Jesse Helms, RIP

Former Sen. Jesse Helms died on July 4, and the first inclination might be to ask, "He was still alive?," for he seems so removed from our times. This former television commentator who served 30 years in the Senate, was known mostly for his uncompromising and untelegenic opposition to nearly everything, especially communism and liberalism.

Surely National Review Online, the child of Bill Buckley, would bring some deeper perspectives, or so I thought. He was, the editors wrote, "one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation." They went on:

It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First
and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet
Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in
Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra
rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.

He
was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art,
ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments
of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in
the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of
course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been
placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him? Certainly liberals have forgiven the pasts of other segregationists, from Sam Ervin to William Fulbright…

One might ask, who in either party was for communism? Also, Ervin and Fulbright went on to do heroic service in saving the Constitution from imperial presidents, and in any case, their early positions on civil rights have been well documented. But Helms was a generation or more younger than these men yet had learned nothing. He became a Republican representing North Carolina and helped turn the white South to the GOP with both subtle and overt calls to racism. He succeeded beautifully. But even here, he would have failed had not Lyndon Johnson championed civil rights, handing the South to the Republicans for, in his formula, "a generation." Or more.

David Broder hit the truth in his 2001 column, "Jesse Helms, White Racist":

What is unique about Helms — and from my viewpoint, unforgivable — is
his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American
history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial
resentment against African Americans.

Many of the accounts of Helms’s retirement linked him with another
prospective retiree, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both these
Senate veterans switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party
when the Democrats began pressing for civil rights legislation in the
1960s. But there is a great difference between them. Thurmond, who
holds the record for the longest anti-civil rights filibuster, accepted
change. For three decades he has treated African Americans and black
institutions as respectfully as he treats all his other constituents.

To the best of my knowledge, Helms has never done what the late
George Wallace did well before his death — recant and apologize for
his use of racial issues. And that use was blatant.

Even back in my right-wing days, I found Helms undistinguished and uninspiring. I didn’t get the attraction. He was embarrassing. I suppose the real love affair came down to the fact that Helms could get away with saying things more polished "conservatives" wanted to blurt out, but didn’t dare.

I find the hosannas about his anti-communism unconvincing. The anti-communists who really mattered were in both parties, both conservatives and liberals. Republicans of Helms’ persuasion were against the Marshall Plan, Harry Truman’s initiative that saved western Europe from communism. Helms’ kind of Republicans were suspicious of President Eisenhower, who kept the peace for eight years with both military strength, but also maintenance of the New Deal, which saw the American middle class start its ascent toward its zenith — reached about the time Jesse Helms entered the Senate.

The anti-Castro stance also looks misguided. The communist states we engaged with — which practiced every bit or worse the crimes of Fidel — fell from the imported infection of American music and blue jeans and ideas. Cuba remains a prison. Ah, but the embargo is politically expedient. Meanwhile, Helms was against everything and for little. He helped ensure the nation was so unprepared for the challenges it faces today, where better fuel-economy standards and investment in high-speed rail in the 1980s and 1990s could have made such a difference now.

Jesse Helms was the last of the old-time white Southern demagogues.  Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the hundreds of lynchings and dozens of massacres against blacks that historians have brought to light in recent decades can only look at his civil rights record with revulsion. White Southerners bear an obligation to tread with special care upon this heritage, and if not actively try to right the wrongs of previous generations at least not repeat them, even in soft, latent ways.

But he was consequential in creating today’s "conservative" movement, one based on fear, separation and corporate government under the guise of "free enterprise." It is a movement that has taken "encroachments of Big Government on everyday life" to new heights, with illegal wiretaps, rendition and torture. He also stoked the anti-government sentiment and budget cuts that played well at the polls, but turned the most competent large government in history into the hapless executors of the Iraq fiasco and the man-made disaster that was the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Ironically, the lower-middle-class Southern whites who kept voting for Helms saw the policies he helped champion (with help from Bill Clinton) eradicate hundreds of thousands of their jobs in the textile, apparel and furniture industries. Now they’re working at Wal-Mart for half their old pay. But those godless black commies didn’t take power!

Let us pray that he is already in God’s loving arms, and that maybe we down here have learned something.