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The G.O.P. establishment, notably its members in the White House, have been importuning Helms and his supporters to postpone the inevitable legislative combat. The President's men fear that the emotional debates will destroy their happy, careful consensus. But Helms has not agreed to those pleas for discretion, just as Reagan has declined to give much more than oral support to the cause, thus angering some New Rightists. Though Helms has been for years a resourceful Reagan ally, the two men are respectfully wary of each other, nothing like buddies. Indeed, Helms is notable among conservative legislators for making no effort at a showy intimacy with the President. Thus unbeholden, Helms may be pushed by his impatient followers to lead the New Right charge in Congress, now.
The congressional battles are part of a far larger campaign, a many-faceted crusade in which Helms and other right-wing social activists are pressing to remake the nation in their own image. Helms' America would be a land where certain stern Christian principles prevail and free enterprise is enshrined, where abortion is outlawed, classrooms ring with the sound of children at prayer and Darwin is just a theorist, where school buses rust quietly in their garages, and sex and violence are banished from television screens and library shelves, where men are men and women know their place, which is in the home.* As America rides the cusp of a Reagan-inspired reversion to basics, that vision seems nearer than it has been in decades.
Helms has a personal following on the right that is second in size and dedication only to that of the President himself —and that trusts him more. He has a computer-driven fund raising organization, the Congressional Club, which has raised millions of dollars for Helms and dozens of other conservative candidates. He has a born politician's ease with a crowd, a saint's generosity toward individuals in distress—and a Malthusian indifference to human suffering on a larger scale. He is, in short, in the great tradition of amiable, infuriating, pious, callous, dangerous, ordinary and compelling characters who from time to time emerge to animate American politics.
There are three North Carolinas. The coastal east runs flat and sandy; the Blue Ridge west rises velvety and mountainous. Most populous is the middle Piedmont, a plateau of gentle undulations and pine forests. Scotch-Irish settlers swept onto the Piedmont in 1736. Six years later, two Helms brothers, George and Tillman, were farming on a plot deep in the colony. Before long, there were Helmses all over the place. On the solitary road from Wadesboro to Charlotte, just as the piny hills begin puckering up, grew Union County and the town of Monroe.
At one time, more than one-fifth of the county's residents were slaves. Cotton was the mainstay of the economy, but this was not grand plantation country: small family parcels made slavery mostly pointless. North Carolina came late to the lost cause of secession. Jesse Helms claims no fallen captains or