THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2020 Y A
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.
“In the presidential campaign
of 1968, my father, Governor
George Wallace, understood the
potential political power of down-
trodden and disillusioned work-
ing class white voters who felt
alienated from government,” his
daughter, Peggy Wallace Ken-
nedy, said by email the other day.
“And Donald Trump is mining
the same mother lode.”
Former President Barack
Obama implicitly made the com-
parison between the two men
during a eulogy on Thursday for
John Lewis, the civil rights icon
and longtime congressman.
“George Wallace may be gone,”
Mr. Obama said, “but we can
witness our federal government
sending agents to use tear gas
and batons against peaceful
demonstrators.”
It may seem incongruous to
see Mr. Trump, a New Yorker
born to wealth with no ties to the
South beyond Trump-branded
property in Florida, embracing
the same themes as Wallace,
who was proud to call himself a
“redneck” segregationist from
hardscrabble Alabama. Yet it
speaks to the enduring power of
us-against-them politics in Amer-
ica and the boiling pot of resent-
ment that Mr. Trump, hoping to
save his presidency, is trying to
tap into a half-century after
Wallace did, hoping to win the
presidency.
To go back and read or listen
to Wallace’s speeches and inter-
views from that seminal 1968
campaign is to be struck by
language and appeals that sound
familiar again, even if the con-
text and the limits of discourse
have changed.
Like Mr. Trump, Wallace de-
nounced “anarchists” in the
streets, condemned liberals for
trying to squelch the free speech
of those they disagreed with and
ran against the elites of Washing-
ton and the mainstream media.
He vowed to “halt the giveaway
of your American dollars and
products” to other countries.
“One of the issues confronting
the people is the breakdown of
law and order,” Wallace said at
his campaign kickoff in Washing-
ton in February 1968. “The aver-
age man on the street in this
country knows that it comes
about because of activists, mili-
tants, revolutionaries, anarchists
and communists.”
Just last week, Mr. Trump
framed the current campaign in
similar terms. “So it’s a choice
between the law and order and
patriotism and prosperity, safety
offered by our movement, and
the anarchy and chaos and crime
and socialism,” he told a tele-
rally in North Carolina. In tweets
this week, he promised “all of the
people living their Suburban
Lifestyle Dream that you will no
longer be bothered or financially
hurt by having low income hous-
ing built in your neighborhood.”
Like the pugnacious Mr.
Trump, Wallace enjoyed a fight.
Indeed, he relished taking on
protesters who showed up at his
events. “You know what you
are?” he called out to one.
“You’re a little punk, that’s all
you are. You haven’t got any
guts.” To another, he said, “I may
not teach you any politics if you
listen, but I’ll teach you some
good manners.”
Recalling the time protesters
blocked President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s motorcade, Wallace
insisted that he would never let
that happen to him. “If you elect
me the president and I go to
California or I come to Arkansas
and some of them lie down in
front of my automobile,” he said,
“it’ll be the last thing they’ll ever
want to lie down in front of.”
Mr. Trump has made similarchest-beating threats. “When the
looting starts, the shooting
starts,” he wrote on Twitter after
protests turned violent in Minne-
apolis following Mr. Floyd’s
death under the knee of a white
police officer. A few days later,
the president said that protesters
who tried to enter White House
grounds would be greeted “with
the most vicious dogs, and most
ominous weapons” and that
Secret Service agents would
“quickly come down on them,
hard.”
Among those who saw an
analogy between the two men
from the start was Mr. Lewis,
who was beaten on the Selma
bridge in Wallace’s Alabama in
1965 and died this month. “It is a
reasonable comparison,” Mr.
Lewis said in an interview with
The New York Times and CNBC
in 2016. “See, I don’t think Wal-
lace believed in all of the stuff he
was preaching. I think Wallace
said a lot of stuff just to get
ahead. I don’t think Trump really
believes in all this stuff, but he
thinks this will be his ticket to
the White House.”
More recently, former Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has
said that Mr. Trump is “more
George Wallace than George
Washington.” Mr. Trump’s cam-
paign fired back this week in a
statement by Katrina Pierson, a
senior campaign adviser to the
president, who credited him with
increasing funding for histori-
cally black schools and signing
criminal justice reform.
“There’s only one candidate in
this race who bragged about
receiving an award from George
Wallace, and that’s Joe Biden,”
Ms. Pierson said. “Biden also
said that Democrats needed a
‘liberal George Wallace, someone
who’s not afraid to stand up and
offend people.’ ”
Both quotes refer to articles in
The Philadelphia Inquirer, one in
1975 about Mr. Biden’s oppositionto busing and another in 1987
mentioning a campaign stop in
Alabama during his first presi-
dential campaign. The Biden
campaign countered with other
clips from the 1970s in which Mr.
Biden criticized Wallace and
vowed to vote Republican if he
won the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1976.
Wallace made his name as the
most prominent segregationist of
his time but he neither started
nor ended that way. Unlike Mr.
Trump, he was a small-town boy
from Clio, Ala., who grew up to
jump into politics as a progres-
sive, eager to help the disadvan-
taged with New Deal-style pro-
grams. As a judge and a Demo-
cratic candidate for governor in
1958, he made a point of promis-
ing equality for Black Alabam-
ians. But when he lost that con-
test to a candidate who dema-
gogued on segregation, Wallace
told an aide that “I was out-
niggered and I will never be
out-niggered again.”
After winning the governor’s
mansion with a hard-core racist
appeal, he came to national at-
tention in 1963 by promising in
his inaugural address “segrega-
tion now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever” and months
later by standing in the school-
house door in a failed effort to
block the integration of the Uni-
versity of Alabama. Wallace that
same year ordered the Confeder-
ate flag flown above the State
Capitol, where it remained for 30
years before being taken down
for good.
In “Settin’ the Woods on Fire,”
an acclaimed 2000 documentary
on his life, Wallace was quoted
telling an associate who asked
about his race-baiting that he
wanted to talk about issues like
roads and education but that he
never got as much attention as
when he thundered about race.
Wallace made his first faint
stab at the White House in 1964,but when he ran for real in 1968
he bolted from the Democratic
Party to lead the ticket of the
American Independent Party.
Trying to appeal to a national
audience, he toned down the
explicitly racist language and
used code words instead, defend-
ing states’ rights, slamming
court-ordered busing and prom-
ising law and order.
Like Mr. Trump, he denied
trafficking in racism and turned
the accusation around on his
opponents. “I think the biggest
racists in the world are those
who call other folks racist,” Wal-
lace said. “I think the biggest
bigots in the world are those who
call other folks bigots.”
In an interview on “Face the
Nation” on CBS in Washington,
he said his white critics called
him a racist while fleeing to the
suburbs so they did not have to
send their children to schools
with Black children. “This is a
segregated city here because of
the hypocrites who moved out,”
he said. “This is the hypocrite
capital of the world.”
Mr. Trump, who has come tothe defense of the Confederate
flag by mocking NASCAR for
banning it, likewise tries to turn
the racism charge against his
critics. Last year, he asserted
that four congresswomen of color
were “a very Racist group of
troublemakers,” referred to a
Black congressman who angered
him as “racist Elijah Cummings”
and declared that the Rev. Al
Sharpton “Hates Whites &
Cops!”
After Mr. Biden last week
called him “the first” racist presi-
dent, Mr. Trump repeated his
assertion that he had “done more
for Black Americans than any-
body with the possible exception
of Abraham Lincoln.” (These are
both ahistoric statements, of
course. Many presidents were
racist and early on even slave
owners, while Lincoln was hardly
the only president to have done
more for Black Americans than
Mr. Trump.)
In that 1968 race, Richard M.
Nixon beat Hubert H. Humphrey,
but Wallace won five states in
the Deep South — Alabama,
Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana
and Mississippi — the last time
an independent or third-party
candidate captured any states in
the Electoral College.
Wallace ran again in 1972, this
time as a Democrat, but was
felled by a would-be assassin’s
bullets that left him paralyzed.
He ran again in 1976 from a
wheelchair, winning Democratic
contests in three states but los-
ing the nomination to a more
moderate Southerner, Jimmy
Carter.
By late in life, Wallace had a
change of heart and repented his
earlier racism, going so far as to
call Mr. Lewis and others to
personally apologize. He ran for
governor one last time in 1982 by
reaching out to Black voters and
after winning installed many
Black appointees in state govern-
ment. At the 30th anniversary of
Selma, he sang “We Shall Over-
come” with Black Alabamians.
When Wallace died in 1998, Mr.
Lewis wrote an Op-Ed article in
The Times forgiving him.
Mr. Trump, for his part, shows
no signs of backing down and
was the only living president to
neither attend Mr. Lewis’s me-
morial service on Thursday nor
send a message to be read. Wal-
lace’s daughter said Mr. Trump
understood, as her father did,
that “the two greatest motivators
for disaffected voters” are “hate
and fear.”
“Mr. Trump exudes the same
willingness to fight rather than to
seek rational solutions much like
my father did in 1968,” Ms. Wal-
lace Kennedy said. “Both prom-
ise to be a president with person-
ality and bravado who is ready to
fight first and worry about the
consequences later.”‘My father, Governor George Wallace, understood the potential political power of downtrodden and disillusioned
working class white voters who felt alienated from government. And Donald Trump is mining the same mother lode.’PEGGY WALLACE KENNEDY, referring to her father’s presidential campaign in 1968George Wallace in 1968, when he was running a third-party, “law and order” campaign for president. His us-against-them style is a match for President Trump’s.ROBERT ELFSTROM/VILLON FILMS, VIA GETTY IMAGESNEWS ANALYSISA Half-Century After Wallace,
Trump Echoes the Politics of Division
WALLACE
IN HIS WORDS“The militants, activists,
revolutionaries, anarchists
and some communists, and
the Supreme Court having
handcuffed the police in our
country, and making them
second-rate citizens.”
SOMETIME DURING THE 1968
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN“It’s sad my friends that the
streets of our large cities are
unsafe, and the average work-
ing man cannot walk to work.”
OCT. 9, 1968, BOSTON“And if you walk out of
this building today and get
knocked in the head, the
person who knocks you in the
head is out of jail before you
get in the hospital, and on
Monday they’ll try the police-
man about it. He’ll wind up
getting in trouble about it.”
SOMETIME DURING THE 1968
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN“What did this liberalism do?
It brought us dope addiction in
the streets. The breakdown of
law and order.”
MARCH 12, 1972, PALATKA, FLA.Mr. Trump, after clearing Lafayette Square of protesters.
He has portrayed the nation’s cities as hotbeds of chaos.DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom Page ATranscript from a video at
nytimes.com/politics.TRUMP
IN HIS WORDS“We’re in the process of
defeating the radical left,
the marxists, the anarchists,
the agitators, the looters.”
JULY 4, 2020, WASHINGTON“They want to demolish our
heritage so they can impose
their new oppressive regime in
its place. They want to defund
and dissolve our police
departments. Think of that.”
JUNE 20, 2020, TULSA, OKLA.“And you call 911, and they say
‘I’m sorry, this number is no
longer working.’”
JUNE 20, 2020, TULSA, OKLA.“The violent mayhem we have
seen in the streets of cities that
are run by liberal Democrats,
in every case, is the predictable
result of years of extreme
indoctrination.”
JULY 3, 2020, MOUNT RUSHMORE
NATIONAL MONUMENTBD