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<text id=93HT1093>
<title>
68 Election: The Coalition of Frustration
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1968 Election
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
October 18, 1968
THE NATION
Wallace's Army: The Coalition of Frustration
</hdr>
<body>
<p> Consider his image. On the platform, his head barely rises
above the bulletproof lectern he takes with him everywhere. On
the TV screen, he comes over as a cross between Flem Snopes and
Huey Long. An uninspired orator, with a set, almost unvarying
speech, he seems intentionally to mangle his syntax and
mispronounce words. Yet he is the only presidential candidate
in the fall of 1968 who could be called charismatic.
</p>
<p> Consider his campaign. It is perhaps the most amateurishly
organized drive that any serious candidate has mounted in
modern American history. In many cities, it is impossible to
find his campaign headquarters. In others, like Louisville, there
are as many as three, each competing for funds and attention.
Not one member of his staff has had previous experience in
national politics. By contrast, Eugene McCarthy's "children's
crusade" was a model of efficiency and professionalism.
</p>
<p> Consider George Corley Wallace himself, the dour little
Alabama demagogue who has influenced the entire 1968 campaign,
defied the two-party system and raised the specter that no one
will be elected President on Nov. 5. Though the odds against
him are very long indeed, he could conceivably become the 37th
President of the U.S. "We could be elected," he says. "It is
not an impossible dream."
</p>
<p> Eight months ago, Hubert Humphrey could confidently say of
Wallace: "I don't think he's going to rustle up many cattle."
Now, surveying the depleted Democratic herd, Humphrey takes
every opportunity to excoriate Wallace as "the apostle of fear
and racism." Richard Nixon has been saying for weeks that
Wallace had "peaked" and would soon go downhill. Recently,
however, he has found cause to attack Wallace and the
"third-party kick" directly. "Do you want to make a point, or
do you want to make a change?" he asked a crowd in Flint, Mich.,
last week. "Do you want a moment's satisfaction, or do you want
to get four years of action?"
</p>
<p> If the polls are any indication, about one out of every
five voters--something like 14 million Americans--will
choose the moment's satisfaction and pick Wallace and General
Curtis LeMay, his running mate, next month. Fervent Wallaceites
may, of course, decide at the last minute that a vote for their
man is a wasted ballot and switch to either Humphrey or Nixon,
but there is no evidence that this will happen. Thousands echo
the opinion of Charles Gutherie, a cement finisher from Los
Angeles. "You take Nixon and Humphrey and shake 'em up in a bag
and they come out the same--a couple of namby-pambys who are
going to keep giving our money away to other countries while
they let a bunch of punks run wild in this country." Says Noble
Olson, a Cincinnati engineer: "Nixon maybe is the better of two
evils. But I am through voting for the better of two evils."
</p>
<p>Smoldering Distrust
</p>
<p> As in 1964, when he made his first presidential bid but
dropped out of the race after Barry Goldwater was nominated,
support for Wallace's American Independent Party is
concentrated in the South, where Gallup gives him 38% of the
vote, more than he gives either Nixon or Humphrey. But strong
Wallace sentiment is found in every other section as well. He
is on the ballot in all 50 states. (The Supreme Court may knock
him off in Ohio, however.) Forums in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids
were S.R.O. when the former Governor appeared, and large crowds
turned out for motorcades in such Northern strongholds as
Chicago and Jersey City. About 20,000 ignored chill weather last
week to hear the standard Wallace spiel on Boston's historic
Common, which once was as far from Dixie in attitude as the
other side of the moon. "They were really packed in there
together," Wallace exuberantly told reporters. The other two
candidates "would be proud to draw such a crowd."
</p>
<p> Nixon or Humphrey would be even prouder to evoke the
empathy and enthusiasm that Wallace so often arouses. With the
campaigns of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy scarcely more
than memories, the onetime bantamweight boxer is the only
contender left who attracts such spontaneous support. Just as
antiwar sentiment found expression in McCarthy, says Historian
James MacGregor Burns, "the smoldering distrust among urban
whites" is finding its voice in Wallace."
</p>
<p> Though Minnesota is by no means a Wallace stronghold, 47
of 50 people who attend a volunteer firemen's party in Rockville
are wearing Wallace buttons. In nearby Richmond, bowling is a
little slower because a zealous pin setter takes time out to
slap Wallace sticker on each ball before he returns it. In the
parking lots of auto plants outside Detroit, row after row shows
a near-solid line of Wallace bumper stickers. White workers
complain bitterly that management has forced them to remove
Wallace emblems from their lunch pails.
</p>
<p> At the big Buick factory in Flint, a poll of 8,000 members
of United Auto Workers Local 599 showed that 49% will vote for
Wallace, 39% for Humphrey, 12% for Nixon. Alarmed, labor
leadership has quietly dropped its usual pre-election drive to
register all union members, and in concentrating instead on
black neighborhoods, where Humphrey can count on solid, if
unenthusiastic support. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s Committee on
Political Education (COPE) has distributed thousands of
pamphlets documenting Wallace's consistent antilabor record in
Alabama. Few members seem to read them or note that COPE rated
the Vice President a 100% supporter of labor when he was in the
Senate.
</p>
<p>Sinking Feeling
</p>
<p> Blue-collar workers make up a large proportion of
Wallace's supporters, and he has a special hold on the less
educated and the less affluent. He attracts the union member who
fears for his seniority, the homeowner who is afraid that
Negroes will lower property values in his neighborhood. He
voices the unease of the housewife who does not want to see her
child bussed to an integrated school, of the middle-aged who are
outraged by student protest, of the ten-hour-a-day man who is
upset by welfare programs and feels that Negroes are too lazy
to work. Often the Wallace supporter, typically a central-city
resident, feels that he is not understood by the suburbanite who
does not have to worry about racial violence and crime in the
streets. Indeed, many in the Wallace constituency have eminently
reasonable complaints, even if they are not always recognized
by liberals or the policymakers in Washington that Wallace
derides. The lower middle class is hurt by crime, high taxes,
inflation and the other ills of the 1960s. It cannot comprehend
why, and has a sinking feeling that its world is falling apart.
</p>
<p> White policemen and firemen are solidly for Wallace. He,
in turn, lavishes praise on them. "I don't see how the police
restrain themselves as much as they do," he said in Cleveland
last week. "If they could run this country for about two
years," he has said at other times, "they'd straighten it out."
They might even straighten out Alabama, which last year had the
highest murder rate in the nation.
</p>
<p> His appeal is not entirely limited to the lower middle
class, however, Wallace draws some support from propertied and
professsional people. Most of his contributions, officially
estimated at $70,000 a day, come in small bills at rallies, at
$25-a-plate dinners, and in checks through the mail. Affluent
backers pay $500 and up to join Wallace "Patriots Clubs" and
lunch with the candidate when he comes to town. In Dallas last
month, Wallace dined with such "plain folk" as Mrs. Nelson
Bunker Hunt, daughter-in-law of Oil Billionaire H.L.Hunt: Paul
Pewitt, who has a $100 million fortune from Texas oil and Idaho
potatoes; and M.H. Marr, an oilman worth about $10 million.
However much money he has, the average Wallace booster is what
Political Analyst Samuel Lubell calls a "recent getter," someone
who has worked hard for what he has and is fearful of losing it.
</p>
<p> Almost all Wallaceites believe that there are simple
solutions for complicated problems. In his platform, released
this week--just 22 days before the election--he says that
if peace negotiations fail, he would solve the war by turning
it over to the generals. Law and order would be maintained by
eradicating an "unexplainable compassion for the criminal
evidenced by our executive and judicial officers and
officials." He would seek an amendment to the Constitution that
would require the Senate to reconfirm the Supreme Court and
federal appeals court.
</p>
<p> His followers all have their own complaints and their own
reasons for believing that Wallace can help. The addition of
LeMay--Wallace's Agnew, in the view of many critics--will
probably add to his appeal, particularly with those who are
frustrated by the war. The general's inspection trip to Vietnam
this week will doubtless help Wallace's effort to convince
voters that he has a grasp of world affairs--and, in fact,
last week's speech on foreign policy before the National Press
Club in Washington was reasonably restrained and cogent.
</p>
<p>Who Will Be Hurt More?
</p>
<p> Nixon has always conceded Wallace Mississippi, Louisiana
and, of course, Alabama. He gave up Georgia some time ago. Now
he is seriously concerned about his chances against Wallace in
Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and North and South Carolina,
Kentucky and Virginia, once considered promising for the
G.O.P., are less than firm. No one in either of the major
parties gives Wallace even an outside chance of carrying any
state outside the South.
</p>
<p> No one can tell at this stage where or how the Wallace
role will affect the major parties, but it could tip the balance
in several key states. In Texas, where a Democratic poll puts
Humphrey a notch ahead of Nixon, Wallace at present has 26% of
the vote. In Missouri, also a tight race, he has 22%. In
Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Humphrey, according to the
Democrats, is also slightly ahead, Wallace pulls 15% and 12%.
</p>
<p> Which of them will be hurt more? Strategists for both
parties would dearly like to know, though at the moment Nixon's
lead appears so commanding that even a large Wallace vote may
not affect the outcome. Certainly Nixon could count on most of
the Southern states if Wallace had sat this year out. Certainly
Humphrey could depend on union support in big industrial states
if Wallace were not in the race. "Originally," says Al Cella,
Humphrey's chairman in Massachusetts, "the assessment was that
Wallace would not cause much harm because this is a
`Democratic' state. That view has changed. Humphrey is in very
serious trouble here."
</p>
<p>Two-Way Wash?
</p>
<p> In the big states, many suburban and rural conservatives,
certain Nixon people in any other year, are choosing Wallace in
1968. In New York, Wallace thus seems to hurt both parties about
equally. Nixon believes that this holds true for the country at
large: the Wallace vote, in his view, comes down to a "wash" for
both parties. No one likes to contemplate what would happen if
Wallace won enough states on his own to deny either of the other
candidates a clear majority of 270 votes in the Electoral
College. Though this is still highly unlikely, Wallace
nonetheless constitutes a very real threat to the stability of
the electoral process and indeed the future of the two-party
system. If he does prevent both Nixon and Humphrey from gaining
a majority, he might bestow his electoral votes on his preferred
candidate and claim that he picked the President.
</p>
<p> An end to the dominance of the two parties is, of course,
his goal. A good part of his stock speech is an attack on the
Democratic and Republican parties--with both given equal time
and tirade. At some point, Wallace always notes that "both
national parties have looked down their noses and called us
rednecks--and I'm sick and tired of it." At another point, he
declares that "both national parties ought to be for law and
order. They took it away from you by kowtowing to anarchists."
He adds: "There's not a dime's worth of difference between
either of them."
</p>
<p>What the Show Is Like
</p>
<p> A combination of revivalist rally and Southern medicine
show, Wallace's campaign is a curious blend of the old, old
politics and the brand-new. It is certainly livelier than
either of the other candidates'. To open a rally, there is "Sam
Smith and His American Independent Party band," a small combo
with electrified instruments that churns out Nashville-style
country music and leads the audience in a slow rendition of God
Bless America. Then on come the Taylor Sisters, Mona and Lisa,
two seasoned blondes who harmonize a couple of toe-tapping
standards and belt out an anthem entitled Are You for Wallace?
(to the tune of Are You from Dixie?).
</p>
<p> Occasionally there are variations. A few weeks ago in
Dallas, a white-haired, grandmotherly woman paraded around the
hall in an ante-bellum dress of red, white and blue. In one
hand she held the Stars and Stripes, in the other the Stars and
Bars. She was greeted with cheers. There is even a George
Wallace Waltz (copyright by Lyle Woodruff): Stand up for
America, red, white and blue/ And vote for George Wallace,/he's
fighting for you./He will scatter the Commies and/pseudos like
sheep;/So dance to the George Wallace/Waltz, my sweet...
</p>
<p> After the entertainment, out steps George. He is generally
introduced by Aide Dick Smith, one of about 40 traveling Wallace
staffers, all of whom (except for Tom Turnipseed of South
Carolina) are from Alabama. A weekly newspaper editor from
York, Smith gives a brief, effective warm-up talk, while Wallace
girls, dressed in dark skirts and white blouses, pass up the
aisles with yellow contribution buckets. When Smith and the
girls are finished, Wallace marches up to the lectern.
</p>
<p> The talk rarely varies in content, but the format does.
Wallace simply chooses from his compendium of evils as they
come to mind. "Now I want to say something about Vietnam," he
will say by way of introduction, or "Let's talk about law `n'
order." While the crowd is cheering, he will often spit quickly
and inconspicuously into a white handkerchief.
</p>
<p> Much of Wallace's appeal lies in personal contact. After
each talk, dozens of Wallaceites line up patiently to shake his
hand and say "God bless you, Governor," or "You're the only
hope for America." The candidate acknowledges each message with
a hand squeeze and a nod, occasionally saying "Thank y'all for
heppin' us."
</p>
<p>Ivory-Tower Pointy Heads
</p>
<p> For a long time, "Mr. 'Umphrey"--as Wallace refers to
the Vice President--received more attention than "Mr.
Nixon." Lately, because of Nixon's success at the polls, he has
turned his fire on the Republican, who is credited with a
variety of sins, from deceitfulness to being part of the
Administration that sent troops to Little Rock in 1957. Last
week there was a new charge in the catalogue. The reason Nixon
is so far ahead in the polls, Wallace averred in Albany, N.Y.,
is simple: he controls the pollsters and manipulates public
opinion with the help of the "Eastern money-interest crowd."
</p>
<p> There are many reasons for Wallace's appeal, but his
antipathy to "them"--anybody who is not "us"--is the chief
one. While Wallace stoutly denies that he is a racist, "they"
usually means the blacks. "They" also embraces Supreme Court
Justices and bureaucrats in Washington, professors in colleges,
and journalists almost anywhere. Wallace supporters feel that
"they" have all taken too much control over their lives. In a
curious way, the roots of the Wallace movement are entangled
with those of the New Left. Both would welcome drastic change
in institutions that seem aloof and unresponsive to their needs.
</p>
<p> With a histrionic flair for the crude, sardonic image,
Wallace lampoons all of "them," assuring his listeners that
they themselves are just as smart as the people in positions of
power. The bureaucrats who enforce school-desgregation
guidelines "don't have enough sense to know how to get out of
bed in the morning, so they have to write a guideline for us."
Intellectuals are "overeducated, ivory-tower folk," or
"pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle
straight." He says: "Any truck driver'd know right off what to
do at the scene of an accident, but you take a college
professor, he'd just stand around lookin' and gettin' sick."
</p>
<p> Few in Wallace's audiences believe what they read in the
nation's newspapers or magazines. Though he is usually amiable
with newsmen in private, Wallace nurtures this general distrust
by deriding reporters and editors as "sissy-britches
intellectual morons." When he does come up against the "pointy
heads," it is almost always the man from Clio, Ala., who
triumphs over the products of Cambridge, Berkeley or New Haven.
Usually more adroit than his questioners, Wallace either evades
tough questions or answers them with a half-truth about his
record in Alabama. Few outside the state know enough to dispute
him. A sample: "My wife received 87% of the Negro votes in Selma
in the general election." Mrs. Wallace did indeed receive that
percentage of Negro votes in the general election, but her
Republican opponent was also a racist and many Negroes were
running for local offices on the Democratic ticket. She had
received virtually none in the more important primary, when
Negroes had a choice.
</p>
<p>Surefire Footage
</p>
<p> When confronted with hecklers, many of them college
students or teachers, Wallace can be masterful. Though he
sometimes loses his temper, most often he orchestrates the
shouts of the protesters with chants from his own audience,
working both groups up to a fever that occasionally erupts in
violence, making surefire footage for the evening TV news shows.
"They on our payroll," he cracks about the hecklers.
</p>
<p> "When I get through speaking," he will tell them, "you can
come up here and I'll autograph your sandals." Or: "There must
be a barbers' strike around here." If nothing else works, he
can usually provoke an angry reaction with the remark: "Now,
let's talk about race." However it is started--and provocation
is not often necessary--there is almost always a commotion,
often ending in fistfights or clashes with the police. His point
is made. Since the beginning of this month, Wallace's language
has become increasingly blunt: and his audiences, ever more
ferocious, have responded in kind. In Pittsburgh this month,
white youths in the crowd confronted black demonstrators with
screams of "Who needs niggers? Who needs niggers?"
</p>
<p> Hecklers may realize that they are helping him, even as
Wallace claims, but this does not deter them. "You have to show
that there are people against him," is the reasoning some give,
or "Nixon has already won." More and more, they shout
four-letter words or make obscene gestures. Their signs, at
least, are original, ranging from CHICKEN LITTLE WAS RIGHT TO
SIEG HEIL, Y'ALL and WEIRDOES FOR WALLACE.
</p>
<p> In a real sense, Wallace has been practicing for this
campaign all his life. The grandson of a country doctor, he had
readymade constituents. Many of the men in Barbour County who
carry the first name Wallace were delivered by Dr. Wallace, a
well-remembered, rigidly pious man who rode a horse every day
until he died in 1948 at the age of 80. George was always
closer to his grandfather than to his father, George ("Sag")
Wallace, a sickly, angry man who tried his hand--without any
success--at farming. Sag was more successful at courthouse
politics--he was once chairman of the county board of revenue--and
young George can at least credit him with his own
vocation.
</p>
<p> When Sag died in 1937, George's mother, Mozelle ("Bitsy")
Wallace, a high school music teacher before she married, moved
to Montgomery. Today she is secretary to the director of the
state bureau of preventable diseases. A fiercely independent
woman, she hardly ever sees or talks with George or his sisters
and two brothers any more. "Of course, somebody's gonna get
George sooner or later," she told Marshall Frady, author of the
critical biography Wallace. "I've accepted that. He's gonna get
it. My only consolation is, when it happens, he'll be doing the
only thing he's ever cared about doing anyway."
</p>
<p>Anything, with Ketchup
</p>
<p> There is, in fact, nothing else for George but politics
and the pursuit of power. Food has no interest for him; he will
eat anything, so long as it is smothered in ketchup. He is
never without a cigar, but he cannot say what brand he is
smoking at any given moment. He does not drink: alcohol, he
says, "wastes your physical and mental energy." His dress is
nondescript: always a white shirt and a faintly iridescent black
suit. He has no hobbies and no interest in material possessions
(he claims assets of $77,000). Aboard his campaign plane, he
spends most of his time staring solidly out the window, neither
reading nor talking.
</p>
<p> The private Wallace seems virtually emotionless. Always
busy, he spends little time with his four children (Bobbi Jo,
23; Peggy, 18; George, 16; and Lee, 7); his late wife, Lurleen,
reportedly once nearly divorced him as a consequence of his
neglect. Yet in his anxiety to maintain a power base for his
presidential bid, he did not hesitate to run her for Governor
in 1966 (she died of cancer last May).
</p>
<p> A B-29 flight engineer with the rank of sergeant in World
Wart II, Wallace still receives an allowance for "nervous
disability" from the Veterans Administration; despite constant
air travel on his campaigns, he has a phobia about flying.
Before going to war, he had received a law degree from the
University of Alabama, and in 1946 he won election to the state
house of representatives; in 1952 he was elected a state judge.
He made his first, unsuccessful, try for the governorship in
1958. His opponent, John Patterson, had taken a harsher line on
race, and Wallace learned a lesson. "They out-niggered me that
time," he reportedly declared, "but they'll never do it again."
They never have. Alabama today comes close to being George
Wallace's personal satrapy, much as Louisiana was Huey Long's
in the 1930s.
</p>
<p>One Man's State
</p>
<p> Alabama, a historically backward state, scarcely inched
ahead during Wallace's regime. With a 4% sales tax and a low
property levy, its tax structure is biased against lower-income
workers. As Governor, Wallace sponsored a law providing that
corporate income taxes can be raised only by constitutional
amendment. He did raise spending greatly, but only by floating
huge bond issues and obtaining massive grants for highways and
education from the despised Federal Government.
</p>
<p> In some respects, Alabama under Wallace became a police
state. The climate of order, even today, is such that the FBI
has to stand constant guard on the home of Federal Judge Frank
Johnson, a notably liberal jurist. Wallace's contempt for his
own state's constitution was clear when he ran his wife for
Governor, in clear violation of the spirit of a clause that
prohibited him from succeeding himself. His disregard for
federal authority was memorably displayed in 1963 when he "stood
in the schoolhouse door" to bar a Negro girl and boy from
enrolling in the University of Alabama.
</p>
<p>Neo-Know Nothings
</p>
<p> Though Wallace bears a certain stylistic resemblance to
the Populists of the 1890s, to whom he is often compared, Yale
Historian C. Vann Woodward notes that the Alabamian lacks
entirely the Populists' positive approach. Mostly small
farmers, the Populists had specific, rational proposals to curb
the excesses of big business and finance. Wallace's philosophy
was more accurately foreshadowed by such extremist groups as
the Anti-Masonic Party of the 1820s which felt that it was
fighting a godless conspiracy and the American Protection
Association of the 1890s, which saw itself taking a stand
against foreign infiltration. The Ku Klux Klan, though its tone
and methods have been far more violent than Wallace's, shares
his anti-Negro feelings. Wallace's most recent ancestor was the
McCarthyite syndrome of the 1950s; it, too, exaggerated the very
real dangers of Communism and transmogrified Communists into
all-purpose villains.
</p>
<p> Perhaps the best historical parallel is offered by the
Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just as the Wallaceites are
troubled by the migration of rural Negroes to the cities, the
Know-Nothings were disturbed by the influx of foreigners, most
of whom were Irish and German Catholics. A major aim of the
movement was to bar Catholics from public office. Officially
titled the American Party--as is Wallace's in some cases--the
Know-Nothings briefly held a balance of power in several
state legislatures in the mid-1850s. In Massachusetts, they
even had a majority. The high-water mark of Know-Nothingism was
1856, when former President Millard Fillmore, running for the
presidency under the party's banner, polled 22% of the vote. The
party split over slavery, however, and almost immediately fell
apart, many members joining the new Republican party.
</p>
<p> Like the movements of the past, according to Harvard
Sociologist Seymour Lipset, Wallace's American Independent
Party is essentially a voice for "the sense of frustration of
millions of Americans." He adds: "It is a movement of the
adherents of religious and secular fundamentalism."
</p>
<p> Some scholars have compared George Wallace's movement to
Nazism and Fascism. German-born Professor Hans Morgenthau,
perhaps extrapolating from his own country's unhappy past,
identifies the Hitler and Wallace movements as representing
"the revolt of the lower middle classes against the modern age."
C. J. Burnett, a political scientist at the University of
Pennsylvania, explains the third-party leader in two words:
"Adolf Wallace." Such comparisons are as simplistic and
misleading as anything George Wallace himself has hurled at his
opponents. The Wallace phenomenon is disquieting enough in its
own terms: it does not have to be equated with a political
horror that arose in totally different ways and under totally
different circumstances.
</p>
<p> The Alabamian himself grows furious at the Hitler
parallel, reminding his younger critics that "I was fighting
Nazis before you were born." Which is, of course, true. Social
Critic Michael Harrington writes that he would not call Wallace
a fascist, but believes that his movement is one of the closest
things to Fascism this country has ever known. "Society has
certainly become worse when it is legitimate to voice racist
thoughts," says Harrington.
</p>
<p> In large measure, George Wallace is, as Harvard
Psychiatrist Robert Coles says (quoting Tolstoy), the product
of a "series of accidents, a coming together of various events."
The war in Vietnam is one of the chief accidents, acting as a
catalyst for many others. Wallace supporters--like many other
voters--cannot comprehend why the U.S. cannot whip the North
Vietnamese, and they feel aggrieved at the burden the war has
placed on their pocketbooks.
</p>
<p> The war has also contributed to the rise of the New Left,
which not only directly helps Wallace with its heckling but has
nourished as well the malaise of the non-hip majority. "The New
Left holds the majority of society in contempt," says Paul
Goodman, once a radical youth hero. "They are concerned with
their own gut issues, but they pay no attention to the
majority's gut issues. And this rouses fear and anxiety on the
part of the majority. If the New Left had a program for the
majority, Wallace would get only the lunatic fringe."
</p>
<p> Other "accidents" are Lyndon Johnson, who has raised a
crisis of confidence that causes many of his countrymen to
distrust their Government, and Hubert Humphrey and Richard
Nixon, whom many voters regard as products of an unresponsive
party system. The final accident may have been the murder of
Robert Kennedy. Though he stood 180 degrees apart from Wallace
on issues--it is hard indeed to imagine two men more
diametrically opposed--Kennedy gave many current Wallace
adherents the same feeling of strength, honesty and plain
pugnaciousness that Wallace does. "Bobby went to faceless people
and talked to them and made them feel that they had a champion
leading their cause against an entrenched Establishment,"
observes David Carley, a liberal leader from Wisconsin. "Without
his positive program, they're quite willing to turn around now
and vote their doubts and frustrations and fears. Wallace is
just the leader for that."
</p>
<p>Where Will Wallace Go?
</p>
<p> In the course of more than 150 interviews with Wallace
supporters across the country, TIME correspondents discovered
that many would have voted for Kennedy before Wallace. To a
lesser, though still significant degree, many others said that
they would have preferred Eugene McCarthy to Wallace.
</p>
<p> Important as next month's vote is, far more important is
what happens to the movement in the future. Traditionally, the
two-party system in America has been so strong and capacious
that third parties could be absorbed into one of the two major
parties. Abraham Lincoln might not have been elected President
in 1860 if a large number of Know-Nothings had not been taken
into the new Republican Party. Much of the Populist program,
which included the graduated income tax, eventually was enacted
by the Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson Administrations.
</p>
<p> The same fate could overtake the American Independent
Party. It is debatable whether Wallace could field the
candidates for Congress, the state houses and the courthouses
who could form a major party. (A number of Southern
officeholders might, however, leave the other parties for the
A.I.P.) The war, too, will eventually end, and either Nixon or
Humphrey may be able to regain some of the trust lost by Lyndon
Johnson. Historian Harry Jaffa, one of Goldwater's advisers,
argues that, as a conservative President, Nixon might "defuse"
the potential of the right in the '60s, just as F.D.R. defused
the far-out left in the '30s. Another charismatic leader--Edward
Kennedy could be one--might also lure many of Wallace's
disaffected followers back into the political mainstream.
</p>
<p> Still, the centrifugal forces disrupting the U.S. are
stronger than at any time since the Civil War. Wallace has
succeeded in doing what no one else has ever managed: he has
brought together into a single party large segments of both the
lower middle class and the far right. Members of the John Birch
Society and a score of other groups of the radical right, who
until now have clashed in intramural squabbling, have found
common cause and respectability in Wallace's camp.
</p>
<p> Indeed, many of the people who have flocked to Wallace are
so disenchanted with normal politics that they may never be
brought back. In a weird doppelganger effect, they mirror the
radicals of the left--who may, in time, find their own party
and their own George Wallace. The genius of the American
political system has been that, unlike those of Europe, it has
kept right and left from polarizing into separate, warring
parties. This may no longer be true. "We might well end up with
a multiparty system," warns Barry Goldwater, a Nixon supporter,
in the current National Review. "Given our present Constitution,
this could mean disaster for America."
</p>
<p> The possible paths the movement--and the political system--might
take within the next few years are almost limitless.
Wallace probably has no clear-cut program for the future. "Naw,
we don't stop and figger," he told Author Frady. "We don't
think about history or theories or none of that. We just go
ahead. Hell, history can take care of itself." There are few,
however, who doubt that Wallace, whatever his fate in 1968, will
be trying for the presidency again in 1972. A few weeks ago,
after staring out at the Rocky Mountains from his campaign
plane, George Wallace turned to a reporter and remarked: "Just
think, some day I'm going to be President of all that."
</p>
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