The Distance between Us: Reconsidering the Political Landscape of George Wallace's 1968 Presidential Campaign

The tension in the room was palpable. george wallace sat mere feet away from the conservative standard bearer, William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley, the host of the Public Broadcasting Service's Firing Line, quickly removed any doubt concerning his feelings toward the Alabama governor with a searing introduction that read more like a roast than a welcome. Buckley grilled Wallace on his grand feat of political "chivalry," which saw him hand over the governor's office to his wife, Lurleen, when term limits precluded his reelection. Buckley also highlighted Wallace's 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley's comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like "out-segged" or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed. Wallace fired back his fair share of barbs about being far more popular in elections in Alabama than Buckley had been in his disastrous mayoral campaign in New York City.¹

But the pivotal question of this hour-long program was fairly straightforward: was Wallace really a conservative? Buckley, who throughout his career fancied himself a gatekeeper of conservatism, felt that liberal media analysts too easily labeled Wallace a conservative not all that different in many regards from the GOP's 1964 nominee, Barry Goldwater. Moreover, Buckley was concerned that Wallace was misleading voters by taking advantage of the conservative label. In Buckley's estimation, Wallace was an "impostor."²

In some ways, Buckley was right. But in other ways, so were liberal pundits. The truth is that Wallace's 1968 third party campaign filled a political gap that was emerging by the late 1960s between the Democratic and Republican parties. Some scholars have referred to Wallace's American Independent Party as a bridge that functioned to usher disenchanted white racial conservatives from their longtime devotion to the Democratic Party over to the rightward-shifting Republican Party. This essay provides a deeper look into George Wallace's 1968 presidential platform to see if we can glean any new insights about how the American Independent Party envisioned government. In many ways, Wallace's campaign was conservative, but in exactly ways we often assume. In other ways, Wallace's platform embraced and sought to expand a liberal agenda in terms of government management of the nation's problems. In most instances, scholars have investigated the ways that Wallace's third party campaign influenced the major parties, especially the Republican Party. Here I want to see how the two major parties of the 1960s influenced this third party movement and what that might tell us about who it attracted. By putting Wallace's platform under a closer microscope, we can get a better sense of exactly how the American Independent Party fit into the space between the two major parties.³

Political platforms are an often-neglected piece of political history. They occasionally make appearances in the historical narrative, such as when the Democrats famously included a civil rights plank in Harry Truman's 1948 platform, a monumental shift in the trajectory of that party. Either because they are viewed as too idealistic, too vague, or just pure formality, party platforms don't always attract analysis. But perhaps they should, especially in this case. In the tumult of 1968, even the two established parties were scrambling to define themselves. Democrats, who enjoyed the benefit of a historically booming economy under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, struggled with how to frame their Vietnam agenda and how to frame their Civil Rights advances in the wake of urban unrest. Republicans looked to recover from the disastrous Goldwater campaign of 1964, and they sought a way that their party might settle between the moderate and conservative wings. Both parties' platforms were, respectively, the one comprehensive and collaborative statement of those...