The basic facts of 1968 roll out like a drumbeat: The Tet Offensive, Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the election of Richard Nixon. And the beat goes on. 1968 was, in that overworked term, a watershed year. America’s stalemate in Vietnam and descent into domestic upheaval lifted Nixon into the White House on a wave of white middle-class resentment that continues to roil the country 50 years on.
With all that in mind, there is nothing hyperbolic in the title of Michael Schumacher’s The Contest: The 1968 Election and the War for America’s Soul (University of Minnesota Press). In the past, the Milwaukee native (he’s lived for many years in Kenosha) has written biographies of Allen Ginsberg, Eric Clapton and Francis Ford Coppola. The Contest is his first full-blown history of a historical period and in a sense, it’s also an emotional and political autobiography of a formative year in the author’s life.
“I was 18 years old then, starting college and taking political science courses,” he recalls. “My friends and I really followed the election. It mattered to us.”
Schumacher’s subject has been analyzed many times before and the first drafts of 1968’s history appeared while events were still unfolding. “I don’t know if anything can be new,” he admits. But in researching The Contest, he surveyed thousands of pages of oral history recently digitalized or mislaid for years in archives. “I got the voices of many people who aren’t around anymore,” he continues. Schumacher sought to depict the era’s sense of turmoil.
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Three contenders sparred in the 1968 presidential election. The winner emerged from the Republican camp and held the White House until driven out by the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s appeal to fear sounds familiar today but his 1960s brand of conservatism would nowadays place him to the left of many liberals on some issues. Third party candidate George Wallace ran on a race-baiting populist campaign that fractured the Democratic Party’s longtime hold on the South. At their disrupted Chicago convention, the Democrats put up Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a well-intentioned liberal burdened by his refusal to entirely disavow Johnson’s Vietnam policy.
Schumacher feels sorry for Humphrey. In The Contest, he calls him “a casualty in the war for America’s soul.” Humphrey was trapped between his membership in the political old guard and the yearning for something different expressed by the New Left and the antiwar movement. Unable to bridge the divide, which Schumacher interprets in generation-gap terms, Humphrey floundered on Election Day. Like other recent historians who have investigated the era, Schumacher came away from The Contest with sympathy for the man the antiwar activists hated most, Johnson. “I do believe he will be treated better by history over time. He was a giant,” Schumacher says. “I do not agree with him on Vietnam but he was a phenomenal leader for getting the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act across. My respect for him grew.”
The Contest is large and filled with facts, telling details and observations about the people and events of its momentous year. Schumacher’s portraits of 1968’s key political players are well taken and he spends many pages on the student activists whose protests helped push the year’s events.
