R.I.P., Jesse Helms
Jesse Helms died early last Friday. When I heard the news, I suppressed the impulse to say here what I thought of him. Not the time, while his family and friends gathered to bury him. [And, I’d already had my say about him, which you can read here.]
Five days later, I’m still not comfortable speaking ill of the dead, but I do think it’s important that we remember — while the eulogies flood in — who Jesse Helms really was. He was a small-town police chief’s son with an ingrained notion that some folks in the world were better ‘n other folks, and that’s just the way God had set it up. Fortunately, his daddy and he were in the first group. The coloreds in his town were in the second, along with a sorry lot of whites. As soon as he could, Helms went to Raleigh and started associating with the moneyed class, money being an excellent indicator of God’s favor in these things, doing Willis Smith’s bidding in the 1950 U.S. Senate campaign (Smith was a white-shoe lawyer running against Frank Porter Graham, the liberal former UNC President) even while Helms was allegedly still a journalist covering the campaign. Not long after, Helms was made the N.C. Bankers Association’s paid executive in Raleigh, and he remained the bankers’ man throughout his public career as a Raleigh City Council member, WRAL-TV editorialist and U.S. Senator. He was anything but a man of the people, though of course he purported to be a man of the white people (and later, the straight people) with his regular blasts at “the bloc vote,” Martin Luther King and gay causes of every kind.
I missed Helms in his heyday of hate in the ’60s and ’70s. When I moved to Raleigh from New Jersey in 1986, I expected to see a great deal of him, since by reputation he was outspoken and a forceful advocate for his conservative causes. But, not so. I never saw Helms, on television or anywhere else, until I finally sought him out during the ‘96 Senate campaign, his last and the first year I wrote for the Indy. By then, he was a fragile old man who could barely manage to get up on the stage when presidential candidate Bob Dole came to Raleigh. His ill health might’ve cost him that election had the facts been known. They weren’t, because by then Helms was accomplished at keeping himself out of sight. Having barely survived the ‘84 Senate campaign against Jim Hunt, Helms knew full well that the world was passing him by, his views were distinctly out of favor, and if people really got a load of his act, they’d turn against him. So he picked his public spots very carefully from then on, coming out of the weeds as the ‘90 campaign approached to attack the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), of all things, because it helped support the work of controversial artists like Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.
Here’s my story about the impact Helms had on North Carolina. In 1989, I organized a seminar on First Amendment issues for high school social studies teachers — in connection with the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. It was held at the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching, which is located on the campus of Western Carolina University. One of the sessions, on freedom of speech, focused on the NEA funding issue, among other things. So I planned to bring some books containing examples of the art to which Helms had objected, including Serrano’s “Piss Christ” image and Mapplethorp’s sexually charged gay-male photographs, just so they’d be available if the teachers wanted to view them. No requirement that they do so. I’m not stupid. This was raw, racy stuff — that’s why it was controversial — and many teachers, I knew, would just as soon not have to look at them. But in case any wanted to, they would be available on a bookshelf in the Center’s library.
Or they would’ve been available there, except that the director of the Center heard about it and he barred me from bringing those books onto his premises. Yeah, freedom of speech and all that, he said, but if Sen. Helms got wind that dirty pictures were being shown to teachers at the taxpayers’ expense, there could be hell to pay — and his budget cut. “There’s an election coming,” he whispered to me in some anguish. I was working for a state commission at the time, so I checked with one of the members, Dr. John Caldwell, the well-respected chancellor at N.C. State. Caldwell said, “You’re a guest of the university. It’s their call.”
If I remember correctly, the books stayed in my car. Ironically, all of them were available anyway in the WCU Library, which information I conveyed to the teachers, one of whom went and checked a couple of them out for the group’s perusal. (I did not put him up to it.) Anyway, that’s who Helms was, a man who sowed fear and was feared to the point that even on a university campus, the idea that people might see for themselves and think for themselves about the issues of artistic expression and public funding was thought to be a little too risky to chance it while Helms was on the scene.
July 14th, 2008 12:39
The director should have based his decision on what he thought was right, not whether he would make a powerful person angry with him.