Helms vs. Weld Is Not Just Personal

The unprecedented public campaign by former Massachusetts governor William Weld to gain confirmation--or at least a hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--for his nomination to be ambassador to Mexico often appears to be nothing more than a face-off between two men who hate each other’s guts, a schoolyard squabble between a kid with a lace collar and a neighborhood tough. While there is considerable personal animus between the conservative North Carolina senator and the liberal governor from the Northeast, there also is a history of bitter party factionalism that makes Bill Weld and Jesse Helms natural political enemies and exacerbates whatever personal contempt they might harbor for each other.

The Republican Party has always been beset by divisions. Its very genesis on the eve of the Civil War brought under the same roof factions that coexisted only with the greatest caution--New Englanders who regarded slavery as a moral stain, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant politicians, and industrialists whose interest in the new party was based on its willingness to embrace the high protective tariffs of the old Whig Party whose adherents it had captured.

Bewildering factional battles followed the war, with various reform and anti-reform groups doing battle under such colorful titles as “stalwarts” and “mugwumps.” Later there were divisions over whether the United States should embrace a policy of imperialism.

But in the late 19th century and well into the 20th, there began to emerge two distinct regional wings of the party that drew their strength from the areas in which the GOP had its largest groups of adherents: the Northeast and Midwest.

This division, however, was never exclusively territorial. The party’s eastern wing was dominated by old-money families and industrialists whose fortunes were made during and after the Civil War. They patterned themselves after the British aristocracy, sought marriageable noblemen for their daughters and saw Britain as a natural American ally. The party also was strong in the Midwest, where its ethnic roots were more diverse. Germans in Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin and Scandinavians in Minnesota and the Dakotas had no special affection for Britain and simply felt more remote from the affairs of Europe. American entry into World War I on the side of Britain transformed what had been an uneasy relationship between the GOP’s pro-British Easterners and its pro-German Midwesterners into an outright struggle over internationalism and isolationism. This split reemerged in the years before World War II.

The choice of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower over Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft in 1952 signaled the temporary triumph of the internationalist faction, but as the party’s strength began to shift in the 1960s from the Midwest to the Sunbelt and even into the hitherto Democratic South, the old isolationist wing reasserted itself in a new guise and achieved a brief triumph with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the humiliation of Nelson Rockefeller, leader of the party’s eastern wing. Goldwater and his followers believed in going it alone against the country’s Cold War enemies. For them, the anti-Russian NATO alliance was as much an object of suspicion as the United Nations with its sinister implication of world government.

With the South now the most dependable region for Republicans, the party’s officeholders in the Northeast are clearly out of the party’s conservative mainstream. Republicans in Congress, however, have been strong enough to temper the party’s rightward thrust.

So when Helms regards Weld, he sees not only a man he considers an overbred and overprivileged preppy dilettante, but also a man sailing under false colors, an apostate of sorts who more properly belongs in the Democratic Party. Weld, for his part, sees Helms as a symbol of narrow sectarianism who can only bring the party to grief by alienating moderate voters.

In the end, Helms probably will prevail, but the last word will not have been spoken on the subject. The long-standing feud will enter a new phase in 2000 when the party, hoping to recapture the White House, will see again a struggle between its hostile elements, as it did last year when Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan battled over the soul of the party.

Factional struggles never end in total victory for one side or the other, even in formal peace treaties. Typically, they produce temporary armed truces, or a brief subjugation of the enemy who uses the period of banishment as simply an opportunity for more plotting.