Will Jesse Rise Again? : Running Against a Black Man for a Fourth Term, Helms Has Faith in the Politics of Nostalgia

AS THE LAST streaks of daylight play out in tremulous pinks and oranges, a steady drizzle of sensi ble Chevrolets, work- worn pickup trucks and family vans with tinted glass jolt over potholes into a dusty field, weaving to avoid couples strolling toward the National Guard Armory in Wilmington, N.C.

Earnest young men perspire in dark suits and paper-white shirts split by somber ties, clothes that hang unfamiliarly on their frames. They hover near the doors, pointing people toward the rows of long, foldaway tables covered in white paper tablecloths and, beyond them, the line of steel vats filled with good North Carolina grub--barbecue pork, Brunswick stew, coleslaw, hush puppies. Postcard-size American flags fixed with patriotic bunting dot the white walls of the armory.

A group of men discusses engine displacements; a few older women stir the hot, soupy air with paper fans, and the din of long Southern drawls rises to fill the brick cavern. Then, suddenly, the conversations fade and a splatter of clapping swells to a tide of applause as North Carolina’s senior senator walks in.

A smile of sorts ripples over Jesse Helms’ lips as he plunges into the aisles, shaking hands, stooping to whisper a word to an acquaintance or pat a child on the head. As he moves along, he sheds his blue suit jacket. When he shuffles by, he extends a soft, pink hand, his eyes refracted through his clumsy, owlish glasses, and he gruffly purrs, “Glad to see you here.”

“Jesse’s a man of common sense,” a middle-aged woman patiently lectures a visiting Northerner. “He knows what human nature is. Grass-roots people will support him to the end.”

“Now you look here,” says her husband, the owner of a small construction company, as he holds up a leaflet that has been left at each place setting. “He’s against higher taxes, for the death penalty, against abortion and, right here, he’s against using taxpayers’ money to pay for obscene,”--he stumbles, wrestling with homoerotic-- “well, I can’t pronounce that, but pornography and avant-garde art.”

His wife speaks up again. “I don’t think the government should be funding art in the first place. To me, putting a crucifix in urine is disgusting. Now, who’s the strongest opponent of spending federal dollars for supporting the NEA? People say he stands for what the Constitution intended. This nation is founded on the Bible by godly men.

“The thing about Jesse,” she says conclusively, “is you know where he stands. The thing about Jesse is, what you see is what you get.”

Jesse. It’s always Jesse. Not Senator Helms. Not Mr. Helms. It’s just Jesse. More than anything, 69-year-old Jesse Helms has convinced many white North Carolinians that he’s one of them, that Jesse Helms is just plain folks.

In this, his fourth U. S. Senate campaign, he is counting, once again, on a powerful down-home style that melds folksiness, a bearlike embrace of traditionalism and his misty-eyed recollections of North Carolina’s bucolic past with a finely tuned, state-of-the-art political money machine second to none in the country. He won his last election, widely regarded as one of the most vicious races in modern American politics (another was the 1950 Senate campaign in which Willis Smith, a former American Bar Assn. president, aided by Helms, defeated Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, after months of rabid race- and redbaiting), by a hairsbreadth over former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. This time, Helms’ opponent is Harvey Gantt, a 47-year-old architect and former mayor of Charlotte. Gantt, though, is different from Helms’ previous opponents: He is black.

Although Helms insists that he is not running a racially tinged campaign, Gantt’s very color has thrust the issue of race before every North Carolinian as it has never been before. The campaign also has become this year’s most clearly drawn run for the Senate--one in which Helms’ unvarnished conservatism clashes starkly with Gantt’s unapologetic liberalism, a contest that has remained neck-and-neck as the candidates push toward Nov. 6.

As Jesse Helms steps onto the stage this evening in September, loosening, then stripping off, his tie, his eyes dance over the crowd, a gathering of white, middle- and lower-income people, his people, who spring to their feet, chanting, “Six more years! Six more years!” Then he speaks, his voice rising and ebbing in the cadences of his southern Piedmont roots. There’s more storytelling than oratory, more homilies than stentorian exhortations.

“I never promised any free money from Washington because there wasn’t any free money from Washington,” Helms reminds his faithful. “Every dime has to come from the taxpayers’ pockets.” He turns nostalgic, reminiscing about being sworn in on the floor of the Senate for the first time. “And I looked up. My father was in tears. He was my favorite man.” He takes a deep breath to draw out the emotion. And then he tells of his recent fact-finding visit to Saudi Arabia and his determination that American troops should be able to send letters home free of charge. “I got that passed the first day of the session.”

“You see,” the middle-aged woman says, nudging the visitor, “that’s what I mean. Jesse’s practical.”

Then, Helms flicks away the bugaboos that have followed him through life: “I hear talk of racism. But who was the senator, by the way, who chose a fine, highly qualified--and I’m talking about a black man--to serve in the No. 2 spot on the minority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? I wonder who that senator was?” And finally, he turns to the fate of the nation. “There’re two equally important No. 1 problems--the federal debt and,” his voice begins a slow climb, drawing each word out syllable by syllable, “the imperative need to restore moral and religious principles as the keystone to our survival as a free nation. I am persuaded that the Lord is giving us one more chance to turn this country around.”

Applause, shouts of approval and stomping feet smother his final words.

THERE ARE FEW states in the waning decade of the century that could nurture a Jesse Helms. A product of small- town life, Helms grew up in a South of untroubled certainties, deeply held religious beliefs and fixed social relations. But the tranquillity of rural North Carolina life--much taken for granted as the natural order of things--even it was jarred by the events of Black Friday, 1929, when Helms was 8 years old.

Helms has never described the effects of these national traumas on his boyhood or his home town, Monroe. There are, to be sure, WPA accounts of the impact of the Depression on rural America, great photographs by Walker Evans, but North Carolina’s native son Thomas Wolfe, in “You Can’t Go Home Again,” described more lyrically the repercussions that events on Wall Street had on his state, even in little hollows like Monroe:

“The collapse of the Stock Market, which had begun in late October, was in some ways like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout America. Millions of people in the far-off hamlets, towns and cities did not know what to make of it. Would its effect touch them? They hoped not. . . . But the waves of fear had touched them, and life was not quite the same.”

North Carolina, and the country, survived, but the path to recovery, through the New Deal and World War II, forever shattered the sleepy stability of the South. For those who remember wistfully the years before the war, before the onslaught of the civil rights movement, Southern society was almost Edenic, a place where the races respected each other’s place, where the Bible was law, women were treated like ladies and morality was plain. Nostalgia, perhaps because it proved comforting, subsumed for many people the crueler realities of that era; it also became, because it idealized the past, a blueprint for the present.

When he was a television editorialist in the 1950s and ‘60s, Helms would retreat to this fictive world. In 1964, as the currents of the civil rights movement flowed through his state, he told his listeners the story of “a young Negro mechanic” who had driven him home one day:

“He recalled the days of his boyhood. ‘We lived on this white man’s place. We helped them pick their cotton, and they helped us pick ours. When some of us were sick, they come down and looked after us. And when some of them were sick, we did the same. We got along just fine for 19 years without a cross word.’ ”

Declared Helms of the mechanic’s tale: “His nostalgic memories of his family’s relationship with their white neighbors were a contradiction of the evil image of the South which the agitators of today constantly seek to build.” What’s more, Helms noted, these “evil images” were “killing such books as ‘Uncle Remus’ and such plays as ‘Green Pastures.’ ”

In Wilmington, and elsewhere, Helms always summons up a bit of that old South, touching chords that resonate with unease over the pace of change. But Helms’ state is changing--and changing permanently.

In the last 20 years, traditional agriculture (tobacco) and the state’s principle industries (textiles and furniture-making) have been weakened by a reordered national and international economic environment. There is no longer one North Carolina. In the west, where the mountains tumble into Tennessee, there is deep poverty. Similarly, in much of the state’s eastern swath, the coastal plain, nearly 25% of the population subsists below the poverty line. In contrast, along the central corridor of the state, called the Piedmont, a belt of flatland spreading out from Interstate 85 from Charlotte to Raleigh, urban growth, universities and high-tech research and development industries compete with top institutions in other states.

Yet for every accomplishment that boosts the state’s image, many others seem to hold it back. No state has a lower industrial wage. With the death of 11.5 out of every 1,000 infants born, North Carolina ranks fourth among all states in infant mortality. One out of six adults older than 19 is illiterate. And only this year did North Carolina manage to push past South Carolina to rank 49th in SAT scores.

Indeed, there is a widening perception among many North Carolinians that the state may actually be regressing. “North Carolina used to rely on low wages, no unions, the work ethic,” says John Dornan, executive director of the Raleigh-based Public School Forum, a private group concerned with education issues. “We can’t do that anymore. As our industries--textiles and furniture--are hit by Third World competition, we have to rely on education.” Billy Ray Hall, president of the Rural Economic Development Center, a private, nonprofit agency in Raleigh, paints a more despairing picture. “If we don’t replace our manufacturing base, make investments that make us competitive internationally, we aren’t going to make it.”

The inexorability of change, and the struggle between resisting or encouraging it, are at the root of Jesse Helms’ appeal. Hoover Adams, the nominally retired founder and editor of the Dunn Daily Record in Harnett County, traces his friendship with Helms back to the Willis Smith campaign. Adams, who keeps a large brass Democratic donkey on his desk, has uneasily watched North Carolina evolve. “There’s no question,” Adams says, “that morals are laxer than they used to be. Even around here. You see couples living out of wedlock. You see single girls going into bars. In Chapel Hill and Durham, where you have the college element, you have a lot of longhair intellectuals--I don’t mean they have long hair necessarily--and they’re all liberals. They’re not typical of small communities in North Carolina.”

James H. Pou Bailey, another of Helms’ oldest friends, a poker-playing buddy and semi-retired judge in Raleigh who used to quietly place a pearl-handled revolver on the bench while holding court, nods when asked if Helms might be a bit out of step with the times. “I wouldn’t disagree that time is passing him by,” Pou Bailey says. “We grew up when the farmer was king. Now very few people are working on the farm. It’s a different ball game, and that’s led to Jesse’s success.

“In general, I would guess Jesse would deplore these changes. He wants the status quo. But he has enough sense to know these changes are irreversible. Take tobacco. Everyone who can see the tip of his nose knows its going down the tube. I think deep down in his heart he agrees that change is inevitable. But deep down in his heart, he would like to direct that change, to control it. But he can’t. Given his druthers, he’d like to go back to the romance of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ which never really existed in the first place.”

JESSE HELMS IS not running again to eliminate poverty in North Carolina, to raise the state’s abysmal college-entrance test scores, to improve newborn infants’ chances of surviving their first year, to halt the degradation of the state’s environment. In fact, one finds little in Helms’ statements, speeches, campaign ads or Senate activities to suggest much concern for his state’s dire condition.

Rather, North Carolina’s problems are, in Helms’ view, of a different order. “Never,” Helms declared in January as he announced his intention to seek reelection, “has America needed prayer more than now. To forget the power of prayer and make so much of politics? Everything’s political? No, it ain’t. No. 1 is faith in God. . . . I submit to you that a nation that forgets God is committing suicide.” Next to the primacy of belief in a supreme being (Helms is a Baptist with pronounced fundamentalist beliefs) is an unwavering opposition to abortion--which he invariably describes as “the senseless slaughter of unborn babies”--in all instances, except when absolutely essential to save the life of the mother. After these two themes, and only after them, does Helms discuss his opposition to new taxes (which would “pay for a spending spree of Congress”), to the federal deficit (“a bipartisan scandal”), to the return of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government (“because some of those New York bankers wanted it to happen to bail them out from a bunch of bad loans made in and to Panama”) and, most stridently of late, to the erosion of what he calls “family values.”

“If you’d told me, 10 or 15 years ago, that what’s happening today was going to happen, I’d have laughed,” Helms told the 1,700 supporters gathered for his reelection announcement at the State Fairground in Raleigh. “Think about it. Homosexuals and lesbians, disgusting people marching in our streets demanding all sorts of things, including the right to marry each other. How do you like them apples? Isn’t our obligation, yours and mine, to get up and do some demanding on our own? What about the rights of human beings, born and unborn? What about the rights of women who want to stay in the home doing the most important job there is--raising their children?”

Coupled with this focus on traditional values, for the past year, has been a relentless assault on the National Endowment for the Arts, triggered by his becoming aware of the endowment’s funding of works by Andres Serrano, particularly his “Piss Christ,” a crucifix in a tank of urine, and a series of homoerotic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Helms did not mince his words at the fairground: “What that perverted homosexual filth is, is not modern-day Michelangelo. It is modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.”

In a sense, most of these issues have preoccupied Helms since his earliest days as a television editorialist. They are passionately held beliefs that emanate from the soil of rural North Carolina and from between the covers of the Bible.

On Oct. 18, 1921, Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born to a policeman and his wife in Monroe, population 3,000. Helms attended, but did not graduate from, Wake Forest College before joining the Navy in 1942. He spent most of World War II as a recruiter in his home state, and when it ended, Helms returned to Raleigh, where he became city editor of the Raleigh Times. Then, in 1948, he discovered the budding electronic media, initially in the form of radio station WRAL and later its sister television station, where, except for three years working for Willis Smith in Washington, he remained until deciding to seek his own Senate seat in 1972.

At WRAL-TV, “the Voice of Free Enterprise in Raleigh-Durham,” Helms verbally battled the rush of integration, the erosion of traditional mores, the tumult of student protests against the Vietnam War, social programs, higher taxes, the Soviet Union and communism, and liberals on the Supreme Court who ordered busing to end segregated schooling in the South and who banned prayer in public schools.

Above all, Helms became known for his virulent antagonism toward the civil rights movement. In 1964, while the Senate was debating the provisions of the Civil Rights Act (described by Helms as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress”), he regaled his listeners with the tale of Walter Honaker, a luncheonette owner who refused to serve black customers. “Mr. Honaker’s policy, wrong as some may believe it to be, is nevertheless no threat to the health or safety of any other citizen,” Helms said. “He is merely asking that he be left alone to make his decision and to succeed or fail as a result of it.” This editorial was typical of Helms’ position on integration, one that invariably found sympathy for the practitioners of segregation who became, in his articulation, the real victims.

After a rough-and-tumble campaign in 1972, Helms was sent to the Senate in the same year in which Richard Nixon steamrollered George McGovern. The new senator brought to Capitol Hill every one of the views he had expressed as a television commentator. The difference was that now he was in a position to make his views felt in the corridors of power.

ONLY RARELY does a real hint of the passions stirred by Jesse Helms bubble to the surface in the Senate. In Septem ber, 1989, during a particularly vigorous debate on the Senate floor over a bill to award $20,000 each to the surviving Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey castigated Helms to his face for his statements denigrating the measure. Eschewing the Senate practice of addressing colleagues through the chair, Bradley rose and looked directly at Helms. “I would implore you to use some restraint when it comes to issues as sensitive as this,” remonstrated Bradley.

Helms’ well-honed strategy in the Senate--attaching an endless string of amendments promoting his conservative causes to legislation, putting holds on bills in committee and stalling ambassadorial nominations--has had, in the view of Capitol Hill insiders, a paradoxical effect of undermining his effectiveness and yet forcing the Senate leadership and the executive branch to pay attention to him.

“He will bring the institution to a screeching halt to promote his own agenda over the interests of the nation and his state,” says one senior Senate staffer who has been on the Hill for two decades. “He polarizes people, drives them apart.”

Another senior staff member sighs when asked about Helms. “The institution can only function if the individual power of a senator is exercised on a selective basis,” he says. “What Helms does is exercise that power constantly on what many of his colleagues see as the trivial, aimed at 30-second TV spots rather than at serious public policy. There is enormous resentment against that. On the other hand, where he triumphs is against the weak. He can really screw up somebody’s confirmation. Helms discourages the State Department from sending up names of people engaged in carrying out controversial policy. He is able to exact a price.”

Helms’ senior aide in Washington, James P. Lucier, says he has heard all this before. “On issues that are compromisable, he compromises,” Lucier says. “But on the issue of whether to compromise with an atheist government, or to kill an unborn child, or to raise taxes--those are issues that precede politics. The abortion issue would have disappeared had it not been for Senator Helms. To him, it’s not an issue. An issue is something you exploit to enlarge your constituency.”

Like an evaporating puddle on hot pavement, one of Helms’ biggest issues has almost disappeared in the last year: the Soviet threat. Many people on Capitol Hill say the transformation in Eastern Europe is responsible for Helms’ boisterous attacks on the NEA. One Senate staffer, marveling at Helms’ political deftness, put it baldly: “Eastern Europe knocked him out of the box. Here was paramount evil crumbling before his eyes. Then along came Mapplethorpe and his pictures, and Helms had himself a new whipping horse.”

Actually, it was not Helms but New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato who first stumbled across NEA grants to Serrano and Mapplethorpe last year. But D’Amato, a Republican who represents a constituency devoted to the arts, was persuaded to mute his views, leaving the field to Helms. So far, Helms has seized every opportunity to mention the issue.

Often lost amid Helms’ high-profile rhetoric has been the real substance of his presence on Capitol Hill. This year, North Carolina’s major newspapers, which Helms lumps together with whomever his opponent happens to be--this year, it’s “my eight opponents, Harvey Gantt and the state’s newspapers”--have put the senator’s legislative record under a microscope. They reveal a senator preoccupied not with his state’s problems (apart from his rock-hard support for agricultural subsidies for tobacco farmers) but almost exclusively with an assortment of conservative causes, what have been called “hot-button issues.”

Seth Effron, a reporter for the Greensboro News and Record, examined Helms’ voting record over the past 11 years and came up with a portrait of the senator that is largely predictable. Part and parcel of the Helms image is his strong support of defense spending, and his record reflects it--94 votes to sustain or increase the military’s budget, with only six to trim funding (to cut the U.S. troop presence in Europe, for example). Helms has consistently rejected spending on social programs, voting 41 times to oppose increases in, or even cut, school lunch, child-care or child-health programs, 16 times against college-loan programs, 39 times against job training in public schools and 28 times to kill or cut the food-stamp program. He also stands firm in his belief in the need for religion in public schools and in his opposition to integration, voting 17 times to reintroduce prayer in schools and 20 times against busing. And though he once voted for an AIDS program to help veterans, on 19 occasions he cast votes to cut or eliminate broader AIDS programs.

But Effron also found that there were instances in which Helms abandoned his avowed principles. In 1982, he voted to approve a $99-billion tax increase, the largest in history. In 1986, Helms voted aye on a measure to raise $15.8 billion in additional taxes. Moreover, there are times when Helms attempts to take credit for projects he has fought against.

At the Wilmington rally, an enthusiastic Helms supporter told a visitor that he should be grateful for Helms’ efforts to get Interstate 40 built, the highway that now runs from Raleigh to the coast. “You can thank Jesse for that,” she said. In fact, although Helms was conspicuously present at the highway’s opening, he opposed the project all along, favoring instead the widening of an existing state road.

Most political pros in the state think that efforts such as Effron’s will have little effect on voters. “There’s a declining number of people spending time reading newspapers,” says Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina. “More and more information comes from drive-time radio or television. Helms is masterful with the 10-, 15-, 30-second commercial, which becomes fact. Political advertising is overtaking truth.”

JESSE HELMS HAS stayed in Washington in no small part because he is buttressed by a fund-raising machine that knows few rivals in American politics, a font of money that generates an endless stream of television commercials. The National Congressional Club, a political action committee run by friends from the Willis Smith race, and his Helms for Senate Committee have generated millions of dollars for him.

When the fury, dust and tears of the Helms-Hunt campaign passed, it became clear that Helms had raised and spent $16 million in his winning campaign. The most recent campaign finance reports show that he will approach that Senate record this year. Not surprisingly, Gantt pursues Helms from a considerable financial distance, although his aides have spoken with more confidence of late about the inflow of campaign funds, especially from the film industry and arts communities.

Since Gantt’s Democratic primary victory in June, the Helms campaign, using Congressional Club mailing lists, has stepped up its pleas for money, with two or more letters going out to the faithful around the country each week. Because the letters are sent continuously to the same pool of voters, each is carefully worded to avoid repetition.

A letter from Peter Moore Jr., Helms’ campaign manager, begins this way: “Dear Friend: Have you thought about how devastating it would be if Jesse Helms lost his Senate campaign? The very next day, Ted Kennedy would choke up with emotion as he congratulated Harvey Gantt on his victory. Liberal reporters would barely be able to report their stories--they would be dancing with glee.”

A more recent letter sent out under the signature of Helms’ daughter, Jane Helms Knox, begins: “Dear Friend of My Father: I have never written a letter like this before and nobody knows I am writing it (a little hard to believe since it was churned out by the campaign’s direct-mail operation). I have never known a man more decent, more honorable, more compassionate--or more courageous--than . . . my Daddy.” The letter ends with the standard plea for money: “My father needs $63,000 in the next three weeks to keep his reelection campaign going.” Helms’ wife, Dot, has recently started appearing on the campaign trail, too.

The Raleigh News and Observer, in a comprehensive review of Helms’ campaign finance records, found that the average age of frequent contributors was 80. Of these supporters, nearly 70% live out of state.

The money Helms will continue to raise right up to Election Day is now being poured into television commercials--Helms’ skillfully crafted “attack ads,” which most political professionals think will ultimately decide the election since Helms has chosen not to grant interviews this year. One recent weekend, the campaign spent so much money that political ads were running even during Saturday morning cartoon shows. “Attack ads are very, very important,” says Beyle, the political scientist from the University of North Carolina. “Helms didn’t invent them, but he perfected them. And no one can slug it out with Helms ad for ad. He’s got too much money.”

It is said in North Carolina that Helms was shocked when Gantt won the Democratic nomination. Conventional wisdom held that no black person could run for statewide office, although 22% of North Carolinians are black. Aware that he is dogged by accusations of ingrained racism, Helms made a public statement disavowing any appeals to voters on the basis of race. “I told my folks here, and I told my folks in Raleigh, that some heads will be cracked if anything is done that even appears to be racist.” But then, Jesse being Jesse, he added, “Now what y’all call racist is one thing.”

The first hint that race as an issue had not been fully extinguished came only a month later when James Meredith--the same James Meredith who enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, protected by federal troops, and who now is a special assistant in Helms’ Washington office--issued a statement assailing the delegates to an NAACP convention in Washington. “I have a background profile on more than half of the delegates,” Meredith wrote on Helms’ Senate stationery, “and over 60% are involved in the Drug Culture and at least 80% are involved in criminal or immoral activities.” Two days later, when questioned about Meredith’s accusations, Helms simply replied that Meredith “had a point.”

None of Helms’ television or print ads have overtly exploited race as an issue. As Helms’ friend Hoover Adams puts it, “Why would Helms bring up race? Everybody can see that Gantt is black.” Instead, Helms is intent on depicting Gantt as outside what he believes are mainstream North Carolinian principles. A typical Helms ad reads: “North Carolina Values vs. Extreme Liberal Values--You Decide. . . .” As has been true in every campaign, Helms mixes the true and the false in depicting the opponent he wants North Carolinians to see. His ads correctly describe Gantt as opposed to the death penalty but incorrectly accuse him of wanting “to cut defense $300 billion”--the entire defense budget for the nation. Another ad charges that Gantt supports abortions in the last trimester or for the purposes of selecting the sex of the child. Gantt denies this and has done so repeatedly.

As one of the most prominent architects in Charlotte, Harvey Gantt derives much of his success not from the political maelstrom but from such Helmsian virtues as hard work and professional excellence. Indeed, in 1963, television commentator Helms, while denouncing Meredith for entering Ole Miss under federal bayonets, praised an obscure young man who became the first black to enter Clemson: “He has stoutly resisted the pose of a conquering hero for the forces of integration. . . . He has rejected the fanfare and trappings of the NAACP. . . . He has refused to make pompous speeches and statements. . . . If ever a man put his best foot forward, Harvey Gantt has done so.”

For two terms, Gantt served as mayor of Charlotte, the city’s first black chief executive. His color, for better or worse, has made him a household name in North Carolina far more rapidly than would have been true had his roots been Anglo-Saxon. For his campaign managers, this is a plus. But they must still battle the Helms machine and get across Gantt’s relatively liberal vision. While Gantt expects virtually every black voter to pull the voting lever for him, he hopes for support from a significant percentage of white women because of Helms’ position on abortion. That and a smattering of white male votes are the combination that Gantt believes will send him to Washington.

Gantt’s style at rallies, an easygoing recitation of traditional liberal themes, contrasts vividly with Helms’ predilection for emotionalism. At a September rally in Raleigh jammed with a multiethnic crowd, Gantt spoke softly, knowing his words fell on fertile ground. “It’s time for us to make some changes,” he said, “to get on with the business of sending somebody to Washington who’s interested in bringing people together, not dividing them. . . somebody who’s attuned to the times we’re living in, someone who’s concerned about the human condition. . . . We ought not be proud of our high infant mortality rate. We ought to be concerned about the low-birth-weight babies. We ought to be concerned about elderly citizens who work all their lives and can’t even afford the cost of filling out a prescription. We ought to be challenged to do something about it. . . . Folks, isn’t that a noble agenda for North Carolina to embrace?”

After the first week of October, opinion polls showed a virtual dead heat, with Helms ahead of Gantt 47% to 46%. Still, Walter De Vries, executive director of the North Carolina Institute of Political Leadership in Wilmington, argues that the Helms campaign has and will continue to define the shape of the election. “This is not a personality race. Helms draws the agenda. This is what the paid media does. The Gantt campaign is basically reacting to Helms’ paid TV commercials, more than to what Helms is saying on the stump or what Helms is saying in news conferences because he really doesn’t have any.”

In its final 10 days, this campaign and its peculiar flavor lead those who care deeply about the South to reflect on Helm’s place in the region’s future--and its past. Prof. Beyle puts Helms squarely in the receding past. “My view is that Helms represents the ghost of Christmas past, the way things were and the way they want it back--whether its racial relations, family values, the way the economy used to be.”

Grasping the phenomenon of Jesse Helms, however, cannot rest solely with political science; North Carolina is too linked with a past of interwoven illusions and realities to succumb easily to academic analysis. One of the South’s best-known novelists, Lee Smith of Chapel Hill, has contemplated the character, the idiosyncrasies, the humor and suffering of her land for much of her adult life.

“There’s a big difference between the perception of North Carolina from the outside and the reality of politics here inside,” she says. “There’re all these different strains here. There’s the country music strain that’s linked to machismo, drinking a lot, clear emotions, the family. But there’s also this idea of outlaws, say Waylon Jennings. These people are liberals.

“Jesse Helms, well, I’d say he’s part of the Southern tradition of demagoguery. It’s having a boss. You know, there’s this trait of seeming to represent your interests against rich people, yet be working for rich people. It’s a very powerful thing. I think the South is still a place of myth and legend, and if you can capture that, you’ve got everything. There’s something about if you don’t have anything--you derive your pride from strange sources, like being better than black people. There’s a real xenophobia. There is a real desire not to know.

“There’s a desire to perpetuate the Old South, and they want to hold on to it all the more now that it’s gone. The South is in love with its image of itself.” She pauses, her eyes wandering off into the distance. Then she says quietly, “It’s just gone. And it’s been gone for 10 years.”