by Thomas Healy
Still, Nixon was grateful for McKissick’s efforts. Shortly after the election, he offered him a job in the administration, suggesting the former soldier might like a position in the Department of Defense. McKissick declined, citing his commitment to build Soul City, but he was featured prominently at the inaugural festivities. He and Evelyn shared a box with Nixon and his wife, Pat, at a Kennedy Center concert the night before the inauguration, then watched the swearing-in the next day from the presidential viewing stand. They were also among a hundred guests invited to a state dinner at the White House in honor of the British prime minister.
McKissick moved quickly to capitalize on his newfound influence in the capital. Shortly after the inauguration, he and Bob Brown formed the National Council of Black Republicans, which secured three hundred thousand dollars in funding from the Republican National Committee. A few weeks later, McKissick met privately with the RNC’s chair, a former congressman and United Nations ambassador named George H. W. Bush. Bush praised McKissick for his work on the campaign and pledged to build on his outreach to Black voters. “Things are in the process of change here at the National Committee,” he assured McKissick. “I am determined that out of this will emerge a Republican Party with a sound record toward all Americans and with a much greater image of an open door.”
* * *
MCKISSICK HAD WON the favor of party officials in Washington, but he still had work to do back home. That fall, voters in North Carolina had elected the state’s first Republican senator since 1903: a television pundit and former political operative named Jesse Helms. And although he belonged to the same party as Nixon and Bush, Romney and Rockefeller, Helms represented an entirely new breed of Republican—one that had little enthusiasm for the kind of federal programs supporting Soul City, and even less enthusiasm for the project’s goal of racial uplift.
By the end of his career, Helms would be one of the most powerful politicians in the country, “a maker of presidents and breaker of senators,” in the words of one biographer. But his origins were humble. Born in 1921, a year before McKissick, he grew up in the small mill town of Monroe, just south of Charlotte. His father was a fireman and policeman with a reputation for roughing up suspects, especially if they were Black, and Helms was in awe of him. “My father was a six-foot, two-hundred-pound gorilla,” he recalled as an adult. “When he said, ‘Smile,’ I smiled.” Like McKissick, Helms worked hard as a boy, sweeping floors, jerking sodas, and covering high school sports for the local newspaper. He attended college briefly, first at a small Baptist school near Monroe, then at Wake Forest. But when he was offered a position on the sports desk of the News & Observer in Raleigh, he dropped out, believing he could learn more on the job than he could from any pointy-headed professor.
Due to a hearing problem, Helms was rejected for combat duty during World War II and served as a navy recruiter instead. It was the best thing that could have happened to him. Instead of storming the beaches at Normandy or patrolling the South Pacific, he honed his skills as a writer and public speaker, extolling the virtues of military service at high schools and civic clubs. He also received a crash course in radio broadcasting, traveling the state to interview sailors and their families. Helms was so enthralled with the new medium that when the war ended he left newspapers for good, taking a job as news director at WRAL, a Raleigh station owned by a conservative businessman named A. J. Fletcher. Fletcher treated Helms like a son, and his political beliefs—in free enterprise, small government, and an aggressive foreign policy—strongly influenced the young broadcaster. So when Fletcher backed a right-wing lawyer named Willis Smith in his bid to unseat Frank Porter Graham in the 1950 Senate race, Helms signed on, too, volunteering for the candidate in his spare time.
Smith’s campaign against Graham was one of the nastiest in North Carolina history. Following the playbook of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had recently launched his crusade of innuendo and insinuation, Smith’s supporters implied that Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina, was a communist sympathizer. They also suggested that a Graham victory would lead to racial intermixing. One of the campaign’s most notorious ads featured a photograph of Graham’s wife, smiling and dancing with a Black man. Another carried the warning “White People, Wake Up,” followed by a series of rhetorical questions: “Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and daughters in your mills and factories? Negroes eating beside you in all public eating places? Negroes riding beside you, your wife and your daughters in buses, cabs, and trains? Negroes sleeping in the same hotels and rooming houses?” Graham favored all this and more, the ad asserted. “But if you don’t, vote for and help elect Willis Smith for Senator. He will uphold the traditions of the South.”
Helms later denied any involvement in the Smith campaign. But the evidence against him was compelling. The advertising manager of the N&O recalled Helms bringing him ad copy, including the picture of Graham’s wife dancing. “I loaned him my scissors and he took and outlined around the figure of Mrs. Graham with a Negro,” the manager said. Even close friends of Helms acknowledged his role in the campaign. One Smith aide who later served as a state judge reported that Helms was “up to his neck” in the campaign and that there was no “substantive publicity that he didn’t see and advise on.”
Whatever Helms’s involvement, he was generously rewarded by Smith, who took him to Washington as his administrative assistant. Smith’s office adjoined that of another freshman senator—Richard Nixon—and Helms marveled at Nixon’s unapologetic pursuit of suspected communists. He was equally enamored with Richard Russell, the longtime Georgia senator who used his mastery of parliamentary tactics to defend segregation; Helms even worked on Russell’s ill-fated campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. After Smith died suddenly in 1953, Helms returned to Raleigh, becoming executive director of the North Carolina Bankers Association. In addition to lobbying the legislature, Helms was responsible for publishing the association’s monthly magazine, Tarheel Banker. Previously a dull little periodical consisting primarily of industry news and personnel ads, Tarheel Banker was transformed under Helms into a provocative platform for his conservative views. In editorials and personal columns, he attacked what he viewed as the creeping socialism of American politics and denounced the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring that the only reasonable response was to close the public schools. Helms also began a lifelong feud with his old employer the News & Observer, which he viewed as dangerously liberal. When “The Nuisance and Disturber,” as he called it, criticized the state’s banking industry, Helms responded in kind: “It is a shame that the Capital City of our State does not have a newspaper whose reliability and integrity are respected by our legislators.”
Tarheel Banker established Helms’s reputation in the business community, but it was not until he returned to WRAL as executive vice president, in 1960, that he became a statewide figure. By that time, the station had acquired a television license, and Helms delivered a nightly editorial on the events of the day. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and speaking with a country twang that belied his political savvy, he pioneered the kind of paranoid, polarizing commentary that would later become standard cable-news fare. He attacked anything and anyone associated with the left—the United Nations, the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement—and saw communist plots everywhere. “The Congress of the United States yields to blackmail, and passes socialistic legislation,” he warned. “The Supreme Court shackles the police, compounds confusion in the legislatures of the states, and turns loose murderers and rapists to repeat their evil deeds upon the innocent and law-abiding members of society. How much of this is the result of communist planning? Who can say?… The communists want law and order destroyed in America. They want riots in the streets and demonstrations on the campus. They want confusion in our courts, and frustration among our states.… The name of the game is now survival—and we will either win it or lose it.”
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nbsp; Helms and his supporters denied that he was racist, but his editorials were filled with the kind of coded language easily decipherable by bigoted whites. In one diatribe on the civil rights protests he asked, “Is survival possible when civilization reverts to the law of the jungle?” In another he declared, “We must decide whether we will be ruled by sanity or ruined by savagery.” Sometimes he spoke more bluntly, as when he referred to the “purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinctions in group intellect” or when he described the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.” In case the message still wasn’t clear, WRAL signed off each night by playing “Dixie.”
Pundits at the News & Observer and elsewhere mocked Helms as a demagogic crank, but he found a constituency among the white farmers and factory workers who felt put upon by the bankers in Charlotte, the politicians in Raleigh, and the intellectuals at UNC (dubbed the “University of Negroes and Communists” by Helms supporters). To these “forgotten folks,” Helms was a righteous warrior fighting to preserve old-fashioned Christian values. He might be harsh in his judgments, they acknowledged. But if he was mean, he was “mean for Jesus.”
Like nearly all white southerners at the time, Helms was a lifelong Democrat. But when Kennedy and Johnson pivoted left on issues of race and economics, he abandoned party allegiance, proclaiming that the “fight is pitched not on party lines, but on sharply contrasting principles and ideals.” He supported Goldwater in 1964 and Nixon in 1968. And when conservatives in North Carolina were looking for a Senate candidate in 1972, he agreed to run as a Republican.
His opponent was Nick Galifianakis, a congressman from Durham who styled himself as a new kind of Democrat who could appeal to independents, the young, and minorities. Helms presented himself as a traditionalist who would preserve the southern way of life. His campaign slogan—“Jesse: He’s One of Us”—highlighted the contrast, asserting his own authenticity while slyly calling attention to his opponent’s Greek heritage. The campaign was hard-fought and expensive, with Helms spending a record $654,000. Nixon’s coattails were short that year, and Democrats scored impressive gains in the Senate. But Helms prevailed, defeating Galifianakis by a comfortable margin of eight points.
* * *
MCKISSICK REMAINED NEUTRAL during the race. When asked by reporters whether he supported Galifianakis or Helms, he was noncommittal, though his silence was telling in light of his switch to the Republican Party. But when Helms won, McKissick was quick to offer an olive branch. On November 10, three days after the election, he sent the senator-elect a telegram congratulating him on his “impressive victory” and requesting a meeting to brief him on Soul City. “In spite of the fact no two men think alike,” he wrote, “there are many common things that we should work together on, and many common things we should work together for.”
Jesse Helms at a victory celebration after winning his first Senate race.
It was a pragmatic gesture, emphasizing the interests the two men had in common while downplaying their differences. And it showed just how “sophisticated” McKissick had become. In Three-Fifths of a Man, he had criticized the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which was best represented by his famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” McKissick had argued that Washington was too willing to accept a secondary role for Blacks in exchange for white cooperation. But his letter to Helms echoed Washington’s speech, stressing the mutual progress the two men could make despite their fundamental differences.
In any event, Helms was not interested. He had long viewed McKissick as a reckless agitator and CORE as a communist front. And although Nixon had embraced both McKissick and Soul City, Helms saw no reason to go along. “I’m not a Nixon Republican,” he explained to reporters shortly after being elected. “I’m nobody’s Republican or anything else.” So when he responded to McKissick’s telegram two weeks later, he left no doubt where he stood on Soul City. “In fairness to you, I feel I should make clear that I do not favor the expenditure of taxpayers’ funds for the project known as ‘Soul City,’” he wrote. “Moreover, at the appropriate time, I intend to request a careful independent examination of expenditures to date, in order that all citizens may have complete facts on which to base their judgment of this type of federal spending of their tax money.”
It was an ominous response, with its implication of financial misconduct and its threat of a federal investigation. But McKissick was undeterred. Shortly after receiving Helms’s letter, he followed up with his own letter, in which he expressed his “mixed feelings” upon reading the new senator’s words. “I am delighted, of course, at any time to hear from a fellow republican whose opinion(s) on any issue may be in opposition to or in accordance with my own,” he wrote. “But I am also keenly regretful that even without a visit to the Soul City Project and prior to the securing of facts and relevant data on the Project and before being sworn in as a senator for North Carolina, you have decided to launch an investigation of the Soul City Project.” McKissick added that he had called Helms’s office the day before to invite him to a briefing on Soul City and that he hoped the two men might meet soon to discuss the project. “In our telegram to you, we had requested a conference with you for this purpose,” he concluded. “I again extend my request for a conference with you.”
Over the next year, McKissick made numerous attempts to meet with Helms, sending him brochures and press releases, and phoning his office whenever he was in Washington. He never secured an appointment, but he did run into Helms once, in the rotunda of the Capitol. McKissick was there with T. T. Clayton, trying to drum up support in Congress while he negotiated the final terms of his deal with HUD. Walking through the cavernous hall, the two men spotted North Carolina senator Sam Ervin and approached him to make their pitch. Ervin had opposed Soul City from the beginning, urging George Romney to reject McKissick’s application. But with no plans to run for reelection when his term ended in 1974, he seemed to have mellowed, and his response was encouraging. “Don’t worry,” he told McKissick, “I’m not going to hurt you.”
McKissick and Clayton were feeling buoyed by that response when they saw Helms walking toward them. Before they could utter a word, the junior senator cut them off. “Floyd,” he said in his tight-lipped drawl, “I want you to know I’m going to kill Soul City.”
As Helms walked away, McKissick turned to Clayton and fumed, “Did you hear what that son of a bitch said?” To which Clayton could only respond, “I sure did.”
• 13 •
Present at the Creation
In the fall of 1972, Bignall Jones was sitting in his dimly lit office at the Warren Record talking to a reporter for the Charlotte Observer. Squinting across the desk at his visitor, Jones reflected on the new city being built nine miles down the road on his family’s old plantation. Once skeptical that Soul City would ever get off the drawing board, he was now bullish about its prospects, declaring confidently, “I think it’s going to work.” When asked what had changed his mind, his answer was simple: “About $14 million.”
Jones’s reaction was typical. In the months after HUD approved the loan guarantee, the public perception of Soul City shifted dramatically. Many who had once been opposed to the project were now grudgingly supportive, while those who had been skeptical were suddenly converts. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published editorials praising McKissick’s plan, while a headline in the Greensboro Daily News declared, “Soul City: No Scoffers Heard Now.” Even some of McKissick’s Black critics had come around. The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, who had once derided Black capitalism, lauded Soul City as Nixon’s only true contribution to Black people. “I am constrained to believe that nobody in the administration intended it to be that way because I can’t imagine this administration doing anything as positive as Sou
l City,” he wrote to McKissick. “There must have been an injection of your own personality into the situation and Soul City comes out as a monument to your belief and perseverance.”
Local officials also changed their tune. In October 1972, the Warren County Board of Commissioners met to consider a resolution endorsing the project. At first, those officials had been wary of McKissick’s plan. Not sure what to make of Soul City—and doubtful it would ever get this far—they had listened to him and his staff without taking a firm position. But the loan guarantee cast Soul City in a new light. And when the board met that fall, it voted to approve Soul City and to offer McKissick whatever help he needed.
Around the same time, the towns of Henderson and Oxford agreed to cooperate with Soul City on construction of a regional water system. Funded by a mix of federal, state, and local grants, the system would provide ten million gallons of water a day, including at least two million gallons for Soul City. The project was so popular that even Representative L. H. Fountain, who had earlier written George Romney to express concerns about Soul City, agreed to throw his weight behind it. To McKissick, this was proof he could win support by showing how Soul City would benefit the surrounding area. “Sometimes in order to help yourself, you have got to help others,” he explained.
But the strongest evidence of Soul City’s changed image came from industry. In the months after the loan guarantee was approved, McKissick had promising conversations with a number of major corporations, including Borden Foods, Avon Products, and Burlington Industries. Whereas he once had to fight to get in the door of such companies, they were now coming to see him. And he soon landed his first catch. In November, a team from Morse Electro Products Corporation flew down to scout Soul City. Based in New York, Morse made sewing machines and stereo equipment and was planning a new factory on the East Coast. Executives spent several days touring the property, reviewing the development plan, and interviewing McKissick and his staff. By the time they left, it was clear they were impressed. Still, even McKissick was surprised when, two days into the new year, he received a letter from company president Philip S. Morse, informing him that the board of directors was formally considering Soul City for its new plant. The facility would be large—about the size of six football fields—with a workforce of 350. And although many details remained to be worked out, such as training and housing for employees, Morse’s letter indicated that the decision was all but made. He explained that the plant would open by the end of 1973 and that his public relations department would be in touch soon regarding an announcement. “We approach this move on the part of our Company with a great deal of enthusiasm and high expectation for the future,” he wrote.