U.S. Senate Candidate Willis Smith's 1950 campaign poster. Smith employed Jesse Helms in that campaign as researcher and strategist, later employing him as Senate staffmember.
The rest of this poster's litany reads:
* Negroes working beside you, your wife and daughters in your mills and factories?* Negroes eating beside you in all public eating places?
* Negroes riding beside you, your wife and your daughters in buses, cabs and trains?
* Negroes sleeping in the same hotels and rooming houses?
* Negroes teaching and disciplining your children in school?
* Negroes sitting with you and your family at all public meetings?
* Negroes Going to white schools and white children going to Negro schools?
* Negroes to occupy the same hospital rooms with you and your wife and daughters?
* Negroes as your foremen and overseers in the mills?
* Negroes using your toilet facilities?
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reached back into conservative history during a speech on Wednesday, lauding late Republican icon Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) as an example for his present-day colleagues, Mediaite reported.
“The willingness to say all those crazy things is a rare, rare characteristic,” Cruz told the audience at a gathering held by the conservative Heritage Foundation. “And you know what? It’s every bit as true now as it was then. We need a hundred more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.”
Alan: Jesse Helms' Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms
Alan: "Conservatives and Jesse Helms" is the best available compendium of Helms' quotations and Helms' vignettes. The substance of this article begins with the words, "Here are quotes by Jesse Helms himself" - four pages after a litany of conservative eulogies. http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/07/conservatives-a.html
Cruz said during his speech that Helms’ propensity for saying “crazy things” was the reason actor John Wayne reportedly donated $5,000 to Helms’ first campaign for Senate. Cruz also said someone like Helms was needed in this day and age, when pressure cookers can be turned into explosives.
“I know if Jesse Helms were still with us, he would not shy away from this stuff,” Cruz said at an event with the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, before telling the audience that as a child, he donated $10 to Helms — his first political contribution, representing 20 weeks’ worth of his allowance — “’cause they were all beating up on him, they were coming after him hard, and I thought it wasn’t right.”
As Mother Jones reported, people “beat up” on Helms for his racist and homophobic beliefs, including statements that gay Americans were “weak, morally sick wretches;” his 1990 campaign commercial denouncing affirmative action as a “racial quota law;” and his 1983 filibuster against a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday, among other incidents.
“It’s easy in this age to say that Helms, who carried his dislike of African-Americans like a badge of honor for 30 years around the U.S. Senate, was a son of the South who was simply honoring good, old-fashioned Southern values,” then-CNN contributor Roland S. Martin wrote following Helms’ death in 2008. “But when you stand in opposition to a bill that would, for the first time, give African-Americans from border to border the constitutionally guaranteed right to cast a vote, then I refuse to call you a stand-up person for the rights of every man, woman and child.”
Watch Cruz’s remarks, as posted by Mediaite on Wednesday, below.
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When the history of Helms’ role in American political life is written, it will note, along with his qualities of courtly good manners and personal warmth, some of the following:
- Helms entered the political arena in 1950 as a researcher for a segregationist candidate who appealed to voters with these sentiments: “White people, wake up before it is too late,” said one ad. “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”
- Following this (successful) campaign and a brief stint as a congressional staffer, Helms returned to North Carolina to battle integration efforts with fervor—for example, calling the University of North Carolina the “University of Negroes and Communists” and proposing a wall to seal off the campus.
- Helms termed Martin Luther King Jr. a Communist and a pervert, and characterized the civil rights as a bunch of “moral degenerates.” As the heroic non-violent marchers gained power, drawing primarily on black churches nationwide, Helms proclaimed 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.”
- Helms gained his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1972 by defeating a Greek-American with the slogan, “Vote for Helms—He’s One of Us!” He employed a similar slogan versus his African-American challenger in 1990 and 1996, Harvey Gantt, including the infamous“white hands” ad, designed to exploit white resentment over U.S. affirmative action policies.
The litany of Helms’s senate “accomplishments” include: (failed) obstruction of the creation of Martin Luther King Day, opposition to the extension of the Voting Rights Act, and support for the terroristic/apartheid regime in South Africa, among many, many other milestones.
From "Think Again: You Don't Know Jesse" - http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2008/07/10/4629/think-again-you-dont-know-jesse/
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Alan: In Oakland, California, I was friends with a Jewish physicist at Cal Berkeley who was one of two Holocaust survivors in his extended family. Every campaign cycle, Werner sent money to Helms opponent, convinced as he was that Jesse Helms was the most dangerous man in American politics.
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