Whistlestop, page 39
Reporter: That it’s only Negro citizens. You keep telling me—
Wallace: I’m saying that the high crime rate [in Alabama] comes about because of the high predominance among Negro citizens against each other. And that is an absolute fact. I was a judge for six years in Alabama and I know…
Reporter: Governor, aren’t you really saying that you can make safe… the streets for white people but you don’t know why you can’t make them safe for Negroes?
Wallace: I’m not saying that.
Round and round it went with Wallace. Reporters couldn’t pin him down. But they drew conclusions anyway. Historian Dan Carter quotes NBC’s Douglas Kiker, a native Southerner: “George Wallace had seemingly looked out upon those white Americans north of Alabama and suddenly been awakened by a blinding vision: ‘They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The Whole United States is Southern!’”
The cartoonists and television comedy shows had a field day with Wallace. On NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In there was the line, “George Wallace your sheets are ready.”390 In a Herblock cartoon a tailor hems the long coat of a man wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. On the coat is written “law and order talk,” but the hem doesn’t go all the way down to cover the bottom of the white sheet he wears beneath the coat. On the sheet is written “racism.” On the man’s top hat read the words “states’ rights.”391 The hat covers his KKK hood.
Wallace’s states’ rights argument rested first on constitutional grounds. Like Barry Goldwater and others who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Wallace did so on the theory that it was not within the proper power of the central government to compel states to run their domestic institutions a certain way.
The Los Angeles Times editorialized: “Wallace denies that he is a racist, or that he would run as a racist candidate. His talking points for the last four years have been opposition to ‘big government.’ But while he has tried to embrace several issues… there is no doubt that Wallace’s primary targets are those federal laws, actions and court decisions which have worked against segregation in the South. Wallace’s forte, however disguised in high rhetoric, is to play upon the fears, frustrations and bigotry of the discontented and the ignorant.”
What gave Wallace cover was that he had plenty of targets in his “law and order” campaign other than African-Americans protesting in the big cities: the hippies, anarchists, and communists. “A group of anarchists lay down in front of [Lyndon Johnson’s] automobile and threatened his personal safety,” he told crowds. “The president of the United States! Well I want you to tell you if you’re to make me the president and I go to California and some of them lie down in front of my automobile, it’ll be the last automobile they ever lie down in front of.”
Wallace supporters were additionally irritated by the mobs of smelly hippies because they forced Americans raised on World War II victory stories to confront the brutal fact that America could no longer assert its will across the world.
Wallace complained about the criminals who were released too easily and the permissive culture that made excuses for them instead of treating them like the savages they were. If “policemen could run this country for about two years,” he said, “they’d straighten it out.”392
Theodore White recorded the signs for Wallace in Chicago that spoke to the emotions he aroused: “I worked to buy my house, George, protect our home.” “News media unfair.” “Law and Wallace.” “Wallace—friend of the working man.” “Voters ring the bell of liberty with Wallace.” “Give America back to the people, vote Wallace.”
Pointy Head Versus the Common Man
Wallace loved locking arms with regular people. The two parties had ignored their worries. Wallace elevated them, by identifying with their resentment. “They’ve never paid any attention to the aspiration of the average man on the street, to the oil worker, to the shipyard worker, the autoworker, the communications worker, the businessman, the white-collar worker. They’ve said no, we’re going to bus your children. We’re going to tell you who to sell your property to.” He told an audience at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute that he had more faith in taxi drivers to know what was right for the country than he did in the “elite cult” of “ivory tower folks with pointy heads who couldn’t park their bicycle straight.”
On foreign policy, he said, even the “rednecks” had enough sense “to know Castro and Mao Tse-tung were communists when the theoreticians were praising them as agrarian reformers.”
To bolster his point that he was in touch with the common man, Wallace very often referred to polls that showed support for him. “He never seems to forget the results of a favorable primary or poll,” wrote Gene Roberts of the New York Times. “Even the most obscure. ‘This TV station in Sacramento took a poll, 5,000 people called in and 68 percent were for me. They really like me in Sacramento. We’re going good all over. And let me tell you about the poll two weeks ago in Houston…’”
Heaven help the pollster Wallace didn’t like. In June 1967, Gallup showed that Wallace had a 58 percent unfavorable rating and only 24 percent favorable.393 “They lie when they poll,” he said. “They are trying to forge public opinion in the country, and professional polls are owned by eastern monied interests, and they lie. They’re trying to rig an election.”394
Noisy protesters showed up at nearly every Wallace rally to make sure he knew there was genuine anger behind those unfavorable poll numbers. A long-haired student in faded dungarees and sandals held up a sign: “Support Mental Illness—Wallace for President.”395 In Ohio, a thousand protesters greeted him. At some rallies, anyone with long hair or casual dress was kept out.396 Placards read, “If you liked Hitler, you’ll love Wallace” and “Wallace is Rosemary’s baby.” Protesters held their arms straight out, forming a Nazi salute. Chairs were thrown. Punches, too. One woman reportedly went to greet the candidate and put a lit cigarette in his hand. African-Americans held up signs that read “Black power” and “The world is watching.” People wore sheets and paper bags over their heads.
Wallace often delighted in these confrontations. He promised to sign the sandals of the hippie protesters. He said they looked lovely and then mock-corrected himself, “Oh, I see that you’re a he and not a she.” The only four letter words they didn’t know were W-O-R-K and S-O-A-P, he said. Wallace welcomed protesters, wrote the Chicago Tribune, “believing their presence will bring him voters from fed-up Americans.” Sometimes he even blew kisses toward hecklers and cried: “They got me a million votes!”397 Aides joked that if the protesters didn’t show up, Wallace would have to hire them.
“Let me say this much,” Wallace would warn. “Have your fun now, because after November fifth you are through in this country.”
He’s Not Just a Noisy Gong
Wallace said there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between Republicans and Democrats on major issues. He called the Republicans and Democrats “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.”
The governor never had a real shot at the presidency. He did, however, have a shot at chaos. If he kept Humphrey or Nixon from getting a majority of the electoral votes required to win, the vote would move into the House of Representatives for the first time in 144 years. He wouldn’t be president, under such a scenario, but he would be kingmaker. He’d give his endorsement in return for support on his key issues, like stopping forced school integration and housing reforms.
Wallace threatened Nixon the most. He was such a threat, columnists regularly speculated that Lyndon Johnson had quietly encouraged Wallace to run to undermine Republicans. Without Wallace, Nixon could be confident that Democrats in the South were still angry enough at Johnson and Democrats for the Civil Rights Act that they would never vote for him or his party. With Wallace in the race, those voters had another person they could follow other than Nixon.
If voters were going to leave Nixon, it would be over two issues: integration and law and order. Wallace denounced the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools. Nixon accepted the decision but objected to measures taken by the Johnson administration to encourage integration. On law and order, the differences were hard to see, but Wallace claimed Nixon was just weak tea compared to the Wallace authentic brew.
Nixon wanted to sap Wallace’s strength without actually directly antagonizing the Wallace voters, so he argued that a vote for Wallace was a wasted vote. Worse, a vote for him might help elect Humphrey by denying Nixon electoral majority. That meant more busing. More federal meddling. More drift in Vietnam.
Conservatives also criticized Wallace as a big spender. He supported, among other things, an expansion of Social Security payments, and allowing older people to deduct drugs and other medical expenses. A poll of conservatives by Human Events magazine found almost unanimous opposition to Wallace.
Democrats “at first were inclined to view the Wallace bid with some complacency and even smugness,” wrote David Broder in June 1967.398 But as the former governor rose, they realized a lot of the cars parked at his rallies had Democratic bumper stickers on them. Wallace was making inroads among white lunchpail voters in Northern industrial cities who saw an emerging African-American working class as a threat to their livelihoods. They bristled as well at rising taxes and the squeeze of inflation of the Johnson-Humphrey years. Though Wallace didn’t address those issues as much, his promotion of simple commonsense solutions gave voters hope that he could lick those problems, too.
Wallace soon enjoyed the imitation that comes with success. Nixon and Humphrey were trying so hard to copy Wallace on the law-and-order issue, San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto finally concluded: “None of the candidates is running for president. They’re all running for sheriff.”
Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, also started to sound like Wallace on the stump. The trick for Nixon and all future candidates who hoped to benefit from the “Wallace factor” was to exploit the grievances he stoked while not straying into the racism at the heart of his message. On the other hand, they didn’t want to miss people’s legitimate fears about law and order.
Richard Nixon spoke this language at the Republican National Convention in 1968, in Miami, where he beat out Ronald Reagan for the affection of the Southern delegates. His ally was 1948 Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had the credentials with the Wallace base. In return for giving Thurmond vetting power over his vice presidential pick and promising to protect South Carolina textile workers, Nixon got a trusted stamp or approval in the South.
In one meeting with the Southern delegation orchestrated by Thurmond, Nixon showed how he could do the Wallace wink. Without ever explicitly renouncing his own past support for desegregation, Nixon got it across to his listeners that in the White House he would do as little as possible to execute federal court mandates. We know this because the Miami Herald asked a member of the Florida delegation to carry a concealed tape recorder. Nixon said that as president he would not “satisfy some professional civil rights group, or something like that.”
George Wallace’s successful manipulation of racial and social issues gave birth to imitation and suspicion in future campaigns. In Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kick-off tour, he visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi and spoke about state’s rights. The fairgrounds were just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town associated with the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers from the North. Liberals heard a deliberate eco of Wallace’s appeal to white voters.
The president’s men defended the reference as libertarian, merely a nod to the country’s founding principle of local control. Critics couldn’t get past the symbolism and coded language. The Reagan team manipulated symbol better than anyone. How could they not know what they were flirting with? “Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys,” wrote William Raspberry. “The essence of that transformation, we shouldn’t forget, is the party’s successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan’s Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.”399
Bill Clinton defended his 1994 crime against charges that he had emphasized law and order issues to appeal to white voters worried about the black inner city. When Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 by talking about crime committed by illegal immigrants critics said he was making a Wallace-like appeal to the portion of the electorate that doesn’t like people with skin of a different color. He also re-Tweeted messages from white supremacists. When he was slow to condemn groups aligned with the Klan, Republicans in Washington blanched. It looked like he was playing dumb, so as not to lose the bigot vote.
What had changed since Wallace’s time was that political leaders were quicker to call out coded behavior than they had been in 1964.“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” Speaker Ryan said, criticizing Trump. “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln. We believe all people are equal in the eyes of God and our government. This is fundamental, and if someone wants to be our nominee, they must understand this.”
The Wallace Collapse
The violence of 1968 pushed Wallace higher in the polls. In April, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, which uncorked chaos in a hundred American cities. At that point Wallace was polling at 9 percent. Within days after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in early June, he polled at 16 percent. After the violence of the Democratic National Convention later in the summer in Chicago, his numbers jumped again. By mid-September, Wallace garnered 21 percent. On that kind of climb, he’d get to 30 percent by voting day. That would probably throw the election into the House.
Wallace was doing well enough to make Nixon worry that since the Democrats controlled the House, it was almost certain that Humphrey would make a deal with Wallace if the election wound up there. Toward the end of the campaign Nixon challenged Humphrey to agree that the winner of the popular vote should get the support of the loser, but Humphrey never responded; he was no dummy.400
Pundits didn’t think Wallace could be stopped by the normal political roadblocks. “It is not an issues movement,” wrote Max Lerner in the Los Angeles Times, “except for the one overarching ‘law-and-order’ issue. Instead it is a mood movement. Its mood is one of overwhelming protest and rage, curiously vigilantist despite its law-and-order rhetoric. That is why it cannot be fought as trade-union leaders are trying to fight it, by focusing on bread-and-butter arguments. Since it is an irrational movement, of recoil and fears, it cannot be met by appeals to reason.”401
This sounds very modern. Liberals complain that Republicans have tricked white working-class voters by getting them to vote on cultural issues like abortion and opposition to same-sex marriage and based on their economic self-interest.
The pundits were wrong about Wallace though. Bread-and-butter appeals did work. As Wallace rose, unions sent out sixteen million fliers in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and California.402 “George Wallace could cost you $1,000 a year,” said one, arguing that the average income in Alabama was $1,000 below the national average. The fliers also pointed out that Alabama’s unemployment rate was higher than the nation’s as a whole.
The union fliers made emotional appeals, too. One included graphic pictures of riots in the South and asked, “Do you want police dog, billy club and fire bomb law and order?” Another said Wallace had “no program other than racism.”
“Let’s lay it on the line,” Hubert Humphrey told a Detroit audience. “George Wallace’s pitch is racism. If you want to feel damn mean and ornery, find some other way to do it, but don’t sacrifice your country. George Wallace has been engaged in union-busting whenever he’s had the chance… and any union man who votes for him is not a good union man.”403
Humphrey also helped draw Northern audiences away from Wallace by changing his position on the Vietnam War. On September 30, 1968, the Vice President came out against president Johnson’s handling of the war. His numbers improved. Then Johnson called a halt to bombing, and Humphrey’s numbers went up further.
Toward the end of the 1968 campaign, violence flared nearly everywhere Wallace went, much of it triggered by the candidate himself as he taunted hecklers at already tense rallies. At New York’s Madison Square Garden, 3,500 police were required to keep the peace at a Wallace rally.404 His gatherings devolved into shouting matches, which suggested chaos and hinted that his presidency might be one long string of disturbances.
The final thing that pulled Wallace back to earth was his selection of Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay had been the U.S. Air Force chief of staff and head of the Strategic Command. He shared Wallace’s ability to tell it like is, but he did not share his talent for knowing when to put a cork on the effluent.
The choice blew up on the launchpad at a Pittsburgh press conference where the jowly LeMay was introduced to reporters. They already knew him as cigar-chomping, tough-talking “Old Iron Pants,” who had introduced colorful descriptions of nuclear holocaust into the popular conversation. He had mused about bombing “the North Vietnamese back to the stone age” and destroying “every work of man in North Viet Nam if that is what it takes.”
LeMay had orchestrated the Pacific bombing campaign in World War II, planned the successful Berlin Airlift, one of the most extraordinary feats of modern logistics, and reorganized American defenses.
He was also a hothead whose fondness for metallic solutions made him the model for the deranged general Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, distrustful of civilian authorities and quick to use bombs to solve problems. “If you have to go,” John Kennedy once said of him, “you want LeMay in the lead bomber. But you never want LeMay deciding whether or not you have to go.”405
