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When Florida Counted: 1972

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By GARY R. MORMINO Tribune correspondent

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 22, 2008

TAMPA - Presidential candidates took turns lambasting an unpopular war, a flagging economy and a controversial president. In Washington, a sitting Republican president urged the faithful to circle the wagons; in Florida, partisans swore that the president was as dangerous as his vice president was loony. The field included a woman, who was black, and a fiery populist.

It was March 1972. Florida counted.

At that time, raw wounds still festered from the tumultuous 1960s. Richard Nixon was president and not yet disgraced, and Watergate was the name of a fashionable complex in Washington, not yet a scandal.

The Democratic Party, still reeling from Nixon's triumph in 1968, appeared hopelessly splintered across ideological, ethnic and racial lines. A dozen Democrats contended for the nomination, and Florida's March 14 primary was a key to victory.

Most Democratic contenders proudly stood on the liberal edges of the party.

Hubert Humphrey, the hapless nominee in 1968, had fought for liberal causes since he burst upon the national scene in 1948. The press regarded the U.S. Senator from Minnesota as the party favorite.

Eugene McCarthy, also a Minnesota Senator, was a poet, a former baseball player and the darling of the Left in 1968.

Edmund Muskie, a popular U.S. Senator from Maine, was the establishment favorite whose candidacy never caught fire on the national stage.
George McGovern was a little-known U.S. Senator from South Dakota, a WWII hero and an unabashed critic of the war in Vietnam.

Shirley Chisholm, a congresswoman from New York, became the first African-American to seriously run for the presidency.

John Lindsay, a silk-stocking mayor of New York City, hoped to capitalize on the many Empire State expatriates living in Florida.

Henry "Scoop" Jackson was to the State of Washington what Claude Pepper was to Florida, a Cold Warrior with liberal credentials.

The man who would capture the hearts and votes of Floridians, however, was no liberal. He was George C. Wallace. A national figure since June 1963, Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door to resist the integration of Alabama's public schools.

Elected governor of Alabama in 1963, Wallace electrified the nation in 1968 as a candidate on the American Independent Party. He lost the election, but his message endured.

In 1972, he had a bigger impact. Wallace was running as a Democrat, and his message was no longer dismissed as red-neck rhetoric. His new wife, Cornelia, insisted he discard the old polyester suits and slicked-back hair for double-knit suits and blow-dried hair.

On the most compelling issues of 1968, Wallace's answers resonated with Florida voters.

By 1972, Vietnam had become a national migraine. Most of the Democrats wanted immediate withdrawal. Wallace's message was unambiguous: Either win or leave.

Crime had spiked in the 1960s, and Americans were mad. Democrats typically stressed federal programs to uplift poor people and improve the conditions that foster crime. Wallace was unequivocal: Law and order today, tomorrow and forever.

Wallace's favorite target was the poster children of 1972: long-haired, peace-lovin', draft-evadin' hippies. The only four-letter words that hippies did not know, sneered Wallace, were s-o-a-p and w-o-r-k!

The issue in the 1972 Florida primary was busing. It's an issue that hounded Reubin Askew, Florida's governor. A Democrat and populist determined to modernize the state and wrest Florida from the control of small-minded politicians and corporate interests, Askew, like Georgia's Jimmy Carter, was known as a moderate New South governor.

The champion of integration realized that housing patterns segregated blacks and whites. Busing was a necessary evil to promote fairness and enable people to overcome their fears.

Askew appealed to the voters' sense of fairness when he insisted that on a nonbinding straw ballot in 1972. It asked two questions: Do Floridians approve of quality education for all children? Do Floridians approve of busing?

Record numbers of Floridians voted March 14, 1972. Wallace not only won the state, he swept every county in Florida. Although Wallace won about 41 percent of the primary vote, about 8 in 10 Floridians voted against busing. The Alabama spell-binder won 60 percent of Florida's white vote.

In Hillsborough and Pasco counties, Wallace won twice as many votes as his nearest rival. The Alabama populist dominated in places such as Plant City and Dade City but also Davis Islands and Carrollwood. Curiously, Tampa's black precincts went for Lindsay, not Chisholm.

Upper Pinellas County voted for Wallace in such numbers that a Tribune reporter claimed that Ulmerton Road had become "somewhat of a Mason-Dixon line."

While voters punched ballots in Tampa, a 21-year-old loser mapped his path to fame. Arthur Bremer vowed to assassinate Wallace or President Nixon, whichever was more convenient. In May, Bremer followed Wallace to a shopping center in Maryland, pulled out a .38 pistol and shot the candidate, paralyzing him.

McGovern persevered to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, only to be demolished in November by President Nixon.

In one of history's supreme ironies, Nixon's paranoia undermined him precisely at the moment he should have been most secure.

Gary R. Mormino directs the Florida Studies Program at USF St. Petersburg. E-mail him at gmormino@stpt.usf.edu.

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