1 янв 1968 г. - Richard M. Nixon elected

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Silent majority: Term used by President Richard Nixon in a 1969 speech to describe those who supported his positions but did not publicly assert their voices, in contrast to those involved in the antiwar, civil rights, and women’s movements

On the Republican side, former vice president Richard M. Nixon had engineered a remarkable political comeback. After losing the presidential campaign in 1960 and the California gubernatorial race in 1962, he had left public life to practice law at a high-powered New York firm. Securely outside the GOP leadership, he was insulated from blame for the liberal Johnson’s rout of the conservative Goldwater, and he carefully engineered a return to electoral politics after 1964. Nixon and his advisors courted two groups of voters whose long political loyalty to the Democrats was wavering: working-class white voters in the North and white voters of all social classes in the South.

Offended by the antiwar movement and the counterculture, and disturbed by urban riots, northern blue-collar voters, especially Catholics, had drifted away from their longtime loyalty to the Democratic Party. Growing up in the Great Depression, these families were often admirers of FDR and perhaps even hung his picture on their living-room wall. But FDR had been gone for three decades. Social scientists Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard Scammon captured the disaffection of working-class white Democrats in their study The Real Majority (1970). The book profiled people such as this forty-seven-year-old working-class woman from Dayton, Ohio: “[She] is afraid to walk the streets alone at night…. She has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights.” Moreover, they wrote, “she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on campus.” The political backing of uneasy families like hers were increasingly up for grabs — a fact Republicans knew well.


It was not only Republicans who tapped working-class anxieties over student protests and urban riots. The controversial governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, entered the 1968 presidential campaign as a third-party presidential candidate, trading on his fame as an unrepentant segregationist. He had tried to stop the federal government from desegregating the University of Alabama in 1963, and he was equally obstructive during the Selma crisis of 1965. Appealing to whites in both the North and the South, Wallace called for “law and order” and attacked welfare programs; he claimed that mothers on public assistance were, thanks to Johnson’s generous Great Society, “breeding children as a cash crop.”

George Wallace had become famous as the segregationist governor who stood “in the schoolhouse door” to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama in 1963 (though after being confronted by federal marshals, he stepped aside). In 1968, he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination on a populist “law and order” platform that appealed to many blue-collar voters concerned about antiwar protests, urban riots, and the rise of the counterculture. In this 1968 photograph, Wallace greets supporters on the campaign trail.


Wallace hoped to carry the South and deny both Nixon and Humphrey the needed electoral majority, forcing the election into the House of Representatives. He fell short of that objective, but did collect 13.5 percent of the popular vote. More significantly, Wallace’s insurgent White House bid framed a set of politically effective issues — liberal elitism, welfare policies, and law and order — for the next generation of mainstream conservatives.



Nixon offered a subtler version of Wallace’s populism in a two-pronged approach. He adopted what his advisors called the “southern strategy,” which aimed at attracting southern white voters fervently opposed to the civil rights gains by African Americans. Nixon won the backing of a particularly influential former Democrat, and key southerner, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential nominee. Nixon quietly assured Thurmond that as a candidate he had to support civil rights, but a future Nixon administration would go easy on enforcement. Nixon also ran against the antiwar movement, urban riots, and protests, calling for a strict adherence to “law and order.” He pledged to represent the “quiet voice” of the “great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators.” Here Nixon was speaking not just to the South but to the many millions of suburban voters nationwide anxious about the spread of social disorder.

Nixon’s twin strategies — southern and suburban — worked. He received 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, defeating him by a scant 500,000 votes out of 73 million cast (Map 27.3). The numerical closeness of the race could not disguise the devastating Democratic collapse. Humphrey received almost 12 million fewer votes than Johnson had in 1964. The white South largely abandoned the Democratic Party, an exodus that would accelerate in the 1970s. In the North, meanwhile, both Nixon and Wallace made significant inroads among traditionally Democratic voters. The New Deal coalition that had kept Democrats unified for thirty years splintered and Nixon won the election. Nixon’s 1968 victory foreshadowed — and helped propel — a decade of electoral realignment.

With Lyndon B. Johnson’s surprise withdrawal and the assassination of the party’s most charismatic contender, Robert Kennedy, the Democrats faced the election of 1968 in disarray. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who left the Democrats to run as a third-party candidate, campaigned on the backlash against the civil rights movement. As late as mid-September Wallace held the support of 21 percent of the voters. But in November he received only 13.5 percent of the vote, winning five southern states. Republican Richard M. Nixon, who like Wallace emphasized “law and order” in his campaign, defeated Hubert H. Humphrey with only 43.4 percent of the popular vote.


The unrest of the late 1960s had fractured the Democratic Party and left an opening for Republicans to grow in influence. Though he was an ardent anticommunist, President Nixon was a centrist by nature and temperament and not part of the archconservative Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. He accepted the basic idea that the government should play a role in the economy, and thus proved to be a transitional figure between postwar liberalism and the rightward turn of the post-Vietnam era. Nixon led rightward by capitalizing on the nation’s unrest and uneasy mood through carefully timed speeches and displays of moral outrage.

In late 1969, following another massive antiwar rally in Washington, Nixon gave a televised speech in which he referred to his supporters as the silent majority. It was classic Nixonian rhetoric. In a single phrase, he turned a complex generational and cultural struggle into us-against-them — and placed himself on the side of ordinary Americans against rabble-rousers and troublemakers. It was an oversimplification, but silent majority stuck. For the remainder of his presidency, he projected himself as the defender of a reasonable middle ground under assault from the radical left.

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