Wallace in Boston

SAM SMITH and his Alabamans used to play at rallies for Lurleen Wallace, when she was running for governor in 1966 and dying of cancer. Last night, grandly re-christened Sam Smith and his American Independent Party Band, they performed for George on Parkman Bandstand, a concrete-columned pagoda on Boston Common.

Older men, with guitars slung over their suitcoats, they made very fine country and blues. Soothing, mellow music, like "Your Cheatin' Heart," and "Make the World Go Away." The candidate hadn't come yet, and Sam was doing his genial best to set the mood.

But seeing the demonstrators must have wrenched the hundreds of people who were serious about hearing the candidate. The demonstrators had come early and taken the seats immediately surrounding the Bandstand, and that inner ring looked like the floor of the Democratic Convention, a sea of signs. The biggest was a bedsheet ten feet square that had been hoisted aloft right opposite the candidate's podium and read George Wallace Your Friendly Fascist.

Sam Smith stepped back after singing "Make the World Go Away," and a Wallace aide stepped forward. Now we all love America don't we, he said.

"We want peace, you fucking bastard!" screamed a demonstrator. The students started chanting peace, peace, peace.

"Everybody who loves America raise his hands," the aide asked, and the mass of serious listeners filling the outer ring showed their palms and their cheers rose over the peace chants.

The band began playing God Bless America, in a slow and sentimental tempo, led by a sweet trumpet. Now everybody sing, said the aide, and the whole thing swelled up and that funny feeling stirred in people's stomachs.

The demonstrators booed when it was over. Then the booing unexpectedly peaked and suddenly the candidate was beaming behind his big bullet-proof podium, which covered all but his head and shoulders. His sympathetic listeners in the crowd, which crammed a grassy area of several city blocks, let out whoops of greeting which again reached higher than the catcalls.

Oddly, no one introduced him. He stood there until the noise died down, and then he himself introduced five Southern labor leaders who were touring with the campaign party. That was a good move, because the demonstrators had been passing out leaflets headed "George Wallace--Enemy of the Working Man."

Then the candidate put on his glasses to read his speech. First thing, he wanted everybody to know that he had never acted against a man because of what he said or on account of his color. The demonstrators booed, and he said that he hoped they would let him talk; maybe by the end he would have persuaded them to see things his way.

THE demonstrators shrieked their outrage, but George went on; the loud-speakers worked very well. He said he would get the federal government out of local education, and they yelled, but the crowd out back gave him thunderous approval. He said he would make the streets safe to walk down, and the students didn't like that either, but the others did.

So it went. The demonstrators did their best to drown him out, and they began shouting before he could complete each of his well-known lines. But the candidate stayed calm and collected, and his friends in the audience matched all the boos with cheers. After the demonstrators drowned out his passage about running over anarchists, he started to play with them.

"Here's what I'll do for all my fans in the front rows," he said. "When I get through speaking, come on up here and I'll autograph your sandals for you."

"Go Home! Go Home!" chanted the kids. The candidate blew them kisses. The older crowd loved it.

Howls again. "They believe in free speech," murmured Wallace. "These are the free speech folks." He talked softly and whimsically, like a guitar-strummer sometimes speaks in the middle of a folk song.

When they roared again, he said more strongly, "My friends, you are proving just what I have been saying all over this country. You folks from Harvard make a lot of noise, but wait until November. You're a minority in this country, and you are about to find that out."

Judging by the applause the older people gave that line, he was right.

It was the candidate's show all the way. He baited the demonstrators, he needled them, he laughed at them. They bawled even when he said innocuous things; they were willing butts for his jokes. They were crude and boorish, doing their little bit to make the candidate look good.

As uneventfully as his speech began, it ended. Wallace gave a last hardy wave, and vanished behind a fast-moving phalanx of Secret Service men, who hustled him through a sparse spot in the crowd. Boston policemen on horses and on foot, armed with varnished riot sticks three feet long, kept the mob away.

The people who had come to hear what the candidate had to say were shocked at the demonstrators.

"We think they are a disgrace to humanity," said one housewife from West Roxbury. "Call them students? Call them apes."

"I had heard of these odd-looking people," said another woman, peering anxiously around her, "but I had ever seen them before. Wallace is right--these people have to be controlled. They scare you."

But really, they were too futile to be scary. As most people left the Common, they gathered in mini-rallies all over the grass. The TV men turned their klieg lights on them and they cavorted with gusto for the cameras, led in chants by their cheer-leaders.

The candidate had really summed up the situation in the last line of his speech.

"I wish ...," he began, before waiting for quiet. "I wish ... I wish I could take you youngsters all the places I go, because you give me a million votes every time you come." He was so right, so right.