North Carolina Pays the Price

By Claude Sitton

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 9-11

Americans don’t ask much of those whom they send to the U.S. Senate. A senator can usually pass muster at the polls if he tips the pork barrel toward home occasionally, votes his constitutents’ pocketbook interests and keeps enough goodwill among his colleagues to avoid becoming an embarrassment to his state. Sen. Jesse Helms will leave Washington shortly it appears on two of those three counts.

Helms has offended the tobacco industry by switching his vote to assure passage of a tax bill that doubled the

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levy on cigarettes. He has drawn the contempt and ridicule of other senators by threatening political retribution against those who opposed his proposals on abortion and prayer in the schools. And, now, he has suffered two stunning defeats on these very issues in as many weeks.

Not even Helmsites can deny that the session soon to recess has raised more critical questions about his ability than any other in his ten years in the Congress. There’s much irony in this. Helms could not have asked for a brighter political prospect than that which faced him in the Senate two years ago.

The apparent political mood was conservative, if not reactionary. Ronald Reagan, the Tar Heel senator’s own choice, had assumed the presidency. Republicans had taken control of the Senate, thanks in some measure to the PACman blitz against moderates and liberals financed by Helms’ National Congressional Club. And hot-eyed disciples of the moral majority were flooding Capitol Hill to demand that congressmen and senators toe their radical, right-wing line. Given those odds, success was a certainty.

But Helms managed to blow it. All manner of excuses come to mind. Post-election polls indicated that the conservatism read into the defeat of former President Carter was more apparent than real and was by no means the radicalism espoused by the Helms’ camp. Further, the single-issue factions of the right are a contentious lot. Helms, who compromises grudingly at best, soon found himself feuding with them. This same rigidity added to the senator’s troubles with others.

Republican control of the Senate had given Helms the chairmanship of the Agriculture Committee, which once carried the obligatory prefix “powerful” before its name. One of the chairman’s important responsibilities, perhaps his most important, is shepherding the farm bill through the Senate. But Helms flunked his test as a legislative quarterback and Sen. Robert J. Dole, the Finance Committee chairman had to assume floor management of the bill to save it from defeat.

It’s possible that newfound fame had led Helms to feel he was above compromise. After all, had he not graced the cover of Time? But news magazine cover stories have hexed far greater figures than Helms. And, as observed by Lauch Faircloth, the canny state commerce secretary, “The higher the monkey climbs up the flagpole, the better you can see his rear.”

There’s a double irony in the recent twin defeats suffered by Helms under circumstances that once seemed so promising. He did not take a truly conservative position on either of the issues he chose for his fight-and-die stand in the Senate. Remember that the conservative theme sounded again and again in the 1980 campaign was “Let’s get government off our backs.”

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Instead of halting government intervention, Helms sought legislation interposing government between a woman and her doctor in that most private of decisions–whether to end a pregnancy. He endorsed interventionism again with an amendment to a debt ceiling bill, an amendment that would have permitted states to order prayers in the public schools, a blatant contravention of the Constitution’s pledge of religious freedom.

That latter piece of mischief also would have stripped the Supreme Court of authority to review state prayer laws. This raised the specter of constitutional amendments voted by the legislative majority of the moment. That and other aspects of the two Helms proposals proved too much for even some conservatives.

Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican whom Helms acknowledges as the father of conservatism, was among the naysayers. Goldwater said Helms had damaged the conservative cause with his radical measures and bullyboy tactics. And it was Goldwater who gave the coup de grace to the Helms prayer amendment with a motion to send the debt ceiling bill to committee with instructions to rid it of all riders.

Some other senators thought that Helms was less interested in government-imposed morality than in whipping up emotions that would generate contributions to his National Congressional Club. Undoubtedly, those Helms apponents standing for re-election will feel the club’s lash. But whether Helms’ objectives are ideological or monetary, his actions leave no doubt that he ranks them ahead of everything else. That means that even his constituents’ economic welfare and the goodwill of his colleagues, without which no senator can be effective, come second.

This session, then, poses a question that only North Carolinians can answer. That is whether the state wants to go on paying the price of keeping this true believer of radical stripe in the Senate.

Claude Sitton its the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer.

Morality and the MX

By Claude Sitton

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 18, 20

Self-appointed guardians of the nation’s morals on the radical right usually fall silent when the arms control issue comes up. I have in mind the Reagan administration’s supporters of moral majoritarian stripe–the Jerry Falwells, the Jesse Helmses and the like.

How can these radicals work themselves into a lather over food stamps, sex on TV and abortion while ignoring a nuclear arms race that could cut short humanity’s earthly tenancy and turn the world into a cinder? Their moral priorities seem a bit skewed.

In May, the US House of Representatives approved construction of fifteen MX missiles to be added to twenty-one already being built. Never mind that our nuclear arsenal, as is true of that of the Soviet Union, has tripled since 1969, when each nation had enough firepower to destroy the other no matter which launched the first strike.

The events that could suck the two countries into a nuclear conflict grow more common. Those of recent weeks suggest how real the danger is.

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The Iranians and Iraqis began a new round of attacks on oil tankers and appear determined to turn the Persian Gulf into a lake of fire. The influential International Institute for Strategic Studies announced in London that US relations with the Soviet Union had sunk to their lowest point since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Hostilities in Central America and US overt and covert involvement there grew apace.

No one has a sure way to halt this rush toward mutual annihilation. President Reagan’s approach hasn’t worked. if anything, it has pushed the world nearer the brink by the massive, and costly, weapons buildup. But an alternative was suggested the other day to by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chicago, in a commencement speech at Emory University in Atlanta.

Bernardin headed the informal committee of Catholic bishops last year that issued the pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” Unlike the radicals of the political right, he thinks moral purpose has a vital role to play in this area.

To ignore the moral dimension of foreign policy, says the cardinal, is to erode both the religious and constitutional heritage of America. The first provides for moral assessment of public policy through the insights given us by religious pluralism. The second supports such moral values as respect for life and reverence for the law.

“In the past,” says the cardinal, “war was used as a last resort to protect key political values. In our time, the use of nuclear weapons would threaten all our values–political, cultural and human. Such an acknowledgement drives us to the conclusion that the prevention of nuclear war must be given primacy in the political process.”

Bernardin represents no peace-at-any-price faith. Catholics, as he points out, have had a long and painful experience with communism, in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland, for example.

“We cannot be naive,” says the cardinal. “Some cold realism is needed, as we stated in our pastoral letter. But the depth and seriousness of US-Soviet divisions on a whole range of issues should not make us lose perspective concerning a central moral and political truth of our age:

“If nuclear weapons are used, we all lose. There will be no victors, only the vanquished; there will be no calculation of costs and benefits because the costs will run beyond our ability to calculate.”

Bernardin thinks that giving first priority to prevention of use of nuclear weapons requires that arms control be insulated from other US-Soviet differences, an end to the policy of “linkage” pursued by the Reagan administration. Without that separation, he argues rightly that there always will be enough division to block arms control.

No doubt the cardinal shares the concern of the moral majoritarians over sins of the flesh. But his concerns reach far beyond their narrow perspective. Unlike them, Bernardin knows that Americans no longer live in a world in which war can be used as a tool of foreign policy, for that could lead to the most immoral of all acts, the destruction of humankind.

Claude Sitton is editor of the Raleigh News and Observer

Arguments Over What the South Was, Is, and Will Be

Reviewed by Claude Sitton

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 28-30

The South Moves Into Its Future: studies in the analysis and prediction of social change. Edited by Joseph S. Haymows. (The University of Alabama Press. 322 pp.).

Historians and journalists have disputed for years over what the South was and is. Undaunted by this lack of consensus, Southern sociologists now have set out to predict what the region will be. What’s more, they think they can not only describe but also shape the South that will exist in 2050. That seems doubtful at first.

This bold venture in The South Moves Into Its Future comes a cropper at once on a question of definition. Joseph S. Haymows, the book’s editor, concedes in the

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preface that “the South” has several meanings. The reality is that there are–and always have been–not one but many Souths, Virginians and Texans having about as much in common as possums and armadillos. Further, there is the pertinent issue of whether the South still exists much beyond the confines of geography, history and fiction.

The fourteen authors infer the course of future Southern changes from changes now in process. Given the variables involved, the results are at best informed conjecture, conjecture that comes no closer to consensus than the historians and journalists. Further, the fact that few of the authors are likely to be around fifty years from now to answer for myopia lends a certain smugness to the undertaking.

Nevertheless, the book contains much informed debate about the social, economic and political directions of the South of today that makes it well worth the reading.

The studies referred to in the title were delivered at the 1986 meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. They begin with an examination of the impacts of the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II, impacts the book says brought the “New South.”

In one significant chapter, Jeanne C. Biggar predicts that current trends of in-migration will swell the region’s population to one-third of the nation’s total within the next fifty years. That in-migration also will create a South that is both younger and older, slightly more feminine and perhaps less black. And it will exert pressure on the environment and public services ranging from utilities and transportation to education and health.

Biggar says that barring a radical change in the racial composition of in-migration during the next fifty years an increasing dominance of white population numbers can be expected. This in turn may exacerbate socioeconomic and racial segregation in Southern cities, with central cities being abandoned to black residents while suburbs grow more white.

John D. Kasarda, Holly L. Hughes, and Michael D. Irwin think that, contrary to Biggar’s projections, the black percentage of the South’s population will increase somewhat. They also predict that many of the region’s competitive economic advantages will continue, while cautioning that its labor-intensive industries will grow more vulnerable to offshore competition. Future economic growth depends largely on investment in quality education at all levels and development of an information-age public infrastructure that supports a larger service sector.

The political South of tomorrow looks like more of the same through Paul Luebke’s crystal ball. He discounts the possibility of a biracial liberal alliance, a hope once popularized by V. 0. Key. Southern Democratic parties show little sympathy for an ideology keyed to biracial economic justice. Instead, those whom he calls the economic modernizers will adopt liberal ideas needed to defeat the conservatives while refusing to share power with the liberals.

Switch the debate to New South vs. No South and John Shelton Reed opts for the enduring South, which he explored in a 1986 book of that name. He concedes that Southerners now look more like other Americans, but argues that there are some persisting differences in localism, attitudes toward some types of violence and in a number of religious and quasi-religious beliefs and behaviors. Other authors question just how much South is left to endure. And Gordon F. Streib says old Dixie’s hopes for cultural survival depend upon its elderly as bearers of tradition.

Patricia Yancey Martin, Kenneth R. Wilson and Caroline Matheny Dillman present one of the book’s most conflicted analyses. They cite authorities who indict

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white males for many of the region’s social ills. They then concede that data on white that matter, are scarce and that a distinctive Southern style of what they call “gendering” may not even exist.

John J. Moland Jr. takes a downbeat approach to black-white relations. He thinks Reagan-Bush conservatism will persist into the twenty-first century, shifting to a more liberal and equitable direction by its second quarter.

W. Parker Frisbie sounds a hopeful note about the prospects of Southern Hispanics. He foresees full assimilation for Cubans, rapid progress by Mexican-Americans and a much slower pace for Puerto Ricans.

In summary, Haymows paints a South of 2050 that is aging, politically conservative, more than four-fifths urban, moving toward cultural similarity with the nation and drawing its income more and more from manufacturing and high tech and service industries. With the changes will come problems, says the editor.

Urban concentration will exacerbate pollution of air, water and other resources. Demands for public services will continue to outrun the public funds to provide them. Problems of inter-group relations–ethnic, racial, age, gender, and class–will intensify. The national balance of trade, the national debt, foreign economic competition and high defense expenditures will aggravate or extend economic problems. Management of toxic waste will become more and more urgent.

These problems, says Abbott L. Ferris in the book’s last chapter, simply present opportunities for sociologists. He notes how far the South has come in the past half century, in part through the efforts of sociologists such as the late Howard W. Odum and two organizations they helped found–the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Regional Education Board.

Political trends suggest that the region must rely on its own resources in preparing for the South that will be. If sociologists show the way, they will have made a more worthwhile contribution than those who argue over what the South was and is.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Claude Sitton covered the South for the New York Times during the Civil Rights Movement, served as long-time editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and has recently been teaching at Emory University.