Mar 20, 2016 5 min read

Thousand of protesters descended on the candidate as he spoke. “Shame, shame, shame, shame,” they shrieked. Then “sellout, sellout, sellout, sellout” after which they deployed more explicit language — the kind of language that’s not normally heard or uttered in a campaign for president.

The yelling and the cursing required the candidate to raise his own voice. Time and again he was interrupted by the screaming young people. Finally, he was driven from the platform. Even some veteran reporters covering the rally were vexed.

One of those reporters would write that he was sure that without the police standing by, the protesters would have rushed the stage, doing physical harm. He was just as certain of his own response to such an eventuality: to fight back with ferocity, delivering blows for the sake of beleaguered American democracy.

No, this is not a description of the 2016 campaign, although it very well might be. All of this, and more, took place in 1968, when it really did seem that the country was coming apart.

The current race for the White House has evoked all sorts of comparisons, including to 1952, when the Republican “establishment”, in the person of conservative Sen. Robert A. Taft, was taken down by the moderate Dwight EIsenhower, prompting a donnybrook of a convention.

Nineteen-sixty-eight was a horrendous year. In the spring, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down. His assassination ignited riots in dozens of American cities. In June, Robert F. Kennedy was killed following his victory in the California Democratic primary.

Looming over everything was President Johnson’s war in Vietnam, which had taken nearly 30,000 American lives up to that point, and protests against the war. In August, the Democratic convention in Chicago was engulfed in chaos. The nation watched in horror as police waded into protesters, prompting a Democratic senator, speaking from the convention podium, to decry “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

The party’s nominee that year was Hubert Humphrey, the vice president of the United States. He was a good and decent man who certainly deserved better than what he got. It was Humphrey would suffered the catcalls described in the opening paragraph.

As Teddy White commented in The Making of the President 1968 on the v.p.’s awful September Boston rally, “The press and television would … report Humphrey as a victim of the marauders; but the nation is hardly inclined to elect a victim as president.”

Republicans in 2016 might count their lucky stars that Donald Trump, should he be nominated this July, will never, it seems, be depicted as a victim, despite being the object of protesters’ wrath.

The GOP nominee in 1968, of course, was Richard Nixon. There was a third candidate that year, George Wallace, a mean-spirited segregationist and former governor of Alabama.

There’s a tendency these days to conflate 1968 with 1972, when Richard Nixon pursued a law-and-order “Southern strategy.” Many of today’s commentators forget that Wallace had the South all to himself in 1968 and the lion’s share of the law-and-order sentiment.

In the spring and summer Wallace was riding high. He was admired by many voters for having “the courage of his convictions” and for “telling it like it is.”

By October, Wallace had fallen back to earth, laid-low by violence at nearly every campaign stop. The headlines said it all: “Mob beats boy who sassed Wallace … police club leftists … fight breaks out as hecklers disrupt Wallace rally.”

It was too much for voters. They couldn’t stand to be associated with such a character.

Despite Wallace limping to the finish line in 1968, he did have one singular success. Since the advent of the New Deal a generation earlier, white working Americans had one political home, the Democratic Party. The Wallace campaign exposed the alienation of white working people from the party that had once championed them — that had made their wellbeing its cause.

It’s been downhill between white blue collar Americans and the Democrats ever since.

The 1968 campaign is rife with cautionary tales, from the coarse public language of the Republican vice presidential candidate, Spiro Agnew, which raised alarms in the Nixon camp, to the siren-songs wailed at the political extremes in that year of years.

White, taking it all in, was prompted to write that the political center “is where men come to rest while romance calls them out” to positions on the far left and right.

This was 48 years ago. Much has changed, including, maybe, our idea of what matters in a political love affair. Then again, perhaps some things never change.

We shall see what has changed and what is constant as this turbulent political year continues to unfold.

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” Robbins can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.