Misery loves gloomy precedents — reassurances that there have been times when a nation’s political life was as repulsive as it now is. So try Chapman University historian Luke A. Nichter’s “The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968.” Nichter argues that George Wallace, with his “class-based message,” created a “lasting movement.”
In 1968, North Vietnamese deaths in three weeks of the Tet Offensive (perhaps 50,000) almost matched U.S. deaths in eight war years but shattered Americans’ support for the war. U.S. urban chaos, however, following two assassinations (the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in April, Robert F. Kennedy in June) displaced the war as the dominant issue.
Wallace was elected Alabama governor in 1962, propelled by full-throated racism, which also characterized his test run in the 1964 Democratic presidential primaries. But by the mid-1960s, he was, Nichter says, “a New Deal-inspired Southern populist, a demagogue first and a segregationist second.” His antic, and comic, rhetoric (e.g., against “briefcase-toting bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight”) would have echoes in 2016.
The major 1968 candidates were all from working-class families: Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the son of a struggling Wallace, S.D., pharmacist; Richard M. Nixon, the last president born in a home without electricity or running water; Wallace, son of a farmer in hardscrabble Barbour County. The working class would define 1968.
Starting with Lyndon B. Johnson, five of eight presidents were to come from former Confederate states. But Wallace had an epiphany from Wisconsin. In 1964, that state’s governor worried that the state would be tarnished if Wallace received 100,000 votes in its primary. He received 266,984. This startled both national parties more than they would be again until 2016. Wallace launched his 1968 campaign not in Dixie but in Western Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump romped in 2016 and 2020.
To get Wallace on California’s ballot, his supporters there each had to complete a two-page legal form by Dec. 31, 1967. Ohio’s secretary of state was so given to invalidating signatures, Wallace supporters had to get 100,000 more than the 433,000 required. A spontaneous combustion of popular support prevailed everywhere.
Evangelist Billy Graham said he thought that presidents are divinely chosen, but he also believed that the Almighty needed his assistance in 1968. More peripatetic than consequential, Graham fawned over Johnson, who almost seems to have favored Nixon, as Graham did. Graham, however, called Wallace “one of the finest orators of the twentieth century.” This judgment was an anticipation of evangelicals jettisoning their standards in 2016.
In 1968, Nichter reports, a senior Humphrey adviser warned of blue-collar defections: “The group that we have often depended upon as the backbone of the Democratic vote is leaving us by the droves.” Humphrey, however, almost won with the help of a former plumber.
On Sept. 29, 1968, Gallup showed Nixon at 43 percent, Humphrey 28 percent, Wallace 21 percent. On Oct. 9, Gallup showed Nixon 44, Humphrey 29, Wallace 20. George Meany was, however, head of the AFL-CIO, and 30 percent of private-sector workers were unionized. (Today, 6 percent are.) Meany energized his coast-to-coast membership from coast to coast, and on Oct. 24, Gallup showed Nixon 44, Humphrey 36, Wallace 15. On Election Day, Humphrey, having tardily shifted his focus from Vietnam to populism, lost the popular vote by 0.7 points.
In 1948, less than 1 percent of Northerners supported South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat presidential candidacy. Twenty years later, Nichter notes, about 8 percent supported Wallace, almost half of whose votes came from the North. Four years after Johnson won 61 percent against Barry Goldwater, the Nixon-Wallace combined vote was 57 percent. Humphrey received 12 million votes fewer than Johnson had in 1964, although the U.S. population in 1968 was 8 million larger.
Nichter believes that Wallace’s 13.5 percent of the popular vote “started a sustained movement that migrated into and eventually came to dominate the Republican Party.” On Election Day 1968, Donald Trump was 22.
