From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994.

• Author: Egerton, John

By Dan T. Carter Louisiana State University Press, $22.29

One of the great drawbacks of writing biography--or so it would seem to me--is the unavoidable necessity of spending huge blocks of time studying your subject, dead or alive. This could get to be tedious. It could be much worse if the person were someone you didn't particularly like, someone whose philosophy and behavior you found reprehensible, and someone who was hostile to your biographical intent. The whole experience could be enough to make you swear off writing forever.

All the more reason to admire a scholar such as Dan T. Carter, the Kenan Professor of History at Emory University. For eight years, he labored on a biography of Alabama governor and presidential aspirant George C. Wallace, who to this day has not deigned to speak to the professor. If anything, Carter's admittedly more liberal proclivities and Wallace's cold shoulder made the author bend every effort to be thorough, fair, and honest in his portrayal of the foremost segregationist of the mid-20th century.

First in a full-length biography and now in the series of lectures which comprise his current book, Carter has taken such a lucid and precise measure of the man and his times that a portrait of much greater depth and breadth emerges: not just Wallace and Alabama and the segregationist South, but the sweep and substance of a halfcentury of American politics.

Carter's The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics received critical acclaim when it was published in 1995 and won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award earlier this year. Now, in his Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures in Southern History, delivered in 1991 at Louisiana State University, he succinctly summarizes the rise and fall of Wallace as a regional and national figure and goes on to document the Alabamian's profound influence not only on Southern Republicrats but also on Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the conservative counterrevolution of the past 30 years.

While noting the significant differences between economic and social conservatives, particularly in regard to the politics of race and gender, Carter nonetheless asserts that the two streams "ultimately joined in the political coalition that reshaped American politics from the 1970s through the mid-1990s." What's more, though most Republican conservatives try to ignore George Wallace "in...