Let Us Now Speak Ill of the Living...

Let us speak ill of the editors of National Review, who write:

The Editors on Jesse Helms on National Review Online: Jesse Helms died on the Fourth of July — a fitting end for a true American patriot. He was one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation.... It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.

He was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art, ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him?...

One of the things that Jesse Helms was against was the teaching of seventeenth-century poetry:

To Their Coy Senator | OurFuture.org: Rick Perlstein: Here's a New York Times article from October of 1966:

CHAPEL HILL, N.C, Oct. 22—"To His Coy Mistress"... by Andrew Marvell, one of the great poets of the Puritan period in England, has risen to stir a tempest on the campus of the University of North Carolina. An instructor has been transferred from teaching to research duties. Students are mounting protests. Faculty members are disturbed. Chancellor Carlyle Sitterson, who recommended the transfer, has had to issue a clarifying statement in justification for his stand.

The clouds began to gather when Michael Paull, an instructor in freshman English, assigned his class to write a theme on the subject of "To His Coy Mistress," a poem that appears in many college textbooks.... One of the students apparently wrote her parents... the parents brought it to the attention of WRAL-TV, a television station in Raleigh with right-wing views that has been a frequent critic of liberalism at the university....

All 22 of Mr. Paull's students signed petitions requesting his return to teaching duties. Between 200 and 300 students and faculty members, organized into the Committee for Free Inquiry, met and asked that Mr. Paull be reinstated and that a review board be set up in the English department 'to determine whether or not Mr. Paull's effectiveness as a teacher been damaged to such a degree as to necessitate his reassignment to nonteaching functions."

Some newspapers expressed concern. The Greensboro Daily News declared, "The spectacle of a great university 'reassigning' its instructors at the behest of a bullying television pundit is hardly believable." The Daily Tar Heel, campus newspaper, headed its editorial, Who's afraid of Jesse Helms? The university—that's who"...

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BONUS!!

Ramesh Ponnuru on Jesse Helms:

RAMESH PONNURU: [Jesser Helms] was willing to stop a lot of things that had a lot of bipartisan support. For, you know, just one small example of that, William Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, had been nominated late in the Clinton administration to be ambassador to Mexico, had huge bipartisan support. He was a Republican, after all. Jesse Helms said no and single-handedly blocked it....

[But] he was also to work with people, like Paul Wellstone and Madeleine Albright, who actually became quite [interrupted]...

He was a throw-back to an older era of conservatism, a much more combative type of conservatism than you have today...

David Brooks on Jesse Helms:

[nothing]

David Frum on Jesse Helms:

[nothing]

Comments

[charles]

A student demonstration in support of my fellow graduate student Paull was my first demonstration just after I arrived on the UNC campus as a brand new graduate student. For several years there, it was afternoon sport among my peers to throw things at the nearest television set hosting Helms' bigoted commentary on WRAL. If the current "conservatives" want to claim Helms and his legacy as the face of modern conservatism, they are welcome to his racism and bigotry which was always evident; it is obvious that those claiming him have nothing else to offer America. During the civil rights movement days, when faced with an intractable problem, we often said that it was nothing that a few funerals wouldn't solve. That is finally coming true. Those who hope to don Helms' mantle will find his ideas and commitments thoroughly repudiated now and in the future. My beloved South will of course be the last to know.

Charles

[MattY]

I agree with this newspaper report:

"To former Sen. Jesse Helms, if only civil rights “agitators” like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left Southern segregation alone in the 1960’s, Whites would have eventually decided on their own when to breakdown racial barriers."

Jesse's problem is that we have to go back in the way-back machine to find a tie when this was relevant. Even the Dred Scott decision which gave federal mandate over semi-citizens would have mandated integration in commerce. The federal courts, having thus recognized power over certain semi-citizens would have been duty bound to uphold the rights of commercial integration, even absent the civil war.

[Robin]

"He was a throw-back to an older era of conservatism, a much more combative type of conservatism than you have today..." befriending the likes of Roberto D'Aubisson, Leopoldo Galtieri...

[Bernard Yomtov]

I am curious as to what catastrophe would have befallen our republic, or Mexico for that matter, had Weld been confirmed. Why does Ponnuru think that blocking Weld was an accomplishment of note?

[Gene O'Grady]

I wonder if Helms was aware that Marvell and others of his 17th century counterparts were championed and introduced into the literary canon by people like T S Eliot and the American Southern New Critics like Tate and Ransom who were, amid myriad faults, intelligent conservatives, and in promoting the Metaphysical Poets, to use a problematic term, were in some measure looking to connect with pre-enlightenment traditions as a critique of modern mass culture?

Probably not really much of question.

[Anthony Damiani]

I approve of Brooks and Frum here (rare to be sure). De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that. The silence speaks volumes.