Jimmy Carter

> We have already found a high degree of personal liberty, and we are now struggling to enhance equality of opportunity. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute, our laws fair, our natural beauty preserved; the powerful must not persecute the weak, and human dignity must be enhanced.
>
> Jimmy Carter in his inagural address.

## Jimmy Carter

Official Portrait, 1978

**James Earl Carter Jr.**(or **Jimmy Carter**) (born October 1st, 1924) is an American politician and philanthropist who served as the 76th Governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975, and then as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. At the age of 99, he is the oldest living former President of the United States.

## Personal Life

### Birth & Childhood

*This section is still under construction!*

Jimmy Carter was born on October 1st, 1924 at the Wise Sanitarium (now called Lillian G. Carter Nursing Center) in Plains, Georgia. His mother worked at the hospital as a nurse. Carter was the first US president to be born in a hospital.

### Education

Carter was enrolled to nearby Plains High School from 1937 to 1941. By the time he enrolled, the Great Depression had impoverished Archery and Plains. The family, however, benefited from New Deal farming subsidies, and Earl took a position as a community leader. Jimmy was a diligent student who had a fondness for reading. According to a popular ancedote that has held to this day, he was passed over for valedictorian after he skipped school with his friends to venture downtown in a hot rod. Carter's teacher Julia Coleman was a strong influence to him. Carter played on the Plains High School Basketball team, when he was an adolescent.

### Navy

He served in the Navy at the end of WW2 in 1946 to 1953. During this time, he began an association with the nuclear submarine program, led by Hyman Rickover.

In 1952, Carter assisted in the shutdown of a nuclear reactor, which was making the island it was living on radioactive. This later changed Carter's views on conserving energy.

### Farming

After his father died, Carter had to resign from the Navy so he could focus on the peanut farming business. He, his wife, and their 3 children lived in a house in Plains while they were looking after the business.

### Political career

Racial tension was inflamed in Plains by the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court anti-segregation ruling in *Brown v. Board of Education*. Carter was in favor of racial tolerance and integration, but often kept those feelings to himself to avoid making enemies. By 1961, he began to speak more prominently of integration, being a prominent member of the Baptist Church and chairman of the Sumter County school board. In 1962, a state Senate seat was opened by the dissolution of Georgia's County Unit System; Carter announced his campaign for the seat 15 days before the election. Rosalynn, who had an instinct for politics and organization, was instrumental to his campaign.

Early counting of the ballots showed Carter trailing to his opponent Homer Moore, but this was the result of fraudulent voting orchestrated by Joe Hurst, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Quitman County. Carter challenged the election result, which was confirmed fraudulent in an investigation. Following this, another election was held, in which Carter won against Moore as the sole Democratic candidate, with a vote margin of 3,013 to 2,182.

The civil rights movement was well underway when Carter took office. He and his family had become staunch supporters of John F. Kennedy. Carter remained relatively quiet on the issue at first, even as it polarized much of the county, to avoid alienating his segregationist colleagues. He did speak up on a few divisive issues, giving speeches against literacy tests and against an amendment to the Georgia Constitution which, he felt, implied a compulsion to practice religion. Carter entered the state Democratic Executive Committee two years into office, where he helped rewrite the state party's rules. He became the chairman of the West Central Georgia Planning and Development Commission, which oversaw the disbursement of federal and state grants for projects such as historic site restoration.

In November 1964, when Bo Callaway was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Carter immediately began planning to challenge him. The two had previously clashed over which two-year college would be expanded to a four-year college program by the state, and Carter saw Callaway—who had switched to the Republican Party—as a rival that represented aspects of politics he despised. Carter was re-elected in 1964 to serve a second two-year term.

For some time in the State senate, he chaired its Education Committee; he also sat on the Appropriations Committee toward the end of his second term. Before his term ended, he contributed to a bill expanding statewide education funding and getting Georgia Southwestern a four-year program. He leveraged his regional planning work, giving speeches around the district to make himself more visible to potential voters. On the last day of the term, he announced his run for Congress.

### 1966 and 1970 campaigns for Governor of Georgia

In Carter's first run for the governor, he ran against liberal former Governor Ellis Arnall and the conservative segregationist Lester Maddox in the Democratic primary. In a press conference, he described his ideology as "Conservative, moderate, liberal and middle-of-the-road. ... I believe I am a more complicated person than that." He lost the primary, but drew enough votes as a third-place candidate to force Arnall into a runoff election with Maddox. Maddox narrowly won the runoff ballot over Arnall.
In the general election, Republican Bo Callaway went on to win a plurality of the vote, but short of a 50 percent majority; the state rules empowered the Georgia House of Representatives, which had a Democratic Party majority, to elect Maddox as governor. This resulted in a victorious Maddox, whose victory—due to his segregationist stance—was seen as the worse outcome to the indebted Carter. Carter returned to his agriculture business, carefully planning his next campaign. This period was a spiritual turning point for Carter; he declared himself a born again Christian, and his last child Amy was born during this time.

In the 1970 gubernatorial election, the liberal former governor Carl Sanders became Carter's main opponent in the Democratic primary. Carter ran a more modern campaign, employing printed graphics and statistical analysis. Responding to the poll data, Carter leaned more conservative than before, positioning himself as a populist and criticising Sanders for both his wealth and perceived links to the national Democratic party. He also accused Sanders of corruption, but when pressed by the media, could come up with no evidence. Throughout his campaign, Carter sought both the black vote and "Wallace vote," after the prominent segregationist George Wallace of Alabama. While he met with black figures such as Martin Luther King, Sr. and Andrew Young, and visited many black-owned businesses, he also praised Wallace and promised to invite him to give a speech in Georgia. Carter's appeal to racism became more blatant over time, with his senior campaign aides handing out a photograph of Sanders celebrating with black basketball players.

Carter managed to come ahead of Sanders in the first ballot by 49 percent to 38 percent in September, leading to a runoff election being held. The subsequent campaign was even more bitter; despite his early support for civil rights, Carter's appeal to racism grew, criticizing Sanders for supporting Martin Luther King, Jr. Carter won the runoff election with 60 percent of the vote, and he went on to easily win the general election against the Republican candidate Hal Suit, a local news anchor. Once he was elected, however, Carter changed his tone, and began to speak against Georgia's racist politics. Leroy Johnson, a black state Senator, voiced his support for Carter, saying, "I understand why he ran that kind of ultra-conservative campaign. ... I don't believe you can win this state without being a racist."

## Heroism

* Founded the Department of Energy.
* Founded the Department of Education.
* Arranged the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
* Founded the Department of Health & Human Services.
* Signed the Indian Child Welfare Act.

## Trivia

* Jimmy Carter is actually related to Thomas Cornell (an early settler of Boston, Massachusetts), who is related to Richard Nixon and Bill Gates.
* He's is the oldest living former President of the United States, at the age of 99.