While Helms served thirty years in the Senate, his tenure on
Capitol Hill was never so historically significant as his crude pursuit
of power and the unsettling lengths to which he went to retain it.
"He'll be remembered, in part, for the strong racist streak that
articulated his politics and almost all of his political campaigns --
they were racialized in the most negative ways," recalled Kerry Haynie,
a political science professor at Duke University.
Helms'
death Friday, at age 86, brings America a small step closer to the end
of the antebellum era in our politics that saw the men who had battled
to deny the franchise to millions of Americans because of the color of
their skin -- and who fought even more aggressively to deny adequate
education, nutrition and health care to African-American children --
make the easy transition to leadership positions in the "modern"
Republican Party.
Helms was not always a Republican. As a
young man of the Old South, he had no interest in joining an
organization that, well into the 20th century, proudly referred to
itself as "the party of Lincoln."
Only when the Grand Old
Party adopted a southern accent and replaced references to the Great
Emancipator with grumping about "racial quotas" did Helms make the
switch to the party of Ronald Reagan, George Bush and John McCain. He
brought along the symbols and sounds of the "Jim Crow" Democrats,
insisting that Republican events celebrate the memory of Robert E. Lee
and encouraging the singing of "Dixie" at party rallies.
Helms
was not just any Republican, however. He was an essential player in the
remaking of the party. With his National Congressional Club, a
money-raising machine that helped forge what came to be called "the New
Right" within the GOP, Helms aide Carter Wrenn says the senator forced
"the realignment of the Republican party."
- "You can't really separate the growth of the Republican party from Jesse's career," explained Wrenn.
The
wily Richard Nixon was one of the first Republicans to recognize Helms'
utility. The North Carolinian was welcomed into the GOP by then
President Nixon and his southern strategists of the late 1960s and
early 1970s because they understood that Helms was skilled at working
the fault lines that could turn white fears into Republican votes.
The
Republicans are still working those fault-lines. Indeed, some of the
people who worked most closely with Helms as he transformed what began
as an anti-slavery party into a comfortable retreat for white-backlash
voters are now key players in the campaign of John McCain, the
presumptive Republican nominee for president.
- "Let us
remember a life dedicated to serving this nation," McCain declared in a
statement on the death of Helms, to whom he was compared favorably by
former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole earlier this year. (Actually,
Dole suggested that McCain was somewhat more conservative than Helms.)
Those
who battled hardest against Helms and his racial politics are quite
certain that the 2008 campaign of Republican McCain against Democrat
Barack Obama, who in August will become the first African-American
nominee of a major party for president, will take a Helmsian turn.
- "There's
no question appeals will be made by McCain's campaign on racial lines,"
says North Carolina Congressman Mel Watt, who felt the full brunt of
that racial politics when he managed the campaign of Harvey Gantt, an
African-American Democrat who challenged Helms in 1990 and 1996.
Jesse
Alexander Helms Jr. got his start in national politics as a campaign
strategist for Willis Smith, who mounted a race-baiting challenge to
U.S. Senator Frank Porter Graham in the 1950 North Carolina Democratic
primary.
Graham, a former president of the University of
North Carolina, served in the Senate as a national Democrat, who
supported President Harry Truman and accepted the party's emerging
commitment to civil rights.
Smith, who was backed by the
segregationist dead-enders who that had supported the 1948 States'
Rights Party ("Dixiecrat") campaign of segregationist Strom Thurmond,
hired Helms to help him win by exploiting racist sentiment in the state.
- One
advertisement that Helms and his team created screamed: "White people,
wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you,
your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham
favors mingling of the races."
Another advertisement
allegedly worked up by Helms highlighted a doctored photograph that
purported to illustrate the penchant of Graham's wife for dancing with
African-American men.
The Smith campaign was, according to
the Raleigh News & Observer, a publication for which Helms once
worked, "called the most overtly racist campaign since the turn of the
century."
Unfortunately, it was also successful -- a lesson that was not lost on the 29-year-old Helms.
Smith beat Graham, won the general election, went to Washington and took Helms along as his administrative assistant.
But
Helms was soon back in North Carolina, encouraging massive resistance
to integration, as a Raleigh city councilman and a television
commentator who referred to the University of North Carolina as the
"University of Negroes and Communists" and suggested that walls be
erected around the UNC campus to prevent enlightened thinking from
"infecting" the rest of North Carolina.
Though he was
genteel in person -- so much so that this reporter would sometimes
describe him favorably when compared to less gracious members of the
Senate -- Helms went wide-eyed and brutal when the cameras went on.
- Helms warned that, "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."
He
suggested that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist dupe and
refused, even decades after King's death, to honor the Nobel Peace
Prize winner.
He dismissed the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and "moral degenerates.
As
the movement gathered strength -- and as murderous violence against
activists in particular and African-Americans in general increased --
Helms menacingly suggested to non-violent civil rights activists that,
"The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus
far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere
with other men's rights."
When his fellow Democrats began to
reject his brand of race-baiting politics in a series of primaries that
saw moderates such as former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford beat
segregationists, Helms followed Thurmond into the Republican Party.
In 1972, he determined to follow Thurmond into the Senate.
Helms
got a couple of lucky political breaks. First, President Nixon was
running his "southern strategy" reelection campaign to attract
segregationist Democrats to the GOP. Second, the Democratic nominee for
the Senate that year was North Carolina Congressman Nick Galifianakis.
Galifianakis
was a Greek-American, which to Helms and his supporters meant the
congressman was a bit too "ethnic" to represent North Carolina. The
newly-minted Republican, who could always be counted on to exploit any
difference that might benefit his candidacy, campaigned on the slogan:
"Vote for Helms --- He's One of Us!"
That was mild compared
with the 1990 and 1996 campaigns Helms ran against Gantt, the former
Charlotte mayor who was the first African-American to compete seriously
for a southern Senate seat in the modern era.
In 1990, after
Helms fell behind in the race, his campaign began running television
advertisements that showed a white man's hands crumpling up a rejection
notice from a corporation that had refused to hire him because
affirmative action policies had supposedly required that the job go to
a "less qualified minority." After those words were uttered, an image
of Gantt flashed on the screen.
Helms won a narrow victory that year, as he did in 1996. And Helms did not leave his sentiments on the campaign trail.
Unlike
George Wallace and a number of other southern pols, who made racist
noises at election time but then quietly funded roads, schools and
other projects in African-American communities, the former North
Carolina senator's hometown newspaper noted delicately in an obituary
that, "Although Helms denied he was a racist, his work in the Senate
seemed at odds with the interests of blacks."
In addition to
waging a filibuster in an attempt to block the Martin Luther King Jr.
Holiday, Helms opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act and
championed the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Even as he
rose in stature in the Senate, where he eventually served as chair of
the powerful Foreign Relations Committee, Helms remained the son of the
south that he had always been.
- When Carol Moseley-Braun of
Illinois became the first African-American woman to sit in the Senate,
Helms followed Moseley-Braun into an elevator, announcing to Utah
Senator Orrin Hatch: "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry.
I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries."
Then, emphasizing the lines about how "good" things were before the Civil War ended slavery, Helms sang "Dixie."
In
one way or another, that's all he ever did. As the Rev. Jesse Jackson
recalled, "At the height of his power, he fought for the values of the
old confederacy. He resisted the new South. He resisted the opportunity
to fight for a more perfect union."
Despite the best efforts
of the senator and his spin doctors to rehabilitate the old man by
hiring a few conservative staffers who happened to be people of color
or by posing him for pictures with U2's Bono, Helms finished his career
without the apologies that came from George Wallace, Orval Faubus and
his fellow segregationists.
Even Strom Thurmond admitted his
defenses of segregation were wrong, but not Helms. Nor did the North
Carolinian ever make serious efforts to appeal to African-American
voters -- as Wallace, Thurmond and "Jim Crow" politicians began to do
late in their careers.
- "He was sort of unrepentant until the
end," said Duke's Kerry Haynie. A biographer of Helms, Ernest
Furgurson, put it more bluntly when he wrote: "All his public life,
(Helms) has done and said things offensive to blacks, and to anyone
sensitive to racial nuance."
Jesse Helms may have started
as a Democrat and finished as a Republican. But he always sang "Dixie."
And those who sang it with him are now working for John McCain. Alex
Castellanos, the veteran Republican media consultant who produced the
so-called "White Hands" commercial that Helms used against Gantt, has
according to the Washington Post been advising McCain's campaign on
media strategy.
Castellanos bluntly refers to his work with
Helms as "The Cause." And that cause has attracted other key players
from the late senator's campaigns. Republican strategist Charlie Black,
perhaps the most prominent member of McCain's political inner circle
(especially since he suggested that a terrorist attack on the United
States would benefit the Republican's prospects this fall), advised
Helms throughout much of the senator's career and played a particularly
central role in the 1990 campaign, according to contemporary media
accounts.
When the "White Hands" ad stirred a national
controversy, Black appeared on the PBS Newshour to defend it.
Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown, who was also on the
show, said to Black: "You are a principal adviser of Jesse Helms. Would
you advise him to run that kind of ad, Charlie? Do you approve of that
ad, Charlie?"
- Black replied, "I advised Jesse Helms to do what he's always done."
The
question now is whether Black will advise McCain, another Republican
who is trailing an attractive African-American Democrat, to do what
Helms always did?
The answer is: Not exactly. McCain's
presidential campaign will not be a precise homage to Helms? Black his
fellow strategists will, undoubtedly, be a bit subtler. But Mel Watt
suggested in a recent interview that we might still hear the faint
strains of "Dixie."
- "Clearly, times have changed, and people
aren't going to be able to get away with those kind of direct racial
appeals," said Watt, recalling the 1990 anti-Gantt campaigning by Helms
and his associates. "But they will make them more subtle, and call them
something else. They'll call them economic appeals, like they did with
the 'White Hands' ad."
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Subscribe to this comment's feed
