Political magnet drew parties to the right
Amid chaos, George Wallace energized his conservative base
When George Wallace took the stage, the show began.
With a “Stand Up For America” banner nearby, the former Alabama governor – a bantamweight figure standing a bit under 5’7” – would denounce Democrats, Republicans, the Supreme Court, anti-Vietnam War protesters, Communists and any person who didn’t fit his vision for the country, slicing the air with his hand and rocking left to right as he spoke.
His supporters – who could stuff thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in loose change into buckets passed at the rallies – would cheer and give him standing ovations.
“A lot of folks just worshiped him, the poor white people in the country,” said Tom Turnipseed, Wallace’s campaign co-chairman, in a recent interview.
But his opponents, who had not forgotten the man who proclaimed “segregation forever” on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, were there, too. They yelled “Sieg heil” or “What about Selma?” at the candidate, who would talk back, sometimes losing his place in his speech.
Fights erupted. Wallace was the tar-
get of fruit, candy, pennies and in at least one instance, a small whiskey bottle. Peggy Wallace Kennedy, who traveled with her father’s campaign in the summer of 1968, stood on the stage at one rally when the projectiles started flying.
“They had to get us off the stage,” she said in a recent interview. “They pretty much carried us to the car. Just took us from the crowd to get us to the cars.”
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 fall 1968, George Wallace had pulled the major parties to the right. Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon conceded the Deep South to him and rewrote 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 served as a step in the rise of post-World War II conservative politics and heralded 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.
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 he 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 “so-called ‘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, Massachusetts, 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 late September, Wallace was leading or close in enough southern states to throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Wallace’s stated goal was to do that to win “concessions” on civil rights
By October, both Nixon and Humphrey were pushing back against Wallace. Humphrey enjoyed solid support from unions, and the AFL-CIO hit Wallace (who tried to cultivate unions) hard on economic issues, highlighting Alabama’s status as a right-to-work state. Humphrey also took aim at the relative- ly poor economic conditions in Wallace’s home state.
Nixon and the GOP, meanwhile, told conservative voters that voting for Wallace would mean a Humphrey victory.
“Nixon’s message was, ‘Don’t send Washington a message, send them a president,’ ” said Ken Hughes, a historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
The Wallace campaign, meanwhile, was stumbling. Wallace picked retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. At a news conference broadcast nationwide on Oct. 4, LeMay began attacking what he called a “phobia” over nuclear weapons and claimed that Bikini Atoll, site of nuclear weapons testing, had seen animals return to the site.
“If I have to go to war and get killed in the conflict in Vietnam with a rusty knife, or get killed with a nuclear weapon, if I had the choice, I’d get killed with the nuclear weapon,” LeMay said. The campaign effectively exiled LeMay afterward.
Legacy
The Wallace/LeMay ticket finished with 10 million votes, about 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace took five southern states – as of 2018 he is the last thirdparty candidate to win states in the electoral college – and drew votes from both men.
“Humphrey was mainly preoccupied with Nixon and the Vietnam issue to bring the liberals home,” speechwriter Ted Van Dyk said. “We really did see Wallace as an unpleasant distraction. We should have seen him as more important than that.”
Wallace also drew votes from Nixon, and some political commentators at the time thought his candidacy prevented a southern Republican breakthrough in Congress. But beyond that, Wallace had gotten concessions, even without the House of Representatives.
“The policy concessions that came, came from Democrats and Republicans competing for Wallace votes,” Hughes said.
Wallace said as much in a newsletter sent to supporters the following March: “Both national parties and their candidates took positions that would not have been taken had our movement not been involved,” he wrote.