As We Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.

today, it is perhaps important to note that if it weren't for the holiday, the political career of a noted racist perhaps wouldn't have gone as far as it did, and perhaps we would have been spared the craziness of the GOP "mainstream" today.

The real purpose of Jesse Helms' opposition to the MLK holiday was to help advance his own re-election chances in North Carolina.

More Helms

The problem with Jonathan Chait's brief complaint by the "conservative" whitewashing of Jesse Helms' bigotry is if it were for the racism he spewed, he would NEVER have been elected to the United Senate in the first place.

It was racism that got him there, and it was the Republican Party's acceptance of Helms' racism for which he will be largely remembered.

Goodbye and Good Riddance

That could sum up the WSWS's opinion of the death of former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who died Friday at the age of 86.

Martin notes the nauseating tributes from the media, especially those who thought it was fitting the racist, fascistic Helms died on Independence Day.

The rest of the article is the 2001 commentary marking the retirement of Helms from the U.S. Senate, and I posted the original the other day.

The "Hands Ad" Helms used in his hard-fought 1990 re-election campaign has been posted elsewhere but I include it here to show this guy never left the bigotry behind:

Helms

Just so you know, Jesse Helms remained the same bigot at the end of his life as he was when he first started out.

As I have said before, he's left behind a horrible legacy.

More Helms.

The NYT makes note of Jesse Helms' political extremism. There's no use getting around that fact.

The horrible thing about him was he made the extreme mainstream in the Republican Party. He made fascism respectable.

The WSWS noted Helms' dubious career when he retired back in 2001. Elizabeth Dole replaced him. The WSWS reiterated the fact Helms didn't have overwhelming popularity in North Carolina and in fact came close to losing a number of close re-election campaigns. Only through the help of a well-financed radical right operation (which he helped create) saved his bacon. Helms was also raised on bigotry:

Bigotry was the font of Helms’ politics. His home town, Monroe, was notorious as a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. Racial oppression was so intense that it sparked one of the most important acts of armed resistance by black residents during the civil rights era, led by Robert F. Williams, head of the Monroe NAACP. Williams was ultimately framed up on charges of terrorism and fled the United States, living for a decade in exile in Cuba and China. A new biography of the civil rights leader recounts an incident of his boyhood:

“Walking down Main Street, Williams watched a white police officer accost an African American woman. The policeman, Jesse Alexander Helms Sr., an admirer once recalled, ‘had the sharpest shoe in town and he didn’t mind using it.’ His son, U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, remembered ‘Big Jesse’ as ‘a six-foot, two hundred pound gorilla—when he said “smile,” I smiled.’ Eleven-year-old Robert Williams looked on in terror as Big Jesse flattened the black woman with his huge fists, then ‘dragged her off to the nearby jailhouse, her dress up over her head, the same way that a cave man would club and drag his sexual prey.’ Williams recalled ‘her tortured screams as the flesh was ground away from the friction of the concrete.’ The memory of this violent spectacle and the laughter of white bystanders haunted him for decades.” (Quoted from Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Such was the environment that produced Jesse Helms. It is an indictment of American capitalist society that this son of a racist policeman, bigot and defender of mass murderers became a powerful figure in American politics. Like scum on a stagnant pond, the rottenest elements in American society rose to the top of the political system during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Helms left a very vile, very shitty legacy.

Obituaries.

Few people noticed when North Carolina's hard-right TV commentator Jesse Helms rode into the Senate in 1972. Nicknamed "Senator No" for all of his "no" votes on bills he regarded as way too liberal, he was thought of as belonging on the fringe of the Republican Party's radical right wing at a time when Congress was a more cordial, less partisan body. Helms, though, wasn't interested in getting laws passed; he was more interested in pandering to his natural constituency of what would be later known as the religious right. Helms was creating a long-term political strategy with his "no" votes.

Little did people, especially Democrats, know Helms would help to create a far-right political network which would catapult itself to power during the Reagan years and largely remain in power ever since. Observers always write about the influence of Barry Goldwater on the right, but he was a minor influence compared to Helms.

Helms was also known as a world-class political backstabber. He had an "owlish" appearance, had a very cordial demeanor, but he could knife politicians in the back using third parties to do the dirty work.

Helms and one-time protege Lauch Faircloth were instrumental in the coup attempt against former president Bill Clinton when they got together with David Sentelle to ditch special prosecutor Robert Fiske in favor of Kenneth Starr to persecute both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The attempt to oust Bill Clinton ultimately failed though costing the government millions of dollars, and Faircloth ended up getting beat for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 1998 by the upstart trial lawyer John Edwards.

Helms, 86, died early this morning from vascular dementia.