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Commentary: Jimmy Carter’s Place [1]
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Date: 2025-01-13
Many memorials to former President Jimmy Carter, who died at 100 years old on December 29, 2024 in Plains, Georgia, have bordered on hagiography.
They describe a gentle and grounded man who, despite a disappointing presidency, traveled around the world promoting disarmament and women’s rights, preaching Christian charity and economic redistribution, and building houses for the poor and displaced. He was a modern-day aw-shucks Baptist saint, all the more likeable because he was rather ineffectual–the president who was too Good to be good.
But in these liberal-minded tributes, his life is a dual rags-to-riches story.
First, of course, the tale of a farmhand who made it to the White House. Second is one of political formation: ignorance-to-enlightenment. Despite his rural upbringing, disbelieving pundits write, Carter supported women’s rights. Despite his Baptist Christian faith, he promoted Black civil rights and the welfare state. It’s a new take on the American dream. No matter your backward upbringing, you, too, can be liberally enlightened.
To his liberal detractors, the same binary remains. His progressive politics could never outpace his inherited Southern white smallmindedness. His civil rights record was tempered by his white Georgia-ness. His muddled foreign policy was the result of his quaint peace-loving provincial-ness. His broad presidential failure was due to alienating the left wing of his party and sidling up to moderates. He couldn’t help it.
With some reflection, they might realize that his uncommon progressivism is because of his background, not despite it. There is something particularly “rural Southern” about his politics: a commitment to place. In his political and post-political lives, Carter fought back against the disorienting placelessness that plagues modern American life.
He was born where he died, in rural Plains, Georgia. His father, a businessman and farmland investor, benefitted from New Deal farming subsidies. In his 1971 Georgia gubernatorial inaugural address, Carter made a case for racial and economic equality, a worldview borne of a Plains upbringing.
“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he said. “Our inherent human charity and our religious beliefs will be taxed to the limit. No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.” Rural white and Black families, diametrically opposed in the American imagination of race, both labored under the burden of rural poverty and illiteracy in Plains.
When post-presidency Carter appeared in the news, he was most-likely holding a hammer or a saw, wearing a hard hat, on a ladder propped against a gutter. He worked for Habitat for Humanity for 36 years, building permanent and affordable homes for working-class and displaced people who could normally not afford a new house.
The Carter Work Project, which has provided over 100,000 volunteers for Habitat build sites, is the undertaking of a family who knew the value of a physical place to inhabit. “To have a decent place to live,” he said, “is to have a chance to live in peace and to have adequate health care and adequate education, so you can take advantage of your talents.”
His commitment to Georgia was sometimes almost impolite. The University of Notre Dame invited him to address graduates in 1977 and sprung on him an honorary doctorate at the ceremony. “Had I known ahead of time that they planned to do this,” he wrote in his White House Diaries, “I would have not let them. My own intentions were to receive an honorary degree only from Georgia Tech.”
After the embarrassment of the presidential election, Democrats found out that they aren’t who they thought they were. Upper and upper-middle class voters are now solidly blue, while the (multiracial) working class warmed up to Trump. The hope of Carter’s home state going blue was quickly extinguished on election night.
No one wants to take political cues from Jimmy Carter. Probably, no one should. But he is at least an example of a person with specific policies, informed by values instilled by a particular place and its community.
Perhaps the Democrats could pursue a candidate similarly tethered. That wish might be naïve, but where has our cynicism gotten us?
Christiana Wayne is the assistant news editor for the Daily Yonder. She studied history at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.
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