Special Lecture

1968, Turning Point or Detour

Instructor:  Dr. Sheldon Hackney

JUDY AND DONALD SMITH
VISITING SCHOLAR

Course Description:   Just as the election of 1932 is seen as a political realignment of the electorate that brought to an end a period of Republican Party hegemony, the resulting era of New Deal liberalism persisted until 1968.  Only a national hero could succeed as a Republican presidential candidate in that period, but 1968 was a tumultuous year in many ways:  the public shifted from support of the war in Vietnam to opposition, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered by a racist rifleman in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, there were major disruptions in Chicago at the Democratic convention, and then Hubert Humphrey lost the election to Richard Nixon, who pursued a “southern strategy” and carried the rim South.  In 1972, the South was solid again, but it was solidly Republican.  An era of conservative dominance was underway.  What drove that dramatic reorientation?  Where did the various elements of the new conservative majority come from: economic conservatives, social conservatives, the Christian right, neo-conservatives, and perhaps others?  Can they stick together? Is it a coincidence that the only Democrats elected to the presidency since 1968 are centrist Southerners?  Can the new Republican majority continue its dominance?

Biographical Information:  Sheldon Hackney is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania where he writes and teaches about the American South, the Sixties and the American national identity.  His first book, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (1969), won the Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association and the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association.  After serving as the provost of Princeton University (1972-75), Hackney was president of Tulane University (1975-81) and The University of Pennsylvania (1981-93).  His service as chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-97) is the subject of The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture Wars (2002) and One America Indivisible (1997).  Mr. Hackney has written and spoken widely about higher education and about American culture.  He is at work on a biography of his mentor, the eminent historian, C. Vann Woodward.