The Peabody named nation’s top historic hotel
The Peabody ducks are flying above a flock of other historic hotels after the Memphis landmark won the top spot in a new ranking by USA TODAY’s Readers’ Choice awards.
A panel of hotel experts nominated The Peabody and a selection of other grand historic hotels nationwide for the Best Historic Hotel designation. Readers of 10best.com then voted. The final tabulation landed The Peabody in the No. 1 spot.
“The grande dame of Southern hotels, the historic Peabody, is a treat to the senses,” according to the 10best.com description. “Opulence abounds, a dynamite restaurant pleases the palate and the famed ducks entertain both adults and children at this hotel dating back to 1869 ...”
The description also references the “old time-y pool area” as “a throwback to the glamour days of indoor hotel pools.”
The description notes that each hotel on the top 10 list has witnessed a great deal of history, and that each has “held true to its historic roots and unique sense of place.”
10best.com is intended, according to its description, to provide readers with unbiased travel content for destinations nationwide. Businesses do not pay to be
The chaos of the rallies reflected the chaos of a campaign that flew from rally to rally on a plane with a tendency to stall on landings and takeoffs; that, according to its campaign finance cochair, relied on money pulled from those campaign rally buckets to meet daily expenses; and that drew people from the fringes of American life, including one man expelled from the reactionary John Birch Society for “extremism.”
But by the fall of 1968, George Wallace had pulled the major parties to the right. Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon conceded the Deep South to him and rewrite a “southern strategy” designed to appeal to white backlash over civil rights. Wallace had also forced Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey to give a speech on “law and order,” a phrase many of Humphrey’s liberal supporters viewed as racist.
Wallace’s campaign – which self-destructed by November, 1968 – was rooted in its peculiar place in time, as America struggled with the traumas of Vietnam and growing unrest at home. But it also presaged the rise of later conservative politics and a political populism that would emphasize emotion over policy.
He also used tactics that his daughter and some historians see echoes of in President Donald Trump’s approach to campaigning. Like Trump, Wallace boasted of his crowd sizes; complained of “rigged polls” and accused the media of treating him unfairly, all while working to ensure the spotlight stayed on him.
“He was a little bit like Trump, in that he really didn’t have to buy a lot of advertising,” said Dan T. Carter, a retired University of South Carolina professor and author of “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics.” “He got coverage wherever he went.”
Peggy Wallace Kennedy said Trump and her father “both adopted the notion that fear and hate were the biggest motivators of voters.”
“They were charismatic, they knew how to work a crowd,” she said. “That’s what the average American wants in a leader. They’re looking for a leader who would rather fight first and worry about the consequences later.”
‘Stand up for America’
In his campaign, Wallace dropped some of the more explicitly racist and segregationist language he used as governor of Alabama. But the ideas were the same. Speaking in Baton Rouge in June, Wallace said both parties “have supported the complete take-over of your schools by the federal government … they have trifled with our children too long and they have trifled with our institutions too long. That’s the reason I’m running for president.”
He could be more direct with rightwing publications. Wallace told National Review in 1967 that he was a segregationist (“I believe in segregation all right, but I believe in segregation here in Alabama”) and in campaign literature denounced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as “one of the most tragic, most discriminatory pieces of legislation ever enacted,” promising to work for its repeal. The platform of Wallace’s American Independent Party denounced the “socalled ‘Civil Rights Acts,’ . . . which have set race against race and class against class.”
What Wallace wanted to do if he got to the White House wasn’t clear. Judy Turnipseed, who oversaw campaign memorabilia for Wallace, said she didn’t know that Wallace “really thought through about being president, in the sense of presiding over the country.”
Wallace Kennedy said her father understood his voters.
“Compare ‘Stand Up For America’ with ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” she said. “It doesn’t suggest how you’re going to do that, but it makes the average American really feel great.”
Wallace staffers found some of their supporters frightening. While visiting Webster, Mass. to assist efforts to get Wallace on the ballot, Tom Turnipseed visited a Polish-American club, and was invited to have a drink with the manager.
“He said, ‘When George Wallace is elected president, he’s going to line up all these n-----s and shoot them,’’ Tom Turnipseed recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, hell no’ … this guy was dead serious.”
By the summer it was clear many Americans wanted Wallace to be president. The former governor reached 16 percent support in the Gallup poll in July. and Gallup found Wallace supporters were far more likely to oppose integration and believe that “Negroes themselves are more to blame than whites for their present conditions” than the nation as a whole. Wallace supporters were also more likely to consider the war in Vietnam a mistake (their candidate never committed to a clear policy on the subject, beyond declaring national aims and listening to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.)
Polls also showed Wallace making inroads among northern union workers, a key Humphrey constituency.
“What made Humphrey upset was that he would go to traditional strongholds or places of support for his campaign … he would go through the shop floors and see Wallace buttons,” said Michael Brenes, a Yale historian and author of an upcoming book on Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. “He would see posters of Wallace hanging in the office of union leaders. And he and his staffers were baffled and angry by this.”
By late September, Wallace hit 21 percent national support in Gallup’s Sept.