Nation: The Jeering Section

The 1968 presidential race may well be remembered as the campaign of the hecklers. Since there was little substantive debate on the great issues, the most striking phenomena were the boos and catcalls, four-letter words and shouts of “Sieg heil!” Hordes of hecklers dogged the trail of every candidate, punctuating their speeches with yells and raspberries.

Who were they? Most were college students, but their politics varied. They included antiwar protesters and radicals who believed that the present political system must be shouted (and broken) down. Others were dissenting moderates, trying to goad candidates to speak more explicitly on the issues.

The overall effect, however, was not the stimulation of fuller debate. The hecklers’ chief accomplishment was generally to disrupt meetings and render the candidates momentarily speechless. Wallace alone found a use for the barrackers. He pointed to long-haired protesters as “anarchists,” as exemplars of the breakdown of order and respect. When the hecklers booed, Wallace bowed and blew them kisses. “They got me a million votes,” he said, adding that he needed the hecklers; silence caused him to flub his lines more than once. But late in the campaign he ran into a reverse form of hectoring. Lank-haired students wearing Wallace buttons cheered him wildly and chanted, “Kill for peace!” Such demonstrations left him dumfounded.

Help for Lincoln. Rowdies are hardly new to American politics. In the 1828 campaign, crowds castigated Andrew Jackson and his wife Rachel as bigamists because her divorce from her first husband was not final when they married. To forestall protesters in his bid for the Republican nomination in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was not above packing the galleries of the Chicago Wigwam with his cheering friends. Ulysses S. Grant’s hopes of a third term as President were thwarted by pro-Garfield hecklers on the convention floor in 1880.

Four years later, Republicans accused Grover Cleveland of siring an illegitimate child, and anti-Cleveland mobs cried derisively: “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?”, to which Cleveland’s Democrats appended: “Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!”* For all that, presidential candidates in the past were usually spared the ignominy of being heckled to their faces.

In other countries, heckling is a sometime thing. The French do not even have a word for it. In Japan, speakers were once measured by their ability to stare protesters down, but heckling has become rare since World War II. Heckling is most common in Britain, where it is something of an art, designed to test a speaker’s combativeness and quickness of wit. Appropriately, the word comes from the Middle English “hekele,” to tease or comb flax, or broadly “to tease with questions.”

The pithy putdown remains the most effective way to silence a heckler—provided, of course, he is reasonably civilized and relatively quiet. A classic was the riposte by John Wilkes, an 18th century libertine and libertarian, who heard the Earl of Sandwich roar at him in Commons: “I am convinced, Mr. Wilkes, that you will die either of a pox or on the gallows.” Wilkes parried: “That, my lord, depends on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.” Today, Prime Minister Harold Wilson can also hold his own. When a heckler shouted “Rub bish!” during a 1966 election rally, Wilson won points by imperturbably replying: “We’ll take up your special interest in a moment, sir.”

Ex-Footballers. The U.S. candidates of 1968 seldom proved as adept, if only because the heckling for the most part was deliberately disruptive. Humphrey tried to ignore his tormentors, then to outtalk them, with uneven success. Nixon developed elaborate techniques to thwart hecklers. At indoor rallies, his aides often refused to admit unkempt students or others who looked like troublemakers. If shouting started, a soundman turned up the p.a. system to earsplitting level. Bevies of Nixon-aires, mostly off-duty airline stewardesses, did their best to drown out the dissidents with chants of “We want Nixon!” Republicans also hired beefy ex-footballers to mingle with outdoor crowds. They stood next to protesters and told them to put down placards, claiming they could not see, or to be quiet, contending that they could not hear the speaker.

Some U.S. politicians have discovered that a better way is to let hecklers hang themselves with their own words. When Robert Kennedy visited Tokyo’s Waseda University in 1962, he made a gallant attempt to quiet an anti-American mob by inviting the noisiest of the hecklers to share the microphone. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, used the same tactic this year with more success. And at a rally last week, Nixon made the best of a sticky situation by giving opponents an opportunity to criticize without heckling. He allowed 1,200 Syracuse University students to sing a ballad to counter his campaign, and even silenced his supporters who tried to interrupt them. The song the students chose was Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence, a theme that has hardly marked the 1968 campaign.

* Cleveland admitted paternity but won anyway, aided by the opposition’s slur that Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” He was again the winner in 1892 against Benjamin Harrison.