George Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the “law and order” president sends federal forces into the streets.
WASHINGTON — The nation’s cities were in flames amid protests against racial injustice and the fiery presidential candidate vowed to use force. He would authorize the police to “knock somebody in the head” and “call out 30,000 troops and equip them with two-foot-long bayonets and station them every few feet apart.”
The moment was 1968 and the “law and order” candidate was George C. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama running on a third-party ticket. Fifty-two years later, in another moment of social unrest, the “law and order” candidate is already in the Oval Office and the politics of division and race ring through the generations as President Trump tries to do what Wallace could not.
Comparisons between the two men stretch back to 2015 when Mr. Trump ran for the White House denouncing Mexicans illegally crossing the border as rapists and pledging to bar all Muslims from entering the country. But the parallels have become even more pronounced in recent weeks after the killing of George Floyd as Mr. Trump has responded to demonstrations by sending federal forces into the streets to take down “anarchists and agitators.” The Wallace-style tactics were on display again on Wednesday as Mr. Trump stirred racist fears about low-income housing moving into the suburbs. Continue reading.
When segregationist George Wallace ran against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey on the American Independent Party ticket in the 1968 presidential race, he was so overtly bigoted that he made even Nixon’s more racist supporters uncomfortable. Nixon, in fact, feared that Wallace would split the right-wing vote and cause Humphrey to lose the election. Peggy Wallace Kennedy, his daughter, is now 69 — and she sees a lot of her late father in President Donald Trump.