xterm and erase character

[Harry Putnam]

With the changes that are being tried in xterm package, I seem to
need to manually set stty erase to ^H so that stuff works like I
expect it to in X.  However setting that in .bashrc like:

  stty erase 

Causes bad behavior in text mode terminals.  I get ^? for backspace
and ^[[3~ for delete key.  I have to manually do ^H to get the
desired behavior of deleting one character to the left.

I've forgotten the standard test for a terminal to know if it is in X
or not but even knowing that I'm wondering if I could set a resource
in ~/.Xresources for xterm, so it would only happen in xterm running
in X.  Not to have to bother with it in init files.

That is, is there a resource setting that will cause erase char to be
^H (control+H) that can be inserted into ~/.Xresources?