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“The Story of Jimmy Carter is the Story of the South”

by Jason Berggren

David Potter once wrote that “historians need not justify the South in order to understand it, but that effective historical treatment is impossible without understanding, and that understanding can never be attained by denouncing southern society for being what its past has made it, as all societies are.” The same could be said about Jimmy Carter. His presidential views and actions need not be justified to understand him, but effective historical and political treatment of his presidency is impossible without understanding the southern burden he carried and was placed upon him by others.

Carter was a “New South” governor and president, but there was a lot of the “Old South” in him as well. Rather than divesting himself, he made “no effort,” wrote novelist Reynolds Price, “to conceal his origins in and indebtedness to that tragic land, people, and knowledge called South.” When he spoke on the campaign trail in 1976, Time magazine went so far as to claim that “the hoofbeats of a defeated army,” the Confederate army, could be heard “in the cadences of Jimmy Carter.” Although it was his conviction that the South cannot live in the past, he did believe that southerners must not forget the past, showing due honor to the region’s heroes and the region as a place, as he had to his father and to Plains.

Perhaps, Ronald Reagan summarized Carter’s life and the meaning of his presidency best. At the 1986 dedication ceremony of the Carter Presidential Library and Museum, which is built on “a wooded hillside near downtown Atlanta from which [Union] General William Tecumseh Sherman watched the burning of the city in the Civil War,” Reagan publicly acknowledged and highlighted Carter’s peculiar presidential burden. On the one hand, Reagan noted a region’s pride in Carter for winning the presidency and a region’s comeuppance from segregation and poverty on the other. Reagan explained, too, that the life and career of Jimmy Carter “is a powerful story of family and region.” Like the reborn region he was from, Carter’s life was a compelling combination of and testament to “the best regional traditions of pride and hospitality” and “a new sense of openness and opportunity.” In short, Reagan said, “the story of Jimmy Carter is the story of the South,” and that this dedication of his presidential library may be viewed not merely as a celebration of a favorite son, but “as a celebration of the South.” In a sense, Reagan spoke of the library as if it was a monument to Carter’s and a region’s burden.

One Atlanta journalist at the time, at least, did not miss the ultimate significance of Carter’s presidency and his place in the region’s history. While “it is hard to imagine,” Frederick Allen of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution surmised, “anyone suggesting that the Kennedy Library tells a story of New England, or that the Ford Library somehow explains the psyche of the Midwesterner,” “it is precisely the unique stake that southerners held the presidency of Carter that makes him…such a wellspring of ambivalent emotions.” Whether fair or not, Carter carried “a region’s pride on one shoulder and its inferiority complex on the other.” “These,” Allen concluded, “were Carter’s burdens in the White House and, like leaden epaulets, he has worn them ever since.”

Regardless of how his presidency is ultimately judged by history, the incredible fact that a “Jimmy Who?” from a small town in a small black-belt county in southwest Georgia became president at all was an immense, perhaps unprecedented, political achievement in itself. Carter’s win in 1976, remarked one presidential scholar, was “a practical political miracle,” and “he has to be given credit for that.” But even more impressively and importantly in the broader scope of American political history, and the history of the American South, was “the Carter effect” on the presidency. Unlike with John Kennedy, where not a single Roman Catholic would succeed him for the next sixty years until Joe Biden was elected in 2020, Carter’s impact was immediate.  As he made it safe for future candidates to proudly proclaim being “born-again” evangelicals, Carter burst the doors to the presidency wide open for other candidates from the South to run, and to run in both major parties. By 1992, all three major presidential candidates, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, were from the South, two were born there and one had moved there. In the 1990s, Democrats twice won with Clinton-Gore, a “double bubba,” all-South, all Baptist ticket.

Carter believed that the bitterness of the Civil War had lasted too long and that his election was perhaps the final, yet necessary, step in the reconciliation process between North and South. With his election, he thought that most northerners at long last were ready to accept southerners as their fellow and equal countrymen, and that most southerners were at long last ready to join the mainstream, modernize, and send presidents to govern in Washington, rather than just a message to Washington. In the decades ahead, it did happen. All in all, he seemed pleased with his life’s work. At the unveiling of his statue on the grounds of Georgia State Capitol in 1994, Carter said, “I have had an opportunity as a Georgian, as a southerner, to do things that have made my life full.”

 

For more stories about Jimmy Carter please go to www.americustimesrecorder.com/category/jimmy-carter/