Helms’ Ideological Roots Go Deep in Southern Hometown : Politics: To the senator who leads Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, the GOP agenda is a birthright.

The Republicans are trumpeting themselves as the party of the new--the new majority, new ideas, new energy.

And then there’s Jesse Helms.

To the senator from North Carolina, the Republican agenda--line item veto, tax cuts, school prayer, deregulation, the end of the welfare state--is old.

Maybe not as old as the hills. But certainly as old as the days when Helms grew up in this cotton mill town, when his teetotaler family attended the Baptist church twice a week and his father served as the police chief.

Since that time, Helms has argued for “small-town values” unceasingly and battled for them cunningly. He has used bluster and bombast and has earned every enemy and every friend he has--and he has a lot of both.

When Helms joked that President Clinton was so unpopular on North Carolina military bases he’d need a bodyguard to visit there, and when he suggested that he might block Clinton foreign policy initiatives unless the vote on the GATT agreement was postponed, veteran Helms watchers were not surprised.

Because there is nothing new about Jesse Helms.

But the stage is new. This week “Senator No,” a man admired as an idealist and despised as a bigot, becomes one of the most powerful voices on America’s role in the world--chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Helms never has served in an executive position in government; aside from a term on the Raleigh City Council in the 1950s, he had never held elective office until he was elected to the Senate in 1972.

But from the very start, Jesse Helms showed total self-assurance, never wavering from his conservative mission.

“He’s created a moral politics” that is “focused on social issues, hot-button topics” like abortion and homosexuality, said Michael Lienisch, author of “Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right.”

“I’d say he’s more moral than a politician,” said a longtime friend, Hoover Adams, who is the former publisher of the Daily Record of Dunn, N.C. “If it’s right, he’ll say it.”

This is how Helms himself put his credo, in a book published a few years after he reached the Senate:

“Atheism and socialism--or liberalism, which tends in the same direction--are inseparable entities. When you have men who no longer believe that God is in charge of human affairs, you have men attempting to take the place of God by means of the Superstate.”

The result is government that, in redistributing wealth, “rewards the indolent and penalizes the hard-working,” he said.

Helms opposes the U.S. military mission in Haiti, calling President Jean-Bertrand Aristide a “murderer” because of his alleged encouragement of violence. But Aristide’s leftist politics may trouble him just as much.

Foreign aid is a special target for Helms, who has said too much goes “down foreign rat holes.” For years, he has questioned the value of U.S. contributions to the United Nations. He supported white-minority governments in Africa because they were alternatives to Communists.

Helms has tangled with secretaries of state--Republican or Democrat. For example, he accused George Shultz, secretary of state for Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan, of “playing footsie with the Communists.”

In domestic matters, Helms can be just as undiplomatic, whether in a fight over funding for what he calls “obscene art” or opposing the nomination of a housing official he described as a “militant-activist-mean lesbian.”

He uses Senate rules to hold up nominations and delay legislation. He drafted an amendment to prohibit first-class air travel by some mid-level federal officials, and even wrote legislation to require foreign governments, now shielded by diplomatic immunity, to pay parking tickets in the capital.

In this and other ways, he presents himself as a champion of average taxpayers, small-town folk like himself.

At the same time, Helms has created a highly sophisticated political fund-raising apparatus that bankrolled his campaigns and conservative causes.

“Senator Alms” the magazine New Republic once called him, referring to this direct-mail powerhouse, the National Congressional Club. Over the years, it has raised tens of millions of dollars, often by sending out appeals over the senator’s signature. Helms broke with the group in August, reportedly unhappy with some unauthorized mailings.

One fund-raising letter that Helms liked well was written in 1985 and called for conservatives around the nation to buy enough CBS stock to “become Dan Rather’s boss” and counter alleged liberal bias at CBS News.

That message was vintage Helms, ironically so to some who remember his earlier career as a journalist. Helms, who declined to be interviewed for this story, generally keeps reporters at arm’s length. He required their questions to be submitted by fax during his 1990 reelection campaign.

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As a television editorialist in the 1960s and early ‘70s, Helms often criticized the news media. When a newspaper dropped the comic strip “Little Orphan Annie,” he fumed that it was “because she personified the virtues of hard work, frugality and free enterprise.”

These are the virtues, some would say, of a different time and place.

Growing up between the world wars, Helms has written, he and his friends “were able to absorb from our homes and our Southern environment great ideals--and few illusions. . . . Our home ties were very strong, and the church was the dominant influence in our lives.”

“That was a different world back then,” said Ray House, 89. He was the principal of Helms’ high school, where discipline meant occasionally confiscating a couple of bootlegged cigarettes (though never from Jesse Helms).

Though no one can restore those innocent times, House said, “Jesse’s trying. He’d like to hold it. We know that was a good world.”

His father, “Mr. Jesse,” was a tall, imposing figure, police and fire chief in Monroe for decades. “When Mr. Jesse spoke, people jumped,” recalled Walter Love Jr., a friend of Helms and fellow member of the school band, where Helms became a state champion tuba player.

Young Jesse worked jobs at the drugstore and the local newspaper. It was the Depression, and his family was as poor as any other, maybe poorer.

Another friend, Vann Secrest, said the hard times instilled conservatism in many, though Helms’ often goes further. “There was no room for liberality in our lives,” Secrest said. “We all had to stand on our own two feet.”

Helms himself has said, “Nobody would have thought of turning to the government to solve all our problems.”

He did accept a job from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration program to help pay his way at Wingate, a local Baptist junior college, according to Ernest Furgurson, a reporter and author of “Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms.”

From there, he went on to Wake Forest College, and then to the Navy and to jobs in newspapers and broadcasting.

There’s debate over his behind-the-scenes involvement in the red-baiting, racially charged 1950 Democratic primary won by Sen. Willis Smith. A few months afterward, Smith made Helms his administrative assistant in Washington. He later served as executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Assn.

Helms honed his message as a fire-breathing television editorialist in Raleigh--”a precursor to Rush Limbaugh,” said University of North Carolina political scientist Thad Beyle, who has studied Helms for 30 years.

That message, in Beyle’s words: “Anti-integration, anti-big government, anti-civil rights”--he once railed against that movement’s leaders as “moral degenerates”--”anti-Northerners, anti-liberals. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he was for except old values, as he perceived them.”

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Though much remains the same, time goes on in Helms’ hometown. The Baptist church has been rebuilt. Photos of his father are yellowing at the town’s Heritage Center.

And just down the street from the traditional Christmas candles whose electric glow brightens each window of the handsome courthouse, one can spot a black Santa Claus figure smiling in the window of an African art shop.

Things change in 50 years. How about Jesse Helms?

“Most people sort of evolved in their thinking from what was typical of that time and place. He didn’t,” said Helms’ biographer, Furgurson.

Notably, when others later moderated their stand on race as segregation waned, Helms became “a cheerleader for those who didn’t,” he said.

Other ex-segregationists like South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond have embraced black voters, but Helms has not and so must use racial polarization to win more of the white vote, said Emory University Professor Merle Black.

In the waning days of Helms’ 1990 campaign, postcards were sent to largely black precincts discouraging voting. This prompted a U.S. Justice Department investigation.

People in the campaign were apparently behind the cards, acknowledged campaign chairman Thomas Ellis, but neither he nor Helms knew about or approved them. If Helms had known? “He’d have probably stopped it,” Ellis said.

He continued: “In all my dealings with Jesse, there’s never been a time when he’d treat a black person not as a human being and as an equal. . . . So long as the black vote is going to vote solid Democratic, the Republican (candidate) is going to be considered more of a racist.”

The effectiveness of racially tinged ads is undisputed. One that tied Helms’ 1990 challenger, black architect Harvey Gantt, to racial hiring quotas probably gave Helms his narrow victory, Black and other analysts said.

Helms’ supporters say the ad, showing white hands crumpling a job application during a voice-over about quotas, merely raised a legitimate public policy issue: affirmative action.

Black scoffed: “That wasn’t an ad to promote discussion. That was an ad to promote emotion. That was a turnout ad.”

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“He knows his constituency and he works to wake them up,” said Beyle, the UNC political scientist.

And though he has never won more than 54% of the vote, signs of Helms’ constituency abound: “I love my country--but fear my government,” read a bumper sticker on a car that cruised through Monroe on a recent day.

His friend Adams said he thinks Americans will be proud of Helms as committee chairman, though he acknowledged, “He may ruffle some politicians. He may ruffle some countries.”

Will Helms control his penchant for shoot-from-the-hip remarks, like the Clinton “bodyguard” gaffe? Adams shrugs.

“I think that flap is going to help reelect him,” he said.