Race-Baiting Former Senator Jesse Helms Has Died

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet at 1:21 PM on July 4, 2008.

One of America's most notorious race-baiters has died. Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms passed away early this morning at the age of eighty-six. Conservatives are eulogizing Helms as one of the most important architects of their movement.

Helms wasn't just a politician who happened to be racist, racism was his politics. He entire career was an extended pitch to the worst instincts of Americans. He became a conservative icon by skillfully harnessing the media of his day to stoke the country's darkest fears about race, sex, and modernity. Along the way, he helped build what we know today as the right wing noise machine--an integrated network of media outlets, think tanks, political consultants, lobbyists, church groups, and direct-mail fundraisers dedicated to rolling back the reforms of the 1960s and "reclaiming" America for straight white guys with money.

Jesse Helms may even have been world's first vlogger. In 1960 he began producing a TV segment called Viewpoint for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, NC. In all, more than 2800 2-minute Viewpoints were broadcast.

Helms used Viewpoint and other syndicated media products to establish his brand of race-baiting demagoguery. "Dr. King's outfit...is heavily laden at the top with leaders of proven records of communism, socialism and sex perversion, as well as other curious behavior," Helms announced in a 1963 edition of Viewpoint.
(As a Senator, Helms launched a filibuster against the MLK holiday. He also went to court to try to force the FBI to open its files on Martin Luther King, whom Helms denounced as a communist on the Senate floor.)

"Are civil rights only for Negroes? White women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who have had their purses snatched by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated," he opined in a 1963 Viewpoint later quoted in The Charlotte Observer.

In a 1964 Viewpoint, Helms called the Civil Rights Act “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.”

Quite simply, Helms believed black people were naturally inferior to whites: “No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect. ... There is no bigotry either implicit or intended in such a realistic confrontation with the facts of life. ... Those who would undertake to solve the problem by merely spending more money, and by massive forced integration, may be doing the greatest injustice of all to the Negro."

After a stint as a lobbyist for the banking industry and a stretch as a corporate media executive, Helms ran for Senate in 1972. He founded the Congressional Club, a future fundraising juggernaut of the conservative movement, to pay off his campaign debts.

Jesse Helms is the father of modern racially charged political campaign ads. His fascination with using race as a weapon in campaigns goes back at least to his work as an unofficial researcher for a 1950s senate race. Helms' side released a doctored photo of the rival candidate's wife dancing with a black man. At least one major Helms biographer asserts that Helms personally doctored the image, a charge Helms denied.

Helms' race against Harvey Gantt is remembered as one of the ugliest, most racially charged contests in the history of the Senate (which is saying something). In that race, the Helms camp ran the infamous White Hands ad, featuring a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter. The voice over says, "You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority because of racial quotas." In 1996 Helms' campaign was cited by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating civil rights and voting laws. (Bet you didn't know that senior John McCain advisor Charlie Black advised Helms when he ran against Gantt.)

Let's not forget Helms' history as a patron of right wing terrorist movements around the world including the UNITA rebels in Angola, the RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Let's not forget his support for the Afghan mujahedin in the days before they stopped fighting Communism and turned their CIA-gifted weapons on the U.S.A.

In fairness, Hems embraced diversity when it came to his enemies list. He hated gay people as much as African Americans, leftists, intellectuals, and "sex perverts": "Think about it. Homosexuals and lesbians, disgusting people marching in our streets demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other. How do you like them apples?" Helms said in a 1990 campaign speech, quoted in The Los Angeles Times.

When Bill Clinton offered his quasi-defense of gays in the military, Helms said Clinton better have a bodyguard if he visited North Carolina.

Unlike many old school Southern racists, Helms went to his grave a more-or-less unreconstructed bigot. Even Governor George Wallace apologized for his pro-segregation crusades. Strom Thurmond mellowed enough to vote for the MLK holiday. Helms couldn't even muster more than a perfunctory whitewash in his own autobiography: “I did not advocate segregation, and I did not advocate aggravation,” he wrote. After Helms announced that he would not seek another term, Michael Graham wrote in the National Review Online in 2001, "This is one of the disturbing legacies of Jesse Helms. Though you won't see it mentioned in the media coverage of his retirement, Helms was in fact an avowed and unapologetic segregationist." That's the consensus among Helms' biographers.

When he made an appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live in Sept. 1995, a caller praised him “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.”

Helms looked in the camera and replied, “Well thank you, I think.”
--[BlackPressUSA.com]

Now that Helms is dead, the mainstream media are already praising his fighting spirit and his steadfast dedication to conservative ideology. He's being hailed as a man of principle, which he was, if "White Power" counts as a principle.

David Broder of the Washington Post summed up Helms' legacy in an 2001 op/ed entitled, 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."

That says most of it. Here's the rest:

Upon Helms' death Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner praised the late conservative icon effusively, vowing that the legacy of this "great patriot" would live on. In 2002 Heritage bestowed its highest honor on Helms for his “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle"--which tells you just about everything you need to know about Helms and the conservative movement.

Tagged as: race, death, jesse helms

Lindsay Beyerstein a New York writer blogging at Majikthise.