Anyone trying to make sense of our current divided America should read The Broken Road, Peggy Wallace Kennedy’s wonderfully written memoir about the most famous political family in Alabama history. All the elements of white working-class rage that surged to the surface of American politics in 2016—working-class fury at social and education elites that they felt were demeaning them and their culture; economic and technological changes that overwhelmed them; immigrants whom they saw as competing for their low-wage jobs; religious “do-gooders” who seemed to emphasize justice for the poor while ignoring the old-time working-class gospels of hard work and “family values”—had emerged half a century earlier in Governor George C. Wallace’s “politics of rage.” As fate would have it, it may have been Arthur Bremer’s failed 1972 assassination attempt, which left Wallace a paraplegic, that spared the nation a racist Democratic president whose campaigns first cultivated the rich nativist soil of “Stand Up for America” and “Make America Great Again.”
Although historians and biographers have carefully narrated George Wallace’s political career, they have not penetrated the inner sanctum of his closely guarded and dysfunctional family. In this deeply moving memoir, Peggy Wallace Kennedy depicts her mother, Lurleen Wallace, as a grand and noble figure, and her father as essentially an insecure, brilliant demagogue consumed by ambition. Always solicitous of white evangelicals and foregoing alcohol in public, they hid their hard liquor in the Governor’s Mansion. While portraying himself as an example of traditional family values, George Wallace and his retinue of handlers carefully shielded from the public his neglect of family and legendary womanizing. And their children became casualties of parental ambition.
The Irish writer Oscar Wilde once wrote that “children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.” Readers of this memoir are fortunate that Peggy Wallace completed that entire life cycle—from childhood innocence to adult revulsion, to forgiveness, reconciliation, and finally to personal wholeness. The result may well be the most emotionally searing portrait ever written of an opportunistic American political demagogue, his threat to American values, and the tortured legacy he bequeathed his state, nation, and family. Among the readers, one might hope, would be the children and grandchildren of President Donald Trump, for one can easily imagine some distant Trump descendent wrestling with his legacy, and then going on to pen a similar exorcism of family demons.
—Dr. Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Auburn University