Jesse Helms: Modern Conservatism and the Politics of Opposition

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 ...