Jesse Helms: The Most Influential People In Politics

It is without a doubt that Jesse Helms was one of the most influential people in politics in the 20th century. While I disagree with many, if not all, of his tactics and stances Helms took on a variety of issues, I have come to understand that his ability to understand the state of North Carolina and play to the state’s hidden fears on race and a variety of issues proved to be very affective in getting him elected to the senate and allowing the Republican Party to prosper in North Carolina after 100 years of being a dormant political party. Through his use of race, the media, and his awareness of the underlying fears of North Carolina, Jesse Helms would position himself as one of the most significant political figures of the 20th century. After

He was now the leader of the Republican Party and filled the leadership void within the conservative movement that would foster the growing force of the New Right and elect Ronal Reagan as President in the 1980s. Helms was never seen to be an establishment figure but rather just an angry conservative who seemed to be against everything. An example of Helms anti-establishment ways was during the 1976 Republican primary when Reagan challenged President Ford. While Republicans were expected to support the current Republican president, Ford, Helms saw Reagan as the true conservative and threw his support behind Reagan in the primary. While Reagan would eventually lose to Ford for the Republican nomination, Helms influence enabled Reagan to win North Carolina’s primary, which was the first time that a sitting US president ever lost a primary election. This win would set the stage for Reagan in the 1980s to take lead of the New Right, all thanks to Jesse

As Ernest Furgurson, his biographer, stated, “He [Helms] knew his audience… [Helms] understood their daily conversations – at the service station and supermarket, at the courthouse, at the tailgate of pickup trucks parked in the shade of pine trees behind sandy tobacco fields” (211). Helms knew that the issue of civil rights and other progressive causes did not sit lightly with many white North Carolinians. In all of his races, he used the issue of race to fire up his base. For example, in the 1990s, Helms ran against Harvey Gantt, the African American mayor of Charlotte, and used the issue of Affirmative Action to beat Gantt. The Helms campaign released an ad in 1990 demonstrating a white man crumbling his rejection letter because the employer had to give the job to a minority due to quotas. Helms painted Gantt as a radical on race issues, which proved to be affective in defeating Gantt. On the issue of race, Helms did not try to mask his discriminatory views, instead, he capitalized on it because he knew that many others in North Carolina supported his views. While many saw Helms as disillusioned or out of touch with today’s society, I view him as an individual who knew the true nature of North Carolina and did everything in his power to expose it. Helms proved to be a master at political strategy making him one of