s ego was humongous. Sometimes he likened himself to Christ. Many around the Rev. Martin Luther King, with whom he worked for over two years, were affronted by the “sheer, tireless, undiscouragable, uncontainable appetite of Jackson’s ego.” The byproducts of it were sometimes ugly, as when he lived and traveled in high style while many of his staff went unpaid and hungry.

Frady judges Jackson and Wallace as equals in the way they could move crowds. But many who heard Jackson’s “tent-revival sermon” at the 1984 Democratic convention, a speech that left some Mississippi white delegates in tears--”Our flag is red, white, and blue, but our nation is a rainbow--red, yellow, brown, black and white, we are awlll precious in God’s sight!”--would say that Jackson has no equal.

By the end of the 1970s he had become “virtually the sole national voice” of blacks. But the black establishment, like the white establishment, thought it mere whimsy when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. Although he made a couple of crucial blunders (including the devastating “Hymietown” comment), he carried 41 congressional districts and seven major cities, polling 3.5 million votes. Not bad for a beginner.

In 1988, Jackson pulled off what must be considered one of the miracles of American politics. Out of an original field of six Democratic candidates, he finished second in the primaries with 7 million votes, or 29% of the total. More important, writes Frady, “some 2 million of those votes had come this time from whites, almost as many as had gone to [Albert] Gore, [Richard] Gephardt and [Bruce] Babbitt put together.” Jackson’s lasting reward is the memory of that one ecstatic moment when, after 31 primaries and caucuses, he was far enough ahead of the pack to begin considering his cabinet.

Frady is one of the best political biographers of our time, and I consider his book on Wallace to be the finest broad-brush, impressionistic study of a Southern politician that we have. Since the author spent six years tracking Jackson, it isn’t surprising that “Jesse” offers an even greater richness (and sometimes an overripe) bounty of details. We get it all: Jackson’s out-of-wedlock birth and his alleged father fixation; his early reluctance to join the civil rights revolt and then his leadership role in it; his awesome stature as a freelance ambassador in some Third World countries. In “Jesse,” too, are fuller portraits of those around the principal actor than in “Wallace.” Lurleen, Wallace’s first wife, flits through the pages like a sad specter. By contrast, Jackson’s wife, Jackie, jumps off the page with brassy candor (and purple language), her ego easily matching her husband’s.

Aficionados of the written word will be fascinated to trace the evolution of Frady’s style through both books. Most of “Wallace” was first published in 1968, with updates in 1975 and this year. The original portions are elegantly lean and lucid, but the additions to “Wallace” begin to show--and “Jesse” shows even more--that Frady can occasionally descend into a verbal self-indulgence that comes close to babbling. Such as:

“For his children, growing up amid this amiably pandemonious disarray through the years of Jackson’s improvisational activism, their father’s exact business was no less a puzzlement than it proved for others trying to precisely parse him.”

Whew! It doesn’t happen often, but with the Frady of the 1960s, it wouldn’t have happened at all.