Sen. Ted Cruz, R.-Texas, watched returns from the Wisconsin primary election Tuesday night in Milwaukee’s Serb Hall, where he had received a standing ovation four days prior.
In one of those absurd historical mash-ups that is probably wildly unfair to Cruz, American Serb Memorial Hall also the same place where gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson dropped acid and covered George Wallace for the first time in 1972.
Now, according the hall’s own website, it has been overhauled and expanded to seat up to 2,000 people. Back then, the hall was half “lounge and bowling alley” and the other half was an auditorium with a capacity of “about 300,” in Thompson’s acidic estimation.
The Alabama governor, sworn enemy of desegregation and bankers and eastern elites, was scheduled to speak somewhere else later in the evening. Yet, according to Thompson, Wallace didn’t hold anything back when speaking in this neighborhood “full of Polish factory-workers just getting off work”: “It was the first time I’d ever seen Wallace in person. There were no seats in the hall; everybody was standing” — and then some.
“The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert,” Thompson wrote in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Thompson was a die-hard George McGovern supporter, yet he wrote that “Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back … it was a flat-out fire and brimstone performance.”
As one of the supporters there that night told him, “This guy is the real thing. I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain’t the same as the others. He just comes right out and says it.”
Again, the historical happenstance is unfair to Cruz. The candidate in this election cycle who draws more comparisons to Wallace is Donald Trump and even that, I would argue, is well overdone.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Wallace was seeking the Democratic nomination, not the Republican one, and getting a not-insignificant following before he was crippled by a would-be assassin’s bullet in May of 72.
Rather, the point of this reminisce is about the stickiness of history, about how the past is with us, about how places are still haunted, ghosts or no. There continue to be many fine productions at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. Yet what theatergoer in the last hundred years or so ever went to a play there and did not think, at least for a moment, that this is the place where Lincoln was shot?
