Farewell to a Great Jacksonian
By Walter Russell Mead. As rumors spread through Georgetown, Cambridge and Manhattan that North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms had decided not to run for re-election to the seat he had held since 1973, the merriment among the chattering classes could scarcely be contained. Anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, anti-world government, pro-Bible and pro-tobacco, Jesse Helms is the antitype of political correctness. His enemies have never been able to beat him at the polls; now that the senator is yielding the floor to Father Time, liberal Democrats -- and not a few pro-business Republicans -- rejoice at the imminent departure of an eloquent, resourceful, inveterate foe. The jubilation is both premature and misguided.... It is misguided because for all his staunch conservatism and angry rhetoric, Mr. Helms is one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil rights revolution.... [O]nce the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was enacted, Mr. Helms -- along with some of his erstwhile segregationist colleagues like South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond -- did something very revolutionary for Southern white populists. He accepted the laws and obeyed them. This is not how Southern politicians responded in the 1870s and 1880s. Populists like South Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman did not just fulminate against civil rights laws. They led movements of armed, organized resistance, intimidating black voters at the polls, defending racial lynchings and, in Tillman's case, being directly and openly involved in the murder of black political leaders. Even as the passions of the civil rights movement were at their height, Messrs. Helms and Thurmond (whose father was Ben Tillman's attorney) shunned violence.... Even their opposition to affirmative action is based on their claim that these principles violate what ought to be a color-blind stance on the part of the government. That is something no white Southern politician, and especially one representing Mr. Helms' core supporters of farmers and small-town whites, would have ever said before Jesse Helms came along. It is something they all say now. Mr. Helms could have followed the Tillman path and led the white South into violent resistance; he also could have failed to carry his supporters with him into grudging acceptance of the new racial order. He disciplined and tamed the segregationist South even as he represented it to a hostile nation. We are all better off because he managed this difficult high- wire act.