May 15, 1972: Governor George Wallace Is Shot

May 15, 1972: Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, campaigning for the next day’s Maryland Primary, is shot at the Laurel Shopping Center, about halfway between Baltimore and Washington. He survives, but is paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

 

Although Wallace already had significant support from the blue-collar and country votes in Maryland and Michigan, which also had its Primary the next day, it may have been a sympathy vote that put him over the top. In Maryland, Wallace won 38 percent of the vote, to 26 percent for Senator and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and 22 percent for Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. In Michigan, it’s Wallace 51, McGovern 27, Humphrey 16.

Wallace with his wife Cornelia,

at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland,

holding up the May 17 Baltimore Sun headline on his win

The shooter, Arthur Bremer, a janitor from Milwaukee, had been following Wallace around, after realizing that his original target, the man Wallace wanted to replace as President, Richard Nixon, would be too difficult to get close to. His motive was self-aggrandizement, not politics.

 

An appeal to have his mental illness taken into account was rejected, and he was sentenced to 53 years in prison, and was released after 35, in 2007. As of May 15 2022, he is still alive, 71 years old. Since it could not be proven that Wallace’s death in 1998 was directly connected to the shooting, he was not then charged with murder.

Wallace could not continue as a candidate, but, if any single day can be said to be the one where it became clear that the Democrats were doomed for November, this was it. McGovern won only 2 Counties in Michigan, and only 2 in Maryland. Humphrey didn’t win any in either.

To people the Democratic candidates needed to reach, the disaffected within each party's ranks and the independents, Humphrey, a civil rights and labor icon who had been Vice President under Lyndon Johnson in the years of the Great Society, race riots and the early Vietnam War, represented a past they didn’t want to go back to; and McGovern, the favorite of the younger, more radical Democrats, represented a future that terrified them.

Each in their own way, Wallace and President Richard Nixon represented a past they did want to go back to, a time when they were the people being listened to, not black people, Hispanics, gays, feminists, abortion-rights activists, people looking to get drugs decriminalized. They wanted, as both Wallace and Nixon said, "Law and order," and seemed willing to give up other people's rights to get it -- not realizing that they might have to give up something themselves.

The Democratic Party's only hope seemed to be Nixon falling into a terrible scandal. He did -- but nobody seemed to care until the Spring of 1973.

When Wallace ran as a 3rd-party candidate in 1968, he got just under 10 million votes, and won 5 Southern States with 45 Electoral Votes: His native Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, plus 1 Electoral Vote in North Carolina, to give him 46.

Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, and Wallace's presence on the ballot may have swung several other States to Nixon: Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Kentucky, Delaware, Alaska, Ohio, Missouri, New Jersey, Illinois, Wisconsin and California, for as many as 206 Electoral Votes. Wallace couldn't beat Nixon, but he did beat Humphrey, despite finishing far behind him.

Overall, in 1968, the combined Nixon-Wallace vote meant that 57 percent of American voters, representing 347 Electoral Votes, were willing to say, "We have had enough of progress for the poor and minorities." In 1972, with McGovern edging Humphrey for the Democratic nomination, and almost everybody who hoped to vote for Wallace in November going to Nixon, Nixon won 60.7 percent of the vote, the 2nd-most ever behind Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, and 49 out of the 50 States, all but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, for 520 Electoral Votes to McGovern's 17 (and 1 stray Elector).

So which was the nightmare scenario: Wallace dying, or Wallace surviving with only a minor wound?

* Had Wallace died: He would have become a martyr to white supremacy, and, eventually, this country might have had a President Jesse Helms.

* Had Wallace been able to continue campaigning: He could have won the Democratic nomination, and the Party would have been fractured, possibly irrevocably, in its worst shape in 100 years. A new liberal party would have had to grow out of the old New Deal coalition that McGovern, Humphrey, and the later Senator Robert F. Kennedy or New York (who was trying to do so more in the way adopted by McGovern than in the way Humphrey had always done it) had been trying to revive.

And with former Governor Ronald Reagan of California ready to take up the conservative mantle in 1976, it might have taken many years for the Democrats to recover -- just as it actually did, until 1992, as the 1976 win of former Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia represented something of a false dawn, a win that wouldn't have been possible if not for the falls of Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, in separate scandals.

Wallace did run for President again in 1976, but he didn't get very far. Aside from his home State of Alabama, he didn't win a single Primary, although he did win the Mississippi Caucus. He finished 2nd in Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina, but Carter projected himself as a son of the "New South" that was ready to move past the hatreds of the 1960s. His moment had passed.

Plus, Wallace faced a problem that Roosevelt didn't face: Television coverage of himself in a wheelchair. Although he did get elected to a 3rd and a 4th term as Governor, and lived until 1998 (though in constant pain throughout), he didn't look healthy enough to be President in 1976. A big part of his 1968 and 1972 persona was that he was a strong man who would hold the line against them. After being shot, he didn't look like he could hold the line against anything.

Art imitated life: The film Taxi Driver is partly based on Bremer's pursuit of Wallace, although there appears to have been no real-life counterpart to the teenage prostitute played by Jodie Foster. Then, life imitated art: Inspired by Robert De Niro’s taxi driver and his desire to protect people like Foster's character, John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

*

May 15, 1972 was a Monday. There were 9 Major League Baseball games played that day, none postponed due to the attempted assassination. I suspect that, given the polarization he engendered in the American people, if Wallace had died before the games could begin, none would have been postponed, except maybe the one in Maryland, in Baltimore, had the Orioles been at home that day. But they weren't:

* The New York Mets beat the Montreal Expos, 5-3 at Shea Stadium. Tommie Agee and Jim Fregosi hit home runs in support of Jon Matlack.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Chicago Cubs, 4-0 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Woodie Fryman pitched a 6-hit shutout, to beat Ferguson Jenkins. The next night, the Cubs won, 8-1, with Rick Monday hitting 3 home runs. Greg Luzinski hit one off the mockup of the Liberty Bell on the Vet's mezzanine. After that, to make sure that he would remain the only one ever to hit it, it was moved up to the stadium's roof.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 4-1 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente hit a 3-run homer, and Willie Stargell went 1-for-4. For the Cards, Lou Brock went 1-for-4 with a stolen base, and Joe Torre went 1-for-3 and was hit with a pitch. Dock Ellis outpitched Bob Gibson.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit. Merv Rettenmund hit a home run, and Brooks Robinson went 2-for-4 in support of Jim Palmer, who helped his own cause with a triple in this last year without the designated hitter in the American League. Al Kaline did not enter the game for the Tigers.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Minnesota Twins, 4-3 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Harmon Killebrew hit a home run. Rod Carew went 0-for-3, but drove in a run with a sacrifice fly. But knuckleballer Wilbur Wood outpitched Jim Perry.

* The Kansas City Royals beat the Texas Rangers, 5-4 at Kansas City Municipal Stadium.

* The Houston Astros beat the Atlanta Braves, 8-2 at the Astrodome in Houston. Hank Aaron had 2 hits, but neither of them was a home run. He had 645 of those for his career.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the San Diego Padres, 2-1 at San Diego Stadium. (It was later renamed Jack Murphy Stadium, Qualcomm Stadium and SDCCU Stadium.) Frank Robinson, in his only season with the Dodgers, went 0-for-3, but also walked and scored, driven in by Bobby Valentine.

* The Oakland Athletics beat the California Angels, 2-1 at Anaheim Stadium. (It was later renamed Edison International Field, and Angel Stadium of Anaheim.) A home run was hit for the A's by... Angel Mangual. Not Reggie Jackson, who went 0-for-4. John "Blue Moon" Odom was the winning pitcher. Nolan Ryan left the game in the 4th, after giving up Mangual's homer, but it appears to have been due to an injury. On this day, the trade that sent Ryan to Anaheim and Fregosi to Flushing Meadow looked like a win for the Mets.

* The Cincinnati Reds were supposed to play the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, but the game was rained out. It was made up as part of a doubleheader the next day. The Reds swept, winning the opener, 4-3; and the nightcap, 2-0. 

In the twinbill, Pete Rose went 1-for-6 with 2 walks and 2 RBIs, Johnny Bench 1-for-4 (he didn't play in the 2nd game), Joe Morgan 0-for-4 with 3 walks, and Willie McCovey did not play.

* The New York Yankees were supposed to play the Cleveland Indians at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and the Boston Red Sox were supposed to play the Milwaukee Brewers at Milwaukee County Stadium. Both of these games were rained out, and neither was ever made up.

Football was out of season. The hockey season ended 4 days earlier, when the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup, beating the New York Rangers in 6 games.

The basketball season wasn't quite over. True, 4 days before the Bruins' Cup win, the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Championship, beating the New York Knicks in 5 games. But the American Basketball Association Finals were ongoing. In Game 4, at the Nassau Coliseum, the New York Nets beat the Indiana Pacers, 110-105, to tie the series. But the Pacers won the next 2 games to take the title.