George Wallace and California: The Beginning (1968)

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In the 1968 presidential campaign, George Wallace was the nominee for the American Independent Party. In the general election, he captured forty-six electoral votes, all in the South, and 13.5% of the popular vote. This thirty-minute film, produced by Fidelity Productions in 1968, describes the early stages of the Wallace campaign in California in late 1967. It begins with clips of Wallace making campaign speeches, demonstrating the power of his impassioned rhetoric; describes Wallace’s appeal to working-class people with clips of average people voicing their support for George Wallace; and explains the difficulties of running a campaign, including the problems posed by California election law. (In 1968 California had closed primaries, and a party needed 66,000 registered voters by January 1, 1968, in order to appear on the November ballot. The campaign had to persuade voters to switch their party registration from Republican or Democrat to the American Independent Party. They obtained 100,000 signatures in less than two months.)

This film was was preserved through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.