Jimmy Carter

I

Introduction

Jimmy Carter, born in 1924, 39th president of the United States (1977-1981). Carter had served one term as governor of Georgia and was considered an outsider to traditional party politics. From the beginning his presidency was marked by caution, conservatism, frustrations, and disappointments. Many reforms he promised were never carried out—some because they were abandoned by Carter, others because of congressional hostility.

During the 1976 campaign, for example, Carter vowed to reform the tax system, which he called “a disgrace”; yet as president he gave only token support to tax reform. He also promised to reduce drastically the number of agencies in the federal bureaucracy—which he called “the worst, most confused, bloated, overlapping, and wasteful” in history—and to slash the number of federal employees. Instead of eliminating departments, however, he added the departments of energy and education to the Cabinet, and the number of government employees continued to increase during his presidency.

Carter's management of the economy differed little from that of his Republican predecessors. Unlike every Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945), he did not propose any new or sweeping solutions to social problems. Carter, unlike any of the other Democratic presidents in the 20th century, did keep the United States out of any foreign wars, and he substantially increased the percentage of minorities and women in high-level bureaucratic and judicial positions. Opinion polls regularly showed that the public liked Carter as a person but lacked faith in his leadership abilities.

Following his presidency, Carter remained active in public life and gained new respect as an effective statesman and peacemaker, acting as a mediator in several international conflicts. He also used his influence as a former president to call attention to economic and social problems in developing countries and to promote human rights and democracy. In 2002 Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments in these areas.

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II

Early Life

James Earl Carter, Jr., was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, a farming community of 600 people. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a peanut farmer and storekeeper. Jimmy Carter worked on the farm, but he had an uncle in the United States Navy who sent him postcards from exotic ports, so as a boy he dreamed of attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He was the first member of his family ever to go to college, starting at Georgia Southwestern College in 1941 for a year, followed by a year at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He then went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, graduating in 1946, ranked 60th in a class of 820.

After his graduation, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, his high school sweetheart, also from Plains. She became an essential partner in all phases of his life, from the peanut farming business to politics. The Carters had three sons, John William, James Earl III, and Donnel Jeffrey, and a daughter, Amy Lynn.

III

Early Career

Carter was assigned to the nuclear submarine Seawolf and later worked for Admiral Hyman Rickover in a nuclear engineering project. Rickover, an extraordinarily brilliant, icy, and disciplined man, made a lasting impression on young Carter. Late in 1953 Carter resigned from the navy and went home to take care of the family peanut farm when his father was diagnosed with cancer.

The early years back in Plains were not easy for Carter. In 1954 there was a drought and he earned only $200. But he built the farm into a large business, warehousing and shelling peanuts for other farmers in the vicinity.

Because Carter was from the South, his attitudes on race were closely scrutinized during his presidential campaign. His father was a politically active man who had believed in racial segregation, or separation of blacks and whites. But Carter's mother, Lillian, a nurse, did not share her husband's views. In the 1960s she joined the Peace Corps and went to India, at the age of 68. In the 1950s, Jimmy Carter was the only white man in Plains who refused to join the White Citizens Council, an organization devoted to preserving segregation. That refusal caused a short-lived boycott of the family's peanut warehouse. In the mid-1960s, the Carter family and one other person were the only members of the Plains Baptist Church who voted to admit blacks to the congregation.

A

Governor of Georgia

Carter won his first elective office, a seat on the local school board, in 1960, and two years later he moved up to the state senate after proving that his opponent in the Democratic primary had broken voting laws. After two terms in the state senate, in 1966 Carter ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia. He only finished third in a crowded field, behind Lester Maddox, a segregationist restaurant owner who came in first and later won the general election, and Ellis Arnall, a liberal former governor, who believed in using the power of the state to aid those who suffered from racism or poverty.

Carter's defeat was a bitter one for him. He said later that he felt sour about life after the loss, and it was at that point that he underwent a religious experience. His sister Ruth, a Christian evangelist, was with him when he decided to dedicate his life to God. He did missionary work in some Northern states for brief periods, taught Sunday school in his hometown, and spoke about Christianity across the South.

Carter's renewed religious convictions did not keep him from using questionable tactics when he again ran for governor in 1970. Carl Sanders, his principal opponent in the Democratic primary, was a moderate former governor. Carter accused Sanders of being a “Humphrey Democrat.” He was referring to former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey, a Democrat from Minnesota who supported such liberal causes as civil rights for blacks, an unpopular cause among many whites, especially in the South. Some of Carter's campaign workers circulated a picture of Sanders joking with a black athlete. Carter ran a campaign to appeal to conservative rural voters. During the campaign he refused to condemn Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, a leader in the movement to preserve segregation. Carter received less than 10 percent of the black vote in defeating Sanders and then won the general election.

Although Carter's campaign had been tinged with racism, there was no trace of racism in his subsequent actions. In his inaugural speech in 1971, Carter declared, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” Carter's record as governor was quite liberal by Georgia standards. He appointed both blacks and women to many state boards and positions and had a portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the assassinated civil rights leader, displayed in the state capitol.

While he was governor, Carter worked for tough consumer-protection laws and banking regulation. He developed new programs in health care and education, and to reform the prisons. The achievement he later boasted about as a presidential candidate, however, was a governmental reorganization plan that consolidated Georgia's 300 state agencies into 22 superagencies. Although Carter liked to imply that this reorganization had saved the taxpayers a great deal of money, his new programs more than made up for the savings.

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