“You feel you have all known this somewhere. Never again will you read about Berlin in the ’30s without remembering this wild confrontation here of two irrational forces. The American sickness has finally been localized.”
These words were written about a noxious political rally that took place shortly before a presidential election at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. But they don’t refer to what happened on Sunday night when former President Donald Trump spoke at the world’s most famous arena.
Rather, they were written nearly 50 years ago, in 1968, by Richard Strout, a columnist for The New Republic, when another demagogue preaching division and fear spoke at MSG — former Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
In a year of terrifying political events that shone a bright and unsettling light on the racism, intolerance and hatred in American society, Wallace’s 1968 election-eve speech in New York was arguably one of the most unsettling. In the heart of liberal America, Wallace’s army of followers gathered — and as was the case in every other venue where Wallace spoke that year, violence soon followed.
Wallace’s 1968 election-eve speech in New York was arguably one of the most unsettling.
Outside the arena, fistfights and shoving matches broke out with anti-communist John Birchers, neo-Nazis and Klansmen on one side and Trotskyites, Yippies and Black Power activists on the other.Inside, a country music band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Bless America,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Dixie,” while the assembled crowd chanted, “N—–s get out!” “Go back to Africa!” and “White power!” The protesters, who had sneaked their way past security, responded with “Pig! Pig! Pig!” and “Two-four-six-eight, we don’t want a fascist state!”
When Wallace finally took the stage, he thrust his arms in the air in victory like the amateur pugilist he’d been in his youth. “I used to be a boxer, and I been wanting to fight the main event in the Garden for a long time,” he told the crowd. The response, said a writer for Newsday, “may have been the loudest, most terrifying, sustained human din ever heard in New York.”
Wallace’s speech followed its usual path. As the protesters chanted epithets at him, he threw them back at them. “Why don’t you come on down here. … I’ll autograph your sandals,” he mocked. “I have a new word to teach you: S-O-A-P.”
As fights broke out, Wallace didn’t ask for peace. Instead, he sneered at the assaulted demonstrators. “Well, you come for trouble, you got it.”In words that echo Wallace’s rhetorical prodigy, Donald Trump, he made clear the stakes for the upcoming election: “The American people are not going to stand by and see the security of our nation imperiled, and they’re not going to stand by and see this nation destroyed, I can assure you that.”
Wallace was talking about the threat of racial integration. Back in 1968, crime rates were actually rising, and riots in major American cities actually took place (only months earlier, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., dozens of American cities exploded in violence. Smoke from fires in Washington, D.C., floated over the White House, making for the most violent period of domestic upheaval since the Civil War).
In words that echo Wallace’s rhetorical prodigy, Donald Trump, he made clear the stakes for the upcoming election.
Trump’s target is the largely anecdotal fear of migrant crime and crime rates that continue to decline, but, like Wallace’s rhetoric from nearly 50 years ago, it’s also fear of the other — fear of Black men in 1968 to fear of a Black woman in 2024. Perhaps, above all, Wallace’s appeal was driven by fear or change — fear that the progress of the present would replace the nostalgia of the past. One analyst called Wallace’s message “an ideology of preservatism” — or, in modern terms, Making America Great Again.In 1968, Wallace warned that “anarchy prevails today in the streets of the large cities of our country, making it unsafe for you to even go to a political rally.”
In 2024 at a Madison Square Garden, Trump said he “will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.” According to Trump, “We will crush violent crime and give our police the support, protection, resources and respect that they so dearly deserve.”
Wallace’s solution in 1968 was the same, albeit more colorful. “The way to stop a riot is to hit someone on the head,” he used to say.
In 1968, Wallace warned about the pseudo-intellectuals, “the liberals and the left-wingers” and the bearded college professors who couldn’t park their bicycles straight. In 2024, the bogeymen are the “woke liberals,” the communists and the trans activists. Different names but the same target. Like Trump, Wallace taunted and ridiculed his political opponents … but then again, he never called them “an enemy within” or threatened his political opponents with retribution. He even accepted his electoral defeat in 1968. Wallace was one of the most openly racist politicians in modern American history (he said in almost every speech that he never said a derogatory word about any person “because of race, color, creed, religions or national origin,” which might have been true in public, but certainly wasn’t in private). His speeches were full of racial tropes. In Alabama he was an avowed white supremacist — though he toned that down when he campaigned for president. Still, even Wallace was rarely as ostentatiously racist as Trump. The kind of crude humor at Trump’s MSG hatefest, like calling Puerto Rico “a garbage island,” comparing Kamala Harris to a “prostitute” or calling her the “Antichrist,” likely wouldn’t have occurred at a Wallace rally (though when Wallace spoke, the chances that a full-fledged melee would take place were much more likely). Like Trump, Wallace taunted and ridiculed his political opponents … but then again, he never called them an ‘enemy within.’ But one of the biggest differences between Wallace and Trump is their positions within the political ecosystem. Wallace was an outsider, vilified by liberals and distrusted by conservatives (albeit as much for his liberal economic positions as his racial views). Moderate Republicans (yes, they once existed) who believed that the GOP should seek the support of Black voters were outraged by Wallace’s overtly racist appeals.Wallace ran as a third-party candidate in 1968, and though he had one of the best third-party results in American political history, he still received only 13.5% of the vote. Though he was a Democrat (an essential political affiliation in the Deep South), he was largely shunned by the national Democratic Party, even when he joined the party and ran for president as a Democrat in 1972. Republicans, over time, adopted his rhetorical flourishes, his conservative populism and his attacks on “big government.” But they went out of the way to use a dog whistle rather than Wallace’s train whistle. (It is important to note that Wallace, running for president again in 1972, survived an assassination attempt, which led him to become a born-again Christian and renounce his past racist and segregationist views.) In short, Wallace succeeded in influencing the political debate … but enjoyed none of his own political success. Nearly five decades later, his political toxicity and his divisive rhetoric haven’t been dispatched to the ash can of history. Instead, it has been adopted and weaponized by the modern Republican Party. On Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, Donald Trump didn’t just step in George Wallace’s shoes. He put on a much bigger and uglier pair.
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
