"Senator No"

by Dick Polman

JULY 7, 2008 TAGS: POLITICS, RACE, LEADERS COMMENTS (1)

The best Jesse Helms story, a true story that encapsulates his career, begins at the door of an elevator on Capitol Hill.

Helms noticed that one of his Senate colleagues – Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the first African American woman to serve in that august chamber – was in the process of entering that elevator. This gave him an idea. As he got ready to board, he shared his idea with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah: “Watch me make her cry. I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”

Whereupon the septuagenarian senator from North Carolina, one of the master race-baiters of the post-segregation era, proceeded to serenade his black colleague (“I wish I was in the land of cotton/ Old times there are not forgotten…”). He apparently failed to make her cry, but he made his point. Jesse Helms, who died on the Fourth of July in 2008 at age 86, always took his stand in Dixie Land.

It is traditional not to speak ill of the dead. It is also traditional, in politics, to cleanse aging politicians of past sins and re-brand them as statesmen, to reward them for sheer longevity. As the murderous curmudgeon played by John Huston famously intoned in the film Chinatown, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” Such was the spirit of John McCain’s homage to Helms days after his death, when the former Republican presidential nominee declared, “Let us remember a life dedicated to serving this nation.”

McCain was too kind. In reality, Helms dedicated his life to salting the fundamental American wound, leveraging the racial divide, harvesting white fears for political gain. His tactics paid off – in a Senate career that spanned from 1973 to 2003, Helms won five straight races – and his legacy lives on. Some of the prominent Republican strategists who aided his rise are thriving today, and some of his tactics continue to surface on television, as in a North Carolina TV ad aimed at Barack Obama.

Many white Southerners, of course, have built successful political careers by campaigning against blacks – Strom Thurmond and George Wallace spring to mind – but even Thurmond and Wallace apologized in their later years. Helms never did. Long after Martin Luther King became a lionized national figure, Helms publicly dismissed the civil rights leader as a “Marxist,” assailed his followers as “degenerates,” and staged a filibuster in a failed attempt to block passage of a King national holiday.

This is not to suggest that Helms was merely a one-trick pony; during his three decades in Washington, he exhibited a wide range of interests. Earning the nickname of “Senator No,” he inveighed against internationalism (particularly the United Nations, and virtually all weapons treaties), feminism, liberalism, socialism (to the point where he supported right-wing Latin American dictators who ran death squads), secularism (particularly the National Endowment of the Arts), and homosexuality (in 1993, he declared that one of Clinton’s nominees was unacceptable “because she’s a damn lesbian,” and he once referred to all gays as “weak, morally sick wretches”).

Aside from a handful of late-career crusades – his strange-bedfellows alliance with the rock star Bono, to hike AIDS funding for Africa, comes to mind – one might suggest that Helms was usually at war with modernity itself. That was probably not the ideal trait for someone serving as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a job that arguably requires a fair bit of sophistication. But the Senate runs on seniority, and it was Helms’ turn to lead. And so it was Helms who brought Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan, to the Senate floor, where he introduced her as the premier of India … which is a bit like introducing the leader of Israel as an Arab Palestinian, or vice versa. So goes another Helms story, frequently told.

But Helms would never have flexed any muscle in Washington had he not first succeeded so well in playing the race card. He first garnered wide attention in 1950, as a radio news director, when he supported Willis Smith, a segregationist, in a U.S. Senate race. He even came up with a radio ad for Smith. Smith liked it so much that, after he won the race, he hired Helms as an aide and took him along to Washington.

The ad went like this: “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 [Smith’s opponent] favors mingling of the races.”

Jesse Helms, Senator No

Helms returned to North Carolina after Smith’s death, and gained statewide fame during the ’60s as a TV commentator, defending the old Southern verities by attacking those he deemed to be a threat. He typically referred to UNC, the University of North Carolina, as “the university of Negroes and communists,” and assailed the civil rights movement as a communist front. He connected viscerally with traditional voters – whites who felt threatened by social change -- and that gift greased his first Senate victory.

In his ensuing races, he picked at that race scab whenever he himself felt threatened. The tactic worked, most notably in 1990. He was trailing his opponent – a black Democrat, former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt – when Helms unveiled a TV ad that played on white opposition to affirmative action. The image was a white fist crumpling a job application. The narrator said, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.” The ad rallied Helms’ base, and he won. (The ad’s creator, Alex Castellanos, today advises John McCain.)

It would be wrong to suggest, of course, that Helms owed his longevity solely to his canny dealing of the race card. He was a vigorous defender of North Carolina tobacco interests, and, like so many successful senators, he was a stickler for constituent service. He cultivated the grassroots, particularly in the rural “down east,” via direct mail. He was culturally simpatico, in the broadest sense. The two lines most frequently heard among his followers were “Jesse is one of us” and “You know where Jesse stands.”

But his departure from the Senate in 2003, for health reasons, was also fortuitously timed. North Carolina is drawing millions of moderate Northerners to the Chapel Hill academic region, and to the boom towns around Charlotte. The rural traditionalists who boosted Helms for three decades don’t have the same electoral clout anymore. Helms was one of the last antebellum Southern pols; it’s hard to imagine that his brand of political incorrectness could prevail in a statewide race today.

And yet … in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006, Republicans ran a TV ad that conjured the image of the black Democratic candidate, Harold Ford, sleeping with white women (a blonde cooed at the camera and said, “Harold, call me!”). And several months ago, in a North Carolina TV ad, Republicans targeted a white female Democratic gubernatorial candidate by airing a photo that showed her physically embracing Barack Obama; as one North Carolinian wrote on a blog not long ago, “Anyone over the age of 15 … notices these touches, because we’ve seen them in so many Helms campaigns.”

Helms may have died as a relic, but his sensibility survives. And the fundamental American wound has not healed.