Rev. Jerry Falwell
(1933-2007)
Founder, Moral Majority

"Jesse Helms was the thorn in the flesh to the Democratic party from the day he walked into Washington.  And for 30 years, they all wanted him out, ever and always."

Jerry Falwell was a fundamentalist Christian pastor and televangelist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and founded Liberty University in 1971.  With the help of Senator Jesse Helms and others, Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, mobilizing Christian conservatives to political action with moral and social issues, including opposition to abortion, gay rights and pornography. The Moral Majority played a major role in electing Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 and Jesse Helms to his third U.S. Senate term in a heated 1984 battle with Democrat Jim Hunt.

Advice on Starting the Moral Majority:

"They told me as a pastor that I needed to form a 501(c)4, an organization for lobbying purposes, contributions to which are not tax-deductible, and mobilize all 50 states, get the pastors involved, do huge registration, voter registration drives, and then inform these 80 million Evangelicals and millions of conservative Catholics and others on what the issues are and how their representatives in Congress are voting."

Role in Ending Soviet Communism:

"I think there are four persons in the world most responsible for bringing an end to Soviet communism. I think without doubt they are Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Senator Jesse Helms. That’s the quartet who relentlessly and perseveringly never ceased pressing the battle….He was, in both houses of Congress all the years he was there, the most persistent, dependable voice against communism."

Defunding the National Endowment for the Arts:

"There was so much that the National Endowment for the Arts was doing that really didn’t qualify as art.  It qualified rather as an affront to the American people as really just obscenity of the lowest sort. Jesse Helms led the charge to defund them, and he won the hearts of millions of Americans in so doing."

Ernest Furgurson
Biographer & Author of Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms

"A lot of very shady tactics were used in the Willis Smith campaign against Frank Graham, and Jesse was in it up to his neck.”

Ernest B. “Pat” Furgurson, formerly a correspondent and columnist for the Baltimore Sun, is the author of the 1986 biography Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms.  His other books include Westmoreland: The Inevitable General , Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War, Chancellorsville 1863: The Souls of the Brave,  Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War, and Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864.

Good Editorialist:

"He had the knack of a good editorial writer, that is making a single, clear point in each piece and not wandering over the landscape and getting people lost in whatever the opinion's supposed to be. He was good at writing those pieces, good at delivering them  in that voice that we discussed, what sounds like a country boy’s voice but it's really a professional, learned, skilled broadcaster’s voice."

Demagogue:

"He did a very good job of what a lot of other demagogues have effectively done….He used the social issues, the hot button issues, to persuade people that he was their friend and they voted against their own interests in order to go that way."

Tobacco Price Supports:

"He thought as many on that side do that the free market should be left alone to do its thing, but not when it comes to tobacco because tobacco is a major factor in the North Carolina economy even yet. And so he defended government price supports for tobacco virtually to the death because that was his base, and he became in the Senate the principal defender of that system, in total contradiction to his opinions on every other commodity under the sun."

Anti-Communist:

"If they were sufficiently anti-Communist he was for them, and he pitched the idea that if they weren’t there, the Communists would take over--South Africa, Argentina, Chile--and in fact, because he did this so much--and he actually had some of his staff going down to help these people in elections and advise them and get involved in their politics--the message got through to them, wrongly perhaps, at least partly wrongly, that 'well he’s a major spokesman of the American government so we really have the support of the American government.'"

Churches' Involvement in Politics:

"Back in the late '50s, early '60s, when particularly civil rights marchers and people like Martin Luther King were speaking in churches and a lot of people from northern churches were going down--civil rights riders, and so forth in the South--Helms was very much against the idea of churches getting involved in politics, civil rights, what have you. It was a bad thing. It was anti-constitutional and so forth. And of course in later days, Helms was up to his ears with the fundamentalist churches and the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons who mix politics and church all day every day, and it’s a total contradiction and it’s the old story--it depends on whose ox is being gored."

Racial Views:

"I think that somebody who grows up in a small town in the South and has the opinions that he grew up with and the people around him had is not a racist in the sense that he’s a conscious racist, but when people have left home, gone to school, gone out into the world, been exposed to the world, they should learn better. And I really do believe that Helms had ample opportunity through the years to see beyond Monroe in the 1930s, when he was a kid, and so I leave it there and just point out to the fact that he keeps doing the same thing over and over."