A01=William A. Link
ACT UP
AIDs crisis
anti-abortion movement
anticommunism
Author_William A. Link
Carter Wrenn
Category=DNBH
Category=JPHL
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
culture wars
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gay rights
homophobia
Modern conservatism
National Congressional Club
North Carolina politics
Religious Right
Republican Party
rise of Donald Trump
Senator Jesse Helms
southern history
southern opponents of civil rights
southern segregationism
Tom Ellis
Product details
- ISBN 9781469694498
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Jesse Helms (1921–2008) dominated the political landscape of North Carolina during the last half of the twentieth century. Though Helms’s thirty years in the US Senate are most remembered for what he opposed rather than what he achieved, he was a central figure in modern conservativism.
In this concise interpretive biography, William A. Link centers Helms in the political realignment of the late twentieth-century South and the national ascendance of modern conservatism. Helms helped to lead a coalition known for advocating staunch anticommunism, opposing civil rights legislation, and denouncing liberalism. He innovated strategies for consolidating political power by using broadcast media to generate grassroots outrage. In addition, Helms’s National Congressional Club successfully raised a powerful war chest that could be used in television attack ads. Helms’s career-long penchant for race-baiting and homophobic rhetoric created many opponents, but even they acknowledged his uncanny ability to piece together slender electoral majorities in a rapidly changing nation.
In this concise interpretive biography, William A. Link centers Helms in the political realignment of the late twentieth-century South and the national ascendance of modern conservatism. Helms helped to lead a coalition known for advocating staunch anticommunism, opposing civil rights legislation, and denouncing liberalism. He innovated strategies for consolidating political power by using broadcast media to generate grassroots outrage. In addition, Helms’s National Congressional Club successfully raised a powerful war chest that could be used in television attack ads. Helms’s career-long penchant for race-baiting and homophobic rhetoric created many opponents, but even they acknowledged his uncanny ability to piece together slender electoral majorities in a rapidly changing nation.
William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History emeritus at the University of Florida.
