511. America in '68: George Wallace, The First Donald Trump (Part 4)
01:08:49 Share

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Now, Dominic, if you look at most successful businesses, you will notice one thing they all have in common. They all took a

a lot of hard work. Would you say that's true of us? Would you say that's true of the rest of history? I think that is true, actually, Tom. I think we both do work quite hard on it, don't we? We spend a lot of time preparing the episodes. It's not quite the effortless superiority that everybody imagines. But I have to say it does help to have a good team. It's a challenge, isn't it, that all companies face

So this can be a daunting task, especially when you need to find someone right away and you have too many or too little options to choose from. That's right. But Tom, there is a place where people can go to for help, and that is ZipRecruiter.com.

Now, ZipRecruiter does the work for you to make hiring fast and easy. And one reason it works so quickly is because of ZipRecruiter's invite to apply feature. So that lets you personally connect with your top choices to encourage them to apply for the role sooner. Experience faster, easier hiring with ZipRecruiter. Try it free at ZipRecruiter.com slash history. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash history.

slash h-i-s-t-o-r-y history

When you need mealtime inspiration, it's worth shopping Fries for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus, extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings. Fries, fresh for everyone. Fuel restrictions apply.

More Chumba Casino fan mail. Love this. It says, Dear Ryan, I love Chumba Casino. There's so much fun. I love the wild ride from the social slots to the slingo to jackpots quicker than a six-time real spin. Everybody's finding their fun at Chumba Casino. Why don't you find out for yourself? Head to ChumbaCasino.com and enjoy all the fun.

hundreds of casino-style games for free with your welcome bonus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino, no purchase necessary. VGW Group, void where prohibited by law. 18-plus terms and conditions apply. From north to south, to east to west, listen and you'll hear the voice of George C. Wallace.

Ringing loud and clear, he's speaking to America, his words are wise and true. And if you really love your country, here's what you'll do. Let's vote to keep it free, to be destroyed by a great society.

That was Stand Up For America by country singer Lamar Morris. And Dominic, he's from Alabama, like the hero of his song, George Wallace. He is indeed. So, so far, Dominic, in this series...

and we're looking at the politics of America in 1968, we've been very much focusing on the Democrats. And today we're looking at a man who, well, I mean, he ends up running against the Democrats in the 1968 election, but he does begin as a Democrat himself, doesn't he? George Wallace, the hero of that wonderful song. He does. And that's because everybody in the South effectively was democratic.

Because obviously in the, in the aftermath of the civil war, the Republican party and in reconstruction, it's the party of Lincoln. It's the party of occupation. It's the party of, as they would say, union aggression. So the Republican party is tainted and basically to succeed in Southern political life, you have to be a Democrat. And Wallace, as you say, won office in Alabama as a Democrat, but then stands in 1968 for the so-called American independent party.

So he is the champion of segregation and he is one of the most significant third party candidates in American history. He won 10 million votes and five Southern states. So he's not an eccentric. He's not an outlier. And my view of George Wallace, Tom, is that he is one of the most significant American politicians of the 20th century. So far more significant than a lot of people who actually became president.

And the reason for that is because the constituency that he finds and the themes that he makes play with establish kind of a new ideological bent for candidates, and particularly Republicans? Yeah, I think so. His campaign is often seen by political historians as an absolutely crucial moment in the transformation of the American political system. So the way in which the Republican Party becomes hegemonic in the South.

But also you mentioned his themes and we will go into his extraordinary style, his rhetorical sort of flourishes, the country music actually that he uses, the iconography, all of those things. They very obviously anticipate later candidates and most obviously,

The one American politician who's been on people's minds for the last few years, and that is, of course, Donald J. Trump. We'll be exploring the parallels between Wallace's career and Donald Trump's. Well, goodness. Yeah. What a preface. Okay. So tell us about him. Who is he?

And Dominic, I should warn you before you do that, that 1968 in America is obviously your mastermind subject. You did a doctorate on it. You've read every book going on the subject. You've been into the archives. You've uncovered original material. However, as I alerted you in the first episode, I've read a single book. Wow. Amazing. Can I just quote? So this is by Luke A. Nictor, The Year That Broke Politics. And this is the guy who, even though he's not wearing a bow tie and his author photo looks as though he should be,

And he says of Wallace that he's one of the most misunderstood politicians in American history. So just throwing that into the mix because I think...

I mean, having read your notes, I'm slightly struggling to see how he could be misunderstood. Yes, I think Luke Nixer says that Wallace has been a little bit maligned and a bit caricatured, does he not? He does. That's very much his theme, yes. And we'll lay out some of the evidence and the listeners can make up their own minds. I think that's fair to say. Fair enough. So Wallace was born in 1919 in a place called Cleo, which is in what's called the Black Belt of Alabama, so-called the Black Soil, but also because it's the kind of heart of the kind of plantation system.

So Clio and the area around it, incredibly poor. It was always dependent on cotton. Six out of 10 people in that area are black. And almost half of those people in 1919 probably can't write their names. So that gives you a sort of sense of the poverty and deprivation of the area. It's an area and it's a time period in which the shadow of the American Civil War hangs very heavy. So Wallace was brought up on the mythology of the lost cause that we did an episode about a couple of years ago.

There are Confederate war memorials everywhere. There are Confederate graveyards and gravestones. The Confederate flag flies over the state house in Montgomery, Alabama. So he absolutely drinks deeply of that kind of legend. His father is poor. He's a farmer.

He's a failure in the Depression. It's interesting how many of the people actually in this 1968 story, Johnson, Nixon, Wallace. Reagan. Yeah, Reagan. Their fathers were failures who had struggled very badly in the early years of the 20th century. Is that why Wallace is an FDR fan? I think a lot of people in the South, I wouldn't say FDR fans, but they like the social programs. They like big governments. Yes. So he's a paternalistic politician, I think you could say. George goes off to Tuscaloosa.

to the University of Alabama Law School. I've often had criticism because I use Tuscaloosa as a kind of all purpose sort of American generic name to mean middle of nowhere America. So it's a delight to be able to use it properly. Yeah, well done. To mean itself because it's the home of the University of Alabama Law School. He goes there. His best thing is boxing, actually. He's a brilliant boxer. But he's a quarterback as well, isn't he? In the

The school football team. So he's good at sport. He's very pugnacious. Like me. No, he's nothing like you, Tom. I think it's fair to say. No, but in his sporting ability. I encourage you not to develop a parallel between yourself and George Wallace because I want the podcast to continue. Yeah, fine. Fine. But I'm just saying on the sporting field. He's a short guy. He's very pugnacious. He's not got much money. So he works as a kind of waiter and a taxi driver while he's at university to make ends meet.

And we're told in Dan Carter's brilliant biography, The Politics of Rage, that his classmates would, quote, laugh at his shiny pants, loud suits, louder ties and desperate attempts to win friends. I think that's fair enough. In that respect, I think the parallel between Wallace and yourself is... I've never worn shiny pants. It's an exact one. Never, ever worn shiny pants. He is passionately interested in politics. When he was 15, he won a competition.

And he really made a huge effort to win this competition, to be a page for the summer. What is a page? Sort of carrying messages. Okay. You know, opening, closing doors and, you know, sort of just an attendant, an attendant in the Alabama Senate. Because there's Kenneth Parcell in 30 Rock. He's a page. Right. I've never seen that. I've pretty much watched them all and I'd never knew what a page really is. Well, now you know. Now I know. Yeah. He's like a sort of errand boy.

Right, like a sort of office boy in the Alabama Senate. An office junior. Exactly. So politics in Alabama is, shall we say, pretty distinctive. So politics in Alabama in the 1930s is very different from politics of Stanley Baldwin's Britain, let's say.

Obviously, because Alabama was a slave state and a Confederate state, it has been subject to reconstruction and then what's called redemption. So since then, it has become a white supremacist, one party, democratic state. I mean, just for listeners now, that's the thing to keep in mind. The Democrats at this point in the South are very much not the woke party. They're not at all. I mean, they are the opposite.

Since 1901, black citizens of Alabama have been systematically disenfranchised and they're effectively reduced to second-class status. They have segregation, the so-called Jim Crow system. The politics that remains is dominated by the old planters, the plantation owners, and the new business interests developing at the turn of the century.

And the tone of politics is aggressively populist. Politicians in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s in Alabama will play on racism effectively and class grievances to mobilize a white electorate to win elections. But then when they're in office, they will generally govern in accordance with the kind of business interests of the state. So racism is built into the politics of Alabama.

Wallace never questions it. Why would he? Most people don't. He had black neighbors, but they effectively lived a parallel life. There are stories about him at university arguing with northern classmates about the South's racial codes, and he's quoted as saying,

The colour define in their place. I don't hate them, but they're like children and that is not something that is going to change. That's probably what a lot of Alabamians would have said round about the same time, 1920s, 1930s. And is he thinking that because he's thinking that they're racially inferior or that they're culturally and socially inferior? That's a very good question. And I think you're asking a question that he would have struggled to answer

because I don't think people... Well, it's just the air that he's breathing in, right? Yeah, he wouldn't have intellectualized it, I suspect. Right, okay. But we will see later on when he's governor what he writes privately about this question of inferiority. Okay. And we can gauge it.

He gets into local politics. He becomes a lawyer. He marries a girl called, of course, called Lurleen, who is from Tuscaloosa, who has no interest in politics at all. Lurleen will play a part later on, so remember her. She's very sweet. She's not a great brain. Everyone says she's very nice, and George treats her generally, I think, very badly.

There's a parallel with me that she's very keen on fishing, apparently. Right. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Throw that out as well. Okay. He became a flight engineer in the Pacific. He flew bombing raids over Japan. He came back to Alabama. He climbed the Democratic ladder. He became a district judge. And he attached himself to a patron called Big Jim. Of course he did. Of course he did. Yeah.

Is there any other kind of patron in the 1950s Alabama? Surely not. So Big Jim, he's called Big Jim Folsom. He was the governor. He was a populist and he branded himself as the little man's big friend. And I'll just tell you about his rhetorical style. Dan Carter describes it as, and I quote, exaggeration, hyperbole, ridicule, and a kind of country sarcasm that mocked his enemies. Interesting.

And you can maybe trace the lineage of that particular style. Where that's going. Backwards and indeed forwards. But Big Jim had a drawback. He was moderate on race. He was not intensely racist. And the problem for him is that in 1954, there's a landmark Supreme Court decision called Brown versus the Board of Education, very famous to people who know about American history, which effectively said that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

This sort of sparks the drive to integrate schools and indeed other institutions. And this provoked a massive backlash across the white South. The foundation of all these white citizens councils pledged a massive resistance to defend the Southern way of life. And to give you a sense of how influential these councils were, within just a couple of years, Alabama's white citizens council had 80,000 members.

But this is at a time when to win the governorship of Alabama, to win the election, you probably need only 200,000 votes. So in other words, if you have the White Citizens Council on your side, you're almost halfway there. So Wallace abandons Big Jim at this point and starts to tack to what you might call the right wing.

But he doesn't, at first, go quite far right enough. So in 1958, he stood for the governorship in the Democratic primaries. But there was a rival candidate called John Patterson who was even more overtly racist, even more pledged to the cause of massive resistance, and was endorsed effectively by the Ku Klux Klan.

And Wallace lost to this guy, Patterson. So there's a very famous statement that Wallace says to his aides afterwards. He basically says, I'm never going to be outflanked on this issue again, expresses in much more earthy terms than I am. He does. Yeah. He says, I will always be from this point onwards. I will make sure there is never a candidate to my right as it were.

And so in the next four years, he goes out of his way to win white supremacist voters. He swings well to the right on segregation. And he goes around saying to everybody, if the federal government and the courts try to integrate our schools, I will literally stand in the schoolhouse door

to block it. And his radio ads, so this is 1962, governorship campaign, his radio ads pull no punches. Vote right, vote white, vote for the fighting judge. So he's the little man, the ex-boxer with the shiny pants who is going to stand up to Washington and all of this stuff.

Now, you mentioned that guy, Luke Nictor, in his book, in which he basically argues that Wallace has been maligned and people have overdone the race business and that really he's a populist, he's an anti-government populist. He does say that. And so that notorious thing that Wallace says about not being outflanked on the right, he says it's apocryphal. Yeah, it is apocryphal, but perfectly plausible that he said it. I mean, how can we be certain that Churchill said any of the things that are attributed to him? Well, we have to use our judgment. I think it's perfectly plausible that Wallace said it.

So to give you a sense of where Wallace is, his speechwriter is a guy called Asa Carter. Asa Carter had been a ferociously racist and anti-Semitic radio sort of presenter and journalist. He had founded his own Ku Klux Klan group in Alabama. This group had attacked civil rights leaders. They'd attacked Nat King Cole when he came to Alabama. Not Nat King Cole. I know. Very bad form.

I mean, they had beaten people up. And as a warning to what they called troublemakers, the group that Carter had founded had kidnapped a 33-year-old handyman with learning difficulties called Judge Aaron. They kidnapped him, castrated him. What? And poured turpentine over his wounds. No. Later on, as governor...

Wallace pardoned some of the men. So they were caught and convicted for that? They were caught and convicted, exactly. Some of the men turned informant. They were not pardoned, but the ones who had held their silence, Wallace later pardoned them.

Okay, well, that's not looking good. I have to say, Luke A. Nictor doesn't mention that. Carter is the man who co-writes Wallace's inaugural address when he becomes governor in January 1963. It's an extraordinary piece of rhetoric. So Wallace stands up there in Montgomery and he says, and I quote, Today I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood and took an oath to my people,

It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, we sound the drum for freedom. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, 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.

Now, if you are a very conservative listener to this podcast, you might say, this isn't actually about race. This is about states' rights and freedom from federal intervention. And this is the liberty that is built into the American system and way of life. Frankly, as an outsider, I find it impossible to make that kind of call because it's so obvious to me that racism is completely built into this. I mean, the way that that sort of paradoxes

peroration ends, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, I struggle to see how anybody can possibly claim that this is not about white supremacy and racism. For example, there was a journalist from the North called Tony Heffernan who moved to Montgomery in 1961, spent a lot of time with Wallace. And he wrote later, he says, when

When we met, when we go for a drink and I quote, we didn't talk about women. We didn't talk about Alabama football. It was race, race, race, race. Every time that I was closeted alone with him, that is all we talked about. Maybe he's exaggerating.

But on the other hand, Wallace's biographers have found letters that he wrote in 1963. He was asked for his views about black-white relations. And he said the best future in his mind would be complete segregation. He said black people were predisposed to criminality because, and I quote, "...the vast percentage of people who are infected with venereal diseases are people of the Negro race."

So they're lazy, he says, they're shiftless, but they're also, and I quote, more likely to commit atrocious acts of inhumanity such as rape, assault and murder. So that's what he's writing, right? In private. That's in private. That's in private, exactly. Yeah. But also, how does he govern? He sets up commissions to investigate civil rights leaders, to harass them, to harass organizations that are trying to register people to vote, for example.

In Dan Carter's book, he describes how Wallace systematically ignores correspondence from black Alabamians, especially if they're complaining about police brutality. And there's a historian who's worked on this very recently called Jeff Frederick, who's looked very closely at the Wallace administration. He says, and I quote, race was a staple of the Wallace administration, connected to almost everyone and everything coming out of Montgomery.

Race was used to pass legislation, to create and maintain popularity, to build a war chest for future campaigns, to instill in white Alabamians a pathological fear of blacks and the federal government, and quite simply for its own sake. The key moment for Wallace actually is about race in the national consciousness. So this is the summer of 1963.

John F. Kennedy, he's under pressure from kind of black grassroots campaigners. He wants to push through the integration of the University of Alabama. There are two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, who want to enroll. And Wallace fulfills his promise. He literally stands in the schoolhouse door with all the cameras around him to denounce what he calls the usurpation of power by the central government. And that makes him a national figure for the first time. The star, the poster boy, the champion.

of white southern resistance to civil rights. But just to be clear, he is still a Democrat? Yes. Oh, yeah. So it's a Democrat resisting a Democrat president? You're talking about that as though you find that weird. I do find that weird. That's completely normal. The two great parties in American politics for most of the 20th century are not

ideologically homogenous parties. Well, it's just that I suppose where the Democrats are now, it just seems such a kind of reversal. But the two parties now are very different beasts from what they were 50 or 100 years ago. I understand. But it is still just quite

I mean, because you're absolutely saturated in all this. But I think for outsiders listening to it, it's something just to emphasize. I mean, it is a real turnaround, isn't it? It is. So there is a church bombing in the autumn of 1963. Four black girls in their early teens are killed by this bombing, a kind of clan bombing.

The Northern papers blamed Wallace for this. They said he has fueled the flames of hatred. And what does Wallace do? Now, a different person might have rode back at this point, but of course, he's the fighting judge, the boxer. He just doubles down. He says the people who've created the climate of violence are, and I quote, the Supreme Court.

the Kennedy administration and the civil rights agitators. So he is all in on this. So he at no point expresses any hesitation, any self-doubt? No. Any anxiety that he might have contributed to this climate of violence? No, absolutely not. That's not his personality. It's not his style. Right. It would be temperamentally alien to him to back down on this. Okay. Because he's a pugnacious little fellow, but also he's surrounded by people who are saying, you know, you sock it to them, George. This is great. Stand up to the federal government. Okay.

He is, by the way, enormously popular with white Alabamians at this point, and indeed enormously popular across the South. So he thinks to himself, I'll go a stage further. And in 1964, he decides that he will fly the flag for the South in the Democratic presidential primaries. Now, at this point, Kennedy has been shot, and everybody knows that Lyndon Johnson is going to be nominated on a tide of kind of sentimental support

And that he will be pushing civil rights. Yes. Wallace has nothing to lose. He takes his governor's plane up north. He paints over the Confederate flag on the plane with the flag of the United States. He changes the slogan on the plane, which was Stand Up for Alabama. He changes it to Stand Up for America. The 1968 song that we began with is called Stand Up for America.

And he goes up to fight three northern primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. Well, Maryland's kind of a border state, but it's north of the Deep South. Now, at the time, everybody thought, well, this is bonkers. The South had kind of been frozen out of presidential politics. It was still tainted for many years by the Civil War and by the sense that southern politics was different and weird and nothing like northern politics. Well, I mean, I have to say, listening to what you're saying, they're not wrong. Right.

But when Wallace gets up to Wisconsin, as far north as you can get, right, on the Canadian border, the newspapermen following his campaign are stunned that he gets this very warm reaction. He goes and addresses these people in these halls, and they are...

Blue-collar people from Wisconsin often have Eastern European extraction. They're very hawkish on foreign affairs. They say they're worried about crime and law and order and all these kinds of things. And as he rolls out all his usual lines, the Milwaukee Journal would say, you know, he rolls out his great sort of bullet points, if you like. The State Department has sold out to communism. The Supreme Court won't let you have prayers in public schools because it says it's unconstitutional.

Thanks to the civil rights movement and the civil rights bills of this administration, there are going to be quotas at work, racial quotas. You're not going to be able to sell your house to who you want to. Your kids will be stuffed into classes full of strangers, children. And as he says all this, right, torrents and torrents of applause. Now, the thing is, in these northern campaigns, he never says anything overtly racist about

but he doesn't need to because they're dog whistles. Here's the thing, and here's where I really disagree with Luke Nictor. Luke Nictor's argument would make sense if this was all happening in a vacuum and if nobody had ever read a newspaper.

But everybody knows that George Wallace is the man who stood for segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. He said it. So he walks in with that baggage. So everybody knows what he stands for. And he gets tremendous results in these three Northern primaries, 34% in Wisconsin, 30% in Indiana, and 43% in Maryland, which he would have won were it not for an unusually large turnout of black voters.

And people are stunned at this, right? Because this is before the big riots in Newark and Detroit and the sort of darker turn of the 1960s. And political scientists challenged everything they thought about North and South being different and about how the future would mean the South ended up being more like the North. What they realized is that actually the North and the South are converging. That in some ways the North is becoming more like the South because

There's a guy called Samuel Lubell who wrote about this sort of brilliant analysis. He said that in a lot of northern towns and cities, what you have is black families who have migrated over the generations from the south and now pressing up against white neighborhoods. And Lubell described it as a kind of front line across American cities. And he said, that's where the Wallace vote is.

It is the people who live on their front line in those white neighborhoods who feel threatened by the black families who are pushing against them. And as we will see, this is going to be massively, massively important in the long run because there are hundreds of thousands of people like this who are looking for somebody to, as they say, defend their interests and their neighborhood and so on and so forth. Anyway, back to 1964.

LBJ gets the nomination. Wallace is now enshrined in the public imagination as the great champion of the South.

But he has a big problem. He's got a term limit, so he can't run again for governor of Alabama. Oh, he behaves very badly on this, doesn't he? He behaves appallingly. He's a bit like Putin getting Medvedev to run. Yeah, that's a good comparison. But I'm spoiling what he does, so tell people what he does. No, that's a very good comparison. So he pushes forward. I said everyone should remember her, Lurleen. Lurleen has been just a housewife all this time.

Well, I said just out, so I don't mean to be sort of patronizing towards her. She is very hard done by. She's a very sweet, shy, gentle person. She's completely non-political. Wallace is a dog, I think it's fair to say. He's always womanizing and everybody knows about it. She's very hurt by it, but she would never leave him. And what is worse, in 1961, the doctors had been checking up on her and they'd discovered something suspicious. She had cancer, effectively. And they didn't tell anyone.

her, they told George, but he didn't tell her. He didn't pass on the news. That's not massively unusual. It was like Perron, isn't it, with Evita? Exactly. But in late 1965...

She is definitely diagnosed with uterine cancer. She has to have a hysterectomy and she starts radiotherapy. Now, this is the point at which Wallace says, by the way, you're having all this treatment. I want you to run for governor. And she does because she does what George wants. As Dan Carter says. While she's having radiotherapy. Yeah, she's just finished having it, I think. It's extraordinary. Dan Carter says, it was as though Loline Wallace were a plaster Mary being carried through the streets on a saint's day parade preceding the faithful. That's how he describes

Poor Lillian, who hates speaking in public or giving interviews, being kind of paraded around Alabama as a kind of front woman for George. She hates giving speeches. She would just read a very short speech, maybe 500 words. But she absolutely aces it, doesn't she? I mean, even so, that's the amazing thing. What, the election? Yeah. Yeah, of course. She wins a massive landslide, two to one landslide.

Because people know that they're voting really for George. It's not like they're idiots. Or do you think they like someone who's shy and doesn't really like giving speeches? I mean, that's the alternative possibility. Maybe they do. But George always gives a speech at Lurleen's events, right? She will just do a few words, then George will stand up and shout about people with beards and beatniks and Washington and all this stuff. So on the day of her inauguration, January 1967...

Wallace's men have a meeting and the people who are there are people from the white citizens councils from kind of far right groups that the Liberty lobby, the conservative society of America, and they all pile in and they are talking about whether Wallace should run for the presidency in 68 as an independent candidate, not as a Democrat, mount his own campaign. Now,

Only a few years ago, this would have seemed mad for a southerner to think of doing this. But in the intervening period, as we've described in previous episodes, you've had the Watts riots, you've had the birth of black power, you've had the riots in Newark and Detroit, a sense of the social fabric coming unstitched. And that is what Wallace is going to capitalize on. So there's the backlash element to that. But interestingly, and this I think is really important, this also has deeper roots because there has already been a kind of creeping southernization process.

of political life. And in recent years, historians have been looking at all these grassroots groups that have been very popular since the 1950s. In particular, Tom, this will please you. Mm-hmm.

Christian groups. Well, Billy Graham. Billy Graham. He's already featured talking to Lyndon Johnson, hasn't he? But he's also very close to Nixon. So, I mean, basically he's everywhere. He's endlessly popping in and chatting to presidential candidates. And Billy Graham is a southerner too. He's from North Carolina. And in the late 40s and early 50s, Billy Graham had been much more conservative than a lot of people remember. So he had gone around denouncing, and I quote, the filthy, corrupt, ungodly, unholy doctrine of world socialism.

which would be news to Theo, our producer, who is very keen on that kind of politics. And Billy Graham had called for a purge of the pinks, the lavenders and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle.

And Graham was just one of lots of Southern preachers who did this. He slightly goes a bit, well, a bit, I mean, woke. I mean, he doesn't go woke. He becomes a bit more vanilla. He mellows. Yes. But for example, there are much more extreme versions. So there's a guy, the most influential and the most important for Wallace is a guy called Billy James Hargis. Oh, he's brilliant. Are you familiar with his work, Tom? I am because I wrote about fundamentalist Christian hostility to the Beatles. Yes. He hates the Beatles. Which kind of erupts in 1966. But-

One of his followers in 1965

published a pamphlet called Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, an analysis of the communist use of music, the communist master music plan. And his thesis basically was that the Beatles were communist stooges who were there to corrupt the youth and then the Reds would invade. So this is in 1965. So that's even before John Lennon has come out and said that the Beatles are bigger than Jesus. So Billy James Hargis had been going since the 50s. He had a thing called a Christian crusade. He had radio and TV stations across the country.

Absolutely, as you say, Tom, the Beatles, rock and roll music, sex education, the Supreme Court, and also...

civil rights. He says Martin Luther King is a communist. The civil rights movement is an attack on states' rights. It's funded by the Kremlin. All of this stuff. It would amaze people to... Hang on. I was going to say yes. I mean, everyone will know what's coming. That he gets caught up in a sex scandal. What do you think happens to Billy James Hargis? But here's the thing. What this means is that thanks to him and people like him, by 67, 68, there was already

this network of evangelical colleges and publishing houses and radio and TV stations, not just in the South, but across the whole United States. And this is what George Wallace is going to tap into. Crucially, his aides have learned something from Hargis, which is a fundraising technique using what's called direct mail. So this is basically a computerized system

Very familiar to most of our American listeners. But this is the first time that a candidate uses it, right? It's one of the first times, right? So this is the age at which direct mail starts to get rolled out nationwide. You will be bombarded with letters saying, are you worried about, you know, tell you about an issue. Raw sex being taught in schools. Right. Are you? Yes, I am. I'm very agitated about it.

That's exactly it, Tom. Yeah. How do you feel about communists moving into your neighborhood and forcing your children to go to school with strangers' children? Are you worried about it? If so, dial 1-800-WALLACE and send us $10 now. Tax dollars. Exactly. And this is a brilliant way for him, borrowing Hargis' themes...

You know, the idea of a liberal elite, a secular godless elite in alliance with communists and with kind of swanky people on the East Coast who are undermining the morals of small town America. With beards. It's a brilliant way for Wallace to take his themes and sort of slightly take the southern edge off them and make them national themes. And so it is that three months after Lurleen's inauguration in April 1967,

He goes on the top Sunday morning talk show, which is Meet the Press, NBC. And he says, I'm going to run as an independent. They say, are you a racist? No, I'm not a racist. He says, I'm fighting big government. It's nothing to do with race.

He says, and I quote, he's a brilliant popular speaker. He says, this is a campaign for the average man in the street, the man in the textile mill, the man in the steel mill, the barber, the beautician, the policeman on the beat, the little businessman. And he says, these people have been ignored for too long and I'm going to give them a voice. And if the politicians get in the way, a lot of them are going to get run over.

Goodness. Well, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll find out if they are run over and how George Wallace does in his campaign in 1968 to become president of the United States of America. It is as if somewhere, sometime a while back, George Wallace had been awakened by a white blinding vision. They all hate black people. All of them. They're all afraid.

All of them. Great God, that's it. They're all Southern. The whole United States is Southern. So that was NBC's Douglas Kiker, who was covering George Wallace's presidential campaign in 1968. And I guess obviously it's a slight element of exaggeration there, but he is putting his finger on something important about what is making Wallace's campaign tick, right? Yeah, I think so. That Wallace thinks...

Even if that is an exaggeration, he clearly thinks there are anxieties out there in states a long way from Alabama that he can exploit using similar kinds of sort of toned down rhetoric that he has been using in Alabama. And so this enables him to run what is effectively the most significant third party campaign since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose movement.

Bull Moose, Tom. And we love a Bull Moose, don't we? You've been doing some secret reading, have you, to know about the Bull Moose? No, I haven't. I do vaguely know about Teddy Roosevelt. Okay. And I always remember Bull Moose as being a pretty funny name. It just sticks in the mind. Surely he's part of the American Ryder Cup team.

No, it's a police chief in 1950s Alabama, I thought. Yes, exactly. Yes. So, yeah. Now, the thing is, the American system is not set up for three parties. It's set up for two. So all the different states have different sort of ballot requirements to basically stop a third party candidate getting on the ballot. And in total, to get on all the ballots in every single state, Wallace needs, I mean, more than two million signatures. I mean, it's been estimated. Actually, he ends up fighting all these court battles that make it

a bit easier. But for example, in California, which is the biggest prize, he needs 66,000 signatures to get on the ballot. So people need to sign basically a petition. So his great focus as 1967 draws to a close is to get on that California ballot. So he's going to spend a lot of time in California. But there's a problem, a tragic problem. That summer,

Lurleen's doctors tell her that the cancer has spread. She's going to have to go to Houston, Texas for surgery. And Wallace feels, although he probably doesn't really want to, he feels he has to go with her to Houston to kind of be at her side. So he spends two months in Houston. Then in the autumn, she comes back to Montgomery and she's obviously in a terrible state. She's very gaunt. She's very thin.

But Wallace, at this point, just goes straight off to California. Yeah. Straight out to get support. So California, it's the home of hippies and Summer of Love and all that. Yeah. Wouldn't seem obvious, George Wallace.

campaigning land. It might not if you believe the summer of love sort of propaganda, as it were. But there's much more to California. I mean, California, you could write a whole history of the 1960s just in California and it would be brilliant. California is such a complicated and multi-layered place. First of all, California is full of so-called Okies, first and second generation migrants from states like Oklahoma, where Billy James Hargis came from,

So these are migrants from the Dust Bowl who have brought often their religious values with them in the 1930s. So that kind of evangelical Christianity, there's a lot of that in California. California in the 1950s has been incredibly fertile territory for conservatives. So Reagan. Reagan, obviously. Yeah. Billy Graham. The John Birch Society. Lots of historians have written about this in recent years, about all these kind of grassroots groups. They

They meet for coffee mornings and stuff and talk about how much they hate communism. That's all going on in California. And people who put flowers in their hair, presumably as well. They don't like them either. And of course, Reagan has proved that in 1966. He has proved that California can be very fertile territory for a kind of conservative movement. Even so, Wallace's rallies in California are like nothing people have seen before.

He holds 70 of them in just a few weeks. And they are in county fair. They're very unglamorous. They're places that basically, Tom, if you and I go to California, which we will do, of course. We will, with the rest is history, going to San Francisco and LA. Yeah. But we won't be hanging around, I trust, at strip malls, stock car racetracks, high school football stadiums, county fairgrounds and suburban car parks. Speak for yourself. I don't want to come across as a kind of East Coast liberal snob. Okay.

Okay, good. But if you do, that's fine. A, I do want to come across like that. And B, I don't believe you will be going to strip mall car parks. Well, we'll see. Time will tell. And setting up shop there. Anyway, Wallace does. And his rallies would always start. There'd always be a cross between a political rally and a kind of gig. So a country music gig.

And historians have also written tons, really interesting stuff, about how country music, which obviously in Britain we generally regard as risible. I was going to say... What were you going to say? No, I'm not going to say it. You've gone lower than I would. But Americans take it very seriously, so I don't want to offend our American listeners. I mean, obviously I do. But country music is a massive signifier in the 60s and 70s of kind of...

conservative values. Right. And Dan Carter, Wallace's biographer says it's the conservative voice of young white working class Americans. So he kind of draws people with that. He really pioneers the use of country music in American politics. And it's very, very successful. In January, 1968, he announces he hasn't got 66,000 signatures. He's got a hundred thousand signatures and people are really astounded. Who knew that there were so many George Wallace supporters who

you know, on the West Coast in the kind of great American utopia. Yeah. Bad news, however, while he's been away, Lurleen has been fading fast. She has a series of operations in early 68, but she dies on the 6th of May. For once, Wallace is at home and he's holding her hand.

When he's campaigning in California, he's like a kind of Buckingham Palace press release on the travails of an elderly royal, isn't he? Because they were always saying, oh, the Queen is in good spirits while she's about to die. And he's basically issuing the same stuff. Oh, she's fine. She's brilliant. Vote for me. Here's another country and western song. Exactly. So poor Lillian dies.

There was then a sort of Eva Peron style jamboree in Montgomery. So all the schools close, most of the shops and businesses close on the day of the funeral. Tens of thousands of people queue up to pay their respects. I mean, this is a sad detail. She had asked, she specifically said, I want my casket to be closed.

And Wallace insisted that it be opened because obviously it's much better political theater. More dramatic. Yeah. He takes a break for a few weeks. And then the end of May 1968, he plunges straight back into the campaign, apparently untroubled by his wife's death. He goes straight in in Memphis, Tennessee.

10,000 people queue for two hours to hear him say he's going to return control of schools to the people, not, and I quote, some bearded Washington bureaucrat who can't even park a bicycle straight. This is one of his favorite lines. And I can see you laughing. I mean, people are re-hooting with laughter at that. You know, this stuff about bearded bureaucrats who can't park a bicycle straight. Can you park a bicycle straight, Tom? No, I can't. But I haven't got a beard, so there is that. Okay, there is that.

So one question might be, how does he pay for all this, right? Where's the money coming from? Now, his campaign cost about $9 million.

So for context, that is cheaper than Eugene McCarthy's campaign for the Democratic nomination. And I think over the course of it, he generates a surplus. Yeah. His biggest single donor is a very slightly shady man. Really? Called Nelson Bunker Hunt. That's a made up name. Who is the son of an eccentric Texas oil billionaire called H.L. Hunt, who at one point was said to be the richest man in the world. But he's reclusive, so no one's really heard of him.

But 80% of Wallace's funds come from individual donors. And this is through direct mail. This is through people who've seen a special film they've had made called The Wallace Story, which is shown on small, tiny little TV stations across the South and the Midwest. And people watch this film and it's interspersed with appeals for money and they ring the number and they donate money to the Wallace campaign. Do you know someone who puts up a Wallace for president sign in the gardens of his house?

Oh, we've already mentioned him in the course of the series. In the course of the series. John Wayne. Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley? At Graceland, yeah. Does he? Oh, Elvis. I looked up his biography just to see whether there was any George Wallace Elvis link, and there was. I'm sad, but not massively surprised because I suppose Elvis is completely Wallace territory, right? I mean, he's from the right background. He's from the right state. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Well, why do people back Wallace? What's he saying that is so powerful? What I think he does is he takes a lot of anxieties and he weaves them into a very simple, compelling populist narrative. So he takes the riots, he takes rising crime, he takes the campus protests, he takes the suffering of American GIs in Vietnam, he takes the kind of cultural change, and he basically says this is all about you being betrayed by a corrupt secular society.

sort of socialist, rich, elite. Make America great again, to a degree. Yes. The sort of paradigmatic Wallace quote is this. He says, you people work hard, you save your money, you teach your children to respect the law. But then when someone goes out and burns down half a city and murders someone, pseudo-intellectuals explain it away, whining that the poor rioters didn't get any watermelon to eat when they were 10 years old.

That kind of watermelon touch, I think gives you, it was obvious at that point what he means, right? He hasn't used the words. No. He hasn't said anything racist, obviously. No. But the code is right there. And it's also quite Reagan, isn't it? I mean, that's the language that Reagan had been using. It's very similar to Reagan's language in 1966. And there's a similar kind of folksiness to it. Yes, absolutely. It's just that Reagan is more genial, I guess. Reagan is funnier. Yeah.

Wallace is much keener probably than Reagan. Reagan likes to offer hope and optimism as well as to give hippies a bit of a kicking. Wallace's speech is really just a list of enemies. And if you go through them, Washington, he always goes on about bearded beatnik bureaucrats. He loves a bit of alliteration and their inability to park bikes. Yes. And he always says, when I'm in the White House, I will throw them and their briefcases. He's got something about their briefcases. He doesn't like the briefcases. I'll throw all them and their briefcases into the Potomac.

He doesn't like the courts, federal judges playing God. He hates universities, pointy-headed professors. And they don't know how to park bicycles straight. No, no, no, no. And the media, liberal subsisters, intellectual morons. He calls them at the media. Now, here's where people may start to see some parallels. The press can't really decide what to do with Wallace. Do they paint him as a con man, a fraudster?

Or is he a fascist? Is he the Mussolini of the deep South? So Mussolini, not Hitler? I would say... Hitler at this point hasn't become the kind of the default. Oh, he's bad. He's my enemy. He's Hitler. Well, actually he has because counter protesters shout, seek Heil at him and make Nazi salutes and things. So yes, the shadow of Hitler is kind of hanging there.

Wallace himself said to the authors of An American Melodrama, the Sunday Times team that worked on this brilliant book, he said to them, I don't talk about race or segregation anymore. We're talking about law and order and local control of schools, not these other things. Of course, the obvious point, which they make themselves, is that he doesn't need to use the word racist words because everyone knows he stands for it. And Wallace actually, in an unguarded moment, said to a journalist in Cleveland that

Race is the thing that's going to win this thing for me. He knows that race is part of the mix. But Luke Nictor is right about this. There is more to it than just racism. Because obviously crime has gone up by every metric. People are worried about pornography or cultural change or all of these kinds of things. I think Wallace is also tapping a deep-seated...

sort of strain of populism and indeed paranoia that runs right through American politics from the very beginning. I mean, you and I are in agreement, Tom, that the Declaration of Independence is a disgracefully paranoid conspiracy theory. But isn't it also the suspicion that people in the flyover states have of

Eastern West Coast intellectuals and elites. Absolutely. Which is a theme that is obviously very strong in the current election. It is exactly. But no, it's absolutely a resentment of cities, a resentment of the kind of metropolitan elites, a resentment of the federal government, all of that stuff. These are, of course, well-worn themes. They are Ronald Reagan's themes. Government is the problem, it's not the solution, all of that stuff. And there are

Possibly other comparisons. If you look at Wallace's speeches, so I was reading Dan Carter's book, which was published, I think, in the late 1990s. And this is how he describes Wallace's speeches. He was the perfect mimetic orator, probing his audience's deepest fears and passions and articulating those emotions in a language and style they could understand. On paper, his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent and always repetitious.

But Wallace's followers reveled in the performance. They never tired of hearing the same lines again and again. Right. Does that remind you of anyone, Tom? Yes. I mean, there's also, he loves hecklers. So he would say to people when they heckled, he would say, if you shut up and take off your sandals, I will autograph one of your sandals for you as a souvenir. And...

there was always a kind of latent simmering violence at his rallies. So hecklers would be beaten up or people would start throwing chairs and stuff. And again, that was part of the attraction. So part of the appeal of a Wallace rally is to have your prejudices confirmed. It's partly to laugh at the enemies that you all share, but it's also this sort of sense that you're letting off steam and

It's a kind of mutual performance. Yeah. The guy standing at the front and you, the crowd. I mean, I don't think listeners need me to point out that there are more recent candidates of whom exactly...

the same is true. Yeah. So on paper, his speeches were stunningly disconnected at times, incoherent and always repetitious. You quoted that Dan Carter on Wallace. But I mean, that is often what people report about Trump's speeches. But then actually when you listen to the speeches that he's giving, you get a sense of the impact that these are dramatic performances. His ability to connect with his audience is not evident in the words on the page.

Exactly. That it's the atmosphere, which reporters would always comment on. They'd say the atmosphere of these speeches is not like a Eugene McCarthy speech or a Hubert Humphrey speech or a Richard Nixon speech. Slightly like a Bobby Kennedy though? Maybe there's more of a revivalist atmosphere absolutely at Kennedy's speeches. So that's probably the most similar of all the candidates.

But with Wallace's speeches, there was always the aggression, isn't there? And the fact that so much of it is about enemies. And he's unapologetic about that, isn't he? He thinks that violence has a place in politics in a way that is not normal, probably, for presidential candidates openly to say. Not for presidential candidates.

but is normal in the populist atmosphere of the deep South. That is that the aggressive rhetoric. Remember Big Jim? Yeah. Big Jim with his exaggerations, his hyperbole, everything over the top. That's how Southerners speak. But he's not running for president. Big Jim wasn't running for president, but Wallace is. Is there a sense that a slight element of violence is being introduced? Yes, I think absolutely. And I think this is why

So many Northern commentators are so horrified and they're horrified when they look at the polls. So, you know, his dream scenario is he wins the entire former Confederacy. He wins the entire border state region. So that's a place like Maryland and Kentucky. And then he adds one or two Midwestern states like Indiana or Ohio. That's always unlikely, I think.

Even so, at the start of October 1968, one in five Americans say they're going to vote for him. And he is hoping to win the South, maybe win a few of the border states. If he gets to about 150, 170 electoral college votes, the election will be deadlocked. It will have to go to the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1820s. And he can kind of be the kingmaker. That's what he wants. That's his dream. What an extraordinary thing that would be, that he decides the future

of the American Republic. But there are two very comical developments, aren't there? So number one is the presence of this lady called Janine Welch. And I say Janine, she spells Janine. Like a Star Wars character. A-A hyphen, capital N-E-E-N. And Janine is this sort of middle-aged woman who wears, quote, skin-tight silver and gold lame cowboy outfits.

She's a groupie, basically. She's got very close to Wallace. She's what the Clinton campaign would have called a bimbo eruption, right? She is a bimbo eruption, exactly. And she starts sharing his hotel rooms. She's hanging around with him in public and stuff. And his aides are very...

agitated about this and say to Janine, can you please keep a lower profile? And she says, well, the big problem with this relationship is, and I quote, he's in such a hurry, sometimes he won't even take his coat off. Well, that's commitment, isn't it? That is commitment. But basically, they kick her off the campaign. And so that's the end of Janine. But she distracts him. Well, she gets arrested for prostitution. She does indeed. You know what? I googled her. I did some digging. I mean, this is a weird rabbit hole to have gone down. She died about

three months ago oh god she was in her 80s goodness yeah janine welch was not her name she changed her name to something else and it sort of was like much loved pillar of local community and stuff well that's good to know i felt awful reading this having laughed about her gold cowboy outfit or whatever but he also needs a running mate of a more conventional kind this is brilliant so his first choice is this guy called happy chandler yes i can't

The whole story is like a British person's parody of American politics, isn't it? His first choice is this guy, Happy Chandler. Happy Chandler, exactly. He's right, Tom. Who had been the governor of Kentucky and then the baseball commissioner. And basically, he's not immensely racist because he had helped integrate baseball. He had backed Jackie Robinson playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 40s, which was this big moment in baseball's history.

Anyway, there's huge complaints from the people on the far right. So Nelson Bunker Hunt. He doesn't like Happy Chandler. Yeah, he says this guy's soft on the key issue of race, obviously. So you can't have this liberal pinko fellow. So they ditch Happy Chandler.

And they go for their second choice. Which adds greatly to the gaiety of the nation. It does. So their second choice is General Curtis LeMay. He'd been a former commander of US bombers over Japan. He'd been the head of strategic air command, and then he'd ended up as chief of staff of the US Air Force. He's most famous, I guess, because if you've seen Dr. Strangelove, he was the model, the direct inspiration for the character played by George C. Scott, General Buck Turgidson.

He looks like he's made of wood. He never smiles. He's always chewing a cigar. He's basically a hippie's kind of nightmare vision of what the US Air Force is all about, right? Totally is. Because he basically loves bombing people. He can't get enough of it. In his defense, he said one of the favorite sentences I've ever read. That's actually very true of me as well. I've always sought to slaughter as few civilians as possible. But I mean, the thing is, he's probably right.

When you put it like, I mean, politically, it's not the ideal way to frame it, but. I try not to slaughter too many people. Anyway, he had said of the Vietnam War, his solution for it was to, and I quote, bomb them back into the Stone Age. And a lot of people thought this was very impolitic.

Anyway, he's been retired for a few years. Kennedy hated him because after the Cuban missile crisis, he said, should we just bomb Cuba anyway? Yeah. He was like, no. Anyway, he'd been thinking about voting for Nixon, but he loves the thought of being Wallace's vice president because it's his chance to A, have a go at left wingers in America, but also to push his pet crusade, which we should get onto in a minute. So he's going to be unveiled at the Pittsburgh Hilton on the 3rd of October.

And if I say this is very Four Seasons total landscaping, our American listeners will know what this means. So basically, the night before, LeMay meets up in this hotel with Wallace's aides, and they say, what are you going to say? And he says, well, obviously, I'm going to be talking about nuclear weapons. And the reason for that is that he thinks they should be used more often than they have been. That's his pitch. People have, and I quote, a foolish phobia about them. They need to man up. Yeah.

And the Wallace aides, you know, I mean, let's be clear, the Wallace aides are hardly bleeding hearted liberals. It's just like, no, no, no. Please do not bring this up. And because he's so attached to this, they end up staying up with him until 4.30 in the morning begging him. And they say, don't talk about it. Please don't talk about it. Don't mention it. Then he goes in to his press conference.

And the first question is from the Los Angeles Times. General, do you think it is necessary to use nuclear weapons to win the war in Vietnam? And all of Wallace's aides are holding their breath. He piles in, doesn't he? Well, at first he taunts them there because he says right at the beginning, we can win this war without nuclear weapons.

But I have to say that we have a phobia about nuclear weapons. I think there may be times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and through the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them. Brilliant stuff. That's his first answer at this point.

Wallace is just in shock. Now, Wallace is so garrulous usually when he says nothing. He's appalled. There are these hilarious descriptions of reporters sort of scrabbling and fighting. Running off to the phone boxes. Yeah, to ring the newspaper. But if they do that, they miss the even better bit that's coming up.

He doesn't leave this theme alone, does he? And he then goes on. I've seen a film of Bikini Adol after 20 nuclear tests and the fish are all back in the lagoons. The coconut trees are growing coconuts. The guava bushes have fruit on them. The birds are back. Then he comes up with the one slight caveat. The rats are bigger, fatter and healthier than they ever were before. So at this point, Wallace jumps in and he says, just to be clear, just...

General LeMay is not advocating the use of nuclear weapons. He is just discussing nuclear weapons. Well, wait a minute now. I know I'm going to come out with a lot of misquotes from the campaign. I'll be lucky if I don't appear as a drooling idiot whose only solution to any problem is to drop atomic bombs all over the world. I assure you I'm not. And so that must be a comfort. Yeah. So Wallace is apparently absolutely distraught about this. I mean, it does kind of slightly hole in below the water, doesn't it?

It does completely because it makes him a complete joke. It makes his campaign a total joke that they've got this guy. Mad bloke. Doesn't Wallace pack him off on a kind of fact finding tour of Vietnam or something to just keep him out of the way? First, they sent him to most obscure locations in America to give speeches about environmental protection. But he went up somewhere to some Northeastern college and people asked him about population. He said, well,

People should have more abortions. That's the solution to the growing population. And if they don't, nuke them. And this obviously does not play well with Wallace's constituency at all. So it's at that point they said, send him to Vietnam and let's hope he never comes back. Yeah, brilliant. So that's really the end of General LeMay. So that's fun. But the point is, I guess, that Wallace begins, I mean, he's able to articulate people's anxieties, but he appears not the answer to disorder, but an embodiment of it.

And I think he never surmounts that. That's what stops him really breaking through. Because there's a kind of quality of kookiness. Yeah, the aggression. That's why LeMay is so damaging. Exactly. And by the end of the campaign, he's really being hammered by both sides, by the Democrats and the Republicans, saying that he's wasted votes and all of this kind of thing. That said...

As the election approaches, he's still getting big crowds. He's still far ahead in the deep South states, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi. He's clearly going to win those. It's very tight in some of these other states. And everybody knows that the Wallace factor is so unpredictable that it's really impossible to call how this is going to break just before the election. I mean, he got 50,000 people on Boston Common. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

The epicenter of East Coast liberals. Exactly. And then the climax to his campaign, which I think reinforces the parallel with a more recent candidate, is at Madison Square Garden, 24th of October. So it's just a couple of weeks before election day. And this is an extraordinary scene and one that we have seen a lot of in recent years. So it's a 20,000 crowd sellout. It's the biggest rally in New York City since FDR in 1936.

There are brass bands playing patriotic songs, that's country music, but there are also Klansmen,

Minutemen, American Nazi Party members. They're all demonstrating outside to show their support. There are also counter-demonstrators chanting, seek Heil. Okay, so that's the Hitler stuff. Shouting that he's a Nazi and the police separating them. And Wallace comes out to speak. And at first, it's such an enormous occasion that he's a little bit hesitant, actually, even possibly nervous. But then the first protest starts. It's a black guy who hands up a poster with a Klansman.

The noose, the slogan says, law and order, Wallace style. And there are people with megaphones, bullhorns, as our American listeners would call them. And the crowd goes mad at these guys. The police have to wade in to separate fights. And Wallace is galvanized by this. He has this very famous line. He says, why do the leaders of the two national parties kowtow to these anarchists?

One of them laid down in front of President Johnson's limousine last year. I tell you when November comes, the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it'll be the last limousine they ever lay down in front of. And everyone goes, wait. They're delighted. But again, it's that thing about violence. And that's the first of 12 standing ovations. He does all his usual sort of rhetorical tricks. He says, you know, the reason we don't have riots in Alabama is

It's as soon as someone picks up a brick, they get a bullet in their brain and everyone's, hey, that's brilliant. You know, let's shoot more people, all of this stuff.

One thing actually buried in the speech that I noticed when I reread it that I had not thought about before, he says, we should have looked our allies in Western Europe in the face and said to them, you should go into Vietnam. And if you don't go in in Southeast Asia, we're not only going to cut off every dime of foreign aid you are getting, we're going to ask you to pay back all you owe us from World War I right to this very day.

And that sounds very, very familiar. Anyway, we've been talking too long about George Wallace. We will get to the last days of the election at the end of this series. He doesn't become president. His support is squeezed in the final days, but he does, as I said at the beginning, he wants five states and he wins 10 million votes. And I think he really, really matters. And just to sum up the story about why he matters, I'll tell you what happened after the election. So one of Richard Nixon's campaign staff was a guy called Kevin Phillips, a guy in his 20s, very smart.

He was always looking at data. And his argument, he believed that Wallace was the canary in the coal mine for American political life. And he argued, Phillips, he said, American politics is fundamentally changing for two reasons. Number one,

The center of gravity, which was always the kind of northeast, is moving south. And it's moving to a region that Phillips, he called it the Sun Belt, a region that is being transformed by air conditioning and things. Lots of defense contractors, lots of new industries in these places. Arizona, California, Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas.

This is the heartland now. This is the battleground. And the second thing he thought was, he said, white working class voters are going to leave the Democratic Party and they're going to have to find somewhere to go. And he felt that the prize was to get people who voted for Wallace to make the next step

and to vote Republican, to find a line that would not repel people because it was obviously racist, but it would bring in the white South and it would also bring in Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Eastern Europeans, Poles, all this stuff.

And he published this in a book called The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. And he gave a copy to Nixon. And Nixon read it and he said, brilliant, we'll do it. And a few months later, Nixon started for the first time bringing country musicians to perform in the White House. There's a canary in a coal mine. There is a canary in a coal mine because, of course, it worked. In 1972, every single Wallace state voted for Nixon. In 1980, all of them except Jimmy Carter's home state of Georgia voted for Reagan.

In 2000, every single one of them voted for George Bush. And in 2016 and in 2020, they voted for Donald Trump. In 1968, Norman Mailer was writing about Wallace and he said...

America might not be ready for George Wallace, but it might be waiting for a super Wallace. And Tom, I think he was right. Yeah. Well, that was brilliant, Dominic. Thanks so much. Absolutely fascinating. But listeners, the drama of 1968 in America, still a long way to go. Two more episodes. So in our next episode, we will be in Chicago with the Democrats for one of the most dramatic and dramatic

violent showdowns in American political history. So yippee. And then in our final episode, we will be looking at the election itself and Richard Nixon, who is trying to make the most dramatic comeback in American political history, perhaps. And if you can't wait for those, then you can just go to therestishistory.com and join the club and get them immediately. So until next time, goodbye. Cheerio.