The Headless Horseman

"I would like to look you in the eye and tell you that he wants to run," American Party Chairman T. Coleman Andrews Jr. told the 1,900 delegates to the party's first national convention in Louisville last week. "But he looked me in the eye and told me he was not physically able." Andrews then read a telegram from George Wallace in which the stricken Alabama Governor reaffirmed that he would not accept the nomination or a draft as the party's presidential candidate.

Wallace loyalists were having none of it, and vigorously mounted a "draft-Wallace" movement. Some of the zealots even suggested a conspiracy, charging that someone on Wallace's staff had forged the Sherman statement. "Wallace didn't tell me personally he wouldn't run," said one West Virginia delegate. "Anybody could have sent that telegram."

Chairman Andrews, fearing a possible outbreak of violence, arranged midway through the three-day convention for Wallace to again declare his noncandidacy via a telephone hookup to his bedside in the Spain Rehabilitation Center in Birmingham. The delegates, many of them with tears in their eyes, sat in somber silence as Wallace, his weak voice amplified through two loudspeakers, explained that "I have two open places still draining" and "another big pocket of infection." That convinced enough disbelievers to make the convention seem an exercise in futility.

The delegates nonetheless went through the motions. All but swallowed up in the cavernous Freedom Hall, they dressed in red, white and blue ensembles, sang along when the organist played Yankee Doodle Boy and God Bless America, and dutifully waved their placards (read one: THIS is OUR COUNTRY AND WE AIM TO GET IT BACK --BUY LETTUCE AND GRAPES).

The party platform called for law-and-order, stronger antidrug legislation, more restrictive immigration laws, voluntary school prayer and restoration of full trade with the governments of Rhodesia and South Africa. Other planks opposed public housing, Women's Liberation, busing to achieve school integration, the "no win" tactics of limited wars and U.S. financing of "belligerence in the Middle East."

No amount of speechifying, however, could dim the fact that the American Party, founded three years ago and made up of various state parties that had backed Wallace in the 1968 presidential election, was what one dispirited conventioneer called a "headless horseman." The delegates nominated a lame-duck Republican Congressman from California named John Schmitz for President and Thomas Anderson, 61, conservative publisher of Florida Grower and Rancher magazine for Vice President.

Schmitz, 42, a John Bircher who failed to regain the Republican nomination in the California primary in June, was succinct about his personal platform: "One--foreign. Never go to war unless you plan to win. Two--domestic. Those who go to work ought to live better than those who don't." The sentiments were familiar but, with George gone, the old fire was missing.

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