Page:Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace (1963).pdf/13

 faced a desolate land of burned universities, destroyed crops and homes, with manpower depleted and crippled, and even the mule, which was required to work the land, was so scarce that whole communities shared one animal to make the spring plowing. There were no government hand-outs, no Marshall Plan aid, no coddling to make sure that people would not suffer; instead the South was set upon by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops, all loyal Southerners were denied the vote at the point of bayonet, so that the infamous, illegal 14th Amendment might be passed. There was no money, no food and no hope of either. But our grandfathers bent their knee only in church and bowed their head only to God.

Not for one single instant did they ever consider the easy way of federal dictatorship and amalgamation in return for fat bellies. They fought. They dug sweet roots from the ground with their bare hands and boiled them in the old iron pots....they gathered poke salad from the woods and acorns from the ground. They fought. They followed no false doctrine...they knew what they wanted..and they fought for freedom! They came up from their knees in the greatest display of sheer nerve, grit and guts that has ever been set down in the pages of written history...and they won! The great writer, Rudyard Kipling, wrote of them, that: "There in the Southland of the United States of America, lives the greatest fighting breed of man...in all the world!"

And that is why today, I stand ashamed of the fat, well-fed who say that it is inevitable...that our cause is lost. I am ashamed them....and I am ashamed  them. They do not represent the people of the Southland.

And may we take note of one other fact, with all the trouble with communists that some sections of this country have...there are not enough native communists in the South to fill up a telephone booth....and THAT is a matter of public FBI record.