(NAME-MCE) Commentary on Jesse Helms

[Warren Blumenfeld]

Jesse Helms: National Treasure or Unapologetic Bigot
A Commentary by Warren J. Blumenfeld

Over the past few weeks, president of The 
Heritage Foundation, Ed Feulner's, op-ed “Jesse 
Helms: Statesman, Patriot, Practical American” 
has appeared in a number of newspapers across the 
country, including the Iowa State University 
Daily on the campus where I teach (Iowa State 
Daily, Tuesday, July 22, 2008). In his op-ed, it 
seems that Feulner has inducted the late Senator 
Jesse Helms from North Carolina into the pantheon 
of those he considered as illustrious national 
heroes ­- specifically John Adams, Thomas 
Jefferson, and James Monroe, who, like Helms, 
died on the Fourth of July. (One could argue, 
however, that anyone who had enslaved others 
could not be considered as “illustrious,” but 
that could be my focus for another commentary).

In his 52-year political career, and previously 
working as a radio and television commentator, 
Helms’s words and actions, however, seriously 
call into question Feulner’s high praise.

As a radio commentator and aid in the 1950 US 
Senatorial campaign of conservative Raleigh 
lawyer, Willis Smith, Helms was instrumental in 
creating attack posters against Frank Porter 
Graham, Smith’s opponent. One poster and flyer 
read: “White People Wake Up Before It’s Too Late. 
Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife 
and daughter in your mills and factories? Frank 
Graham favors mingling of the races.” In a TV 
commentary on the topic of civil rights 
demonstrators, Helms argued that “The Negro 
cannot count forever on the kind of restraint 
that’s thus far left him free to clog the 
streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with 
other men’s rights (WRAL-TV, 1963). Referred to 
by his Congressional colleagues as “Senator No,” 
on numerous occasions as US Senator, Helms 
denounced Civil Rights legislation, and is quoted 
as referring to civil rights activists as 
“Communists and sex perverts.” In addition, he 
claimed that there was “evidence that the Negroes 
and whites participating in the march to 
Montgomery participated in sex orgies of the 
rawest sort.” Later, he asserted that “crime 
rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a 
fact of life, which must be faced” (New York 
Times, 2/8/81). Helms loudly bellowed the song 
“Dixie” in an elevator ride with Carol 
Mosely-Brawn, the first African American woman 
elected to the US Senate. “I’m going to make her 
cry,” he bragged. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ 
until she cries” (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93). 
Helms pushed the Congress to open Martin Luther 
King Jr.’s F.B.I. files, and he led the 
Congressional opposition to the creation of the 
federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He also 
opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 
Voting Rights Act of 1982, among other civil rights legislation.

Helms demanded that ten female House of 
Representative members “act like ladies” when 
they disrupted a Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee in their call for support of a United 
Nations treaty against gender discrimination. 
Helms ordered the women forcibly removed by 
Capitol police (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 
10/28/99). In 1973, Helms pushed through his 
amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, which 
prevented international family planning 
organizations to “provide or promote” abortion.

In his response to HIV in 1987, he proposed that 
“Somewhere along the line, were going to have to 
quarantine people with AIDS,” and for over 20 
years, he consistently opposed expanded federal 
support and funding to AIDS research. For 
example, he opposed the Kennedy-Hatch AIDS bill 
stating that “There is not one single case of 
AIDS in this country that cannot be traced to 
sodomy” (States News Service, 5/17/88), and 
“We’ve got to have some common sense about a 
disease transmitted by people deliberately 
engaging in unnatural acts” (New York Times, 
1995). In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms sponsored an 
amendment in the US Senate, prohibiting federal 
funding for AIDS educational materials that 
“promote or encourage...homosexual sexual 
activity.” Under Helms’s sponsorship, Congress 
passed an amendment in 1989 to restrict all 
National Endowment for the Arts funding of any 
art deemed “homoerotic” or “religiously 
offensive.”  In 1990, he referred to gay and 
lesbian people as “weak, morally sick wretches,” 
and has accused them of “engaging in incredibly 
offensive and revolting conduct.” He warned 
against “homosexuals, lesbians, disgusting people 
marching in the streets, demanding all sorts of 
things, including the right to marry each other.”

In line with Helms’s opposition to President 
Clinton's foreign policies, Helms once warned 
President Clinton that if he were to ever visit 
any military base in the state of North Carolina, 
“he had better have a bodyguard.”

These are simply a few of the many statements and 
actions of the late Senator Jesse Helms. By 
conferring the status “statesman,” “patriot,” and 
“practical American” on Jesse Helms, Ed Feulner 
has lowered the bar to the ground and has 
trivialized the honor and integrity of our true political and civic heroes.

Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld
Assistant Professor
Multicultural and International Curriculum Studies
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
wblumen at iastate.edu
515.294.5931 office
515.232.8230 home