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8: George Wallace and Beyond: Short-Lived Parties, 1968 and After
- University of South Carolina Press
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8 George Wallace and Beyond Short-Lived Parties, 1968 and After There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican parties. George Wallace, 1968 Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic was a success because a few people survived on life rafts. Eugene McCarthy Some years are as bland as dry toast. Others spark excitement even long after they have passed. Nineteen sixty-eight excites the memory of those who lived through it, though there are many who recall its torment far more than its triumphs.1 It was the year of the Tet Offensive, a military setback but morale victory for Vietnamese Communists because it revealed to Americans that no light could be seen at the end of the tunnel; the year of My Lai, the most infamous mass atrocity that American forces ever committed in Vietnam. In China the Cultural Revolution was raging. France went to the brink of revolution. Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring tragically was ended by Soviet force of arms. In the United States, attitudes bristled during the long, hot summer when African Americans, recoiling from years of racial injustice, burned down huge sections of America’s northern ghettos. The social contract appeared to be breaking down as Martin Luther King Jr. and then Robert Kennedy were gunned down and killed, Black Power and separatism replaced integration and reconciliation as core values of many victims of white racism, and millions of young whites deserted liberal idealism (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”) to enlist in the New Left or the counterculture. In 1968 a young man could be drafted and kill and die in Vietnam. But if he was under twenty-one, most states deemed him too young to be trusted with something as important as the vote. The National Organization for Women celebrated its second birthday in 1968. Another four years passed before Congress proposed the Equal Rights Amendment, George Wallace and Beyond 119 and five before the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to an abortion. The birth of the gay and lesbian rights movement was still a year away. Nineteen sixty-eight was Ronald Reagan’s second year of eight as California governor —a dress rehearsal, as it turned out, for the presidency. It was the year when a wartime president, Lyndon Johnson, withdrew from his race for reelection after a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary against a peace candidate of his own party, Eugene McCarthy. Antiwar demonstrators during the Democrats’ August convention acted provocatively in Chicago streets, and the brutal ferocity of city police amounted to what some investigators came to call the “Chicago Police Riot.”2 On the convention floor, a young network reporter named Dan Rather was roughed up on camera , and CBS anchor Walter Cronkite declared that“we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan!” Nineteen sixty-eight was the last year when an establishment candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, could avoid submitting through primaries to the voters ’will and still take his party’s nomination. It was the year Richard Nixon first won the presidency. Nineteen sixty-eight was the kind of year that breathes life into third parties. Wallace, the American Independent Party, and Their Legacy Americans who experienced 1968 may never forget the lightning bolt first illuminating southern skies as a signal of an impending national storm. That year former governor George Wallace of Alabama launched and led a coast-to-coast movement of conservative whites who were eager to “send Washington a message” that African Americans had pushed too far too fast, that wars worth fighting are worth winning, that it was time to get tough on crime and to suppress ghetto riots and antiwar militancy . Wallace’s movement became a crusade of people wanting to shout to all those in power that they were mad as hell about what was happening in the 1960s. By then Wallace had been a nationally recognized political figure for more than five years. In 1963, at his first inauguration as Alabama governor, he had sounded the theme of his new administration: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” That was also the year when the new governor had “stood in the schoolhouse door,” symbolically defying the commitment of federal power to desegregating the University of Alabama. Although by 1964 Wallace was thinking of making a third-party run for...