1968: Dixiecrats give it to Humphrey

What if George Wallace had managed to force the 1968 election to the house and the Southern Democratic delegations managed to broker a deal with Humphrey, giving him the Presidency?
 
The Democratic Party would have been severely weakened even if Humphrey had won a close election. “Winning” in this way would have made him a lame duck President on day 1, would have made the Dixiecrats ultimate kingmakers but would not have avoided the white flight from the Dems but only accelerated it. Good chance without Watergate, and with the stink of Vietnam sure to hamstring the Dems as well as the oil embargo and recession, a Republican is all but assured of victory. And whom might that Republican be? A charismatic figure who can assure victory and unite the religious fundamentalists as well as Dixiecrats ready to bolt. Yes we would have a Ronald Reagan Presidency 8 years earlier than IOTL.
 
The Democratic Party would have been severely weakened even if Humphrey had won a close election. “Winning” in this way would have made him a lame duck President on day 1, would have made the Dixiecrats ultimate kingmakers but would not have avoided the white flight from the Dems but only accelerated it. Good chance without Watergate, and with the stink of Vietnam sure to hamstring the Dems as well as the oil embargo and recession, a Republican is all but assured of victory. And whom might that Republican be? A charismatic figure who can assure victory and unite the religious fundamentalists as well as Dixiecrats ready to bolt. Yes we would have a Ronald Reagan Presidency 8 years earlier than IOTL.

The religious right wasn't quite a thing yet and Reagan in 68 looked at having Ed Brooke as his running mate.

Reagan was more economically conservative in 72 than he was in 1980, but the moderate faction of the GOP was also stronger.
 
I resemble that very much!

I wasn't much focused on what happens when Humphrey and Wallace and the other Southerners shake hands on the Congress deal. Indeed, Humphrey would be wobbly being the first President since John Quincy Adams to be chosen via the Congressional process, but if the deal involves stuff that gratifies enough Southerners, it could well leave him in a pretty solid position come 1972.

Re Vietnam, Johnson had been negotiating a peace treaty with Hanoi and Moscow for some time before the election. Nixon infamously (it was secret at the time, but has become well known since) and criminally (but LBJ knew via illegal channels and so could do nothing) torpedoed the treaty by lining up the South Vietnamese leadership to refuse to consider it. But that was contingent on Nixon's promises to give the South (or anyway, its crony leaders) a better deal as President, and if Nixon goes down for the count in '68 I figure he will fade out of the picture. Well maybe not, but anyway the South Vietnamese leaders will quickly understand their dependency on the patronage of Washington as it is, and they can't hold out until 1973. If Humphrey can pick up in a few months where Johnson left off, a peace treaty might be a done deal before 1969 is out.

The treaty LBJ was pushing is said by every source I have seen to be essentially identical to the one Nixon got after being reelected in 1972 OTL, so while that is hardly reassuring as to how good a protection of the South Vietnamese people it might be, it should be viable in the most cynical sense anyway for domestic US politics purposes. In fact, if the treaty would provide for the USA to maintain some tripwire military presence, the South ought to be protected quite well from the manner in which it fell OTL--whether that secures it from the prospect of falling to civil war is another question, assuming the US forces recuse themselves from being involved directly. However, many people assert that the Tet offensive exhausted the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front forces, and that willy nilly, a commitment to the South Vietnamese state was in fact on the rise, and given effective shielding from overt Northern invasion which is what it took to topple the Saigon regime in 1974, due to Northern forces not daring to advance openly in tanks and armored columns into a nation where US forces even in token numbers stand by to trigger the fast deployment of more of them from say the Philippines or Thailand or Taiwan (no Nixon Goes to China if Nixon is not elected!) and involvement of the US military in the kind of war our forces were trained to fight and win in the honorable and politically defensible cause of defending a sovereign ally from a plain and simple military invasion, I suppose the survival of the South has a fair shot. Anyway a more cynical form of the treaty has the effect of washing US hands and getting our boys out. The difference between Humphrey and Nixon, or any Democrat probably and Nixon, would be accomplishing this four years earlier, because it is also well known that Nixon would boast of using the Vietnam War as an issue to get reelected and had no intention of settling it any early than his second inauguration. Any Democrat, including by late 1968 LBJ himself, had every intention of ending it ASAP and would have I think. And would be able to, albeit perhaps not without dooming South Vietnam. But getting a form of the treaty allowing the South to be protected by American tripwire forces in small numbers might have been a far easier political sell in in the USA in 1969, because while the popular narrative goes that a bunch of hippie peaceniks brought down LBJ, I think it should be clear that the subsequent four years of deception after deception regarding Southeast Asia wore down the credibility of the US government in general and on Southeast Asian issues in particular to make general skepticism far more widespread by 1973 than it ever was in 1969. A Congress that could be sold on ongoing US presence on limited and secured bases in South Vietnam coupled with contingency plans to swoop in with adequate force to stop a maximal North Vietnamese invasion, but with no American GIs roaming the jungles looking for VC villages to set afire, and maintainence of civil order in the South entirely the Saigon government's problem (on paper...in truth surely a lot of CIA activity would be shoring them up and assisting but none of them are draftees brought home in body bags; on paper any dying doing that would not be listed as having been anywhere in southeast Asia at all probably) seems far more likely in 1969 than in 1973, by which time the mood of the votes was, get the hell out, screw the South!

So Biafra might be worth saving, but consider the vastly greater impact of the entire Vietnam war being over before 1970, with the US having had a credible win of sorts, and no escalation into Cambodia. Doable I think!

I do think the stagflation of the 1970s was pretty much sure to happen; it used to be fashionable to blame Nixon for that too but you all can credit my Marxist economics for disbelieving this could have been substantially the case. A little bit, yes, probably, but it was coming like a freight train--or rather the irreversible sinking of said freight train's track into a very sticky swamp--for fundamental reasons I believe. And no liberal power did well in trying to deal with it, but perhaps OTL the misleadership of Nixon and his preoccupation with paying for his useful 'Nam habit (not to mention the sweet rich pork this brought his corporate patrons) closed off some useful avenues, that if not tried in America that some European government might have greater freedom to try, and thus show a better way out of the mire.

Similarly, while it is hardly a slam dunk, I think Humphrey cutting a deal with Southern leaders might actually hold out hope for more effective civil rights outcomes, especially in the South. (Anyone who thinks drastic change in "racial" relations was mainly something only Southerners needed to embrace fails badly to understand the modern USA, or at any time really).

On the whole then, I think Humphrey winning via Congress with a hard deal with southern leaders could result in quite a nice improvement on OTL. It might not be able to fix the incubus of stagflation fixing to land on the world's back, but even without that quite a few nice wins might leave us better off.

And save tremendous numbers of lives in Southeast Asia at least, and possibly in lots of other trouble spots around the world.

I think Humphrey would be well place to win in 1976, the biggest problem by then being that it would then be 16 years of Democratic presidents; by then Republicans might seem shoo-ins no matter how well Humphrey is seen to be doing the job, just because it is the Republican turn. Also, they would not have their brand defined by Nixon nor tarnished by Watergate.
 
The culture of 1972 would have been eerily similar to that of 2000; a good economy combined with a subtle but truly toxic undertone of reactionary thinking. Reagan or maybe Agnew may well have benefited from it.
 
All these "Wallace will make a deal with Nixon" or 'Wallace will make a deal with Humphrey" scenarios fail to answer a crucial question--where is Wallace's leverage? Neither Nixon nor Humphrey will agree to an open deal, and there is no way Wallace can force them to abide by a secret one. (About the only threat he could make would be to run as a third party candidate again in 1972, but that's a long time in the future. And Humphrey would probably welcome such a candidacy, thinking it will hurt the 1972 GOP candidate worse than it will hurt him.)
 
All these "Wallace will make a deal with Nixon" or 'Wallace will make a deal with Humphrey" scenarios fail to answer a crucial question--where is Wallace's leverage? Neither Nixon nor Humphrey will agree to an open deal, and there is no way Wallace can force them to abide by a secret one. (About the only threat he could make would be to run as a third party candidate again in 1972, but that's a long time in the future. And Humphrey would probably welcome such a candidacy, thinking it will hurt the 1972 GOP candidate worse than it will hurt him.)
So a big bipartisan compromise instead?
 
So a big bipartisan compromise instead?

FWIW, James Michener, a Humphrey elector from PA, later wrote that if there had been no majority in the Electoral College, he would "inform all Republican and Democratic electors that I was interested in a plan whereby we would decide the election in the College between Nixon and Humphrey and not risk domination by Wallace. Rather than allow one man to dictate who our President should be, I thought it better for the nation that the two parties decide between themselves what an honorable compromise might be and then encourage their Electoral College members to swing enough votes to either Nixon or Humphrey to secure his election." http://www.slate.com/…/james_a_michener_nearfaithless_elect… Specifically, "If Nixon won the popular vote and led in electoral votes by a clear margin, I would recommend to my party leadership that they arrange a compromise with the Republicans and direct enough Democratic electors to swing to the Republican column to ensure Nixon's election..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=kS3ZCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA14
 
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All these "Wallace will make a deal with Nixon" or 'Wallace will make a deal with Humphrey" scenarios fail to answer a crucial question--where is Wallace's leverage? Neither Nixon nor Humphrey will agree to an open deal, and there is no way Wallace can force them to abide by a secret one. (About the only threat he could make would be to run as a third party candidate again in 1972, but that's a long time in the future. And Humphrey would probably welcome such a candidacy, thinking it will hurt the 1972 GOP candidate worse than it will hurt him.)
Why shouldn't Humphrey be willing to deal with Wallace, and why shouldn't Wallace prefer Humphrey to Nixon?

It helps to understand me saying that to note that in my version of the scenario, the reason Nixon loses is that he picks someone other than Spiro Agnew for VP, someone like John Lindsay perhaps (someone else's suggestion but I ran with it) who is a coastal establishment type, not a border-Southerner like Agnew, and not a hard-hat man of the people type. The premise was that this drives more people who voted for Nixon OTL to shift to Wallace instead.

Wallace is of course not technically a Democrat and his American Independent Party has zero presence in Congress, let alone controlling a single state delegation--though that could conceivably change. But the default loyalty of AIP voters is to the traditional Southern Democratic Party as they knew it--vice versa a great many Southern delegation Democrats have considerable sympathy for the AIP position. Wallace is negotiating not just with his pointless Presidential EV, he is negotiating on behalf of healing a deep rip in the Democratic party.

Now then the conventional way to spin this is that any deal Humphrey makes is a deal with the racist devil. The cartoon picture is that people like Wallace are some sort of born Klansmen, predestined by birth or anyway irrevocably stamped with the evil of their racist choices to be confirmed in racist damnation, and therefore are radioactive for any good person to touch. Indeed if they all insist on being fundamentally racist I do say to hell with them.

But here's the thing. People can change. Wallace himself changed. It is or should be well known that before he positioned himself as the "segregation forever!" champion, he had been in an earlier electoral cycle defeated for being insufficiently racist. It does not speak wonders of his character that instead of seeking a high road victory or more likely permanent martyrdom of obscurity he resolved "never to be out-n*****d again" and went full on Klansman, but the real moral of this story is that by the 1980s his position had again moderated considerably as the winds had shifted once again. Wallace ended his career in Alabama relying on the African-American vote in that state for his victory margins.

If Wallace tries playing reactionary, bring back the past hardball, he will be snubbed and Humphrey might take his chances trying to persuade Southern Democrats that he is too extreme to deal with but they really want him and not Nixon after all, and instead of cutting a deal with Wallace, Humphrey's deal is with these on the fence Southern Democrats. Humphrey might even hope to get some support from certain Republican controlled state delegations, if Nixon has left them cold enough. Anyway even with Southern defectors he probably does not need any Republican delegation states.

If Wallace is middling smart, he'll know he cannot take a temper tantrum tack. He has to position himself in a mediator position between the legitimate demands of Civil Rights and Great Society progressivism, versus the legitimate concerns of middle Americans who fear being bypassed. Acknowledging the former as shared values, Wallace will affirm his supporters want to make sure they are not forgotten, and if Humphrey has good reason to believe he is going to end the Vietnam mess pretty soon I think he and Wallace can come to quite a lot of agreements that in no way compromise the values of those who voted directly for him, and go a long way to gratify the legitimate hopes of those who favored Wallace. Obviously insofar as these people include hard line racists who demand subjugation of non-whites and a free hand for violence against them, there can be no deal. But Wallace does not have to represent himself or any of his voters as such, and let the burden fall on those who currently do think that way decide if they want to get aboard the Democratic Great Society progress bus, or slink off to form a truly reactionary party.

Wallace, in cutting a deal, will be seeking among other things to weasel his way into the Administration. That's one way of holding Humphrey to keep promises, to have the man himself looking at him across the Cabinet meeting table every day, and holding some portfolio of executive power. It works both ways of course; Wallace cannot undermine Humphrey without giving the President a perfectly good excuse to ask for Wallace's resignation.

I am taking the high road option here of supposing Wallace was cynical enough about racism and career focused enough and still enough of a New Deal Democrat to look for a high road option and offer that to his constituency, and that the South was adaptable enough that sufficient numbers of white Southern Democrats could work with African-American new Southern Democrats. Surely a certain number of people who cannot abide racial integration will flee the Democrats, but perhaps with the help of leaders such as Wallace fewer of them than OTL, and instead of first turning "Reagan Democrat" and then Republican, the South might by now be far less characteristically conservative than OTL.
 
Why shouldn't Humphrey be willing to deal with Wallace, and why shouldn't Wallace prefer Humphrey to Nixon?

You're totally missing my point. The question isn't who Wallace prefers. Nor is it whether Humphrey wants to deal with Wallace. The point is that neither Humphrey or Nixon can afford an open deal with Wallace simply because they must maintain the fiction that "the presidency is not for sale or bargain" etc. "As the campaign wore on, Nixon told reporters he was sure that neither he nor Hubert Humphrey would ever make a deal with Wallace. Humphrey, whose famous speech on civil rights at the 1948 Democratic convention had provoked Wallace and the Alabama delegation to walk out of that convention, insisted that he would never bargain with Wallace, saying: "If there's any office in this country that ought to be above any kind of deal with Mr. Wallace ... it's the presidency. I'm a no-deal man." https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/80oct/deadlock.htm

Of course all this righteousness would not necessarily prevent either Nixon or Humphrey from striking a secret deal with Wallace. But the problem with secret deals is how you enforce them.

No doubt one can argue that in cases where no candidate has a majority, deals are inevitable, and they should be accepted by the public the way that coalition agreements between parties are accepted in parliaments where no party has a majority. But the American public has never viewed the presidency in that way. Witness the "corrupt bargain" charge that plagued John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay for the rest of their lives after 1824.

And while my view that an open deal for the presidency would be politically impossible is not dependent on Wallace's reputation (deserved in 1968) for racism, that does make an open deal even harder. As I once wrote about 1960, "If you think I am exaggerating the degree of GOP resentment of an open Nixon-Byrd deal, as conservative and Republican newspaper as the Chicago Tribune warned: 'Worse things can happen in this country than the presence of Sen. Kennedy in the White House. Much worse would be the presence in the White House of a man who would be under obligations to a band of political brigands intent upon depriving citizens of their rights." Quoted in Edmund F. Kallina, Jr., Courthouse over White House: Chicago and the Presidential Election of 1960, p. 132.)" https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/wi-kennedy-jackson-1960.454526/#post-17787556
 
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To be honest I think non Dixiecrat democrats and Republicans would work something out rather then deal with Wallace.
 
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