'Stand Up For America'

The supporters would gather for rallies at all times of the day, in venues from local airports to New York’s Madison Square Garden. They snapped up merchandise and chanted “We Want Wallace.” 

They talked of the presidential candidate as a messiah: “Outside the visible return of Jesus Christ,” said one Baptist preacher before a Chattanooga rally in late July, 1968, “the only salvation of the country is the election of George Wallace.” Buckets passed around the crowds like collection plates, pulling in thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars in loose change. 

Soon, the former Alabama governor — a 5-foot-7-inch bantamweight figure who National Review once described as “the image of Edward G. Robinson in the days of Little Caesar” — took the stage under a “Stand Up For America” banner.

And the show began. 

Cutting the air with his left hand, shifting back and forth on his feet, Wallace would denounce Democrats, Republicans, the U.S. Supreme Court, anti-Vietnam War protesters, Communists, and any person who didn’t fit his vision of America. He would demand lower taxes for individuals and higher ones for “multibillion-dollar foundations” — to shouts, cheers, and standing ovations.

“A lot of folks just worshipped him, the poor white people in the country,” said Tom Turnipseed, Wallace’s campaign co-chairman, in a recent interview. 

But others in the crowd had not forgotten that the man speaking to them proclaimed “segregation forever” on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in 1963, and blocked the doorway to black students at the University of Alabama, and — at that point in time — had not renounced those views. They heckled the candidate with “Sieg heil” or “What about Selma?” They brought signs that said “God Bless George Hitler The Smiling Bigot” and “Why don’t you die?” and “Not even Jesus could forgive what you did.” 

Fights erupted. Wallace, who would talk back to hecklers, was the target 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.

A George Wallace rally in California in 1968. The sign in the center says "Wallace Is Rosemary's Baby." Protesters trailed the candidate at most of his stops.(Photo: Alabama Department of Archives and History) 

“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.”

It was a third-party campaign with no downballot candidates and a platform less about specific planks than splintering rage over “riots, minority group rebellions, domestic disorders (and) student protests,” as Wallace’s American Independent Party put it. It started with no infrastructure, almost no money and high hurdles to ballot access. It drew people from the fringes of American political life, including one man expelled from the reactionary John Birch Society for “extremism.”

But by the fall of 1968, George Wallace had pulled both major parties to the right. Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon, who counted on winning the votes of white southerners unhappy with civil rights, had conceded the Deep South to Wallace and reworked his “Southern Strategy.” Wallace had also forced Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, to give a speech touching on law and order, a phrase Wallace’s supporters saw as being anti-crime but which many of Humphrey’s liberal supporters viewed as racist. 

Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey refused to make a deal with Wallace. "He viewed Wallace with great distaste, largely on the basis of the civil rights issue," said Ted Van Dyk, a speechwriter for Humphrey.(Photo: Des Moines Register)

“He did it because he needed to do it,” said Ted Van Dyk, who worked as a speechwriter for the Humphrey campaign. “He wouldn’t even call it law and order. We’d talk about public safety, and making communities safe, and equal protection under the law.”

Wallace’s campaign — chaotic and, in the end, self-destructive — was rooted in its peculiar place in time, as America struggled with the traumas of Vietnam and growing unrest at home. But Wallace also represented a major step in the long rise of modern conservative politics, and heralded a political populism that would emphasize emotion over policy. His law and order and anti-tax messages, while not original to Wallace, proved appealing to traditional Democratic constituencies and helped pull discussion of those issues to the right.

Wallace also used tactics and approaches to campaigning that his daughter and some historians see echoes of in President Donald Trump’s approach to politics. The comparison isn’t exact: Michael Brenes, a historian at Yale University writing a book about Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, said there are “echoes” of Wallace in Trump, but that the campaign was a product of a traumatic year in American history.

“All the conversations about us being divided in 2018 now, we should look back on 1968 as a time when divisions were even more visible and stark,” he said. “As a historian looking back on it, you have to be cautious.”

But it’s hard to miss parallels. 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 history 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.”

Wallace found it hard to sit still. His daughter said Wallace was “always moving around and always talking.” James Kirkpatrick, who profiled the former governor for National Review in 1967, said that during an interview Wallace was “standing up, sitting down, the horn-rimmed glasses on, the glasses off, lighting his cigar, licking his cigar, spitting in the wastebasket.” 

The 1968 campaign wasn’t Wallace’s first bid for the White House. The Alabama governor had entered a handful of Democratic primaries in 1964. He startled some Democrats with strong performances outside the Deep South, winning 43 percent of the vote in Maryland’s primary that year. By 1966, Carter said, Wallace was planning a third-party bid, expecting Lyndon Johnson to win the Democrats’ nomination in 1968.

Turnipseed, who came on board in 1967, helped organize attorneys to figure out how to get Wallace, running under the new American Independent Party (AIP) on the ballots in the 50 states. “We had young lawyers travel around the country, doing that kind of organizing,” he said. 

The campaign had its first big breakthrough in early January. After a months-long campaign, Wallace obtained the necessary signatures to get on the California ballot. By that point, the Vietnam War, concerns over public safety and white backlash to civil rights combined to make Johnson a toxic figure. Nixon’s Southern Strategy counted on that spreading to the Democratic Party generally, and for white southern voters to choose Nixon over any other national candidate Democrats might put forward. 

But Wallace scrambled that plan. He jumped out to early leads in Deep South states that he never relinquished. By July, Nixon had given up on states such as Alabama and Mississippi, refocusing on the upper South and affluent voters.  

“Nixon’s whole strategy in the South was 'We think there’s a new South, a suburban South in Atlanta, Charlotte, places like that,'” said Timothy Nel Thurber, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has written books on Nixon and Humphrey’s relationships with the African-American community. “We’ll let Wallace have the old segregationist South.”

Wallace might have used softer language in 1968 than in 1963, 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.”

The former Alabama governor snapped at charges that he was a racist, often pointing out that his wife Lurleen, who ran as a stand-in for her term-limited husband in Alabama’s 1966 gubernatorial race, received a large percentage of African-American votes that year. (This was not out of any love of the Wallaces in the state’s African-American community. Black leaders in Alabama urged straight-ticket Democratic voting to get their candidates into office that year.) 

But Wallace declared himself a segregationist to the National Review in 1967 (“I believe in segregation all right, but I believe in segregation here in Alabama. What New York wants to do, that’s New York’s business”). In other campaign literature, he called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — which allowed him to brag about African-Americans voting for his wife — “one of the most tragic, most discriminatory pieces of legislation ever enacted” and said he would work to repeal it.

When it came to race, the American Independent Party platform was an orchestra of dog whistles and bullhorns. It denounced school integration and voting access for black citizens in veiled terms, and civil rights in naked ones. 

“The Federal Government has adopted so-called “Civil Rights Acts,” particularly the one adopted in 1964, which have set race against race and class against class, all of which we condemn,” the platform said.

AIP literature also contained anti-Semitic threads. One Wallace pamphlet highlighted Nixon and Humphrey’s endorsements by B’nai Brith, a Jewish service organization. A Wallace committee in Los Angeles circulated a handout called “Rumors About George Wallace” to assuage supporters’ feelings about the governor’s relationship with Jewish individuals. 

“While it is a fact that some Jewish people work for George Wallace, it is absolutely false that they tell him what to do,” the handbill said. “We need every worker available. We would even welcome Negroes to the effort (but that does not mean they would make policy!!!).”

Not suprisingly, white supremacists were drawn to the campaign. The Anti-Defamation League issued a report that fall that found many Wallace chapters had “persistent peddlers of race hatred, anti-Semitism or far-right extremism.” The segregationist White Citizens Council raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Wallace, and Wallace spoke to their gatherings as late as August. An ABC film crew recorded Robert Shelton, a leader of Ku Klux Klan groups in Alabama, shaking hands with Wallace (Alabama state troopers seized the camera and exposed the film), and Shelton, to some Wallace aides' dismay, would call weekly with unsolicited political advice.

The hard-right stand on racial issues walked with mainline Democratic ideas on economics. Wallace praised unions, promised to support minimum wage laws and called for increases in Social Security and Medicare spending. Kirkpatrick, writing in National Review in 1967, said Wallace’s “conservatism may lack intellectual depth, but it makes up for any absence of philosophy in the hard-driving ring of a salesman’s conviction.”

For all the bluster, it wasn’t exactly clear what Wallace, never a gifted administrator, would do if he got to the White House. Judy Turnipseed, who oversaw campaign memorabilia for Wallace, said she didn’t know that he “really thought through about being president, in the sense of presiding over the country.” Carter, who spoke with many of Wallace’s closest advisors, said running for political office always appealed more to Wallace than the public service that went with it. 

“Campaigning was a real narcotic,” he said. “Not so much the end goal of it.”

But Wallace Kennedy said her father’s supporters didn’t mind.

“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’s campaign was, by most accounts, disorganized. 

“It was by the seat of their pants,” Carter said. “I don’t think they really had much strategy. It was 'Get out, get the crowds, get the publicity and hope for the best.'”

The candidate flew to events on a plane the traveling press dubbed ‘Swaydo One’ – both for Wallace’s fondness for the prefix ‘pseudo’ and the plane’s tendency to stall on takeoffs and landings. Dick Smith, an Alabama publisher who co-chaired Wallace’s fundraising committee, later wrote with pride that passing the hat at mid-morning rallies usually covered that day’s expenditures. The Wallace staff also found itself dealing with infighting within state organizations, in particular a bitter struggle within the campaign’s California chapter.

For all that, the third-party candidate rose in the polls as the tragedies of 1968 unfolded. By June, Wallace had reached 14 percent in the Gallup poll. That number hit 16 percent in July, with 34 percent of Southern respondents saying they would vote for him. 

According to Gallup, 83 percent of Wallace supporters thought “integration was moving too fast” (compared to 45 percent nationwide) and 70 percent thought “Negroes themselves are more to blame than whites for their present conditions” (compared to 54 percent nationwide.) 

“One of our slogans was ‘Stand Up For America,’” said Judy Turnipseed. “Of course, we meant white America. But the way it came across was ‘Go away and leave us alone. We don’t want the federal government to come in and tell us what to do.’”

Wallace supporters were also more critical of President Johnson, and more likely than the nation as a whole to think that entry into Vietnam was a mistake (71 percent to 48 percent). “We had some of the anti-war people on our side,” Tom Turnipseed said. “They thought the war was unjust.” (Wallace never articulated a clear policy for Vietnam beyond vague talk of declaring national aims there and listening to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he chiefly used the conflict to bludgeon anti-war critics.)

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,” Brenes said. “He would see posters of Wallace hanging in the office of union leaders. And he and his staffers were baffled and angry by this.”

Wallace did not attract casual supporters. Michael Bibich of Mansfield, Ohio, wrote that Wallace's election would mean "a new government will be born, a government of the old."

"We the people will help Wallace with his election to revive and bring back the Abraham Lincoln government,” he wrote.

Others saw Wallace as a straight talker. One man at an Illinois event for Wallace told the AP's Haynes Johnson that Wallace "says law and order and he means it. I’m going to vote for him because he says what I think.” 

And those voters were devoted. Unpaid volunteers flooded the states to get the former governor ballot access. At a Wallace rally in Texas in June, the campaign collected $35,000 from buckets passed around the crowd (equal to about $254,000 today). Staffers at Wallace’s headquarters in Montgomery would open the mail on a series of tables and shake out donations “from pennies on up,” as Judy Turnipseed remembered. 

“It was amazing to go into that room,” she said. “It was so many small donations.”

Along with the donations came letters of support. “You are reaching the common people because you are using straight, direct talk about every subject without a lot of big words and fancy phrases they can’t understand,” said one. 

But 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 had 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.”

The campaign used more traditional means of fundraising. Carter wrote that Bunker Hunt, son of Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, a prominent backer of ultra-right-wing causes, was a major donor. Smith, Wallace’s finance committee co-chair, said the campaign organized dinners before nightly rallies that, he claimed, brought in an average of $10,800 a night. 

“Naturally we bought the cheapest meal the caterer would serve because we had to have all the net money we could raise,” he wrote after the election. 

Wallace insisted he ran to win, but the more realistic goal was winning enough states to deny the major candidates a majority in the Electoral College. At that point, the campaign hoped for two scenarios: Either do well enough in the popular vote to convince otherwise committed Democratic or Republican electors to mark their ballots for him when the Electoral College met in December, or deny the major candidates a majority in the Electoral College and throw the presidential election into the U.S. House of Representatives – where a candidate would need the support of 26 states to win — and get “concessions.” 

In a television interview the Sunday before the election, Wallace outlined his terms as “that we return to local government in this country, (and) we stop taxing the little man to death like we’re doing and letting multibillion-dollar tax-exempt foundations go free.”

In September, it seemed possible that Wallace might actually force the U.S. presidential election to another round. He hit 21 percent national support in Gallup’s Sept. 20-22 poll, with commanding leads in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana and smaller ones in Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina. He was close to Nixon in Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Had Wallace won all those states that year, he would have denied Nixon a majority in the Electoral College and succeeded in sending the race to the U.S. House.

The Associated Press surveyed state congressional delegations at the end of October to see where the votes for president might go (it found Nixon had 17 states and Humphrey 12; Wallace only had Alabama). But Tom Turnipseed said in a recent interview the Wallace campaign never had a plan for what it might do in that situation – “we were too busy campaigning,” he said. 

Nixon and Humphrey publicly rejected any idea of making a deal with Wallace and often accused the other of plotting to do so. Humphrey refused to bargain with the former governor, calling him “radical, revolutionary and incredible.” 

“He viewed Wallace with great distaste, largely on the basis of the civil rights issue, and Wallace was pretty open about race as an issue,” Van Dyk, Humphrey’s speechwriter, said.

Nixon also spurned any deal with Wallace: “I think this is one nation and I think there should be a two-man race in the whole country,” he said in September. The New York Times wrote in late October that in the event of a deadlock, Nixon appeared to assume Wallace would throw his votes to Humphrey, “to give himself a better target four years hence.”

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, retired U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff is seen here speaking to the press after American Independent Party presidential candidate George C. Wallace named him as his running mate.(Photo: Bettmann Archive)

Neither Nixon nor Humphrey would meekly suffer Wallace’s blows. While some Republicans denounced Wallace’s record on race – Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller called Wallace “a man who is out now and who is trying to split the United States” — the most common message from the GOP was that voting for Wallace could split the ticket and give Humphrey the victory, hitting that message particularly hard in upper South states Nixon needed to win. 

“Nixon cast Wallace’s candidacy as a message candidacy, as symbolic,” said Ken Hughes, a historian at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia who has studied Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. “Nixon’s message was ‘Don’t send Washington a message. Send them a president.’ ”

In October, Nixon also began to appropriate some of Wallace’s language, particularly on education. While Nixon made sure to stress his support for civil rights, he attacked the use of busing to achieve integration and espoused “freedom of choice” plans that, in practice, would leave public schools segregated. 

“I oppose busing,” Nixon told a group of editors and publishers in early October. “I oppose it not because I am against it, but because I am for education.”

Humphrey lagged for much of the campaign but achieved his first breakthrough after a late September speech where he distanced himself from Johnson’s Vietnam policy, getting support from peace Democrats who associated him with the war. To offset Wallace’s gains with blue-collar workers, Humphrey had the help of unions, with whom he had built a strong rapport since his time as mayor of Minneapolis in the 1940s. 

The AFL-CIO struck hard at Wallace, highlighting Alabama’s status as a right-to-work state and generally poor economic condition, compared the rest of the country. The Humphrey campaign published newspaper ads asking readers “what a United States of Alabama would look like,” answering “instead of being the richest country in the world, the U.S. would be one of the poor ones.” 

The Wallace campaign began stumbling in October. After an aborted effort to get former Kentucky Gov. Albert “Happy” Chandler on the ticket – Wallace’s Kentucky chairman called Chandler “an out-and-out integrationist” — the campaign turned to retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay. LeMay, who Wallace served under during World War II, had a reputation for being a strong — some thought fanatical — advocate of air power. (He was also a passionate environmentalist; perhaps reflecting that, the AIP platform demanded action on air and water pollution and called for an Endangered Species Act.)

On October 4, Wallace and LeMay began a press conference in Pittsburgh, before a crowd of reporters and live coverage from all three television networks. After opening statements, LeMay — to the mounting horror of Wallace and his aides — denounced a “phobia” about the use of nuclear weapons, and claimed that wildlife had made a major comeback at Bikini Atoll, site of numerous nuclear tests. 

“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 press conference proved a disaster. Humphrey began calling Wallace and LeMay “the Bombsey Twins,” and the Wallace campaign effectively exiled their number two man. 

“You couldn’t handle him at all,” Tom Turnipseed said. 

Wallace’s rallies were also becoming violent. As hecklers called Wallace a Nazi or taunted him on his civil rights record, supporters would counter with shouts of “communists” or epithets about the protesters’ race or sexuality. Tempers flared and police intervened; Judy Turnipseed remembered being hustled out of the building after fights erupted at a Milwaukee rally.

Hecklers trailed all three campaigns during 1968, but Wallace seemed to encourage them at his rallies, blowing kisses to opponents or throwing one-liners at them (“Son, if you’ll just shut up and take off your sandals, I’ll autograph one of them as a souvenir,” he said to one) but at least one reporter who followed the campaign wrote the bravado knocked Wallace off his prepared scripts. 

Wallace’s momentum evaporated. “The union workers realize this guy isn’t who they think he is,” Brenes said. “Those crowds at Wallace rallies were turning violent . . . It further adds and inflames the image of Wallace as this fire-breathing, hawkish demagogue.”

By the end of October, Wallace’s national support had slipped to 15 percent. He had already begun complaining about “rigged polls,” and at one point called for a federal investigation into them. At a New York rally, he complained about media coverage but quickly intervened when supporters began shouting at reporters at a press table.

“It’s not these here people who’s to blame,” he said. “It’s the policymakers and the editorial writers.” 

A rally for presidential candidate George Wallace at Garrett Coliseum in Montgomery, Ala. in September 1968. (Advertiser file)

Nixon won a majority in the Electoral College, but edged Humphrey by 500,000 votes in the popular vote, out of more than 73 million ballots cast. Wallace won about 10 million votes, 13.5 percent of the total, well behind Nixon’s 31.7 million votes and Humphrey’s 31.2 million. Nixon took the upper South, while Humphrey won back much of the northern union vote. 

But for a third party, it was an impressive result. Wallace took Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the last third-party candidate as of 2018 to win states in the Electoral College. Van Dyk said Humphrey knew he lost when traditional Democratic strongholds in New Jersey and Ohio underperformed for them. 

“Humphrey was mainly preoccupied with Nixon and the Vietnam issue to bring the liberals home,” he 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 Wallace’s presence on the ballot prevented a southern Republican breakthrough in Congress. The GOP picked up a U.S. Senate seat in Florida (won by Nixon) and a handful of House seats in Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, but went nowhere in the states Wallace won. Nixon finished third in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, due to a strong black turnout for Humphrey.

If Wallace failed to throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, he would soon get much of what he wanted. “The policy concessions 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.

Wallace also said the election gave his movement “an auspicious start,” but while others would take up his causes, his time on the national stage was running out. Wallace mounted an ugly and bitter campaign for Alabama governor in 1970 that cast aside all pretenses toward racial moderation — one flyer showed a white girl surrounded by black children with the phrase “Blacks Vow To Take Over Alabama” — then cast aside the AIP (which became even more reactionary in subsequent years) to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 1972. Facing a large field that included Hubert Humphrey, Wallace did well in many primaries and was starting to show national strength before an assassination attempt that May left him paralyzed for life. 

In later years, suffering from the pain of his wounds, Wallace would experience a religious conversion and repent of his past. In the 1980s, Van Dyk wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times where he referred to Wallace as a reactionary. A few days later, Van Dyk got a typed, single-spaced letter from Wallace insisting he was no longer the man he once was, and talking about his black staff members and what he characterized as good relationships with African-Americans in the state.

“He was generally trying to clear himself,” Van Dyk said. “I felt so badly for him, his heritage being a bad one.”