After a month of preparations, on September 12 the American 1st Army, along with four French divisions, attacked the German salient at St. Mihiel, where more than sixty-thousand soldiers were dug in. It was the Americans’ debut as an independent battle force. The French town had been held by the Germans for four years, and, wrote John J. Pershing, commanding general, “The salient was practically a great field fortress. It had, however, the characteristic weakness of all salients in that it could be attacked from both flanks in converging operations.”

A fearsome four-hour barrage preceded the American advance that morning. The first attack on the salient, from the south across the Moselle Valley, began in drizzle at about 5:00 A.M. and was followed by an Allied bombardment of the western side three hours later. “There was a chill breeze blowing,” Pershing later recalled, “and its direction was such that no sound of firing could be heard from the artillery in our immediate front. … The sky over the battlefield, both before and after dawn, aflame with exploding shells, star signals, burning supply dumps and villages, presented a scene at once picturesque and terrible.” After seventeen months of training, the general observed with tempered pride, American soldiers were fighting and dying under their own flag.

The 1st Army made such quick work of the German barbed-wire barricades that day—using cutters, axes, bangalore torpedoes, and bridging across fences with chicken wire—that the French general Henri Pétain later sent a group of his officers to visit the site to learn their techniques. The Americans had advanced five miles into the south side of the salient by midnight of the twelfth, completing almost two days of the plan in one long day’s effort. Pershing’s line was in place by the next day, when his southern 1st Division and western 26th joined at Vigneulles-lès-Hattonchâtel, trapping the Germans. By September 16 the salient was pinched off, nearly sixteen thousand German soldiers had been taken prisoner, and the long-captive town of St.-Mihiel was freed, although a good deal of it had been destroyed in the barrage. The Americans suffered seven thousand casualties in the operation.

In its September 11 “Talk of the Town” section The New Yorker noted the effect of the war on book advertising: some worthy literary titles that would once have been called “first-rate” or “highly acclaimed” were now “imperative” reading, at least in the words of the Council on Books in Wartime. “We think ‘imperative’ is a funnier word than ‘directive’ or ‘flak,’ ” concluded the magazine. “Certain books … have been pronounced ‘imperative’ by the Council, with all the straight-faced solemnity of a priest blessing a pack of hounds. Americans, although rather cocky about some things, like to be commanded in their reading and welcome any publishing promotion which gives them a new title with an air of finality.” The magazine’s writers—obviously straining under not only the war’s relentless horrors but the pluckiness required of all who wrote about it—made a search and determined that the last day that “warlike tidings” hadn’t spoiled the New York Times’s front page had been November 9, 1938, when the urgent stories were the New York gubernatorial election, the Dionne quintuplets’ planned tonsillectomies, and, in Georgia, a man’s marriage to his eleven-year-old first cousin.

The fall television season introduced some new faces in old formulas: “Julia,” which premiered in September, was thin dramatic fare, but it came with Diahann Carroll, television’s first true black star who did not simply receive co-billing or play in eye-rolling comedy. “Julia” went on against the long-feared “Red Skelton Show” and survived. The new “Adam 12” was decidedly square and derived from real cases like its television ancestor “Dragnet,” while the other two premiering cop dramas tinkered with the established form: “The Mod Squad” had three stars all under thirty, who never appeared in uniform. The trio infiltrated groovy enclaves like colleges or motorcycle gangs—places where crew-cut cops couldn’t follow, but where Clarence Williams III, in his bold Afro, and the ever-miniskirted Peggy Lipton, shaking her hair from her eyes, blended effortlessly. “Hawaii Five-O” made something exotic and lush of the standard detective drama. Its cool star, Jack Lord, commanded in dark suits and blue-black hair. The smugglers and drug dealers who despoiled his paradise rarely got away before he delivered his satisfying tag line, “Book ‘em, Danno,” at the end of the hour.

By the end of September George Wallace had arrived in the polls; 21 percent of Americans were supporting the former Alabama governor for President, making him a credible third-party force in the race while his Alabaman campaign workers struggled to get him onto every state ballot in the country.

The brief defiance he had shown federal marshals attempting to integrate the University of Alabama in 1963 had earned Wallace notoriety and a reputation as a dangerous man, both of which he had attempted to exploit as a minor Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. Now he was back after spending four years honing his angry appeal; when Alabama’s restriction against successive terms threatened his re-election as governor, Wallace asked the people to vote by mail, then called a special session and demanded an amendment to the state constitution. With a speed that might have impressed the master manipulator Huey Long himself, the Alabama house capitulated in twenty seconds to Wallace’s demand. The state senate vote fell short, though, and Wallace- after making sure various choice projects were canceled in his opponents’ districts but failing to get the filibuster law changed by the state supreme court—talked his ailing wife, Lurleen, into running for his job instead. They campaigned together, and despite her reluctance on the stump and recent cancer surgery, Mrs. Wallace whipped all comers. George Wallace retained access to the governor’s mansion, as well as to state moneys and workers for his 1968 presidential attempt.

By the late sixties Wallace’s violent rhetoric seemed less jolting. He was one of a number of apocalyptic political characters—black and white—promising to “stir things up.” He set himself against the two national parties, whose nominees he called “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” He spoke vengefully on behalf of “common folks” and their children who were being bused as part of “social experiments” concocted by “pointy-headed intellectuals.”

Wallace gave almost exactly the same fiery oration several times a day, but he seemed powerfully to mean it. Although he could confide to a reporter in Cleveland that “race is what’s gonna win this thing for me,” Wallace became a master of speaking in racial code as a national candidate. “He can use all the other issues,” marveled a former Alabama senator, “—law and order, running your own schools, protecting property rights—and never mention race. But people will know he’s telling them, ‘A nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.’ ” Part of Wallace’s vivid bigotry came naturally to him, of course, but some had also been campaign bluster he adopted after losing his first governor’s race as an Alabama moderate when he vowed he’d “never be out-niggered again.” He had returned a slightly different man and, after victory, declared famously in his 1963 inaugural, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The 1968 campaign of his American Independent party found him pruning a little of what he had added, but people knew what he was even if he didn’t spell it all out, especially on Northern campuses, where Wallace did battle with America’s youth. His limousine was often attacked, and he met signs that said things like “Wallace is Rosemary’s Baby,” after the popular horror movie of that fall.

By collecting 2,717,338 signatures, the candidate’s people got him on the ballot in every state, each with its own quirky requirements for registration. This was an impressive piece of work, considering that the party was merely a name with no existing organization to handle such an effort. Also, Wallace exported his campaign, using almost entirely Alabamans to staff field offices, and many of these were still employees of the state, where his wife, Lurleen, had died in office in May. “He is a veritable artist of defiance,” Tom Wicker wrote covering the crusade, “a virtuoso of defeat, who has found his greatest strength in picturing himself as the little man run down in the schoolhouse door, the ‘average American’ ignored by the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ controlling the major parties.” Wallace took his country bands across the country, delightedly baiting his hecklers to the point where fistfights sometimes occurred; he played with the threat of violence and made quite a show of bravely carrying on in the face of abuse while below him all was apparent student anarchy. One of his most famous lines became “If you elect me President and an anarchist lies down in front of my automobile, it’s going to be the last automobile he’ll want to lie down in front of.” This threat often led dozens of campus radicals to run out searching for Wallace’s car.

He was never in danger of winning it all but seemed to be building a strong base for the 1972 election. In October, though, he finally had to choose a running mate, and his selection of the former Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay for Vice President cost him votes. General LeMay (”about as politically graceful as a rhino in a game of ice hockey,” wrote the journalist Marshall Frady) faced down a national news conference and offered to “use anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons, if it was necessary” to bring a victory in Vietnam. Soon the hecklers’ signs read, “Bombs away with Curtis LeMay.”

Wallace did not, as feared by many, send the election into the House of Representatives, but he did collect the votes of ten million people, a number of them first-time voters. His 13 percent of the total, especially his strength in Illinois and Ohio, may have decided the election. “In a sense,” noted Frady at the campaign’s close, “Wallace is common to us all. That, finally, is his darkest portent. … As long as we are creatures hung halfway between the mud and the stars, figures like Wallace can be said to pose the great dark original threat.”