There are no love songs in this book, none of the knowledgeable musings on doe-eyed crooners, wild-eyed blues shouters or pin-eyed punk rockers one might expect from Greil Marcus, the noted cultural critic, music historian and pop champion. Instead, Marcus has taken a somber subject for his latest exploration of American cultural history. That subject is nothing short of our own annihilation.
In “The Shape of Things to Come,” curtains go up with a series of quotations from famous thinkers and others either directly or analogically related to 9/11, which seems a decent enough place to start thinking about America’s destruction. From there, Marcus’ introduction summons the voices of John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., who, in their most seminal speeches, repeat differing versions of a contract between Americans and God, as well as Americans and other Americans. For all three, the golden opportunity offered by the New Jerusalem of America, the opportunity to create a perfect community, comes with the threat that should perfection remain unattained, divine and mortal judgment will be swift, damning, eternal and seriously unpleasant (we’re talking hail of bullets and brimstone). Basically, get with the utopia or nice knowing you.
Obviously, Marcus is up to something deeper than pop music interpretation here. In separate chapters, he explores his ideas by refracting the notion of the apocalyptic contract through the later novels of Philip Roth, “Bill Pullman’s face” in “Lost Highway,” “Twin Peaks’” Laura Palmer, and, most successfully, woozy punk singer David Thomas. As the title recommends, Marcus is looking for evidence of the prophecies of his three primary voices in the ones that follow. One can hear the clear, if hysterical, echoes of this all-or-nothing conception in the rhetoric of the Christian right or on Fox News, but Marcus contends that it truly speaks in the dark corners of art.
This is a Greil Marcus book, after all. Those dark corners are where he has always felt most comfortable, resurrecting marginalized voices, songs and figures to lay bare the nature of the culture. “Mystery Train” (1975) and “Lipstick Traces” (1989) remain two of the most compelling investigations of music ever published. “Invisible Republic” (1997) imagined Bob Dylan and the Band’s 1967 “Basement Tapes” as a pivotal cultural moment foreseeing the fallout of the Summer of Love while connecting with musical currents from a deep past. More recently, in “Double Trouble” (2000) and “Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads” (2005), he delved into the psyche of the nation by showing how key cultural landmarks (Clinton’s presidency, Dylan’s epochal tune) resonated with America’s struggle with sin and redemption. In “The Shape of Things to Come,” his loci are weirder and, frankly, less compelling, as is his argumentative approach, normally so fluid and breezy. Here his writing feels stifled, dry and slowed by its own intricacies.
Marcus’ establishing shots are sturdy enough, as he lays out his conception of the prophetic voice that builds America. John Winthrop’s 1630 speech “A Model of Christian Charity” envisioned for the Puritans a “City upon a hill” that would shine forth through the ages, as its citizens were given the opportunity, through freedom, to speak, act and judge for the glorification, or the damnation, of all. As Marcus writes: “The American blessing or curse — the terror or embrace that is found as a reward — is to live out that absolute, or live in its shadow.” Marcus skips 200 years ahead to Lincoln’s second inaugural address, quoted on the wall inside his monument, which wonders whether the horror of civil war will ever be enough to appease God for America’s sins. Marcus finds Lincoln holding to Winthrop’s bargain, to the potential for absolute salvation or damnation. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial comes the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. King reminds his listeners that those who seek to build a better America risk that same catastrophic retribution should they fall short of righteous success.
The trouble is that “The Shape of Things to Come” mostly fails to live up to the drama of these originary speakers. Marcus is hard at work fitting Roth, Lynch, Thomas and the dozens of lesser subjects he examines to the brutal prophecies they supposedly represent. He bulks up Philip Roth’s late oeuvre of paranoid dystopianism, David Lynch’s bizarre vision of an American film noir nightmare, and David Thomas’ cranky yet hopeful visionary rock with ancillary referents and sprawling meanings that mean to cut to the heart of the American experience, but end up becoming mostly tangled in the long journey to connect them to his chosen American prophets.
This book grew out of a series of lectures, classes and teaching fellowships, and like the hip professor Marcus certainly makes, flashes of punk rock, noir film and old-timey music peek from every corner of the book. Yet Marcus’ readers, it would seem, have not done their homework, and the prof must explain everything they have missed in detail, while still sticking to the lesson plan. This causes two problems that make reading this book a frustration: Endless narration overshadows illuminating references, while super-dense references act more to confuse than to illustrate. Marcus is a gifted writer, but the complex narratives at work in Roth’s novels and Lynch’s films require so much exposition that discussion becomes messy and drawn out. Also, Marcus has a hard time stopping. So after we enter the world of Laura Palmer and “Two FBI agents arrive in Deer Meadow to take over the Banks case…” we have a long progression of and then … and then … and then.
The narration can be taxing, but the multitude of references can be positively numbing. David Lynch’s absurdist noir in “Lost Highway” makes even less sense when the plot is not only meticulously laid forth, but also augmented and interrupted by mentions of dozens of noir films, novels, anecdotes about actors, and so on. In the midst of exploring “Twin Peaks,” Marcus takes readers through the plotline of Ross Macdonald’s noir novel “Blue City”: “Macdonald’s dialogue has the slow build-up and deadpan ricochet used by such lead actors as Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart, and even more effectively by players like Thelma Ritter. ‘How well do you know Kerch?’ says Carla Kaufman, a B-girl and prostitute (imagine Gloria Grahame in 1947)”
Macdonald’s book is a great touchpoint, but the trivia never stops — “Blue City” illuminating “Twin Peaks” and “Twin Peaks” illuminating the prophetic visions that began the book. Reading feels like work (homework, even), and in the end, Marcus’ thesis is confounded and largely unconvincing. Lincoln’s ruminations on civil war and divine retribution just don’t seem to presage David Lynch’s art-school noir.
Yet, while the larger topics often fail to catch fire, the smaller anecdotes and descriptions tend to be brilliant. Philip Roth’s novels seem suddenly bitter and hopeless when contrasted with the USA trilogy of John Dos Passos, which Marcus unpacks swiftly, vibrantly and with a sense of real awe. Similarly, while readers may need a few dozen pages to join the excitement over “Bill Pullman’s Face,” in the midst of the chapter Marcus presents the films of Bruce Conner. The chapter attempts to show “Lost Highway” as envisioning pastoral and berserk visions of America evoking the terrifying freedom of America that itself evokes that trio of historic voices where the book began. Yet in just a few pages, describing the experimental films Conner made in the ’60s and ’70s, where stock footage of familiar objects and scenes was cut to form meta-narratives of memory and American identity, Marcus actually makes his point more forcefully than he ever could with “Lost Highway” or with a thousand pages on Pullman’s smirk.
In the third chapter Marcus attempts to locate the “real” America in the character of Laura Palmer — a cocaine-snorting teenage hooker masquerading as homecoming queen. Yet amid endless dissections of the seething evil beneath the bland normalcy of Twin Peaks and its poster girl, Marcus hits on his “real” America when he steps briefly into the Pacific Northwest of the early ’90s, and for just a few pages focuses on the radical, feminist, punk movement that became known as Riot Grrrl. Marcus charts with harrowing emotional investment the early singles of Heavens to Betsy, where Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney, got her start. One gets the sense that, through the anger, the disconsolate screaming, the frank dealings with rape and abuse that informed Heavens to Betsy, Bratmobile and the other Riot Grrrl bands, writers and activists that sprang from Olympia, Wash. — a town so close to Twin Peaks — Marcus’ theoretical wanderings hit pay dirt. What are mere shadows and whisperings in art become the full-throated howlings of real life.
Heavens to Betsy have voice, and they go for the absolute, doing what they believe is right and judging what surrounds them. Reading this section, one thinks: “Well, shit, this is what the chapter should have been about!” Included is even a quote from a Riot Grrrl zine that deftly and cuttingly critiques “Twin Peaks.” “FUCK TWIN PEAKS,” reads the zine, before excerpting a review: “Laura Palmer is hailed as this year’s breakthrough dead girl. ‘My father killed me,’ she says, but Cooper still gets the last word. With an end like that, there’s really no breakthrough.” Through all his hemming and hawing about Lynch, Marcus never once judges his own subjects; but inadvertently his incisive digression has gone and done that work too.
Then something gives way, and the last 80 pages of the book are thunderous and thrilling, as though after all that struggle and strain, the text itself had gained the voice called for by Winthrop, Lincoln and King. David Thomas, enigmatic singer of ’70s proto-punks Rocket From the Tombs and later of post-punks Pere Ubu, speaks and sings like a drifter, a burnout savant, and sometimes just simply like a derelict. In him, Marcus finds the perfected echo of his early American heroes, and most successfully finds the prophetic voice, the American convinced that speaking and acting his own truth is the only route to salvation and redemption. Marcus also finds his best writing, at turns gleeful and weighty, and without recapitulation after recapitulation, sub-referent breeding sub-referent, Marcus is free to write clearly and powerfully:
“The new wave prophesies a new world — it says the new world is already present, and that a new art will reveal it. It says that a new world is waiting to be born, and that speech will call it into being.”
Better still, Marcus makes one believe that Thomas is capable of fulfilling such impressive ambitions. The book’s epilogue runs swiftly through Allen Ginsberg’s antiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” a work that documents the experience of living among the voices of America without losing one’s own. It is a thrilling finish, and stands as a powerful bookend to the introductory array of 9/11 responses and texts of cataclysm and loss.
“In ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’ the nation is left without a creator or a judge — prophecy has not summoned an absolute or a finality. Instead it has retrieved the prosaic, where each citizen has to take the same stand, struggle for the right words, convince others to listen. ‘A lone man talking to myself’ — and what comes down is not promise of idea or miracle but fact. ‘The war … is over now,’ the old man says, and it’s the strangest thing. Now, as you listen, really for the first time in the poem, in its last cadence, you understand that the war actually happened.”
Finally, in these last pages of the book, Marcus really takes flight, writing vividly and lovingly while evoking, and not just theorizing, nothing less than the terrific freedom that exists in the voices of America. Maybe the subjects of David Thomas and Ginsberg are closer to his heart, or simply set free from expository necessities. Either way, the thesis of the book finally starts to take shape and make sense. The terrifying balance between the individual and society in America finally rings true. It’s too bad it takes so long to get there.
I’ve found myself fascinated by the controversy over the “fake” quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that went viral Monday, in the wake of the news about Osama bin Laden’s killing. It’s been the rage on Facebook and Twitter, broadcast to millions of social media users. It’s already been debunked; and then the debunking was debunked. Beyond the messy details, I’m fascinated by the desire of all sides — there aren’t merely two sides to the debate over bin Laden’s killing — to claim King as their moral ally (or to at least make sure he’s not on the other side!).
First, the messy details, quickly. Sometime Monday parts or all of the following “quote” flew around Twitter and Facebook, attributed to King:
I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
Then someone Googled the first sentence, and found King never said it. The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle went up with a “gotcha” post, accusing folks with reservations about both bin Laden’s killing and its celebration with fabricating evidence that King would have agreed with them. But then it came out that, while King didn’t say the first sentence, he had in fact made the other two statements, on Page 53 of his book “Strength to Love.” And it turned out nobody “fabricated” anything: A 24-year-old teacher named Jessica Dovey wrote her own thoughts, sans quote marks, before the King quote, and posted it on Facebook, but as the post was cut and pasted and abbreviated in countless ways, King’s words and Dovey’s got jumbled. No fabrication; no harm, no foul.
But the frenzy over the King quote came along with a disturbing wave of thought-policing, from all over the political spectrum, and they seem to be related. Battles raged Monday not so much over whether the U.S. killing Osama was morally or legally justified, but over the right way to feel about it, and the right way to express those feelings (which seemed to be the core issue the King “quote” was addressing). Has social media made us a nation of biddies, chiding everyone over the “appropriate” way to feel about public events? David Sirota’s Salon piece, “‘USA! USA!’ is the wrong response,” was widely attacked. Maybe I should count Sirota among the feelings-police, but he made a valid political argument, and he came in for an avalanche of criticism merely for suggesting sobriety, not celebration, was the right response to bin Laden’s death. It was somehow read as Sirota criticizing Obama’s decision, which he did not. (It was also posted more than 100,000 times on Facebook, so a lot of people also agreed with Sirota.) Can one both believe that the killing was the right thing to do, and also be sober, even sad about it? Yes, you can, but in some quarters, anything less than high-fiving the president’s “victory” was suspect.
I witnessed a similar Facebook and Twitter frenzy last week when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. I wrote on Twitter, Facebook and my blog that I was “sad” the idiotic birther controversy had come to that. Within moments tweets were flying — I’m beginning to conflate Twitter with Angry Birds, given all my Twitter trouble lately — accusing me of finding fault with Obama’s decision to release the long-form document. I expressly wrestled with the good-or-bad move question in my blog post; and I came down ambivalent. But I was not ambivalent about my sadness the president had been forced to prove his legitimacy to the likes of Donald Trump. People can feel otherwise, but why attack me for a heartfelt response to an insult to the president?
As I wrote on Sunday night, I personally had a hard time seeing bin Laden’s death as something to celebrate, but I didn’t judge those who did. The 9/11 attacks were of such enormity, rippling out to reach so many people in such different ways, we’re all entitled to our subjective reactions; it was everyone’s tragedy, and everyone grieves differently. Ultimately, I’m with Mona Eltahawy, in feeling like I could have done without the drunken “frat-boy” air of some of the partying; but for all I know, someone I see as a drunken frat boy might have lost his mother in the towers, or on one of the doomed planes.
I think we’re seeing the rise of the Feeling Police because in a time of profound social dislocation, a lot of people aren’t sure what they believe about right or wrong, justice or injustice, and they’re not sure whom they trust to give them information and guidance about it. It might be the New York Times; it might also be some witty guy on Twitter; it might be Penn Jillette on Facebook; at its best it’s a moral and political figure like Martin Luther King Jr.
But we can’t outsource our own moral or political values to Dr. King. We also can’t ask President Obama to be Dr. King. I realized years ago that was part of my own problem with Obama being a mere mortal politician, making compromises whether on healthcare reform or government spying. He’s a gifted politician who seems to have a strong moral core, but he’s a politician; and now he’s commander in chief. I can’t expect him to be the prophetic, perfect visionary we white liberals have needed our black leaders to be. Also: You can believe fervently in the power of King’s words about love, and hate, and violence — as I do — and still accept that President Obama did the right thing, based on the knowledge he had before him.
And for now, I do. That doesn’t mean I won’t avidly consume every new account of the operation that led to bin Laden’s killing. If some of the information behind it was acquired through torture or other “extra-legal” means, I want to know that. I may come to believe the president made the wrong decision, but I don’t think that, given what I know.
Back to feelings for a bit: We can’t help focusing on feelings, in the absence of hard information. We’re social animals; we trust our “feelings” to tell us something real. So I had very intense feelings looking at the now iconic picture White House photographer Pete Souza snapped of the president and his team as they “watched” the bin Laden operation in the Situation Room Sunday night. (There’s no hard information about what they were actually watching.) You’ve seen it. It’s riveting. Hillary Clinton is beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed. The only person looking as grim is the president himself; he’s slumped in his chair, looking hard at the screen. Vice President Joe Biden looked stricken; the New York Times reported that he was fingering rosary beads. The military leaders in the room were more granite-faced, but I was reassured to see our civilian leaders grimacing at the reality of killing bin Laden and his family members – even if they’d make the same decision tomorrow. Their “feelings” — at least what appear to be their feelings — reassure me they approached the decision with the moral gravity it deserved.
If Hillary Clinton had been pumping her fist and yelling “USA, USA!” after the killing I’d have been aghast, and said so. The range of “appropriate” feelings — and the way you telegraph them — is more clear-cut when you’re talking about our leaders. Being reassured by seeing their feelings, while we wait for information, makes sense. But ultimately we need, as citizens, to decide if we believe this was a just decision, a moral decision and a decision that made the U.S. safer (which may add up to three different things.) We can’t simply outsource that judgment, whether to King, Obama or our favorite pundits. Wasting time adjudicating whether people are expressing the right reaction in the right way is a silly distraction.
Updates below.
Yesterday, around 3 p.m., a trend started emerging on Twitter. People began reciting a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that seemed strangely apt for this occasion:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
The first person to cite it on Twitter was the famous magician/Libertarian Penn Jillette, but the words quickly went viral, and the source got lost in the shuffle. The only problem? As Megan McArdle pointed out in the Atlantic, Martin Luther King never said that. Actually, the quote from MLK about enemies is:
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
How did this other quote get misattributed to King? As McArdle says in her piece, “It’s a bit too a propos. What ‘thousands’ would King have been talking about? In which enemy’s death was he supposed to be rejoicing?” She also wonders, “Why? What do you get out of saying something pithy, and getting no credit for it?”
Penn admits to being the originator of the quote on Twitter, though he claims it got messed up when he cut and pasted from a longer piece by King. I’m not sure if I believe him; I have a strong suspicion Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking on the sources. [Jillette has since explained the quote further to Salon (see below), stating that it was an honest mistake.] After all, this is the guy who created the documentary “Penn and Teller: Bullshit!” and the subsequent Showtime series about how easy it was to dupe people.
Update: The source of the quote is a Facebook message by Jessica Dovey, where she goes on to quote Martin Luther King Jr. In this context, it’s easy to see how a cut-and-paste job could have accidentally attributed the source to King. Congrats to Jessica, whose Facebook wall post is one of the more famous sayings on the Internet today. Salon has reached out to Penn Jillette for comment, but has yet to receive a response. (See update below.)
Update 2: On Tuesday afternoon, Penn replied to Salon by email, detailing how he made an “honest mistake,” and conveying his dismay over the suggestion that he would purposefully fabricate a quote from Martin Luther King.
“I made a mistake,” Penn wrote, “I read the quote, thought it was too perfect, checked part of it from the MLK book and then cut and pasted it. The part I checked was not the part that was wrong, and I posted it. A stupid, but honest mistake. When someone pointed out the mistake, I apologized as best I could in the limited number of characters. And then I apologized and explained a few more times.”
Penn also stressed his sadness that the mistake on Twitter apparently led some people to think he was disrespecting Dr. King. “It hurts me to have people think I disrespected Martin Luther King,” he wrote.
Did Haley Barbour misremember an episode in which he claimed to have seen Martin Luther King speak in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1962? A growing body of evidence is pointing in that direction.
The controversy centers on comments made by Barbour, the Mississippi governor and likely presidential candidate, to a Weekly Standard writer last year. The resulting profile already landed Barbour in trouble because he lauded the racist White Citizens Council of his hometown as a force for good.
Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.
Here’s what Barbour told the Standard:
“I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”
…
I asked what King had said that day.
“I don’t really remember. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King.”
King did appear in Yazoo City in 1966 — in the wake of the killing shooting* of civil rights activist James Meredith — but that was a year after Barbour graduated high school, and four years after Barbour said he saw King.
Here’s the Clarion-Ledger’s fact-check:
A search of the King Papers at the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute and the papers of David Garrow, author of the definitive biography on King, Bearing the Cross, failed to find evidence King spoke in Yazoo City in 1962.
The paper couldn’t find anyone who remembered a King visit in ’62.
I also spoke with Garrow, who is the author of the definitive King biography, “Bearing the Cross.” Garrow pointed out that King was in the Mississippi Delta region in February 1962, and he stopped at several towns. However, Garrow’s papers do not indicate that Yazoo City was one of the stops.
This is hardly the first time the governor has been accused of getting his civil rights history wrong. One of his childhood friends, for example, told me last year that Yazoo City was riven by racial tensions in the 1950s and 60s, despite Barbour’s rosy memories of that era. Meanwhile, Barbour managed to get his name next to “KKK” in newspaper headlines around the country this month after he refused to condemn a proposed Mississippi license plate honoring a founder of the Klan.
The overriding question remains: Will Barbour’s series of missteps on matters of race hurt him in a GOP primary?
* CORRECTION: Meredith was shot but not killed in 1966
All of the old white guys pictured above voted against the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. (John McCain did, in 2008, apologize for his vote.) 28 years later, it’s hard to imagine even a deeply Republican Congress opposing a holiday dedicated to Dr. King — in part because some contemporary conservatives like to pretend the civil rights activist was or would be a Republican, but mostly because conservatives have spent years pretending to be a persecuted minority group.
That’s why something like Sarah Palin claiming to be a victim of “blood libel” doesn’t raise an eyebrow among the true believers. It’s the myth that keeps the checks rolling in for most right-wingers. The liberals are all-powerful and they oppress us.
It’s especially rich coming from Palin, obviously. The only thing the former governor seems to enjoy more than attacking her political opponents is acting like the entire world is aligned against her and her poor family. A tasteless joke from a late night comedian isn’t simply part of the cost of living a public life, it’s more proof that a cabal of liberal elites is devoted to the relentless persecution of innocent conservative Americans. (Part of the game involves purposefully conflating criticism from media figures with organized political attacks. What, after all, is the true difference between David Letterman and the DNC? They’re all liberals.)
The longtime opponents of what they mockingly termed “the culture of victimhood” now revel in every perceived slight. Republicans accused of unethical behavior make great martyrs.
How bad is the delusion? When they aren’t actually treated like oppressed minorities, they pretend they were. Have you seen the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s exhaustive and remarkable “Insurrectionism Timeline”? Allow me to make the much less exhaustive Timeline of incidents in which young right-wingers pretended to have been the victims of political violence, or even “hate crimes.”
Every so often, some young Republican will pretend to have been the victim of a violent hate crime. In 2006, there was Justin Jatkoff, who was supposedly beaten senseless by either black people or “a homosexual rights group” who’d sent him an “odd/threatening” e-mail. (He was actually just beaten up by his friends.)
Later that year, a conservative Mormon college student named Francisco Nava claimed to have received hundreds of death threats for a column attacking Princeton University’s “hookup culture.” He said he feared for his safety. Then he claimed he was brutally attacked by men in stocking caps who beat him with a bottle of Orangina. After he became a conservative cause celebre, the cops got him to admit that he’d invented the threats and the attack.
And then there’s Ashley Todd, College Republican National Committee field representative, who claimed to have been brutally attacked by some liberal black person during the 2008 campaign, because she had a McCain sticker on her car. A “B” — for “Barack” — was even carved into her cheek. As we all remember, the B was backwards, because Todd has “carved” it herself.
When Democrats were complaining of death threats as the healthcare debate raged, then-minority whip Eric Cantor claimed someone shot up his office. Police determined that the bullet that landed inside a window at his campaign office had been fired randomly into the air.
The Tea Partiers, of course, are frequent self-declared victims of brutally unfair media coverage, and in their more feverish fantasies, they are even intimidated by “union thugs.” (Violent, “thuggish” union members are the enforcers of the modern Apartheid-like regime that conservatives are forced to live under.)
Even when Republicans occupied the White House, controlled both houses of Congress, and maintained a working majority on the Supreme Court, they imagined themselves victims of all-powerful liberals.
So on this Martin Luther King Day, please, spare a thought for America’s forgotten minority: Comfortable white conservatives. Especially the ones in academia, Hollywood, and the media.
The national holiday commemorating Martin Luther King that we celebrate today comes with a bitter irony: Its creation nearly three decades ago was instrumental in rescuing and extending the career of one of the most notorious race-baiters in modern American politics.
It was the fall of 1983 and Jesse Helms seemed destined for political extinction. The staunchly conservative senator was due to stand for reelection the following year, and polls in North Carolina showed him running far, far behind the Democrat who was gearing up to oppose him, Jim Hunt.
That Helms was even in the Senate was something of a fluke; the coattails of Richard Nixon, who carried North Carolina by 40 points over George McGovern in 1972, had been the main reason for his eight-point victory in his first campaign. And even in the early ’80s, North Carolina was still filled with culturally conservative white voters who had been trained from birth to support Democrats. One survey showed Hunt, a moderate who was finishing his second term as governor, 22 points ahead of Helms. Another put the margin at 19. Incumbent senators just aren’t supposed to overcome those kinds of deficits.
But those polls were taken before the first week of October ’83, when the bill to create a federal holiday honoring King — which had easily cleared the House over the summer — landed in the Senate. Two of the chamber’s top Republicans, Howard Baker and Bob Dole, embraced it and urged their colleagues to do the same. The GOP had once been the party of civil rights, and they hoped to attract black voters back into the fold — both for the ’84 Senate elections and for the long-term future of their party.
Helms, though, saw a much different opportunity: to give those conservative white voters in his state a reason to buck their partisan heritage and side with their Republican senator in ’84. Thus it was that he declared his intent to filibuster the King holiday, claiming the slain civil rights hero had been a devotee of “action-oriented Marxism” and that the movement he’d led had actually been a haven for Communists.
It didn’t matter that he stood little chance of prevailing in the legislative fight. By the fall of 1983, even Ronald Reagan, like Helms a hero of the New Right (whose political career was probably saved by Helms’ assistance in North Carolina’s 1976 presidential primary), had come around to supporting the idea of a King holiday — or at least to saying that he’d sign the bill if it reached his desk. Previously, Reagan had offered the standard line of King holiday opponents that giving federal workers a new day off would be too expensive. As J. Bennett Johnston, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, explained to the New York Times, “If you took a secret poll, the Senate would not want additional holidays. But the symbolism of it is so strong, that sweeps aside those arguments very quickly.”
But Helms wasn’t interested in the outcome; he was interested in the show. Undoubtedly, then, he was tickled when one of the first Democrats to lash out at his filibuster was Ted Kennedy — precisely the kind of unabashedly liberal, integrationist Northern liberal who reminded those white Southern Democrats why they’d been abandoning their party in recent presidential elections. “Everybody who disagrees with Mr. Kennedy is a racist and right-winger,” Helms sneered. With a massive push underway to register black North Carolinians to vote, Helms was asked if his stand might hurt him in 1984. But he knew better: “I’m not getting any black votes, period.”
Within days, Helms struck a deal with Baker, then the chamber’s majority leader, to give up his filibuster. In exchange, the final vote would be put off for two weeks, which would give Helms time to pursue a legal bid to force the Justice Department to release the files that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had compiled on King. This, too, was a doomed mission, not that Helms cared. What it really meant was two more weeks at the center of a national media firestorm, making one more stand for old Dixie against Kennedy and the rest of the liberals.
The Senate debate kicked off on Oct. 18, a Tuesday, with Helms — his legal effort squelched by a federal judge the day before — offering a motion to send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee so that King’s ties to “elements of the Communist Party USA” could be fully explored. What he was really trying to do, though, was bait Kennedy into a face-to-face showdown. The Massachusetts Democrat, fully aware of what Helms was looking for, had already indicated that he wouldn’t respond personally to any of Helms’ claims. But his thinking changed when Helms brought up Kennedy’s two slain brothers, John and Robert, who had approved a temporary wiretap of King in the fall of 1963.
“His argument is not with the senator from North Carolina,” Helms said of Kennedy. “His argument is with his own dead brother who was president and with his dead brother who was the attorney general.”
That brought Kennedy to the floor to declare that “I am appalled at the attempt of some to misappropriate the memory of my brother Robert Kennedy and misuse it as part of this smear campaign. Those who never cared for him in life now invoke his name when he can no longer speak for himself.” Kennedy also accused Helms of making a “false” statement — that the King bill never received committee hearings. Helms immediately objected to Kennedy’s language, claiming that it was a violation of rules that prohibit senators from questioning each other’s honor. Baker convinced Kennedy to substitute the word “inaccurate,” though Kennedy did manage another swipe: “The senator,” he said of Helms, “needs to learn the rules.”
On and on it went, with one outraged liberal after another rising to defend King’s name and to take exception to Helms’ words. In a particularly memorable scene, New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan held up a binder of documents about King that Helms was promoting, pronounced it a “packet of filth,” and dropped it on the ground. Even Dole, who served as the bill’s floor manager, took on Helms, saying of his claim that the holiday would waste money, “Since when did a dollar sign take its place atop our moral code?”
Eventually, Helms’ motion was rejected, 76-12. So were a series of other motions designed to derail or alter the proposed holiday. The next day, the vote on the main bill was finally called, and it passed with ease, 78 to 22. “It’s a tyranny of the minority!” Helms roared.
Very quickly, it became clear that Helms’ grandstanding hadn’t been in vain. By the time the King fight was over, polls showed Hunt’s lead vanishing — down to single digits, less than half of what it had been months earlier. As the campaign unfolded, racial resentment became Helms’ prime weapon. Helms fliers and mailers featured large photos of Hunt and Jesse Jackson and cast the black voter registration drive as a sinister effort to disenfranchise whites. Helms himself told audiences that Hunt was a racist because he was relying on black voters, and in the closing stretch, he reminded voters that Hunt needed “the bloc vote” to win. Asked what he meant by that, Helms didn’t mince words: “the black vote.”
On Election Day 1984, Helms did what had looked impossible just over a year earlier: He beat Hunt. Divide and conquer had worked brilliantly. Whites went for Helms by a 63-37 percent ratio (the spreads were much bigger in rural areas). Blacks went for Hunt 99 to 1 percent. Overall, the ratio was 52 to 48 percent for the incumbent. On that same day, Reagan was reelected in a resounding landslide, while Republicans held on to their Senate majority. When it came to 1984, the King fight, clearly, hadn’t hurt the GOP.
And yet it was a momentous occasion in the rise of the modern Republican Party. For a century after the Civil War, the GOP had been the progressive party when it came to race and civil rights. But it all changed, virtually overnight, when the burgeoning conservative movement succeeded in nominating Barry Goldwater — who had joined the Southern filibuster of the Civil Rights Act that Lyndon Johnson signed in 1964 — to run against LBJ. This was the moment that white Southern conservatives like Helms, who had been Democrats their whole lives, began a steady, decades-long migration to the GOP. The King vote in ’83 demonstrated how far along that process was. Of the 22 “no” votes, 18 came from Republicans. Just two decades earlier, all but six of the 29 votes to filibuster Civil Rights had come from Democrats.
When the King holiday cleared the Senate, Dole called a press conference and heralded the fact that 37 Republicans had voted for it. It reflected, he claimed, his party’s inclusive spirit. But the scandal was that 18 of them hadn’t. And the message that most African Americans seemed to take from this was simple: The party that makes a home for Jesse Helms doesn’t deserve to be my home.
Osama bin Laden, Martin Luther King, Jr., President Barack Obama 
MLK Jr.'s words, taken out of context by a magician. 
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)(Credit: AP) 
Clockwise from lower left: Orrin Hatch, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms and John McCain 
Jesse Helms and Martin Luther King, Jr. 
