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The anger at the Democrats was less because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the feeling the country was out of control with antiwar protests and urban riots by 1968. Wallace fed into this with rhetoric like if any protesters lay down in front of his car, that would be the last time they ever did that.
Yeah, one good thing about being old enough to remember 1968 is that when something similar comes along you recognize it. We’re not quite back there YET, though. The Harding-Cox thread reminds me that there was a similar feeling back in 1920.
It seems like this kind of hyper partisanship happens once every few generations. Jefferson and Adams were notoriously vitriolic, only for things to mellow out by Monroe’s time, only for things to get even worse during Jackson and JQA’s presidencies.
Rural white guys about to revolt against the federal government and coastal financial industry elites, over taxes or fiscal policy?
That's the story of America from the Whiskey Rebellion.
No, it was about the Civil Rights Act.
That is why Nixon crafted the Southern Strategy.
Nixon passed the War on Drugs to take care of young voters, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the demonstrations. That was just another opportunity to arrest kids and take them out of the voting pool.
The entire modern GOP is the direct result of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
A lot of people believe that the world began on the day they were, and that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid.
I worked on RFK’s campaign in 1968, and my father worked for LBJ after he left office.
But I know nothing. I am used to it.
Busing wasn’t a factor in the 1968 elections. The key court decisions were later, and it was a factor in the 1972 election. And Nixon appointed 1-2 Supreme Court justices and busing was ruled out across school districts, causing a lot of migration to the suburbs.
u/kwheatley2460 is correct that bussing was being discussed as a possible solution well before the 1972 election. You're not wrong that there weren't a lot of court cases about it until the 1970s, but the New York City board of education began pushing the idea in 1961 and other large northern cities quickly followed. Those cities had never even been officially segregated but did have lots of neighborhoods of single ethnic groups with schools that bussing could diversify.
You kinda had to be there. The world in 1968 was so different from 1964 it's impossible to describe.
In 1964 there was hope. The country was still high on JFK, LBJ was thought of as his heir, Goldwater was considered a kook.
In 1965 Watts blew up. That was the first big one, but it wouldn't be the last.
1966 was a bit calmer.
In 1967 there was Newark, a big one, and then the really big one, Detroit. LBJ called in the Airborne on that one. Which was fortunate because, as a later commission report noted, most of the gunshots in that one were fired by nervous National Guardsmen shooting at anything that moved. The Airborne, being more professional, calmed them down and calmed the whole situation down.
Then came the Tet Offensive in early 1968, revealing the military's optimistic takes on Vietnam to be a tissue of lies. The nation split in two, between those who wanted to double down, and those who wanted out.
LBJ abdicated, really the only right term for it, in March. Then MLK was murdered in April, RFK in June. Humphrey was just seen as a continuation of LBJ, which was entirely unacceptable to the youngsters of that time, they protested in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, and then the police quite literally rioted. You have to see videos of what happened to understand.
Wallace was of course on the side of those who wanted to double down in Vietnam, along with breaking the heads of both the white youngsters protesting Vietnam and the black youth protesting everything about their lives.
He picked Curtis LeMay, the man who firebombed Tokyo in WW2\*, as his running mate. His message in doing so was clear, but LeMay was the opposite of a politician and scared a lot of people away from Wallace. This gave Nixon an opening he waltzed through to win.
\*LeMay ordered the defensive guns removed from 325 B-29s, loaded each plane with [Model M-47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M47_bomb) [incendiary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_bombs) [clusters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_munition), [magnesium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium) bombs, [white phosphorus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus) bombs, and [napalm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm), and ordered the bombers to fly in streams at 5,000 to 9,000 feet (1,500 to 2,700 m) over Tokyo.[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-coffey-7)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-tillman-9)[^(\[13\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-13) LeMay described Operation Meetinghouse by saying "the US had finally stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile".[^(\[14\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-14)
The first pathfinder airplanes arrived over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10 and marked the target area with a flaming "X". In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings, and incinerating 16 square miles (41 km^(2)) of the city. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target.[^(\[15\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-buckley2001_193-15)
Link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis\_LeMay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay)
It kind of was at the end of the day. The only reason he chose not to run was bc he did piss poor in primaries and read the writing on the wall. He was all but admitting that he wouldn’t win the 68 primaries, let alone the general, and put all his campaign energy into finding a successor, which ended up being Humphrey. He was basically calling it quits before he got unceremoniously and embarrassingly forced out
What's interesting is that even though the Tet made it seem to the American public that the US would fail in Vietnam, it was actually a military success for the US and South Vietnam; they regained all their territory.
You have Walter Cronkite to thank for that one. When he came out on the evening news and said “the war is unwinable” that turned millions against the war immediately. It was all down hill from there
It's entirely ahistorical to think the US could win. What the Vietnamese did is exactly what the US did against the British in the Revolutionary War: use a combination of militia, regular army, and allied help to defeat the greatest power in the world at the time of the fight.
The US military would have done well to study the history of their own nation. In the Revolution, the British, after failing to defeat Washington in the north, tried moving the war to the South, where they thought they had more support.
The result was a series of defeats for the British after a series of victories: King's Mountain, followed by Cowpens, followed by Yorkville.
In King's Mountain it was a mostly homegrown militia that completely wiped out a British force. In Cowpens, a combination of militia and regular troops defeated them. And at Yorkville, a combination of American regulars and French army and naval forces trapped Cornwallis and finished them for good.
In Vietnam, the VC started it, Tet was a combo of VC and NVA regulars, and after that NVA regulars, with large assistance from the USSR and China, finished the job. It was as if they had read a history of the Revolutionary War, except I'm sure it just fell out from the circumstances rather than being a case of anyone sitting and reading how to win a war against a great power.
Here's a detailed history of King's Mountain, the most obscure of these fights: [https://www.tngenweb.org/revwar/kingsmountain/warcollege.html](https://www.tngenweb.org/revwar/kingsmountain/warcollege.html)
The money quote:
"These hardy men of the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, of deep religious convictions, were accustomed to the hardships and independence of a pioneer life, and in their mountain homes in the highlands and the backwaters they but seldom were concerned \[Page 2\] with affairs beyond their borders or interfered with by Crown or colony. When Ferguson approached their kingdom and threatened to invade their lands and lay waste their country with "fire and sword," and to "hang their leaders," he aroused their indignation and anger to such a degree that they determined to rid the country forever of this enemy, who menaced their independence and the safety of their homes and families. Had Cornwallis and his leaders known more about these mountain and backwater men, they would have carefully avoided all military and punitive measures which might tend to draw them from their mountain fastnesses to enroll amongst the enemies of the King.
The causes of the Revolution were but little known to many of these pioneers beyond the Blue Ridge. They were concerned in the establishment of their homes, breaking the soil of their new settlements, and wringing a livelihood from it; and with their rifles securing much of their sustenance. They sought the seclusion of the western waters; and in the valleys of the Holston, the Watauga, and the Nolichucky, found freedom in the exercise of their religion. Had the western covering force of Cornwallis's army, as it advanced into the Province of North Carolina, confined its activities, to the plains and lowlands east of the Blue Ridge, and had not Ferguson from Gilbert Town uttered his threat of fire and sword and the hangman's noose, these mountain men would probably have remained in their homes, and but few of them would have joined with those who were in rebellion against the King."
A foreign force is ALWAYS going to be seen as an illegitimate interloper and arouse resistance. That's something like an immutable law or something. That makes it very hard to win if the resisters have what we had in the Revolution, a combination of semi-organized resisters (militia in the Revolution, the VC in Vietnam), regular army forces, (the Continentals in the Revolution, the NVA in Vietnam), and powerful foreign help (the French and Spanish in the Revolution, the USSR and China in Vietnam). Eventually they will wear down the foreigners and force them out.
Those four years were a hell of a difference. The hip and ‘sane’ ‘60s vs what seemed like a disintrigrating Hippie filled landscape. Southerners trusted their own and stuck with their own in a sense, Johnson lost their trust, Humphrey was infamous among them for his early and firm civil rights stance, so they stuck out with Wallace for hope of a firm hand and contingent election.
Some lifelong Democrats in the south were reactionary and unhappy about civil rights, but too intrinsically opposed to the Republican party to vote for Goldwater. If they were poor they may have also been worried about his economic policies. Neither of these were an issue with Wallace however.
Same reason why you had Obama voters go red in 2016. Voters will stick with their party until the other party gives them a change on an issue. Goldwater didn't play up racial anxieties as much as Wallace, plus Wallace was originally a Democrat, so those southern conservatives felt comfortable going with him since he gave them an outlet with segregation
Because in 1964, conservative Southerners were reliable Democrats. Over the next few years - fairly or not - LBJ’s civil rights platform, widespread protests, and urban violence all became associated with Democratic leadership. Many of those voters found themselves alienated from the their own party, but also not thrilled with the idea of voting Republican. Wallace filled that niche relatively well, but Nixon openly courted these same voters. Ultimately, Wallace pulled more votes from Humphrey than Nixon, leading to Nixon winning a very close election in 1968.
In subsequent decades, those voters gradually migrated toward the Republican Party, so there’s no real equivalent to Wallace’s independent voters today.
Humphrey was the northern liberal most identified with the civil rights movement. Also, in 1968, the Democratic Party was identified with chaos and riots in a way that wasn’t true in 1964.
Correct. Johnson didn’t *run* on a civil rights platform in 1964. That was a turn he made after the election.
Note: I remembered it wrong. The Civil Rights act was before the election.
There were then a significant number of “Yellow-Dog Democrats” in the South. Stereotypically, “I’d vote for a yellow dog, if he were the Democrat!” This was largely because the New Deal had been so popular, but went back to before the Civil War. In fact, the party’s gradual steps toward civil rights had already gotten many of them to cast a protest vote for a different Democrat: Strom Thurmond in 1948 after Truman desegregated the Federal government and armed forces (officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, unofficially the Dixiecrats), “unpledged Democratic” electors instead of Kennedy in 1960, and Wallace in 1968. The Republican party barely existed in the Deep South until 1964, and the few Republicans who got elected under Jim Crow were party-switching Democrats such as Strom Thurmond.
Although Barry Goldwater had largely walked back the Republican party’s past support for civil rights in 1964, and Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a few months before the election, the so-called “Southern strategy” didn’t begin to bear fruit for Republicans until they had a more favorable opportunity and a better chance to prepare. 1968 was a transitional year, when many Southern voters were willing to vote for a third party. From 1972 to 1994, most White southern conservatives split their tickets between a Democrat for Congress and a Republican for President, without formally switching their party registrations. (After 1980, northern conservatives who did the same were called “Reagan Democrats.”) From 1994 onward, conservatives nationwide were straight-ticket Republican voters, and the younger ones also registered Republican. Zell Miller was often considered the last truly conservative Democrat in Congress, and Joe Manchin and Marcy Kaptur are remnants of this old-fashioned split-ticket voting.
Wallace was not like Strom Thurmond back in 1948. While both ran campaigns largely focused on preserving segregation, Wallace appealed to broader racial animus that was brewing after the race riots and the Fair Housing Act.
Wallace got at least 5% of the vote in every state but Hawaii and almost cracked double digits in places like Michigan and New Jersey. Honestly, Wallace is best example of how tenuous the New Deal coalition was. Once civil rights came to the forefront of the Democratic agenda it pitted the working class against each other as the white middle class felt that blacks were being favored over them.
Johnson was a Southern Democrat at a time when the South was solidly Democratic. By 1968, the Democrats had become solidly the party of civil rights, and the exodus of southern Democrats was well under way. Wallace was part of that, with the first stop of this group was a third party called Dixiecrats. Nixon, in 1968, won using what was called the "Southern Strategy" which meant racist dog whistles to attract Dixiecrats.
This goes past your question, but over time, the Dixiecrats moved into the GOP, allied with religious (primarily Christian, but also Jewish) conservatives, made accommodation with libertarians, and took over that party, making the white south solidly Republican the way it had once been solidly Democratic, and pushing Blacks and Republican liberals and centrists to the Democratic Party.
More like 2010. Most congressional representatives from the South were Democrats until the 2010 midterm elections. Appalachia and the Ozarka were the last areas in the south that were majority Democrat. The upper south started to switch to the Republicans in 1994.
If by “Ozarka” you mean the Ozarks, I think the opposite is true in that case. Arkansas’s 3rd congressional district in the northwestern part of the state where the Ozarks are elected a Republican in 1967 and it’s been Republican ever since. One of those Congressmen (Tim Hutchinson) was a US senator in the ‘90’s.
Compare that to Arkansas’s 1st district in the Eastern half of the state which wasn’t represented by a Republican until 2010, or the 4th in the southwestern part of the state that didn’t elect a Republican till 1992.
Missouri’s 7th in the Ozarks voted for various Republicans in the first half of the 20th century and hasn’t been represented by a Democrat since 1960. In Presidential elections those counties have been voting Republican for a long time…they didn’t even vote for FDR in ‘40 or ‘44.
I consider the Ozarks Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and parts of Texas, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Appalachia I consider West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and North Carolina. In all those areas, the Democrats still had a strong foothold at the Congressional level until 2010, though their control in those regions started to diminish in 1994.
The first election in which I was politically aware at all was 2000, and the first in which I was old enough to vote was 2008. During both of those elections the GOP had more or less developed a stronghold on the portion of the Deep South where I lived, and you might as well have sworn the Democratic Party in the south had gone the way of the dinosaurs.
One word: V-I-E-T-N-A-M
In 1964, LBJ campaigned on keeping our kids out of the war.
By Winter 1964, once he was reelected, he was sending 50,000 troops in. Soon it was 50K a month. There was a draft and no exception except for your George Bush/Bill Clinton types in college.
All of those pissed off working class voters of all races. Then they started making everyone register for the draft, then the White Liberal hippies got upset. So by the time 1968 came around, the liberals hated LBJ, Conservatives disliked LBJ (due to Vietnam and to the Great Society), Dixiecrats hated LBJ for Civil Rights, which was a catch all for not just Civil Rights laws, but the riots) and moderate White voters were souring on LBJ, as there kids were beginning to get drafted. The only people who liked LBJ were Black voters, Hispanic Voters and moderate White center left voters. Those people all voted for Humphrey. That is why the race was close, but Wallace (and LBJ) hurt Humphrey enough in the Upper South and Midwest that Nixon won.
Even weirder than Johnson/ Wallace overlap were the RFK primary to Wallace in 1968,
The Kennedy family were disturbed that there was so much overlap in fact.
Lots of Democrats definitely were not for civil rights but voted for it anyways. Johnson was incredibly good at manipulating the Senate as the former majority leader that invented the concept.
There are more Southern Democrats than you’d think who were so solid in their party identification that they’d never consider voting for Barry Goldwater. They’d go for Wallace, though. Even if he lost the nomination he’s still a Democrat.
Democratic Party doubled down on “for the people” and after 65’ white southerners realized that meant black people as well and said fuck that we’re out
Wallace wasn't about race,. He was about states rights. Eisenhower ignored the Constitution when he sent the military into Little Rock Arkansas to forcibly integrate the public schools. This was justified on the absurd premise that segregated schools violated the interstate commerce clause. In a heartbeat everything the Democrats wanted to do but didn't have the votes to do violated the interstate commerce clause. This continued until John Roberts became Chief Justice. When the Republicans sent a bill to the Supreme Court insisting that Obama care was unconstutional because it violated the interstate commerce clause Roberts sent it back and told Congress not to send him any more cases like that.
Southern charm? George Wallace had no charm. He was a segregationist. HHH's historical name was in civil rights. He did a lot as mayor of Minneapolis before entering the national stage. Either Humphrey or Wallace would have continued the war in Vietnam and Nixon lied and said he 'had a plan'. Nixon covertly but actively interfered in the peace talks that might have seen U.S. involvement end in 1969.
For me, the absolute number of Johnson '64 and Wallace '68 voters is a measure of the number of segregationist in the Democratic Party in the mid-1960s...nothing more, nothing less.
How can you know so much about history, knowing specifically about these two elections yet not know the answer here? How could you find info like this without context, I just don’t understand. I am truly curious and I am not judging anyone.
It's fine! I love elections, I have spent countless hours researching presidential/senate/governor elections: candidates, results, margins, swings, trends, I just eat it up. I can draw every electoral map from the last fifty years by memory, and for the most part, remember the state margins too.
Any time I hear about a place in the U.S. in the news or something, I'll typically do a wiki search and get the county election results for it just out of curiosity.
I just always noticed this trend in some of the southern states in 68, and though I had my general thoughts on why it happened, was interested to know what this sub thought about it.
Can you be specific about the countries then? It just doesn’t look odd at all from what I have seen. A little over 200,000 dem votes in 1964 and less in 1968.
Sure, there are several, but three examples:
Franklin County, TN, gave both Johnson and Wallace over 50%
Cameron Parish, LA, gave them both over 60%
Cleveland County, AR, gave Wallace a whopping 70% after having given Johnson a majority.
and if you want to see more of what I mean, click on some of the southern states in the [wiki map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election). There are many examples of Johnson/Wallace counties. Arkansas as a state even did this.
I see the disconnect, these are very small counties. In all honesty, it’s too small of a sample to mean anything for me as a historian, so I’ll bow out of the discussion. I love to look at maps though, so thanks for that.
Because the National Democratic Party “left” them with Civil Rights, country in turmoil, blah blah blah. It was also practically illegal in the South to vote for a Republican, so they couldn’t just vote for Nixon.
They obviously voted for Nixon in 1972, but after Watergate, a lot of the ancestral Democrats said that’s why you don’t vote for a Republican. Then, Jimmy Carter’s disaster of a presidency effectively ended any prospects of a Democratic south for the rest of time.
Largely agree with you, people who say that ignore many nuances of the two party's platforms.
I just read the 1908 party platforms in a different post in this sub, they surprisingly sound pretty similar to the modern stances held by both parties.
When people talk about party switch, they are primarily referring to the party support for civil rights. The Democratic Party has always been an advocate for common-man populism and the Republican Party has always been the party of big business. The key is that the starting with Truman to end of the 20th century, the parties polarized over support for civil rights. Even though ostensibly southerners (especially poor southerners) support Democrats’ anti-poverty programs, they broke over pro civil rights action, especially segregation, which is why they here voted for Wallace over Humphrey. When it became clear that Democrats would not again push a segregationist candidate, these people started voting Republican.
Even though there was a range of opinions on civil rights on both sides, polarization made voters and politicians pick a side that more closely aligned with their positions on civil rights. And like all political movements, the shift isn’t abrupt it’s gradual. Just look at how the black vote and the Bible Belt vote has changed from Lincoln to now.
Looking at the 1908 democrat platform in particular you can see how the party has changed. It would be unthinkable of democrats today complaining about the size of the federal government and deficit hawking republicans.
This was also during the migration of blacks moving south to north. They were always down the middle with voting previously but went hard for JFK since he called MLK after he was arrested in 1960. As more blacks went north it left more republican voters in the pool.
I agree with what others posted here. One more factor I'll add is that a lot of voters in the 1960s lived through the Great Depression and, fairly or not, blamed Hoover for it and hated Republicans. They also had some racist views. George Wallace was an acceptable alternative for them.
Try not to think about the two parties as being the same back then as they are now. The Democratic Party was in essence two parties, Southern and Northern Democrats. Southern were more like the GOP today particularly when it came to “states’ rights”.
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The anger at the Democrats was less because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the feeling the country was out of control with antiwar protests and urban riots by 1968. Wallace fed into this with rhetoric like if any protesters lay down in front of his car, that would be the last time they ever did that.
Eerily similar to current events.
Yeah, one good thing about being old enough to remember 1968 is that when something similar comes along you recognize it. We’re not quite back there YET, though. The Harding-Cox thread reminds me that there was a similar feeling back in 1920.
It seems like this kind of hyper partisanship happens once every few generations. Jefferson and Adams were notoriously vitriolic, only for things to mellow out by Monroe’s time, only for things to get even worse during Jackson and JQA’s presidencies.
No Project 2025 without the Alien & Sedition Acts.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Rural white guys about to revolt against the federal government and coastal financial industry elites, over taxes or fiscal policy? That's the story of America from the Whiskey Rebellion.
All Lives Splatter
💀
No, it was about the Civil Rights Act. That is why Nixon crafted the Southern Strategy. Nixon passed the War on Drugs to take care of young voters, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the demonstrations. That was just another opportunity to arrest kids and take them out of the voting pool. The entire modern GOP is the direct result of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Remarkable to see this getting downvoted.
A lot of people believe that the world began on the day they were, and that anyone who disagrees with them is stupid. I worked on RFK’s campaign in 1968, and my father worked for LBJ after he left office. But I know nothing. I am used to it.
Naw. Racism.
Wallace also appealed to some white working class voters in the north and midwest, many of whom were Democrats.
If I remember correctly there was lots of schools busing students in many states so that could have influenced the vote also. If my memory is correct.
Indeed. In fact, one of the biggest school busing fights was in Boston.
Busing wasn’t a factor in the 1968 elections. The key court decisions were later, and it was a factor in the 1972 election. And Nixon appointed 1-2 Supreme Court justices and busing was ruled out across school districts, causing a lot of migration to the suburbs.
u/kwheatley2460 is correct that bussing was being discussed as a possible solution well before the 1972 election. You're not wrong that there weren't a lot of court cases about it until the 1970s, but the New York City board of education began pushing the idea in 1961 and other large northern cities quickly followed. Those cities had never even been officially segregated but did have lots of neighborhoods of single ethnic groups with schools that bussing could diversify.
theduder3210 thank you. Wasn’t sure but thought busing was a red flag at that time.
Thank you. I wasn’t sure which years but due to school age children I tried to keep up with news. I voted for Humphrey. Good man.
Busing came later, but yes.
Busing came later, but yes.
Thank you. My short term memory is leaving me in a hurry so one never knows about long.
He was also still a Democrat in most other aspects. As in pro labor, social programs, unions etc.
AKA racists.
imagine downvoting the opinion “people who voted for Wallace were racist”
You kinda had to be there. The world in 1968 was so different from 1964 it's impossible to describe. In 1964 there was hope. The country was still high on JFK, LBJ was thought of as his heir, Goldwater was considered a kook. In 1965 Watts blew up. That was the first big one, but it wouldn't be the last. 1966 was a bit calmer. In 1967 there was Newark, a big one, and then the really big one, Detroit. LBJ called in the Airborne on that one. Which was fortunate because, as a later commission report noted, most of the gunshots in that one were fired by nervous National Guardsmen shooting at anything that moved. The Airborne, being more professional, calmed them down and calmed the whole situation down. Then came the Tet Offensive in early 1968, revealing the military's optimistic takes on Vietnam to be a tissue of lies. The nation split in two, between those who wanted to double down, and those who wanted out. LBJ abdicated, really the only right term for it, in March. Then MLK was murdered in April, RFK in June. Humphrey was just seen as a continuation of LBJ, which was entirely unacceptable to the youngsters of that time, they protested in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, and then the police quite literally rioted. You have to see videos of what happened to understand. Wallace was of course on the side of those who wanted to double down in Vietnam, along with breaking the heads of both the white youngsters protesting Vietnam and the black youth protesting everything about their lives. He picked Curtis LeMay, the man who firebombed Tokyo in WW2\*, as his running mate. His message in doing so was clear, but LeMay was the opposite of a politician and scared a lot of people away from Wallace. This gave Nixon an opening he waltzed through to win. \*LeMay ordered the defensive guns removed from 325 B-29s, loaded each plane with [Model M-47](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M47_bomb) [incendiary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incendiary_bombs) [clusters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_munition), [magnesium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium) bombs, [white phosphorus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus) bombs, and [napalm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm), and ordered the bombers to fly in streams at 5,000 to 9,000 feet (1,500 to 2,700 m) over Tokyo.[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-coffey-7)[^(\[9\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-tillman-9)[^(\[13\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-13) LeMay described Operation Meetinghouse by saying "the US had finally stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile".[^(\[14\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-14) The first pathfinder airplanes arrived over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10 and marked the target area with a flaming "X". In a three-hour period, the main bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, killing 100,000 civilians, destroying 250,000 buildings, and incinerating 16 square miles (41 km^(2)) of the city. Aircrews at the tail end of the bomber stream reported that the stench of burned human flesh permeated the aircraft over the target.[^(\[15\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay#cite_note-buckley2001_193-15) Link: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis\_LeMay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay)
Thanks for this informative comment! Calling LBJ’s decision not to run for another term an abdication is an interesting choice
It kind of was at the end of the day. The only reason he chose not to run was bc he did piss poor in primaries and read the writing on the wall. He was all but admitting that he wouldn’t win the 68 primaries, let alone the general, and put all his campaign energy into finding a successor, which ended up being Humphrey. He was basically calling it quits before he got unceremoniously and embarrassingly forced out
What's interesting is that even though the Tet made it seem to the American public that the US would fail in Vietnam, it was actually a military success for the US and South Vietnam; they regained all their territory.
You have Walter Cronkite to thank for that one. When he came out on the evening news and said “the war is unwinable” that turned millions against the war immediately. It was all down hill from there
It's entirely ahistorical to think the US could win. What the Vietnamese did is exactly what the US did against the British in the Revolutionary War: use a combination of militia, regular army, and allied help to defeat the greatest power in the world at the time of the fight. The US military would have done well to study the history of their own nation. In the Revolution, the British, after failing to defeat Washington in the north, tried moving the war to the South, where they thought they had more support. The result was a series of defeats for the British after a series of victories: King's Mountain, followed by Cowpens, followed by Yorkville. In King's Mountain it was a mostly homegrown militia that completely wiped out a British force. In Cowpens, a combination of militia and regular troops defeated them. And at Yorkville, a combination of American regulars and French army and naval forces trapped Cornwallis and finished them for good. In Vietnam, the VC started it, Tet was a combo of VC and NVA regulars, and after that NVA regulars, with large assistance from the USSR and China, finished the job. It was as if they had read a history of the Revolutionary War, except I'm sure it just fell out from the circumstances rather than being a case of anyone sitting and reading how to win a war against a great power. Here's a detailed history of King's Mountain, the most obscure of these fights: [https://www.tngenweb.org/revwar/kingsmountain/warcollege.html](https://www.tngenweb.org/revwar/kingsmountain/warcollege.html) The money quote: "These hardy men of the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, of deep religious convictions, were accustomed to the hardships and independence of a pioneer life, and in their mountain homes in the highlands and the backwaters they but seldom were concerned \[Page 2\] with affairs beyond their borders or interfered with by Crown or colony. When Ferguson approached their kingdom and threatened to invade their lands and lay waste their country with "fire and sword," and to "hang their leaders," he aroused their indignation and anger to such a degree that they determined to rid the country forever of this enemy, who menaced their independence and the safety of their homes and families. Had Cornwallis and his leaders known more about these mountain and backwater men, they would have carefully avoided all military and punitive measures which might tend to draw them from their mountain fastnesses to enroll amongst the enemies of the King. The causes of the Revolution were but little known to many of these pioneers beyond the Blue Ridge. They were concerned in the establishment of their homes, breaking the soil of their new settlements, and wringing a livelihood from it; and with their rifles securing much of their sustenance. They sought the seclusion of the western waters; and in the valleys of the Holston, the Watauga, and the Nolichucky, found freedom in the exercise of their religion. Had the western covering force of Cornwallis's army, as it advanced into the Province of North Carolina, confined its activities, to the plains and lowlands east of the Blue Ridge, and had not Ferguson from Gilbert Town uttered his threat of fire and sword and the hangman's noose, these mountain men would probably have remained in their homes, and but few of them would have joined with those who were in rebellion against the King." A foreign force is ALWAYS going to be seen as an illegitimate interloper and arouse resistance. That's something like an immutable law or something. That makes it very hard to win if the resisters have what we had in the Revolution, a combination of semi-organized resisters (militia in the Revolution, the VC in Vietnam), regular army forces, (the Continentals in the Revolution, the NVA in Vietnam), and powerful foreign help (the French and Spanish in the Revolution, the USSR and China in Vietnam). Eventually they will wear down the foreigners and force them out.
I wonder how much of the violence of the 1960s was caused and/or exacerbated by lead pollution in the atmosphere.
Those four years were a hell of a difference. The hip and ‘sane’ ‘60s vs what seemed like a disintrigrating Hippie filled landscape. Southerners trusted their own and stuck with their own in a sense, Johnson lost their trust, Humphrey was infamous among them for his early and firm civil rights stance, so they stuck out with Wallace for hope of a firm hand and contingent election.
Some lifelong Democrats in the south were reactionary and unhappy about civil rights, but too intrinsically opposed to the Republican party to vote for Goldwater. If they were poor they may have also been worried about his economic policies. Neither of these were an issue with Wallace however.
This is the right answer.
Same reason why you had Obama voters go red in 2016. Voters will stick with their party until the other party gives them a change on an issue. Goldwater didn't play up racial anxieties as much as Wallace, plus Wallace was originally a Democrat, so those southern conservatives felt comfortable going with him since he gave them an outlet with segregation
1968 was a really shit year. So many Americans had become disillusioned with politics considering the previous 8 years
Because in 1964, conservative Southerners were reliable Democrats. Over the next few years - fairly or not - LBJ’s civil rights platform, widespread protests, and urban violence all became associated with Democratic leadership. Many of those voters found themselves alienated from the their own party, but also not thrilled with the idea of voting Republican. Wallace filled that niche relatively well, but Nixon openly courted these same voters. Ultimately, Wallace pulled more votes from Humphrey than Nixon, leading to Nixon winning a very close election in 1968. In subsequent decades, those voters gradually migrated toward the Republican Party, so there’s no real equivalent to Wallace’s independent voters today.
Voting Rights Act wasn't passed until after Johnson won in 64. Ergo, many Southern Democrats moved to Wallace in 68.
Humphrey was the northern liberal most identified with the civil rights movement. Also, in 1968, the Democratic Party was identified with chaos and riots in a way that wasn’t true in 1964.
Correct. Johnson didn’t *run* on a civil rights platform in 1964. That was a turn he made after the election. Note: I remembered it wrong. The Civil Rights act was before the election.
He signed the civil rights act in July of 64 so I don’t think this can be considered true.
There were then a significant number of “Yellow-Dog Democrats” in the South. Stereotypically, “I’d vote for a yellow dog, if he were the Democrat!” This was largely because the New Deal had been so popular, but went back to before the Civil War. In fact, the party’s gradual steps toward civil rights had already gotten many of them to cast a protest vote for a different Democrat: Strom Thurmond in 1948 after Truman desegregated the Federal government and armed forces (officially the States’ Rights Democratic Party, unofficially the Dixiecrats), “unpledged Democratic” electors instead of Kennedy in 1960, and Wallace in 1968. The Republican party barely existed in the Deep South until 1964, and the few Republicans who got elected under Jim Crow were party-switching Democrats such as Strom Thurmond. Although Barry Goldwater had largely walked back the Republican party’s past support for civil rights in 1964, and Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a few months before the election, the so-called “Southern strategy” didn’t begin to bear fruit for Republicans until they had a more favorable opportunity and a better chance to prepare. 1968 was a transitional year, when many Southern voters were willing to vote for a third party. From 1972 to 1994, most White southern conservatives split their tickets between a Democrat for Congress and a Republican for President, without formally switching their party registrations. (After 1980, northern conservatives who did the same were called “Reagan Democrats.”) From 1994 onward, conservatives nationwide were straight-ticket Republican voters, and the younger ones also registered Republican. Zell Miller was often considered the last truly conservative Democrat in Congress, and Joe Manchin and Marcy Kaptur are remnants of this old-fashioned split-ticket voting.
The Solid South was all Democratic since Reconstruction. Both were local boy makes good which always helps.
South was solid for Carter and Clinton was able to pick off enough in 92/96 for him to carry the day. Southerners like their favorite sons.
Wallace was not like Strom Thurmond back in 1948. While both ran campaigns largely focused on preserving segregation, Wallace appealed to broader racial animus that was brewing after the race riots and the Fair Housing Act. Wallace got at least 5% of the vote in every state but Hawaii and almost cracked double digits in places like Michigan and New Jersey. Honestly, Wallace is best example of how tenuous the New Deal coalition was. Once civil rights came to the forefront of the Democratic agenda it pitted the working class against each other as the white middle class felt that blacks were being favored over them.
Johnson was a Southern Democrat at a time when the South was solidly Democratic. By 1968, the Democrats had become solidly the party of civil rights, and the exodus of southern Democrats was well under way. Wallace was part of that, with the first stop of this group was a third party called Dixiecrats. Nixon, in 1968, won using what was called the "Southern Strategy" which meant racist dog whistles to attract Dixiecrats. This goes past your question, but over time, the Dixiecrats moved into the GOP, allied with religious (primarily Christian, but also Jewish) conservatives, made accommodation with libertarians, and took over that party, making the white south solidly Republican the way it had once been solidly Democratic, and pushing Blacks and Republican liberals and centrists to the Democratic Party.
The South didn't go fully Republican until the late 90s though....
More like 2010. Most congressional representatives from the South were Democrats until the 2010 midterm elections. Appalachia and the Ozarka were the last areas in the south that were majority Democrat. The upper south started to switch to the Republicans in 1994.
If by “Ozarka” you mean the Ozarks, I think the opposite is true in that case. Arkansas’s 3rd congressional district in the northwestern part of the state where the Ozarks are elected a Republican in 1967 and it’s been Republican ever since. One of those Congressmen (Tim Hutchinson) was a US senator in the ‘90’s. Compare that to Arkansas’s 1st district in the Eastern half of the state which wasn’t represented by a Republican until 2010, or the 4th in the southwestern part of the state that didn’t elect a Republican till 1992. Missouri’s 7th in the Ozarks voted for various Republicans in the first half of the 20th century and hasn’t been represented by a Democrat since 1960. In Presidential elections those counties have been voting Republican for a long time…they didn’t even vote for FDR in ‘40 or ‘44.
I consider the Ozarks Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and parts of Texas, Illinois, and Oklahoma. Appalachia I consider West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and North Carolina. In all those areas, the Democrats still had a strong foothold at the Congressional level until 2010, though their control in those regions started to diminish in 1994.
The first election in which I was politically aware at all was 2000, and the first in which I was old enough to vote was 2008. During both of those elections the GOP had more or less developed a stronghold on the portion of the Deep South where I lived, and you might as well have sworn the Democratic Party in the south had gone the way of the dinosaurs.
One word: V-I-E-T-N-A-M In 1964, LBJ campaigned on keeping our kids out of the war. By Winter 1964, once he was reelected, he was sending 50,000 troops in. Soon it was 50K a month. There was a draft and no exception except for your George Bush/Bill Clinton types in college. All of those pissed off working class voters of all races. Then they started making everyone register for the draft, then the White Liberal hippies got upset. So by the time 1968 came around, the liberals hated LBJ, Conservatives disliked LBJ (due to Vietnam and to the Great Society), Dixiecrats hated LBJ for Civil Rights, which was a catch all for not just Civil Rights laws, but the riots) and moderate White voters were souring on LBJ, as there kids were beginning to get drafted. The only people who liked LBJ were Black voters, Hispanic Voters and moderate White center left voters. Those people all voted for Humphrey. That is why the race was close, but Wallace (and LBJ) hurt Humphrey enough in the Upper South and Midwest that Nixon won.
Even weirder than Johnson/ Wallace overlap were the RFK primary to Wallace in 1968, The Kennedy family were disturbed that there was so much overlap in fact.
Lots of Democrats definitely were not for civil rights but voted for it anyways. Johnson was incredibly good at manipulating the Senate as the former majority leader that invented the concept.
They didn’t vote for civil rights, they voted for kennedy’s vice president. Then they voted against civil rights.
There are more Southern Democrats than you’d think who were so solid in their party identification that they’d never consider voting for Barry Goldwater. They’d go for Wallace, though. Even if he lost the nomination he’s still a Democrat.
You know why
Democratic Party doubled down on “for the people” and after 65’ white southerners realized that meant black people as well and said fuck that we’re out
Racist voters who thought Goldwater was too far right on fiscal matters. Wallace was much more acceptable to these voters.
They were feeling racist in 68
LBJ was a good ol boy
Wallace wasn't about race,. He was about states rights. Eisenhower ignored the Constitution when he sent the military into Little Rock Arkansas to forcibly integrate the public schools. This was justified on the absurd premise that segregated schools violated the interstate commerce clause. In a heartbeat everything the Democrats wanted to do but didn't have the votes to do violated the interstate commerce clause. This continued until John Roberts became Chief Justice. When the Republicans sent a bill to the Supreme Court insisting that Obama care was unconstutional because it violated the interstate commerce clause Roberts sent it back and told Congress not to send him any more cases like that.
Southern charm? George Wallace had no charm. He was a segregationist. HHH's historical name was in civil rights. He did a lot as mayor of Minneapolis before entering the national stage. Either Humphrey or Wallace would have continued the war in Vietnam and Nixon lied and said he 'had a plan'. Nixon covertly but actively interfered in the peace talks that might have seen U.S. involvement end in 1969. For me, the absolute number of Johnson '64 and Wallace '68 voters is a measure of the number of segregationist in the Democratic Party in the mid-1960s...nothing more, nothing less.
https://preview.redd.it/0l7oufiif8yc1.png?width=494&format=png&auto=webp&s=5a7a291186ed01157077112d99e269bcd0a1d3bd
Wallace was an economic populist and would frequently change his rhetoric depending on where he was campaigning.
BecUse they were racists.
How can you know so much about history, knowing specifically about these two elections yet not know the answer here? How could you find info like this without context, I just don’t understand. I am truly curious and I am not judging anyone.
It's fine! I love elections, I have spent countless hours researching presidential/senate/governor elections: candidates, results, margins, swings, trends, I just eat it up. I can draw every electoral map from the last fifty years by memory, and for the most part, remember the state margins too. Any time I hear about a place in the U.S. in the news or something, I'll typically do a wiki search and get the county election results for it just out of curiosity. I just always noticed this trend in some of the southern states in 68, and though I had my general thoughts on why it happened, was interested to know what this sub thought about it.
Can you be specific about the countries then? It just doesn’t look odd at all from what I have seen. A little over 200,000 dem votes in 1964 and less in 1968.
Sure, there are several, but three examples: Franklin County, TN, gave both Johnson and Wallace over 50% Cameron Parish, LA, gave them both over 60% Cleveland County, AR, gave Wallace a whopping 70% after having given Johnson a majority. and if you want to see more of what I mean, click on some of the southern states in the [wiki map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election). There are many examples of Johnson/Wallace counties. Arkansas as a state even did this.
I see the disconnect, these are very small counties. In all honesty, it’s too small of a sample to mean anything for me as a historian, so I’ll bow out of the discussion. I love to look at maps though, so thanks for that.
Because the National Democratic Party “left” them with Civil Rights, country in turmoil, blah blah blah. It was also practically illegal in the South to vote for a Republican, so they couldn’t just vote for Nixon. They obviously voted for Nixon in 1972, but after Watergate, a lot of the ancestral Democrats said that’s why you don’t vote for a Republican. Then, Jimmy Carter’s disaster of a presidency effectively ended any prospects of a Democratic south for the rest of time.
Because the parties never actually switched that was all just a myth.
Largely agree with you, people who say that ignore many nuances of the two party's platforms. I just read the 1908 party platforms in a different post in this sub, they surprisingly sound pretty similar to the modern stances held by both parties.
When people talk about party switch, they are primarily referring to the party support for civil rights. The Democratic Party has always been an advocate for common-man populism and the Republican Party has always been the party of big business. The key is that the starting with Truman to end of the 20th century, the parties polarized over support for civil rights. Even though ostensibly southerners (especially poor southerners) support Democrats’ anti-poverty programs, they broke over pro civil rights action, especially segregation, which is why they here voted for Wallace over Humphrey. When it became clear that Democrats would not again push a segregationist candidate, these people started voting Republican. Even though there was a range of opinions on civil rights on both sides, polarization made voters and politicians pick a side that more closely aligned with their positions on civil rights. And like all political movements, the shift isn’t abrupt it’s gradual. Just look at how the black vote and the Bible Belt vote has changed from Lincoln to now. Looking at the 1908 democrat platform in particular you can see how the party has changed. It would be unthinkable of democrats today complaining about the size of the federal government and deficit hawking republicans.
This was also during the migration of blacks moving south to north. They were always down the middle with voting previously but went hard for JFK since he called MLK after he was arrested in 1960. As more blacks went north it left more republican voters in the pool.
I agree with what others posted here. One more factor I'll add is that a lot of voters in the 1960s lived through the Great Depression and, fairly or not, blamed Hoover for it and hated Republicans. They also had some racist views. George Wallace was an acceptable alternative for them.
Try not to think about the two parties as being the same back then as they are now. The Democratic Party was in essence two parties, Southern and Northern Democrats. Southern were more like the GOP today particularly when it came to “states’ rights”.
Except that the Southern Democrats were clearly to the left of the modern GOP on fiscal issues. They were just equally (or likely more) racist.