Jesse Helms Memoirs

by Larry DeWitt (see other De Witt articles)

Proving that some troglodytes do not change their spots, three years after retiring from the U. S. Senate, Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, is offering up his memoir of his life in politics (Here's Where I Stand ⁽¹⁾). Standing somewhere firmly--even if it is in a pile of bullshit--is apparently what brings self-respect to Republican politicians these days, and it is what gives them bragging-rights over Democrats. The book will be forthcoming from Random House in September, and already Helms has been giving interviews, and excerpts have been published in newspapers in North Carolina and around the country. So it is not too difficult to find out where Jesse Helms "stands."

Among the places he stands apparently is in fond remembrance of the era of Jim Crow, and in explaining why he opposed every piece of civil rights legislation and the entire process of racial integration, Helms allows that the Southerners would have worked things out themselves if just left to their own devices. As he rather wistfully remembers the era of Jim Crow: "We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance." This was, you will recall, part of the cover-story of the conservative resistance to the civil rights movement back in the 1950s and 1960s. To see a prominent politician still repeating these same shibboleths forty years later is mind-boggling.

One also wonders where the political party that Helms represented in Congress for 29 years is in all of this. Does not the Republican Party have an obligation to repudiate this kind of crap when it is being spread around by one of their own? If Strom Thurmond's presence in the Democratic Party was briefly an embarassment to it (and it was); and if Thurmond's long-time presence in Congress as a Republican was an embarassment to that party (and it was); and if Trent Lott's hagiographic wistful admiration for Thurmond's days as an outright bigot was an embarassment to just about everybody (and it was); then Jesse Helms striding the corridors of the U. S. Senate as a Republican legislator ought to have been a source of continuing embarassment to his party as well. I understand that one cannot call a sitting Senator of one's own party a fool, even though everyone knew he was. But the fool has not been on the Hill for three years now, and so it is high time that the Republicans showed some courage of conviction and openly repudiate Helms and all the revisionist historical longing he represents.

It is truly amazing to see that someone could live on this earth for 83 years and gain so little insight into human nature. Those benefitting from power and privilege and the exploitation of others rarely voluntarily relinquish their favored position. As if the whole problem with Jim Crow racism was just that the white Southerners somehow had not noticed that they were oppressing their black neighbors. As if one day all the architects of the Jim Crow system of racial apartheid would suddenly slap themselves on the forehead, turn to each other and say, "My God, Jesse, lookee here. We seem to be taking advantage of all these colored folks. Why, I never noticed that before. We should stop this stuff don't you think?" This kind of wistful falsification of the past is what we get when we allow ideology and politics to trump truth in the telling of history.

Jesse Helms is yet another cautionary tale for all those who think that joining historical narrative to political agenda is bound to result in some liberating, liberal future. More likely than not, it is liable to give renewed life to yet another troglodyte who somehow managed not to notice that the world has changed around him in the last 40 years, and who wants to wax nostalgic for a past that was nothing like the fairy-tale he recounts. No matter how firmly he takes his "stand."

1. Jesse Helms, Here's Where I Stand: A Memoir, (New York: Random House, 2005).