Fear, Hate, and Victimhood: How GEORGE WALLACE Wrote the DONALD TRUMP Playbook by Andrew E. Stoner

Author:Andrew E. Stoner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

For Wallace Kennedy, and almost anyone else, such a scene was unsettling and uncomfortable. For Wallace and his campaign hierarchy, it was what they were counting on to keep the attention going. As one top Wallace aid, Tom Turnipseed, acknowledged many years later, the campaign often lacked any organized plan or objective: “We were too busy campaigning” for any serious contemplation about whether the “heat” of the rally spectacles—the violence—could actually backfire and turnoff the voters it had caused to look.110 Author Heather E. Yates, however, notes that events or circumstances are in place in certain political cycles where spectacle may be more likely than others. She cites the 2016 campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as an example—Trump surprising the Republican establishment by easily walking away with their presidential nomination and likewise shocking the nation by winning the Electoral College; all the while the Democratic Party was making history as the first major party to nominate a woman for president. The Wallace, Nixon, and Humphrey 1968 campaigns—in as tumultuous a political year as ever occurred—likewise may have set the stage of a “disruption of the conventional order of the electoral process,” and as a result, “the campaign cycle would quickly define itself as an unconventional campaign; a year of radical rhetoric, and the personalization of the campaign through digital media platforms … creat[ing] a new form of spectacle in political theater.”111 While the 1968 campaign had no “digital media platforms” to contend with, television was still a new medium being embraced in massive numbers by most Americans.

Where the campaign took its message could be as big a part of the spectacle as anything for Wallace. Following the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago, both Wallace and Nixon took the cue and quickly made their way to Chicago to campaign as in contrast to the Democrat’s show that fell into chaos. A large crowd witnessed Wallace’s noonday motorcade along State Street in Chicago—a route many pols favored, but motorcades were a difficult “event” for reporters to cover, according to Dan King Thomasson, a Scripps-Howard reporter. “The motorcade was a string of convertibles set to drive through the Downtown Loop,” Thomasson recalled:

[Reporters] jumped on the back of one of those cars so we could be right in behind Wallace. As we got to the Loop, pretty soon there was a big crush of people on either side of the car. I was joined by four other guys, Teddy White, Joe Alsop, John McLaughlin, and John Farmer and another guy who decided to straddle the hood ornament. Well, this went on for several blocks through the Loop and the crowd, estimated at more than 100,000, just to see this guy. But we didn’t stop. They kept driving on to the hotel [once we were out of the downtown parade route]. Instead of stopping and dropping us off, they took off with us on the back of this sedan going very fast. They couldn’t have cared less about what happened to us—they were speeding along and we were clinging on for our lives.

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