A Turbulent Year

There will forever be disagreements about the meaning of various events in 1968. But I think all will agree on one thing: it was a turbulent political year such as has seldom been seen in America (not that the turbulence was limited to America).

Four years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had won a full term as president in a huge landslide, almost a year after he had become president when John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. After the 1964 election, the widespread expectation was that Johnson would run for a second full term in 1968, and at that time he seemed invincible. Johnson would have been constitutionally eligible to run for two full terms, because he had served less than half of the term to which Kennedy had been elected in 1960. However, no president who had succeeded to the presidency upon the death or resignation of a president has won a second full term.

What ensued? To quote Harold Macmillan, who was British prime minster from 1957 to 1963, "events, dear boy, events". The 1965-1969 presidential term was certainly eventful. Johnson's domestic policies, including federal funding of elementary and secondary education, federal health insurance for senior citizens, and other expansions of the federal reach, disillusioned some voters. But the biggest "event" was the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam, which began in earnest in 1965.

By 1968, Johnson had lost much of his support. On March 31 of that year, he announced he would not run for president in 1968. In that same speech, he announced the beginnings of the U.S.'s standing down from its military commitment to South Vietnam.

Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination, after a contentious campaign that saw, among other things, the assassination of one of Humphrey's rivals, Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York.

The Republican nominee was Richard Nixon. After losing the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy, and the 1962 California gubernatorial election to Pat Brown, Nixon moved to New York, joined a law firm there, and patiently planned his comeback. He was talked about as a contender for the 1964 Republican nomination but, in what certainly seems in retrospect a wise move, he bided his time. He rather easily won the 1968 Republican nomination; his main opponent was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.

The third-party candidate was George Wallace, then the former and future governor of Alabama. At his first gubernatorial inauguration in 1963, he said: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Between that inauguration and his 1968 presidential candidacy, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been enacted. For the first time, the federal government possessed the tools to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, which were ratified in the wake of the Civil War, and were intended, respectively, to give freed African American slaves equal protection of the laws, and voting rights.

I did not find in Wallace's 1968 platform an explicit pledge to repeal those acts, but that is at least strongly implied by such planks as:

Reestablishment of the authority and responsibility of local government by
returning to the states, counties and cities those matters properly falling
within their jurisdiction and responsibility.

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.

One can speculate about what combination of ambition and conviction brought Wallace to his decision to launch a third-party candidacy. But it is clear that he was setting out a policy position separate from those of the major-party candidates.

Humphrey was a consistent supporter of the type of federal actions that Wallace condemned. I wrote about Humphrey's 1948 convention speech here. In 1964, Humphrey was Senate floor manager for proponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Nixon had been seen as a moderate on racial issues. During his presidency, when the issues shifted from elimination of Jim Crow laws, and impediments to African American voting, to such issues as affirmative action, and the so-called "busing" issue (sending children to public schools outside their neighborhood, in order to achieve racial balance), Nixon to a large degree sided with southern conservatives. But that's different from advocating rollback of the 1964-5 civil rights legislation.

Nixon won the general election with 301 electoral votes, to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace. The popular vote was very close, with 43.42% for Nixon to 42.72% for Humphrey. Wallace received 13.53% of the vote, a much higher proportion than Strom Thurmond had garnered in his similar third-party run in 1948. Wallace won a fair number of votes outside the south, although all of his electoral votes were southern.

Never again was there to be a major segregationist third-party run. Wallace ran for president as a Democrat in 1972 and 1976, failing to win his party's nomination in both of those years. Wallace, as was generally the case with major white southern politicians who retained significant support in the 1970s and onward, moderated his position on racial issues. He won further gubernatorial elections in Alabama in 1970, 1974 and 1982, despite being paralyzed after an assassination attempt in 1972.

Nixon won the electoral votes of Florida, Virginia, both Carolinas, and Tennessee in 1968. He then swept every southern state in his 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. With the exception of 1976, when Georgian Jimmy Carter won a huge majority of southern electoral votes, Republicans have dominated the south ever since. Even in 2000, when Al Gore of Tennessee was the Democratic presidential nominee, his Republican opponent George W. Bush made a sweep of the south, including Gore's home state. Gore won a plurality of the popular vote, but the bulk of his support was outside his home region.