CHAPTER 6

The Aftershock

Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, rather than sounding the death knell for conservatism, prompted a conservative surge. The far-right movement, in particular, seemed primed to capitalize on the energy that propelled Goldwater’s candidacy. Ultraconservatives had flexed their muscles, getting a true right-winger on a major party’s ballot. Louisiana publisher Kent Courtney crowed, “The conservatives demonstrated that they could exert enough pressure and they could work hard enough to do an education job thorough enough to capture control of the Republican nominating convention.”¹ The election results indicated that millions of Americans were willing to vote for a principled conservative, and far-right organizations benefited from their connection to Goldwater’s campaign. Membership rosters soared and more people subscribed to right-wing periodicals than ever before. As the far-right network expanded across the nation, radicals looked poised to stage an insurgency within the Republican Party.²

The post-Goldwater moment seemed like a coronation for the far right, but they soon found themselves on the defensive. Other conservatives blamed the radicals for Goldwater’s loss, arguing that far-right activists epitomized what historian Richard Hofstadter was calling the “paranoid style” in American politics.³ The John Birch Society and its leader, Robert Welch, became the poster children for irresponsible politics. Out of concern for mainstream respectability, conservative media figures and politicians sought to distance themselves from the movement’s original base. William Buckley, once a far-right ally, increasingly viewed ultraconservatives as a clear and present danger to the nascent movement. Goldwater’s loss convinced Buckley that, in order to achieve respectability, conservatives needed to establish more stringent ideological parameters by disentangling themselves from the kooks. In other words, he wanted to redefine the conservative movement’s core by excommunicating the far right. To achieve this, Buckley took direct aim at the Bircher faithful in a series of articles: “One continues to wonder how it is that the membership of the John Birch Society tolerates such paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.”⁴ Buckley was not alone. In the mid-1960s, numerous ultraconservative allies transformed from far-right translators into ideological gatekeepers, hell-bent on clarifying and strengthening conservatism’s hazy borders by limiting radical influence.⁵

Numerous Republicans joined Buckley in disavowing the far right’s conspiratorial radicalism. Republican congressman Melvin Laird warned that “anyone associated with the society is automatically considered irresponsible and, thus, his effectiveness must necessarily be impaired. This is why the John Birch Society has harmed the conservative cause.”⁶ Politicians who traveled in far-right circles, such as right-wing darling Ronald Reagan, had to walk a political tightrope. Reagan’s views often dovetailed with those of the far right—he once disparaged Kennedy’s “tousled boyish hair cut” as a disguise for “old Karl Marx” and fretted that “by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free”—and Birch affiliates were among his earliest supporters.⁷ Like many other conservative Republicans, Reagan never fully repudiated rank-and-file Birch members, but he did criticize Welch’s more outlandish conspiracies. This was not a heartfelt disavowal—conservatives wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. They needed ultraconservative support but hoped to create the illusion of ideological separation by saying the right things to curry favor with moderates. But even a few far-right allies, such as Christian Anti-Communism Crusade leader Fred Schwarz, recalibrated their relationship with the Birch Society. Welch and Schwarz shared a similar constituency of anti-communist evangelicals, and Welch promoted Schwarz’s anti-communist schools to Birch members. Yet, Schwarz demurred to the idea that his organization shared any commonalities with the Birch Society, indicating that the Birchers’ conspiratorial views, and those of ultraconservatives more broadly, were being cast as a political liability.⁸

The aftershocks of 1964 thus created a period marked by growth and uncertainty for the far right. With the recent Goldwater nomination in mind, some ultraconservatives favored coalescing within the GOP and reforming the party from the inside. Because Buckley and company were trying to write them out of the movement, however, other far-right leaders continued to believe that a third party provided the only avenue for successfully challenging liberalism. Goldwater, the consummate Republican, cautioned against third-party action, noting, “Whether it is liberal or conservative, it won’t work, and it does not have any part in our American scheme of things.”⁹ Nevertheless, analysts Rowland Evans and Robert Novak observed that a substantial portion of far-right agitators were growing “disillusioned with the Republican Party as a vehicle for super-conservatism.”¹⁰ Under siege and riven by internecine disagreements, the far right struggled to maintain its pole position within the conservative movement and chart a unified path forward. During these pivotal years, the far right struggled. While being ostracized from the political mainstream, ultraconservatives thrived in the margins, propelling one of the most successful third-party insurgencies in American history with the candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace.

On May 1, 1965, Louisiana publisher Kent Courtney convened the Congress of Conservatives in Chicago, hoping to assess the state of conservatism and reignite his long-range plan to unite right-wingers under a third party. Goldwater’s defeat, he wrote to CSA members, illustrated the need for a “new national, anti-Communist, pro-American political party.”¹¹ Nearly one decade after forming the Constitution Party in 1956, Courtney was tapping back into his third-party roots. The congress attracted a broad swath of far-right activists; over five hundred individuals registered for the conference, with roughly 150 to 200 people in attendance on opening day. Keynote speaker Robert Welch, who had recently garnered an honorable mention in Gallup’s “Most Admired Man” poll, focused on the racial tensions knifing through America. “Thousands of whites will be murdered in time by the few Negro criminals,” Welch declared, “and tens of thousands of fine Negroes themselves will be killed by those seeking leadership of the Negro state.”¹² Welch was projecting his fear of a coming “Negro Revolutionary Movement” led by violent black communists who intended to create a “Negro Soviet Republic” in the Old Confederacy.¹³ Paul Gapp of the Washington Post observed the conference’s conspiratorial tones, noting that many of the guests held “an overriding fear that the Communist conspiracy already has progressed so far that America may be doomed; that all may be destined to imprisonment behind barbed wire, or be slaughtered.”¹⁴ In other words, standard far-right fearmongering.¹⁵ The congress reflected the ultraconservative movement’s strategic fractures. In keeping with the tradition of previous far-right conventions, delegates passed a declaration of principles featuring typical nostrums, such as calling for a withdrawal from all projects and organizations linked to “the establishment of a world government” and a break in diplomatic ties “with all governments that are openly creatures of the Communist Party.”¹⁶ However, just like Courtney’s National States’ Rights Conference in 1956, the Chicago congress failed to bridge the persistent schism between those who favored the formation of a third party and those who opposed it. David Halvorsen of the Chicago Tribune reported, “Many [attendees] feared that the liberals would benefit from the formation of a new party since it would weaken the [conservative] ranks of the Republican Party.”¹⁷ The other faction, led by Courtney, preferred forming a new party featuring George Wallace as the standard bearer. The Chicago congress ultimately tabled all third-party proposals. Instead, a committee was formed to explore future options, including creating a national confederation of independent third parties. Courtney called the delay “realistic” because, as he wrote to his subscribers, “there were not enough new party organizations established in a sufficient number of states.”¹⁸ The plan called for the development of state-level third parties until a national apparatus could be organized.¹⁹

The congress’s failure to form a permanent third party must have been a bitter pill for Courtney, though he put on a brave public face. By 1965 he had spent a decade trying, and failing, to organize conservatives under a new banner. The congress did inspire grassroots third-party activism, however. Attendees returned home from the conference and fostered right-wing movements in their own backyards. Mark Andrews, who served on the congress’s political action executive committee, held a similar meeting in Missouri. Following Courtney’s blueprint, Andrews sent mass mailers to “Missouri Conservatives” and urged people to support the formation of a new political party based on the Chicago congress’s declaration. The ensuing Missouri convention brought in roughly one hundred delegates from neighboring states and eventually led to the creation of a new right-wing party. Other far-right parties popped up around the nation. An anti-communist party formed in Florida and a conservative party appeared in La Grange, Illinois. Twenty Michigan activists created the Michigan American Party to break the “one-party” system and stymie the implementation of a state income tax. The Michigan American Party even invited Courtney to attend the founding meeting as the keynote speaker. Similar conservative parties were founded in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado, and Massachusetts, all of which claimed direct lineage with Courtney’s Chicago congress.²⁰

The national third-party crusade blossomed just one year after the Chicago meeting. Courtney situated the CSA as the movement’s central hub and told members, “As soon as parties are organized in 30 or more States, then it will be time to call a national organizing convention and … raise sufficient money to run their national committee and establish a Washington office.”²¹ The umbrella term “Conservative Party” came to encompass multiple parties with different names across the U.S., including Florida’s Constitution Party and Michigan’s American Party. Some of these parties siphoned members away from local GOP branches. For example, two executive committee members of the Manitowoc County Republican Party resigned and joined the newly created Wisconsin Congress of Conservatives. One of the men, Joseph J. Birkenstock, president of Formrite Tube Company, explained his reasoning in a letter to the editor, criticizing the Democratic Party’s “rapid push toward socialism” and the “slower but also dangerous socializing program that appears to have become the policy of most Republicans in government.”²² The other defector, small business owner Robert A. MacDonald, argued that conservative voices were “muted” by “vocal bi-partisanship” and Republican “me tooism” which resulted in “virtual uniparty rule.” As a result, he concluded, “I intend to work towards the success of a new party for Wisconsin.” The ultimate goal, aside from fomenting a permanent conservative movement, was to nominate a right-wing candidate for the 1968 election under a third-party banner.

The insistence on creating an alternate party underscored the far right’s lingering distrust with the GOP as a home for their movement. Even though Goldwater earned tens of millions of votes, some ultraconservatives believed the party remained beholden to the “Modern Republicanism” of the previous decade. Courtney scorned conservative Republicans for placating liberals in the name of “party unity,” and he viewed Republican votes in favor of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which curbed Jim Crow–era voter discrimination, as confirmation that the GOP was complicit in advancing the liberal agenda. There were indicators, however, pointing to a strengthening conservative coalition within the Republican Party. For example, Reagan’s gubernatorial and John Tower’s Senate victories in 1966 illustrated an ascendant Sunbelt conservatism supported by numerous far-right activists, including Texan J. Evetts Haley. Nevertheless, many ultraconservatives still contended that both major parties were irreversibly tainted by socialism. This not only reflected the continued tactical struggle between third-party diehards and major-party insurrectionaries, but also foreshadowed ultraconservative support for George Wallace in 1968.²³

The expansion of a right-wing third-party movement coincided with the growth of other far-right outlets, including Willis Stone’s Liberty Amendment Committee. “Our crusade for liberty is reaching maturity,” Stone bragged in early 1965.²⁴ Two decades after formulating the Liberty Amendment, Stone believed Americans were finally rallying around libertarian anti-statism. Republican congressman James B. Utt continued to sponsor Stone’s amendment in the House, and numerous press sources, including local CBS affiliates, covered the Liberty Amendment Committee’s 1966 convention. The committee even dabbled in television programming, creating a series titled It’s Your Money that was sponsored by Sand Steel Building Company and broadcast on a local channel in Fargo, North Dakota. Stone’s collaboration with the broader far-right network continued to pay dividends as Courtney’s CSA and the Birch Society distributed millions of Liberty Amendment tabloids. By the end of 1967, Stone’s LAC had chapters in all fifty states and boasted a National Youth Council and National Women’s Division.²⁵

There were signs that Stone’s crusade was waning, however. Between 1965 and 1968, no new states passed Liberty Amendment resolutions, though Arizona came close in 1966. The publication of Freedom Magazine grew more sporadic; by 1968 it appeared bimonthly and sometimes even trimonthly. To arrest any declining interest, Stone turned to increasingly ambitious gambits. He tried to enact a local strategy, similar to Courtney’s CSA action units, because he believed the committee struggled “to overcome the glitter of personalities and the delirium of politics.”²⁶ Then, in 1968, Stone entered the New Hampshire and Wisconsin Republican presidential primaries as a write-in candidate. Stone’s single issue: the Liberty Amendment. A political neophyte, he fared poorly. Stone earned such a dismal number of votes in Wisconsin that his name did not even appear in newspaper tallies. The Washington Post combined Stone’s results with other listless campaigns that, altogether, earned 1.2 percent of the vote. Nevertheless, Stone proclaimed victory: “We attained our purpose … we put the Liberty Amendment into the national campaign as a main issue.”²⁷

Stone’s boasting masked his concerns about the Liberty Amendment Committee’s longevity. In the summer of 1968, he tried to negotiate a merger between his organization and the Birch Society. Stone originally reached out to the Birch Society for help in setting up the LAC grassroots committees, but Welch declined. Birch organizers were stretched too thin already. Stone wrote back, suggesting that the Birch Society simply absorb the Liberty Amendment Committee. After all, Stone admired Welch, once telling him in a private letter, “I have long regarded you as the Thomas Jefferson of our time, capable of rallying people to the cause of truth, justice and equity.”²⁸ The idea of a far-right merger made sense from a strategic perspective. The Liberty Amendment Committee contained battle-hardened libertarians who already cooperated with the Birch Society. Welch saw the potential—he envisioned turning Stone’s organization into a Bircher front group. However, the Birch Society’s executive committee thought “anything resembling a formal ‘merger’ of any other organized group into the Society would be a mistake.”²⁹ Welch informed a crestfallen Stone that his proposed merger was dead on arrival.³⁰

Stone felt a creeping sense of desperation concerning the far right’s legacy. Writing to Welch, Stone confessed to “feeling that somehow time is running out on me, and perhaps on you” and stressed that “the movements we have both started, built and made relatively effective will, unfortunately, be very short-lived after you and I let go.” Stone concluded, “I am trying to find the means by which continuity can be developed and this is a pretty rough deal.”³¹ According to Stone, the far-right movement was hurtling toward its terminus, not because of ideological infirmity or listless institutions, but because of old age. Thirty years had passed since the demise of the Jeffersonian Democrats, and now Father Time was catching up with the Jeffersonians’ midcentury successors. When he entered the Republican primaries, Stone was 68 years old—the same age as Welch. Stone resigned himself to accepting “close coordination and cooperation” with the Birch Society rather than a merger, but he never stopped trying to leave a concrete foundation for future anti-tax advocates.

While Stone fretted about the future, other organizations thrived in the Goldwater afterglow. Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade had grown into a million-dollar-a-year operation, which lined Hargis’s pockets and invigorated his religiously infused culture war. Acrimony over changes in public education gave Hargis a platform to defend ultraconservative social and religious values. Controversies over desegregation continued unabated, and the Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale decision, which found that official school prayers violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, enraged social traditionalists. Hargis charged that the public education system, from grade school through college, was poisoned by federal overreach and communist influence. He fretted about “dictators” controlling schools and warned that federal aid implied “more and more brainwashing of your children.”³² States should control education, Hargis argued, which aligned him with southern segregationists while putting him at odds with the general zeitgeist of education reform that was a staple of liberal platforms, including Johnson’s Great Society. He also attacked higher education, contending that professors “poisoned” the minds of students under a cloak of “academic freedom.”³³ In a televised address, Hargis encouraged crusaders to be proactive by enrolling their children in “pro-American” schools and demanding legislation that would permit the investigation and ouster of “communist” teachers.³⁴ In short, Hargis advocated reactionary, censorial education policies based on his own stringent ideological parameters.³⁵

Hargis protested the teaching of evolution and stumped for prayer in public schools, but it was his protracted battle against sex education that best exemplified the far right’s campaign against the perceived moral degradation of American culture. Sex education in the public school system started at the turn of the twentieth century, existing in an ad hoc manner at the local level until the advent of formalized “sex ed” classes in the 1940s and 1950s. The creation of formal classes led to greater parental scrutiny that was often heavily influenced by religious, racial, and anti-communist anxieties. Far-right groups, including the Christian Crusade, formed the bleeding edge of this reactionary backlash. Hargis fashioned anti–sex education talking points that then filtered into the conservative mainstream. Sex education, Hargis told his radio listeners, is “part of a giant communist conspiracy to demoralize the youth, repudiate New Testament morality in the land, and drive a cleavage between students and parents.”³⁶ Hargis and the Christian Crusade cynically wielded the Supreme Court’s Engel decision as a weapon. If sex was a religious topic, as Hargis believed, and the Establishment Clause prohibited the government from creating a state religion, then, Hargis reasoned, teaching about sex in public schools was tantamount to teaching about religion. “Well, if teachers in the public schools are not qualified to teach religion, they are certainly not qualified to teach sex,” Hargis told his radio listeners.³⁷ Hargis conjured images of the innocent “little red school house” in order to demonize sex education as perverted and un-American. The crusade’s salaciously titled book, Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?, soared to 250,000 in sales as the debate raged, which ensured Hargis’s prominence within the culture war maelstrom.³⁸

Hargis did not fight against sex education alone—the far-right network mobilized to defend traditional values and demonize the liberal state. George Wallace attacked federal education policies as a “blueprint devised by the Socialists which has as its objectives the capture and regimentation of our children and the destruction of our public education system.”³⁹ Clarence Manion accused the Supreme Court and various leftist bogeymen of trying “to secularize and demoralize the government” while turning the nation into a “nihilistic hell on earth.”⁴⁰ The Birch Society joined the cause, too. Welch criticized sex education as a “communist plot” to “keep our high school youth obsessed with sex.”⁴¹ The Birch Society formed a front group, the Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE), which became the first national group to lobby for local and parental controls over sex education rather than federal mandates. One MOTOREDE chapter leader reasoned that sex education was “the major reason for the unrest among youth, who are growing up in a permissive society.”⁴² The campaign occasionally intertwined with the far right’s racist underpinnings. Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby created a “Save Our Schools” campaign to protest everything from sex education to integration and interracial dating. According to the lobby, a nebulous cabal of “totalitarian Leftists” was waging a war of “anarchy and mind molding” against America’s children.⁴³

The far right’s campaign against sex education represented a key skirmish within the larger culture war against liberalism. It encompassed the far right’s religious moralism, political conservatism, and conspiratorial anti-communism. Ultraconservatives deployed their anti-statist rhetoric to challenge federal regulations and advocate for a local, family-oriented social structure. Their efforts ultimately played a key role in the smear campaign against the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) curriculum. Far-right traditionalists lambasted the curriculum creators as communists and spread false conspiracies that educators were actually demonstrating sex to young children. This fearmongering galvanized a constituency of social conservatives who believed parents should be society’s cultural gatekeepers. The battle over sex education also signified that schools remained contested grounds, and conservative white Christians intended to maintain their cultural hegemony. The vanguard formed by ultraconservative traditionalists sought to erase the legacies of liberal reform, bequeathing a tradition of culture-war rhetoric that would be exploited by future generations of right-wing activists.⁴⁴

Hargis’s stature as a far-right culture warrior—particularly his inflammatory, politically driven radio broadcasts—made him a target for liberal detractors and caught the attention of the Internal Revenue Service. At its founding in 1947, Hargis’s Crusade applied for and received an IRS tax exemption as an “educational organization.” However, concerns about the prevalence and influence of right-wing tax-exempt groups led John F. Kennedy’s administration to create the Ideological Organizations Project (IOP), a branch within the IRS that targeted political opposition groups. Using tax audits to obfuscate the project’s true intentions, the IOP investigated numerous groups along the right-wing fringe, including Hargis’s Christian Crusade, Welch’s Birch Society, and Courtney’s Conservative Society of America. The IOP reviewed and sustained the Christian Crusade’s tax exemption multiple times in the early 1960s. But, as Hargis’s notoriety grew, political pressures from the national IRS office led to the revocation of the Crusade’s exempt status in 1964 on the grounds that Hargis’s activities extended beyond education and into the realm of political activism. Hargis viewed this as politically motivated harassment and sued the agency. “This is clearly an attack upon religious liberty and free exercise of religion as guaranteed in the First Amendment,” wrote an incensed Hargis. He concluded that the IRS provided “liberty for religious liberals but no religious liberty for conservatives or fundamentalists.”⁴⁵ In other words, Hargis accused the government of playing favorites.⁴⁶

The IRS indeed struggled to delineate the dividing line between political commentary and political activism, an issue at the heart of its accusations against Hargis’s Christian Crusade, but its decision to revoke the Crusade’s tax-exempt status was easily defensible. Hargis used the Crusade to attack liberal platforms and politicians and fostered a nationwide conservative movement through the Crusade’s media outlets and activist base. In one radio address Hargis dissembled, “No matter how much I would want to endorse Gov. Wallace or Richard Nixon or Sen. Goldwater or any other candidate, I wouldn’t dare subvert our present litigation against the Internal Revenue Service.”⁴⁷ Such a statement amounted to an implicit endorsement of conservative candidates, not to mention the fact that the Crusade published fanatical pamphlets such as “These Liberals Are Allied to Destroy Your Christian Crusade” and “Liberalism’s Latest Gestapo on the Left,” all of which made Hargis’s apolitical professions difficult to believe.⁴⁸ The IRS did probe right-wing groups at a higher rate than liberal organizations, but Hargis ignored the fact that ultraconservative groups, including his own, often violated IRS regulations. Hargis insisted that the Christian Crusade had done nothing to “justify the government’s cruel and oppressive punishment,” but it is beyond doubt that the Christian Crusade was an activist organization following a conservative political agenda.⁴⁹

Nevertheless, Hargis’s fight against the IRS became a cause célèbre for right-wing politicians. Speaking on the House floor in 1967, Kentucky Republican Gene Snyder observed, “I suspect the problem is that Dr. Hargis’ [sic] organization is on the wrong side of the center line of the highway to suit the Federal Government.”⁵⁰ One year later, Utt made a similar argument, noting that the IRS found Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm liable for tax deductions based upon contributions Knott made to the conservative California Free Enterprise Association. Utt considered the IRS’s ruling against the Christian Crusade and Knott’s Berry Farm blatant liberal hypocrisy that hinted at communist subversion. “It is amazing how easy it is to deduct money for … left-wing organizations which support the socialistic Communist ideology,” Utt marveled, “but when you attempt to educate people on the free enterprise capitalist system, you are then dispensing political propaganda.”⁵¹ For the far right and their fellow-traveling politicians, the revocation of tax exemptions represented only the tip of the iceberg—untold magnitudes of federal tyranny lurked beneath the water.

In particular, ultraconservatives blamed the federal government for enabling, even stoking, urban unrest and cultural decay. After the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which prevented property owners from using race to discriminate against potential tenants, Kent Courtney offered thinly veiled racist warnings to his readers that “rioters and looters” could “wreck your property or neighborhood.”⁵² Phoebe Courtney wrote that Johnson’s effort to relax immigration laws would allow “unlimited, non-quota Orientals and Negroes” to enter the country, threatening “American jobs, our cultural heritage, and national security.”⁵³ Racial violence morphed into treasonous liberal conspiracies when viewed through the ultraconservative prism. During a radio interview with General Edwin Walker, Hargis alleged, “I think these riots [in Detroit] are part of a design.” Walker, a committed conspiracy theorist himself, agreed: “They couldn’t possibly be spontaneous at all. They are too large … [they] have to be planned.”⁵⁴ Dan Smoot accused civil rights activists of trying to “establish a Soviet dictatorship,” and Utt alleged that Democrats promoted “civil rights by riot, strife, and revolution” and were “doing much to implement the communist manifesto.”⁵⁵ Even Willis Stone, who generally avoided racial issues, argued that guaranteeing civil rights “would deprive others of their freedom.”⁵⁶ The far right’s racial animosity fed into an undercurrent of conservative resentment, which in turn laid the groundwork for right-wing campaigns, both immediate and in the future, against minority and immigrant communities.

Ultraconservatives saw themselves as under attack from liberal bureaucrats, communist subversives, and milquetoast moderates, and this besieged mentality deepened when long-simmering tensions erupted in the late 1960s. Crime and leftist social movements appeared more prevalent, and ominous, than previous decades. Street violence received breathless media coverage. The seemingly interminable Vietnam War, and especially the Tet Offensive, exacerbated the “credibility gap” and eroded public trust in the government. Hargis went so far as to label President Johnson “America’s first dictator.”⁵⁷ The far right were not the only critics of Johnson’s liberalism—the student antiwar movement, led by Students for a Democratic Society, swelled and turned militant. Similarly, the civil rights movement entered a more radical phase, with groups such as the Black Panthers taking up arms in self-defense and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee espousing Black Power. To the far right, these developments evinced a grand conspiracy. “Communists and their fellow-travelers are behind the cries of black power,” Courtney wrote in his magazine. “They are behind the racial turmoil; they are behind the riots and the burnings of our cities.”⁵⁸ The chaos in the streets, Johnson’s support for civil rights, and the quagmire of Vietnam irreparably fractured the remnants of the New Deal coalition. Contemporary analyst Theodore H. White described the state of Democratic liberalism as “out of date as a Ptolemaic chart of the Mediterranean.”⁵⁹

With liberalism at its weakest point since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal revolution, the far right searched for a politician who could carry the ultraconservative banner into the 1968 election. They found a kindred spirit in former Alabama governor George Wallace. Born into rural poverty in 1919, George Corley Wallace worked odd jobs as a boy and made a name for himself as a bantamweight Gold Glove champion in high school. Politics captured Wallace early. While enrolled at the University of Alabama he networked with local Alabama politicians and ran for half a dozen student government positions, serving as the freshmen class president. World War II briefly suspended Wallace’s political ambitions. He joined the war effort as a flight engineer with the Twentieth Air Force group in Tuscaloosa, where he met and soon married Lurleen Burns. After the war he quickly returned to the political fray. His first big break came when he served as an assistant to the Alabama attorney general, and then Wallace struck out on his own, winning an election to become a member of the Alabama House of Representatives in 1946—he was only 26 years old.

Wallace made a name for himself as an ambitious young politician with a penchant for folksy populism and segregationist rhetoric. As an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1948, Wallace disagreed with Truman’s stance on civil rights but did not walk out with the rest of the Dixiecrats. Instead, he hitched himself to the party’s loyalist faction in order to curry favor with Democratic leadership. In 1958, he barnstormed across Alabama as a gubernatorial candidate but lost to the state’s attorney general, John Patterson, a staunch segregationist who leaned on race-baiting tactics to whip up the white vote. It was a formative moment for Wallace. Before making his concession speech, Wallace told some of his closest advisors that “no son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again.”⁶⁰ Wallace returned to the gubernatorial race in 1962 reborn as a hellfire segregationist. He soundly defeated his opposition, and then, during his inaugural address, solidified himself as the leading tribune of white rage. “We will tolerate [the federal government’s] boot in our face no longer,” he proclaimed before bringing the house down with his most indelible phrase: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say: Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”⁶¹

Despite not being a physically imposing man—he stood a mere 5’7” and weighed less than 150 pounds—Wallace cut a formidable figure. His slicked-back hair, dark eyes, cleft chin, and broad smile could quickly erupt into scathing denunciations of Washington or harangues about communist subversives. He built a career upon a foundation of white aggrievement and states’ rights conservatism. As governor, he fought to maintain segregation, most famously during his “stand in the schoolhouse door” when he tried to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama. He encouraged Eugene “Bull” Connor’s aggressive response to civil rights protesters in Birmingham, making Alabama the poster child of violent massive resistance. After Wallace reached his term limit in 1966, Lurleen ran and won the governor’s seat. Everyone knew that George was the one running the show, but he already had his eyes on the White House.⁶²

By 1967 it was an open secret that Wallace was going to run for president. But rather than trying to win the nomination of a major party, Wallace tapped into the far-right third-party movement by running as the American Independent Party candidate. After all, like the rest of the far right, Wallace saw little separating Republicans from Democrats. “We intend to give the people a choice,” Wallace quipped. “The two national parties are Tweedledee and Tweedledum. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them.”⁶³ Despite being an extreme long shot, Wallace believed he could throw the election to the House of Representatives by carrying the entire South and picking up a couple of industrial midwestern states. Such a scenario would have made Wallace the kingmaker—either the House would elect him outright or other presidential candidates would have to agree to Wallace’s terms to secure his support, meaning a probable abandonment of civil rights platforms and a boost to states’ rights philosophies. “Wallace has long contended that the nation is ripe for a cataclysmic realignment of politics which will mean the death of one of the national parties,” observed Ray Jenkins of the Christian Science Monitor. “He envisions himself as a prime influence in this realignment of liberals and conservatives.”⁶⁴ In short, Wallace’s strategy threatened reactionary reform by taking the electoral system hostage.⁶⁵

Ultraconservatives played a critical role from the beginning of Wallace’s campaign. Sheriff Jim Clark, the man responsible for the police brutality during the Selma march, as well as Klansman and Wallace speechwriter Asa Carter organized a meeting to coordinate the far-right vanguard. Two dozen people representing a broad cross-section of the far right came to the meeting at Montgomery’s Woodley Country Club. Prominent attendees included former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and Leander H. Perez Jr., the segregationist millionaire who dominated Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish and became Wallace’s official Louisiana state campaign manager. Floyd G. Kitchen, the chairman of the Missouri Conservative Party, and Kent Courtney represented the national third-party movement and the broader ultraconservative constellation. Courtney accompanied Wallace on his tour of California in early 1968, boasting that he found “members of the John Birch Society, of the Conservative Society of America, and subscribers of the Independent American working in the Wallace Headquarters everywhere we went.”⁶⁶ The far right turned out to be both the campaign’s stimulant and its primary support group.⁶⁷

Wallace’s campaign was a media spectacle that reflected his constituency’s ultraconservative sensibilities. He traveled with a heavily armed entourage. At a campaign stop at the Orange County Fairgrounds, for example, Wallace strode to the rostrum flanked by sixteen Alabama state troopers. The podium covered him from three sides and was designed to withstand bullets from a would-be assassin. Wallace loved to tell stories, and one of his favorites involved committing violence against a hypothetical protester. “When I get to be President,” Wallace regaled a Daytona Beach crowd, “if an anarchist lies down in front of my car that’s the last one he’ll ever want to lie down in front of.” The crowd ate it up. “Run over them, George,” someone shouted from the audience. “Kill the sonsabitches.”⁶⁸ Journalist Thomas O’Neill noted that Wallace’s show of force was “aimed at the titillation of his special audience type, running heavily to the John Birch Society persuasion.”⁶⁹ Cars parked outside of Wallace’s Long Beach rally bore Bircher-inspired bumper stickers: “SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE.” “REGISTER COMMUNISTS, NOT FIREARMS.”⁷⁰ Part of Wallace’s appeal was his outsider status—he was a political grenade thrower, a verbal pugilist, and with the country riven by racial strife in the late 1960s, he hoped to capitalize on white anxiety and deep-seated racism.⁷¹

Wallace did not paint an uplifting view of tomorrow but instead provided brimstone parables about a wayward country. Despite claiming that Vietnam was his number-one issue, Wallace deployed the language of “law and order,” communist conspiracies, and culture wars. “Stand Up for America,” his slogan demanded. Wallace demonized everyone from “briefcase-toting bureaucrats” and communistic “pseudo-intellectuals” to “bearded professors” and college “anarchists.” Like the rest of the far right, Wallace loosely used the terms “communists” and “subversives” to slander opposing ideologies and hint at racial issues rather than raise serious questions about national security. The state, in Wallace’s view, existed as a force for law and order, a maintainer of hierarchies through selective governance rather than a guarantor of civil rights or equality. His solutions included more police and more troops but, somehow, less government. Wallace mused in one speech, “If we could let the police run this country for two years, the streets would be safe.” His anecdotes pandered to white fears of urban chaos and promoted violent vigilantism. “Bam, shoot ’em dead on the spot! Shoot to kill if anyone throws a rock at a policeman or throws a Molotov cocktail,” Wallace told one audience. “That may not prevent the burning and looting,” he intoned, “but it will sure stop it after it starts.”⁷² Wallace reveled in his authoritarian populism, juxtaposing the “common man” against the scourge of “lazy” welfare recipients and the tyranny of “big government,” with an underlying message that only he could solve the problems.⁷³

Despite actively exploiting racial anxieties, Wallace tried to separate himself from the overt racism that dominated his gubernatorial years. Wallace employed the more muted phrase “local government forever” rather than the fire-breathing “segregation forever.”⁷⁴ When an ABC-TV film crew recorded Wallace shaking hands with Robert Shelton, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Wallace ordered a bodyguard to seize and destroy the footage. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Wallace weaponized the very idea of being called a racist, stating, “I don’t regard myself as a racist and I think the biggest racists in the world are those who call other folks racist.”⁷⁵ Wallace argued that a belief in segregation did not connote racism. “The first thing I want to say is—and you tell this to Buckley—Buckley thinks I’m a racist you know—is that I’m not a racist,” Wallace told James Kilpatrick of National Review. “Oh, I believe in segregation all right, but I believe in segregation here in Alabama. What New York wants to do, that’s New York’s business.”⁷⁶ Wallace was sending a message to his supporters: you are not a racist for demanding law and order or believing in segregation and states’ rights.

Wallace’s racial views resonated with many Americans. A Little Rock waitress told reporters, “I’ve got two young kids at home that will be going to school in a few years. I didn’t go to school with niggers, but next year my kids will be going with them unless we elect George Wallace.” For emphasis, she added, “He’ll stop all that foolishness.”⁷⁷ Roy Harris—president of the Citizens’ Council of America and chairman of Georgia’s Wallace for President organization—praised Wallace for speaking up about “states’ rights and the right to run your own schools.” But, Harris admitted, “when you get right down to it there’s really going to be only one issue and you spell it n-i-g-g-e-r.”⁷⁸ Even George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party leader, said, “While not a ‘Nazi,’ [Wallace] is close enough as that, as President, he would probably preserve our nation and race.”⁷⁹ Wallace supporters, in short, viewed the world through a lens of white anxiety and aggrievement. Wallace’s folksy authoritarianism was a finely tuned racist dog whistle intended to drum up ultraconservative support, siphon voters away from the major parties, and realign the two-party system.

Even though red-baiting, racist demagoguery brought Wallace a great deal of support, his state-level fiscal liberalism threatened his conservative reputation. As governor, Wallace implemented regressive taxes on gasoline and monetary transactions and embraced deficit spending in order to expand Alabama’s budget and boost welfare spending for his supporters. He protected New Deal legacies, such as farm subsidies and Social Security, and reinforced liberal spending measures such as highway construction, even though he despised the federal strings attached to government programs. As one journalist sarcastically wrote, “Wallace is a ‘state’s righter’ who apparently wants the Federal government to continue to shovel disproportionate amounts of Federal funds to his state but to have no say as to how it is spent.”⁸⁰ Wallace defended his liberal economic spending by calling it an investment “in our children’s future” and an effort to “feed the economic stream of our growing industry.”⁸¹ These economic policies nevertheless ran contrary to the libertarianism pulsing throughout the broader conservative movement.⁸²

Given Wallace’s penchant for state-level tax-and-spend policies, far-right supporters looked for signs of fiscal conservatism. Wallace did not endorse the Liberty Amendment in public, but there was evidence of tacit approval. At a meeting of Alabama’s chapter of Women for Constitutional Government (WCG), Lurleen Wallace provided the opening remarks before Mary Cain, a segregationist newspaper editor, took the stage to declare that the Liberty Amendment would stop the “national evil” of federal overreach.⁸³ A few months later, George met with WCG advocates to discuss the proposed amendment. Alabama failed to pass a Liberty Amendment resolution in 1963, but he privately reassured one supporter, “I feel reasonably sure that stronger efforts will be made for the passage of this Amendment when the Alabama Legislature convenes in the next session.”⁸⁴ Wallace’s muted public response allowed ultraconservatives to use him as an empty vessel—they claimed Wallace supported the amendment to the hilt. Writing for the Conservative Journal, Courtney said that Wallace viewed the amendment as a positive move toward local governance and constitutional principles. Tom Anderson wrote in his widely syndicated “Straight Talk” series that Wallace favored the Liberty Amendment to oppose “centralized government and world government.”⁸⁵ An article appeared in Freedom Magazine titled “Wallace for Liberty Amendment,” in which Stone declared that the Liberty Amendment was “the best possible yardstick” to measure candidates.⁸⁶ Stone never formally endorsed Wallace, despite privately describing him as having “all the attributes of greatness.” ⁸⁷ However, Stone’s words were clear enough: Wallace favored the Liberty Amendment; thus, he was the best candidate.⁸⁸

Wallace’s anti-communism, selective anti-statism, and segregationism held significant appeal for far-right activists looking for a home. Ultraconservatives such as Hargis, Smoot, and Walker all voiced support for Wallace’s presidential aspirations. Manion brought Wallace onto his radio show to discuss the “prevailing unlawful disorder” afflicting the country.⁸⁹ Naturally, Wallace’s support network was especially dense in the South. Georgia governor Lester Maddox stumped for Wallace around the country, while Arkansas Supreme Court justice Jim Johnson organized Wallace’s campaign in Arkansas. At a Georgia Klan meeting, Shelton showed a Birch Society film that depicted urban riots as communist-inspired. After the video, Shelton urged the assembled Klansmen to support George Wallace: “I think he’s our only salvation.”⁹⁰ Wallace openly courted the militant, racist vote and refused to unequivocally condemn his own radical entourage, though he did disavow groups that openly advocated violence (militia groups such as the Klan and the Minutemen supported him anyway). Wallace knit together a motley coalition of conservative southern Democrats, reactionary West Coast Republicans, Citizens’ Council members, disgruntled blue-collar laborers, and right-wing businessmen from across the nation.⁹¹

Out of Wallace’s ultraconservative patchwork, one of the most dedicated advocates was Kent Courtney. The 1968 presidential election provided the opportunity, Courtney believed, for conservatives to illustrate their electoral strength. Courtney transformed the Conservative Society of America into the grassroots vanguard of the Wallace operation, dismantling parts of his own organization to support Wallace’s campaign. The CSA shuttered its radio programming in order to fund “Wallace for President” clubs throughout the nation, and the organization started selling “Win with Wallace in 1968” buttons. Fellow Birch Society members, notably Tom Anderson of Farm and Ranch, were among Courtney’s earliest boosters. Courtney used mass mailers and the CSA Newsletter to keep his members up to date regarding the minutiae of the election season, sending polls showing Wallace’s favorable numbers in southern states and information regarding conventions that Courtney organized throughout Louisiana. Courtney also started publishing Wallace for President News, which became the semiofficial periodical of Wallace’s campaign. Similarly, Roy Harris turned his newspaper, the Augusta Courier, into a pro-Wallace outlet. Wallace’s campaign infrastructure itself became a critical hub within the far right’s institutional network.⁹²

Courtney’s publications pandered to the undercurrent of racism that permeated Wallace’s supporter groups. For example, when Wallace visited Richmond, Virginia, he was greeted by a jeering crowd of civil rights protesters. Courtney detailed the encounter in Wallace for President News, describing one of the activists as a “buxom Negress” with “her hair standing on end like a fuzzy wuzzy” and “her eyes popping in all directions, her body contorted with a rhythmic rage.” Courtney tried to contrast the supposed uprightness of Wallace’s campaign with the perceived subversion of the civil rights movement. “If you closed your eyes you could imagine yourself in deepest Africa far from any civilization,” Courtney wrote. “These chanting puppets of the red-black plague in America may have been trained at the Communist camp in Midvale, New Jersey, the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, or at some local temple of the fanatically anti-white Black Muslims.”⁹³ None of the places Courtney listed were “communist camps,” but the imagery convinced readers that the protests were somehow treasonable. In reality, Courtney’s racist language highlighted the symbiosis between anti-communism and segregationism and appealed directly to the ultraconservatives undergirding Wallace’s campaign.⁹⁴

While much of the far right marshaled behind Wallace, other conservatives, especially party-line Republicans and those yearning for mainstream respectability, took a dim view of his candidacy. Buckley worried that Wallace might siphon support away from the Republican Party, particularly if the GOP put forth a moderate-liberal candidate. The Republicans could defuse Wallace by nominating a conservative, Buckley wrote, which would ensure that “some of the votes pried loose by Wallace from Democratic fastnesses might tumble down into Republican rather than Wallace ranks.”⁹⁵ Some right-wingers wondered whether Wallace should even be classified as a conservative. “When it comes to civil rights and the state-federal relationship, George Wallace tents in the conservative camp,” Kilpatrick concluded. “On other issues, contrary to widespread impression, he is moderate to populist.”⁹⁶ Frank S. Meyer, National Review’s resident political philosopher, agreed that some of Wallace’s positions ran “parallel” to conservatism, but he rejected Wallace’s “nationalist and socialist appeals” as “radically alien to conservatism.”⁹⁷ Despite the fact that ultraconservatives formed the base of the conservative movement and their ideas and activities overlapped substantially with the “respectable” right, Buckley and his cohort hoped to discredit Wallace’s conservative bona fides. This was a battle over longevity, credibility, and institutional power. Buckley had transformed from a far-right translator into a conservative gatekeeper, hoping to convince his fellow right-wingers to ignore the third-party siren song in favor of fighting within, and hopefully transforming, the Republican Party.

Republicans certainly felt the pinch of Wallace’s campaign. Evans and Novak observed that Republicans worried about “losing their right wing to Wallace,” while Thomas O’Neill of Baltimore’s Sun gauged that Wallace could be a “lethal blow for the Republican [nominee].”⁹⁸ Pollster George Gallup called Wallace “a greater threat to the Republicans than to the Democrats.”⁹⁹ Despite his long history as a segregationist Democrat, Wallace appealed to the GOP’s right wing. Republican politicians concurred. Goldwater offered a withering appraisal of Wallace: “He’s a conservative, and he’s a disaster.”¹⁰⁰ At a Wallace function in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a Republican official looked upon the crowd and lamented, “I hate to say this, but I see some of our people out there—too many of them.”¹⁰¹ Ralph Greiten, a district manager of a Santa Barbara life insurance company, embodied the Wallace threat. After changing his registration to support Wallace, Greiten told reporters, “We Republican ultraconservatives had no home to go to until Wallace came along.”¹⁰² Despite the remonstrations from pragmatists such as Buckley, Wallace’s insurgency threatened to outflank the GOP’s budding conservative movement.

Not every ultraconservative joined Wallace’s ranks, however. Cattleman and recent GOP transplant J. Evetts Haley called 1968 “the most critical year in our history,” but warned that only the Republican Party, not Wallace’s third-party gambit, could prevent the destruction of “all we hold dear.”¹⁰³ In fact, Haley fought against Wallace supporters in Randall County, Texas, where he served as the Republican county chairman. Rather than supporting Wallace, Haley urged his compatriots to embrace the GOP. He was particularly fond of Ronald Reagan. But Haley was not a down-the-line Republican yet. Just two years earlier he had supported Democrat Jim Johnson’s bid for Arkansas governor because of Johnson’s segregationist values. Nevertheless, Haley remained unconvinced by Wallace. “A lot of my friends went into the Wallace movement years ago, but I wouldn’t go,” Haley said nearly a decade later. “I knew Wallace wasn’t a real conservative.”¹⁰⁴ Haley soon took a hiatus from politics, but his decision to spurn Wallace’s campaign illustrated that the ultraconservative movement was fracturing. Much of the far right remained loyal to Wallace, but over the next two decades many ultraconservatives would follow in Haley’s footsteps, being reborn as Republican conservatives.

The election of 1968 represented an identity crisis for the conservative movement. The far right’s centrality to the movement, particularly its role in Goldwater’s nomination and defeat, loomed like a dark star. Conservatives yearning for respectability, Buckley and other writers from National Review in particular, were trying to redefine the ideological parameters of conservatism by winnowing out the far right. According to their calculus, conspiratorial anti-communist groups were liabilities, embarrassments that eroded credibility. Buckley derided the Birch Society as a “drag on the conservative movement.” But in the same breath he conceded that Welch’s organization provided an “emotionally satisfactory means of serving many Americans concerned for their country’s future.”¹⁰⁵ Republican politicians felt this friction, too. The GOP wanted to capitalize on the far right’s grassroots fervor but fretted that open collaboration would damage the party. For their part, many ultraconservatives were willing to work with the GOP only insofar as Republicans were dedicated to running strictly conservative candidates. The Republican Party faced a fork in the road. Moderate and liberal Republicans feared that nominating a conservative would beget smears of extremism and another landslide loss. Conservatives, on the other hand, believed nominating a moderate might steer energized voters toward Wallace’s third-party insurgency.

The Republicans needed to find a candidate who could navigate this narrow channel. Richard Nixon endeared himself to the GOP rank and file and cemented his status as the front-runner by stumping for Goldwater and other Republican candidates in 1964 and 1966. Nixon borrowed Franklin Roosevelt’s terminology by focusing on the “forgotten Americans” of the suburban Sunbelt and embraced the anti-communist rhetoric that often doubled as a race-baiting code language for southerners. He stumped for “law and order” and railed against the perceived divisiveness of liberal policies. Nixon’s strategy entailed surrendering the Deep South to George Wallace while attacking Wallace’s hold on the Upper South. Reagan challenged Nixon’s candidacy from the right while George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller charged from the left. Romney dropped out of the race early in 1968, and Rockefeller’s late announcement left little time to rattle the sabers of the traditional eastern elite wing of the GOP. Reagan, on the other hand, charmed conservatives and made Nixon’s campaign sweat through the summer.¹⁰⁶

Nixon still had work to do as delegates arrived in Miami for the 1968 Republican National Convention. In particular, he needed to win over the conservative skeptics who soured on Nixon after the Republican “Munich” of 1960. Recent Republican transplant Strom Thurmond remained a well-respected voice in the South, and he helped Nixon pick up crucial southern votes. Thurmond arranged a preconvention meeting with southern delegates, where Nixon agreed to appoint right-wing Supreme Court justices and vetoed four potential vice-presidential candidates anathema to southerners. Though Thurmond did not laud Nixon’s nomination of Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, he agreed that southerners would view Agnew more favorably than a northeastern liberal like Rockefeller. Nixon also secured support from other conservative leaders, including Goldwater, Texas senator John Tower, and grassroots activist Phyllis Schlafly. Eight years after kowtowing to the GOP’s liberal faction and just three years after claiming that the “real menace to the Republican Party came from the Buckleyites,” Nixon sided with the party’s conservative future.¹⁰⁷

The ideological disagreements within the Republican Party paled in comparison to the Democratic Party’s disarray. Under intense pressure due to the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson shocked the world by deciding not to stand for reelection. Multiple candidates had already emerged to contest Johnson for the nomination, including Minnesota congressman Eugene McCarthy and New York senator Robert F. Kennedy. They were soon joined on the campaign trail by Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. Many analysts penciled in Humphrey as the favorite, but his milquetoast liberalism failed to inspire the civil rights activists and anti-war advocates who marshaled behind Kennedy and McGovern. To make matters worse for Humphrey, he struggled to distance himself from the Johnson presidency. Kennedy appeared to have the Democratic nomination sewn up after winning the California primary, but three bullets from the .22 revolver of Sirhan Sirhan ended his presidential aspirations in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. Buoyed by the strength of labor unions and the lack of a true adversary after Kennedy’s tragic demise, Humphrey received the Democratic nomination in Chicago. Yet the anti-war protests outside of the DNC wrought a spectacle of police brutality that diminished Humphrey’s victory. An air of desperation plagued the Democratic Party as the election loomed.¹⁰⁸

From the perspective of far-right activists, Nixon and Humphrey represented varying shades of liberalism. Ultraconservatives considered Nixon’s nomination a regression from Goldwater. Nixon had a predilection for Machiavellian pragmatism, which fueled distrust. Additionally, many far-right activists still resented Nixon’s actions during the “Munich of the Republican Party” and his previous disavowal of the Birch Society. Welch sent fundraising letters warning that a mysterious cabal of “insiders” wanted a Nixon presidency in order to further the communist conspiracy.¹⁰⁹ Kent Courtney printed pamphlets upbraiding the Republican candidate for facilitating big government, supporting civil rights, promoting “phony anti-communism,” backing the United Nations, and for simply being too liberal.¹¹⁰ “Under no circumstances should Nixon be considered a Conservative or of any value to the Conservative cause,” Courtney wrote.¹¹¹ In the eyes of the far right, Nixon remained a creature of “Modern Republicanism.” On the other hand, supporting the Democratic nominee was a nonstarter. Humphrey was a “flaming liberal,” according to Courtney, who “spent his life promoting Socialism, promoting Communism, and dividing and destroying his party and his country.”¹¹² Welch believed Humphrey’s nomination itself was a conspiracy to “improve the image” and “increase the stature of Richard Nixon as a conservative.”¹¹³ The far right often homogenized the two parties—Stone accused both of eroding constitutional traditions by proposing “vast new political excursions into fields of private enterprise and state jurisdiction.”¹¹⁴ Many of the right-wingers who felt disenchanted with the two major parties, who considered the Democrats too liberal and questioned Nixon’s conservative credentials, turned to Wallace’s insurgency.¹¹⁵

The American Independent Party lacked a traditional structure, and Wallace relied heavily on local organizers to run his state-level campaigns, a decision which greatly empowered ultraconservatives. Birchers signed up in droves, fueling the drive to get Wallace on state ballots around the nation, a task they took up with “a missionary zeal.”¹¹⁶ As one man at the American Party of Texas’s state convention proclaimed, “It is the patriotic duty of every Bircher to work and vote for Mr. Wallace.”¹¹⁷ In Bakersfield, California, the Birch Society trained seventy special registrars to sign up voters while over 3,900 members canvassed the state. Bircher enthusiasm meant that many of the Wallace-pledged electors were society members. At least three electors in New York were Birchers, four in New Jersey, and three in Connecticut. Wallace offices in Connecticut sold Bircher paraphernalia such as “Support Your Local Police” bumper stickers and books found in American Opinion bookstores. When the Wallace campaign asked for additional help in Connecticut, Kent and Phoebe Courtney sent out a letter to subscribers of the Independent American with instructions on how to join and support Wallace’s local campaign. Eleven of Massachusetts’s fourteen electors were Birchers or had ties to the society. Out west, Birchers were equally visible. Of the six Wallace-pledged electors in Colorado, two were Birchers (two others were Citizens’ Council members). All three of the Wallace electors from Nevada were Birchers. In the state of Washington, more than half of the 40-member Wallace campaign committee were Birch Society members. The Wall Street Journal described Bircher-led efforts as “impressively smooth,” indicating that, aside from perhaps the southern Citizens’ Councils, the Birch Society was the foremost group propelling Wallace’s movement at the ground level.¹¹⁸

However, the Birch Society frequently downplayed any official role in the Wallace campaign and, as an organization, remained neutral on Wallace’s candidacy. “Our job is to create a climate of knowledge and understanding so conservative candidates can be elected,” Welch opined.¹¹⁹ When Wallace won straw polls at a Bircher gathering, the organization denied any direct connection to Wallace’s campaign, but noted that they both shared an interest in “real constitutional conservatism.”¹²⁰ Individual Birchers strove to maintain this façade. For example, when Willard S. Voit signed up as an unpaid Wallace volunteer, he resigned as vice president of the Birch Society’s publishing house to sever any linkages to the society (he also quit the Republican State Central Committee and the United Republicans of California). Another Wallace worker repeated Welch’s line that “the society and the campaign operate independently,” but he also added, “It’s just that the two stand for a lot of the same things.”¹²¹ In fact, Welch later estimated that 80 percent of Birchers “not only voted for but worked for Wallace.”¹²² When rumors spread that the Birch Society had distributed its mailing lists to Wallace’s campaign, Welch exploded, “There might be some members who give him lists of names of friends that include members of the society, but no self-respecting organization would release its mailing list.”¹²³ However, Welch’s disavowal betrayed an important truth: a significant amount of overlap existed between the Birch Society and Wallace’s operation.¹²⁴

Pennsylvania Birchers, for example, used society connections to build Wallace’s campaign while ostensibly not involving the organization directly. Three Birch members ran Wallace’s campaign in western Pennsylvania, centered on the city of Pittsburgh. They recruited twenty-nine Wallace-pledged electors, of whom seventeen admitted their Birch Society membership. To get Wallace on the state ballot, they organized a signature drive, collecting 7,000 of the necessary 10,500 signatures in two days around the Pittsburgh area, and created a network of twenty-five campaign offices. Investigators from the Wall Street Journal visited eleven of the offices and found that six were run by avowed Birchers. “We went to people we knew would be interested,” remarked John W. Mehalic, a businessman and Birch chapter leader. “It just happens that most of your active workers in the conservative movement are Birchers. Who else works in a conservative movement?”¹²⁵

Not only did the Pennsylvania operation indicate the Birch Society’s centrality to Wallace’s campaign, it also revealed how racism animated Wallace’s constituency even outside of the South. One of the key Pittsburgh-area organizers, dentist Charles A. Provan, distributed Wallace literature to his patients and contributed to the “Let Freedom Ring” telephone operation, which robocalled citizens with recorded messages accusing civil rights leaders of advancing the cause of communism. Another Pennsylvania organizer, Robert J. Crow, occupied a leadership position in Truth About Civil Turmoil (TACT), a Bircher front which blamed civil rights disputes on communist subversion and sent “copies of the criminal records of black militants to local newspapers.” Noxious forms of racism often combined with xenophobic fears of demographic change. J. Warren Keel, the Pennsylvania chairman of Citizens for Wallace, blamed “race riots” on Congress “illegally” passing the 14th Amendment and argued that black Americans should have to go through a naturalization process because they were not proper citizens. The racist, conspiratorial undercurrents that mobilized behind Goldwater in 1964 now formed the backbone of Wallace’s machinery.¹²⁶

The far-right network energized Wallace’s campaign, but it also contributed a significant amount of friction. Journalists asked Wallace incessantly about the Birch Society. “I’m not going to denounce the John Birch Society,” Wallace replied to one reporter, describing Birchers as “some of our finest citizens.”¹²⁷ However, Bircher influence often brought bad press. In Texas, home to some 6,000 active Birchers, discord bedeviled Wallace’s apparatus. Bard Logan, the 56-year-old chairman of the American Party of Texas, was an old hand third-party organizer and dedicated Society member. He had no patience for “pathological Birch haters” because, in his view, “People are only against the Birch Society because it has been a successful anti-Communist organization.” This mindset led Logan to purge state-level American Party officeholders who remained cool toward the society. When the party’s state secretary, Margaret Bacon, refused to distribute Bircher materials, Logan interpreted her actions as an “anti-Birch kick” and fired her for not toeing the line. She received anonymous menacing phone calls afterward. The final caller growled, “If you don’t quit stirring the pot, you’re going to take a swim in the Colorado River with concrete boots on.”¹²⁸ Bacon distanced herself from the party—“I never want to go through that again”—but still claimed to be “one hundred percent” behind Wallace. Other chapter leaders who questioned the distribution of Bircher materials met the same fate: Logan replaced them with dedicated Birchers, and intimidating threats often followed.¹²⁹

The Texas campaign highlighted both the Birch Society’s influence at the grassroots level and the ongoing struggle to define conservatism. The threats of violence also showed that, at times, the line separating far-right activists from violent extremists blurred substantially. “Those Birchers were bent on destroying the American Party,” complained one ousted worker. “They’ve gotten our people into a state of fear and confusion by the techniques of divide, conquer, and destroy. We were asleep and they were organized.”¹³⁰ Chairman Logan took exception to these criticisms and fired back, “They looked to the John Birch Society to organize this party. Now they want us to get out. Well, we’re not getting out.”¹³¹ Indeed, the Birch Society dominated the American Party of Texas. Bacon claimed that twenty-seven of the party’s thirty-one executive committee members were Birchers. Another man said it was at least half. The turbulence in Texas received coverage in numerous national newspapers, but Wallace’s national campaign director Tom Turnipseed downplayed the controversy as nothing more than a “personality quarrel.” And yet, reports circulated that the Wallace campaign asked for Logan’s resignation and sent an official representative to smooth things over in the Lone Star State.¹³²

As evidenced by the Pennsylvania operation and the turmoil in Texas, the broad far-right coalition that fueled Wallace’s campaign was both a blessing and a curse. Ultraconservatives certainly brought a crusading energy—grassroots activists canvassed local areas, solicited signatures, and formed a network of Wallace headquarters across the country. Their efforts helped facilitate Wallace’s rise in the polls. A Harris poll taken in mid-September showed Wallace cruising at 21 percent compared to the 39 percent and 31 percent earned by Nixon and Humphrey, respectively. From the vantage point of a Wallace supporter, it appeared that Wallace had a real opportunity to topple the two-party duopoly. However, many contemporary observers and fellow conservatives still believed that the far-right wing of Wallace’s movement remained an immense liability. This fear seeped into Wallace’s campaign; as analyst Jack Nelson reported, “[Wallace] fears the extremist label would kill him as a significant national figure.”¹³³ Another seemingly insurmountable problem facing Wallace was the disadvantage of running as a third-party candidate in a two-party system. Without the activism on the right-wing fringe, however, Wallace’s campaign might have stalled out before takeoff.¹³⁴

Ultimately, multiple issues doomed Wallace’s campaign. The resuscitation of Humphrey’s campaign, Thurmond’s support for Nixon, and the persistence of extremism all diminished Wallace’s appeal. In late September, Humphrey finally broke away from the Democratic party line on Vietnam by inching toward advocating a peaceful resolution. This led to a flood of support from northeastern labor unions and won over some of the die-hard anti-war advocates. While Humphrey solidified his left flank, Nixon drifted rightward in order to pick up conservative swing voters. Nixon reiterated his opposition to “forced bussing” and promoted the “freedom-of-choice” education plan that reinforced de facto segregation.¹³⁵ Nixon’s right turn peeled voters away from Wallace, but Strom Thurmond’s continued loyalty to Nixon proved even more detrimental to Wallace’s hopes. Thurmond canvassed southern states, detailing the similarities between Nixon and Wallace and, more importantly, warning that voting for Wallace might ensure a Humphrey victory. At a Georgia campaign stop, Thurmond cautioned, “I don’t know of a state of the South the third-party candidate will carry.”¹³⁶ In Mountville, South Carolina, Thurmond climbed aboard a flatbed truck and instructed the crowd, “Don’t dissipate your votes on a third party candidate, even though he says what a lot of people believe.” Thurmond’s actions proved pivotal for Nixon. As one farmer said, “I’m not going to kick Strom Thurmond just to cast a ballot for George Wallace.”¹³⁷

Thurmond’s advocacy helped shift the Upper South toward Nixon, but Wallace’s declining popularity was partially self-inflicted. Wallace tapped General Curtis LeMay as his running mate in early October, an intentional nod to his ultraconservative supporters. During his acceptance speech, LeMay said he did not think atomic weaponry was necessary to win the Vietnam War, but he refused to take the “nuclear option” off of the table. Far-right activists supported LeMay; Courtney had already provided positive coverage of LeMay’s aggressive solutions for the Vietnam question. However, the press had a heyday portraying LeMay as an unhinged warmonger. His off-the-cuff speaking style and apparent hawkishness scared voters and earned the Wallace-LeMay ticket a pithy nickname from Humphrey: “the Bombsy twins.”¹³⁸ Wallace rushed to clarify that LeMay was only pointing out the need for a military plan if negotiations failed, but the damage was already done. Theodore White thought that LeMay brought “no strength or eloquence to the Wallace ticket,” and Buckley, though he complained that the nuclear comments were taken out of context, called LeMay “a damn fool for consenting to run with George Wallace.”¹³⁹

LeMay’s gaffe crippled the campaign, and, when combined with all of the other issues, Wallace’s support evaporated. Over the month of October, Wallace’s poll numbers across the country plummeted from 21 to 13 percent. Republicans smelled blood in the water. Senator Goldwater wrote a column in National Review two weeks before the election urging conservatives to avoid Wallace. Repackaging Thurmond’s argument, Goldwater told readers that a vote for Wallace was essentially a vote for Humphrey and four more years of liberalism. Not only did Wallace stand no chance of becoming president, Goldwater noted, his candidacy was a threat to the two-party system and the conservative effort to remake the Republican Party. “We conservatives have made great strides since 1960,” Goldwater pleaded. “Let’s not throw that progress down Governor Wallace’s rathole.”¹⁴⁰ In this moment, Goldwater turned away from his far-right boosters because they threatened the GOP’s candidate and the party’s growing conservative faction. Right-wing gatekeepers, such as Goldwater and Buckley, were sending a message to ultraconservatives: get in line or get written out of the movement.¹⁴¹

Wallace made it onto all fifty state ballots, listed either under the American Independent Party banner or under a variety of third-party titles such as the American Party, the Courage Party, and even the George Wallace Party. His popularity had cratered, however. On Election Day, November 5, roughly ten million Americans (13.5 percent) cast a ballot for George Wallace and the American Party. Nixon barely edged out Humphrey in the popular vote, but he earned enough electoral votes, 301 (56 percent), to win the presidency. Despite the overwhelming electoral defeat, Wallace’s numbers revealed that his far-right ideologies were not fringe or sectional. He won five states in the Deep South—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—for a total of forty-six electoral votes. Plus, more than four million of the votes Wallace received came from outside of the South. It was the strongest third-party result since Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party run in 1912, and certainly more impressive than T. Coleman Andrews’s poor performance in 1956. White concluded that one consequence of the 1968 election, exemplified by Wallace’s showing, was an undeniable “swing to the right, an expression of a vague sentiment for a government oriented to caution and restraint.”¹⁴² Nevertheless, Wallace’s loss, despite foreshadowing future conservative gains and popularizing a “politics of rage,” must have been bitter fruit for his most avid supporters.¹⁴³

After the dust settled, ultraconservatives expressed a mixture of anger and self-loathing. The far right distrusted Nixon and resented the GOP’s campaign against Wallace. “The American people during the election were fed THE BIG LIE,” Courtney bemoaned in a CSA mailer. “They were told that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey, when, as a matter of fact, a vote for Nixon was a vote for the continuation of the Johnson-Humphrey Administration.”¹⁴⁴ At the same time, the far right found reasons to blame Wallace. Courtney lashed out at Wallace’s campaign for ineffective organizing and having “a lot of slogans, but no solutions,” ignoring the fact that his own organization played a key role in Wallace’s movement.¹⁴⁵ Smoot dismissed portions of Wallace’s platform as “unconstitutional” while Courtney derided his domestic policies as “too socialistic.”¹⁴⁶ This sort of post-election autopsy, a ritual of self-flagellation, was commonplace among the far right, and it fit a notable pattern: ultraconservatives often shelved their own puritanical ideals to back imperfect right-wing candidates but then repudiated those candidates’ more liberal policies after their campaigns crumbled.

The reality was that Wallace’s decision to court extremists, like Goldwater before him, simultaneously energized and narrowed his base. The American public knew that Wallace’s support network ranged from the Birch Society and Citizens’ Councils to klaverns and extremist militias, a volatile political cocktail with limited appeal. Contemporary analyst Nicholas C. Chriss noted that Wallace’s platforms were often superseded by “behind-the-scenes power plays among right-wing extremists, and bickering over John Birch Society issues.”¹⁴⁷ Furthermore, Wallace was running on a third-party ticket in a two-party system, hoping to accomplish something—diverting the election to the House of Representatives—that had last occurred back in 1825. While Nixon’s shift to the right and Humphrey’s renaissance contributed to Wallace’s defeat, the radicals that comprised Wallace’s national constituency also had a hand in his failure.¹⁴⁸

Despite the clear repudiation of far-right third-party politics, some ultraconservatives refused to make amends with Nixon and the Republicans. They assumed Nixon would disappoint them. When asked about Nixon’s potential as president, Welch gave a tepid “Let’s wait and see.”¹⁴⁹ Jim Johnson grumbled, “If [Nixon] does what conservatives want him to do, then there’d be no place for a third-party conservative candidate four years from now.”¹⁵⁰ Courtney remained loyal to Wallace and contended that Americans would “suffer” under Nixon’s administration. Just weeks after the election, Courtney wrote to CSA members, “Nixon doesn’t have a chance of getting re-elected in 1972 unless he adopts, or appears to adopt, the Conservative philosophy of George Wallace, and puts into action programs which will slow down the Communist conspiracy.”¹⁵¹ These misgivings about Nixon’s, and thus the GOP’s, conservative convictions led some ultraconservatives to continue down the path of third-party activism.

The movement that unified behind Wallace, however, splintered into competing factions after the election. In early 1969, roughly 250 people representing 44 states descended upon Dallas, Texas, for a meeting of the “Association of Wallace Voters.” The group intended to create a permanent, ambitious American Independent Party. Courtney was elected to the party’s national committee, and at the convention he could be found handing out pamphlets featuring an article titled “The Pro-Communist Administration of Richard Nixon.” “I don’t expect any radical change in the Nixon administration from the soft-on-communism policy of the past,” Courtney told reporters. Some activists sought to capitalize on Wallace’s southern popularity by focusing on local elections. Bard Logan, the Birch member and chairman of the American Party of Texas, wanted to target liberal Democrats such as Texas senator Ralph Yarborough. “They’ve gotten the idea that they can’t be toppled,” Logan remarked. “But they could be has-beens just as much as we could be also-rans.” By the end of the conference, the gathering had laid out plans for a Wallace run in 1972.¹⁵²

While the Dallas contingent sought to revitalize the American Independent Party, other right-wingers moved away from Wallace’s machine. William Shearer, the Los Angeles businessman who led a California Citizens’ Council and coordinated the western region of Wallace’s campaign, held a meeting in Louisville to create a separate third party. He wanted to implement one of Courtney’s earlier blueprints by establishing a localized party structure that would decide platforms and candidates through national conventions. Shearer noted that this was a response to Wallace’s domineering tactics—Wallace’s confidants wrote the 1968 platform and picked his running mate without the input of local organizers. Essentially, Shearer argued that Wallace’s folksy populism veered too close to an authoritarian cult of personality. “We’re states [sic] rights and local control people,” Shearer said, “and we’re not interested in creating an institution that’s dictatorial in nature.” The disagreements between Shearer’s camp and Courtney’s group displayed the far right’s increasing factionalism. The two sides did not trust or respect each other. Robert Walters, organizer of the Dallas conference, said there was “a pretty damn high nut content” among Shearer’s associates. Shearer took a similarly dim view of Walters’s gathering: “I don’t think some of them are too savory characters.” The right-wing disunity that shadowed Wallace’s campaign metastasized in the election’s aftermath, further fraying the far-right base.¹⁵³

Ultimately, Nixon’s ascent and Wallace’s defeat marked a significant turning point for the far-right movement. As the GOP pivoted rightward, ultraconservatives either melded into the conservative mainstream or lost traction altogether. Some longtime far-right activists, such as J. Evetts Haley, agreed with Goldwater’s argument about continuing the conservative insurgency within the Republican Party. The GOP provided fertile ground for the conservative movement, and it seemed prudent to try and push the party further rightward. However, other far-right activists, such as Courtney, spun into increasingly isolated orbits outside of the political mainstream. The passing of time represented another problem—far-right leaders were growing old, prompting questions of who would lead the movement in the future. Ultraconservatives had failed to get a conservative purist into the White House, but by the end of the 1960s they had created strategies and built a grassroots network that would form a foundation for conservative activists in the later decades of the twentieth century.