Jesse Helms and the Making of Modern Conservatism
For much of his career in public life, Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr., acquired an almost iconic status in American life as a polarizer, rabid conservative, and liberal enemy. Born and raised in Monroe, North Carolina, Helms spent his early public career as a newspaperman, lobbyist, radio broadcaster, and television editorialist. The defining moment of his life occurred in June 1950, when he became involved in the epochal North Carolina Senate contest between legendary southern liberal Frank Porter Graham and conservative challenger Willis Smith. Before 1950, Helms' political views were inchoate; thereafter, he became a committed ideologue, devoted to the cause of conservative resurgence.
For the remainder of his career, Helms pursued a relentless attack against what he conceived as a liberal monopoly that dominated American life. Especially important, prior to his election to the United States Senate in 1972 and his 30 year tenure in the Senate, was the twelve years that he spent as executive vice-president and daily TV editorialist on Raleigh, North Carolina's WRAL-TV. Helms' five-minute Viewpoint" editorials more than 2,700 of them were broadcast between 1960 and 1972 became an important vehicle for the development of a hard-hitting conservative message.
This paper examines Helms' role in the development of the late 20th century American right, what observers are now calling modern conservatism." The study of the roots of the American right has attracted significantly scholarly attention in the past few years, but curiously little of it has considered Jesse Helms' central role. In fact, as this paper will show, Helms was a major figure, and a person who transitioned southern political themes onto the national stage in the 1960s through 1990s. Tapping into powerful and potent popular mistrust of elites, Helms helped to fashion a new conservative majority.
Helms represents various strains that combined to elect Ronald Reagan in the presidential election of 1980 and mark a new era of conservative ascendancy. In the Graham-Smith election of 1950, Helms participated in a vicious election that keyed into post-World War II anxieties among white Southerners about race and anticommunism. Those anxieties became even more pronounced after the Brown decision of 1954, and the onset of federal intervention in limiting and eventually ending white supremacy. Helms remained a resolute opponent of the federalization of southern civil rights, but he also became one of the South's leading critics of the freedom struggle itself. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but, perhaps more important, in h is daily TV editorials on WRAL in Raleigh, Helms developed a message carefully tailored to white fears and anxieties about the post-civil rights world.
Along with race, Helms added other elements to a conservative message. Much of this message was hammered out during the 1960s, and Helms' Viewpoint editorials provided a critique of the tumult of that decade. He regularly criticized what he portrayed as the failures of the liberal monopoly on culture, politics, and public life, and he saw these failures in rising crimes, loose sexual morals, increased secularization, and a declining welfare state.
Once elected Senator in 1972, Helms' office in Washington became an important center of the emerging conservative coalition. He used his position in the Senate to obstruct, delay, and confuse business, but he did so in such a way as to promote conservative cause. Through the use of amendment and filibuster, along with other parliamentary strategies, he forced votes on a cluster of New Right issues, and this strategy helped to publicize his cause, coalesce public support, stimulate fundraising, and expose his Senate opponents to a public vote.
Helms was crucial also in forging an alliance between the Religious Right and other conservative in the 1970s. For most of the 20th century, conservative evangelicals remained non-political, but beginning in the 1970s they became aroused by growing fears about secularization. Specifically, conservative evangelicals were outraged by the Supreme Court prohibition of school prayer in 1962, by the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, and by the threat to religious schools tax exempt status posed by the IRS in the late 1970s. Helms worked closely with Lynchburg, Virginia religious conservative Jerry Falwell in the organization of the Moral Majority, and he helped to mobilize the Religious Right behind conservative candidates in the 1980s.
William A. Link, University of Florida