Because Georgia governors in the early 1970s were still limited to a single four-year term, Carter didn’t have to worry about re-election. That freed him from fundraising but also left him unconcerned about building support for his policies with the public and other politicians. Years later, Carter admitted he could not have won re-election if he tried. “Only decades later would he recognize that building support in one’s party is essential to governing successfully, not to mention staying in office,” writes Jonathan Alter, one of his biographers.
Carter, who was 100, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Ga. The nation’s attention is naturally turning back to his presidency, as well as his tremendous accomplishments promoting democracy and humanitarian causes in the long years since he left office. But it was Carter’s governorship — and his ability to present himself as a Washington outsider in the wake of the Watergate scandal — that not only positioned him for national office but also started the fashion of electing governors almost exclusively as president over the subsequent three decades.
For all but four years between Carter’s victory in 1976 and 2008, the White House was held by former governors. “He began that trend,” says Rutgers University political scientist Saladin Ambar, author of How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency. “The key was being able to sell yourself as someone who could fix Washington.”
Carter’s defeat during his first run for governor in 1966 led him to turn to religion, eventually becoming born again. (He would become the last Democrat to win a majority of the white evangelical vote in a presidential run.) It also convinced him he would need to run a different kind of campaign four years later, one that was marred by personal attacks against his main opponent, as well as racial dog whistles.
At his gubernatorial inauguration in 1971, Carter made a resounding statement in favor of racial equality. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter said. “No poor, rural, weak or Black person should ever had to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.”
His call to end racial bias landed Carter on the front page of The New York Times. As governor, Carter appointed the state’s first Black county judge and the first Black member of the university Board of Regents, while also increasing the number of Black members of state boards and commissions from just three to 55.
But Carter had run in 1970 as an ally of prominent segregationist George Wallace, who was busy winning a fresh term as governor of Alabama next door. Carter’s anti-discrimination statement was seen as such a betrayal to the segregationists who had backed his campaign that a dozen state senators walked out on his inauguration.
At the start of his career, Carter tried to balance his own liberalism on race with the views of the Deep South constituency he was trying to win over. Years later, he said he wished he could have denounced the white supremacist politicians who backed him for governor, but at the time he calculated that he had no chance of winning without their support. “They’re racists and I’m not a racist,” Carter said. “But that would have been the end of my political career.”
Feeling Cheated
After serving in the Navy, Carter moved back to his hometown of Plains to run his family’s peanut farm and warehouse after his father died. Carter presented himself as an outsider throughout his career, but his father had been elected to the Georgia House the year before his death. Of his maternal grandfather, Carter wrote after his presidency, “Grandpa was active in local politics and was considered the most politically knowledgeable man in Webster and Stewart counties.”
Jimmy Carter was the only prominent white man in the area who refused to join the White Citizens’ Council, a group formed to oppose school integration in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. That decision ended legal segregation, but it certainly did not end segregation. In 1955, the Georgia Legislature passed a law that threatened to shut down any school district that integrated.
That was the dilemma Carter faced once he was appointed to the Sumter County Board of Education, just a few months after Brown. His first motion, in fact, sought to shift resources from Black schools to white ones. “I never claimed to have been courageous during the civil rights movement,” Carter told Alter in 2015. “I wasn’t.”
Just days before the all-important Democratic primary in 1962, Carter decided to run for the state Senate. He ran not only against a warehouseman named Homer Moore but the Quitman County political machine that backed him. The machine was run by a corrupt state representative named Joe Hurst. They didn’t think Carter would win, but decided to go ahead and stuff the ballot box anyway. “We do it every time,” Hurst said, “and I don’t want my people to get out of practice.”
Although only 333 people showed up to vote at the Georgetown courthouse in Quitman County, the ballot box there contained 420 votes. The ballot stuffing wasn’t even sly; a roll of ballots — all for Moore — had been wrapped in a rubber band. (A chapter of Carter’s 1992 memoir about the contest, Turning Point, was titled “The Dead Vote Alphabetically.”) Asked why they’d kept the fake ballots rolled up together, Hurst later said, “Well, we knew they were all for the same man, and we knew exactly how many there were, and we didn’t want to have to count them twice.”
Carter, who had smartly drawn media attention to the case, convinced a judge to throw out the Georgetown votes. That was enough to win him the Democratic nomination and with it the seat. Unsurprisingly, the experience convinced Carter, flawlessly honest since he'd been beaten as a boy for stealing two pennies from the collection plate, that politics was a dirty game marked by “electoral fraud and corruption that are almost unimaginable today.”
Outflanked on Race
Carter concentrated on education as a state senator. He served on a commission whose recommendations eventually helped equalize school funding and helped make the state an innovator in terms of setting K-12 standards. He managed to get Georgia Southwestern expanded from a two-year to a four-year college, which played so well back home that he ran unopposed for re-election in 1964. Carter kept what he later called a foolish promise to read every bill that reached the floor, but his knowledge of what was actually contained in legislation lent him some power and influence among his colleagues.
Carter made no comment when comedian Dick Gregory led a march of 1,700 Black residents to the Sumter County courthouse, seeking to register to vote on the exact day in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. He kept quiet, in fact, about all the civil rights activity taking place in his county and state. Martin Luther King Jr. once described Sumter County Sheriff Fred Chappell as “the meanest man in the world,” but Carter called him “a good friend.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good to go around screaming for integration as a state senator,” Warren Fortson, Carter’s attorney during his Senate race recount, said years later.
In 1966, Carter considered a run for Congress but opted to run to succeed term-limited Gov. Carl Sanders instead. He entered the race just 12 weeks before the primary. Carter, who had spoken as a state senator against Georgia’s “30 questions” literacy test, which was used to disenfranchise Black voters, “appealed to the moderate-liberal voter and conducted a gentlemanly and non-racist campaign,” according to historian Randy Sanders.
Carter ran third in the Democratic primary. The eventual winner was Lester Maddox, a notorious racist. Maddox stood in the door of his Atlanta restaurant wielding a gun to turn away Black people who wanted to enter and integrate the place on the day the Civil Rights Act became law. He later closed the restaurant rather than serve African Americans, but not before chasing three Black seminary students away with an ax handle, which became his political symbol. Maddox called integration “un-American, un-godly and even criminal.”
Carter despised Maddox but stayed neutral in the runoff. He knew he would need supporters of Lester Maddox and George Wallace in future races. A poll in April 1970 found that 54 percent of Georgia voters thought integration was happening too fast. That was the constituency Carter would seek to win over in 1970, when the moderate Sanders, who had allowed the state Capitol to be desegregated, was seeking another term.
The Stink Tank Campaign
Carter never said anything outright racist during the 1970 campaign, but he used plenty of coded terms of the time, such as “Georgia’s heritage” and “local control,” leaving segregationists with the impression he was on their side. Carter opposed using public money for private schools, but appeared at one of the all-white “Christian academies” that had sprung up to allow families to avoid integrated public schools, in order to praise it. Where Sanders had blocked Wallace from speaking at the National Guard Armory in Atlanta, Carter said he would invite Wallace to speak at the Capitol. Carter even borrowed Wallace’s slogan — “Our kind of man, our kind of governor.”
Carter’s campaign — the part of it known internally as the “stink tank” — put out flyers and “fact sheets” linking Sanders with Black individuals or showing him socializing with them. Carter also attacked Sanders as part of the Atlanta elite, calling him “Cuff Links Carl,” as part of an appeal to rural voters. “He pictured me as a corporate lawyer who had capitalized on being governor and who was now representing the fat cats [while] he was out there representing the average citizen,” Sanders later said. “That’s a pretty tough thing to overcome.”
Carter sought and won the endorsement of Roy Harris, a former chair of Georgia’s White Citizens’ Council and Georgia director for Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. Maddox endorsed Carter and praised him for “running a Maddox-type campaign.” Although Carter never said he was a segregationist, he left a lot of voters with that impression. “I got the vote of a lot of segregationists and integrationists,” Carter said in 1970, after the primary. “I never did ask their philosophy when I sought their vote."
Success as Governor
Carter told Vernon Jordan, an Atlanta civil rights attorney who became head of the United Negro College Fund in 1970, “You won’t like my campaign, but you will like my administration.” As noted earlier, Carter called for an end to racial discrimination during his inaugural address — as one of his campaign aides later put it, “coming out of the closet” as a liberal once he had actually assumed the office.
Limited to a single term as governor, Lester Maddox won election as lieutenant governor in 1970, which in those days was a powerful position as head of the state Senate. Carter immediately confronted Maddox, saying he would fight Maddox “head-on” if he ever opposed him. Maddox refused to attend Carter’s inauguration. Carter first sought to abolish the office of lieutenant governor and then sought to strip it of the power to appoint committee chairs. He failed in both attempts.
Governors prior to Carter had the ability to appoint the state House speaker and committee chairs, but the governor still wielded considerable institutional power, with the Legislature meeting only 45 days a year. Carter viewed government like the engineer he was, as a series of problems to be solved.
He didn’t think in purely political terms about government as the way competing interests work out differences and seek respective advantage. Unconcerned about re-election and the need to raise funds, he abjured the pay-to-play politics that had been commonplace in Georgia. “Carter neither sought nor developed rapport with politicians, who as a species offended him,” wrote historian Russell Motter.
Maybe it’s not a surprise that his major achievements were mostly process-oriented. He held 51 public meetings around the state during his first months in office, designed to formulate “specific long-range goals in every realm of public life” spread over two-, five- and 20-year periods. “During the campaign and during his campaign as governor of Georgia … he explicitly emphasized principles of procedure for making public policy,” wrote political scientists Jack Knott and Adam Wildavsky during Carter’s presidency.
As governor, Carter implemented zero-based budgeting, calling on agencies to justify their programs and expenses annually, rather than simply building on the dollar figures from the year before. (Agency heads soon learned how to game this system and the experiment didn’t last long.) Georgia lacked the ability to issue bonds for infrastructure, but Carter pushed through an amendment to the state constitution in 1972 to allow for general obligation bonds, which have raised and saved the state hundreds of millions of dollars ever since.
“Something else that he did that didn’t get a whole lot of attention at the time was create the judicial nominating commission, which vets all levels of judges in the state of Georgia,” says Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia.
Carter convinced Coca-Cola, Delta and other major Georgia firms to lend their best and brightest young executives to the state to work out the details. Their memos would come back from his desk covered not only with insightful comments but copy editing changes, Carter correcting spelling and grammar and insisting that they not use contractions such as "don’t" and "didn’t."
His reputation as a micromanager was well-earned but he helped win over some doubters by testifying for a full day before a closed session of the state Senate, showing complete mastery of government operations. “The most difficult thing is to reorganize incrementally,” Carter later wrote. “If you do it one tiny little phase at a time, then all those who see their influence threatened will … come out of the rat holes and they’ll concentrate on undoing what you’re trying to do.”
In the end, Carter reduced the number of governmental units from 300 to 22. Carter had the authority to present his plan to the Legislature as a fait accompli, a package they could either accept or reject but not seriously amend. Carter hated overlap and duplication; as president, he would present a plan to reduce the number of federal agencies by 90 percent, but he was unable to repeat his success from Georgia.
Road to the White House
Carter work on policy issues as governor centered on education and the environment. He sought to protect land and rivers, becoming the first governor ever to block a federally funded waterway project, rejecting a proposed dam on the Flint River. He pushed through a bill in 1972 that lowered the drinking age to 18, believing like many politicians in other states at the time that if young men were old enough to fight in Vietnam it made no sense to deny them a beer at home.
But Maddox managed to block many Carter initiatives during his last two years as governor. By that time, Carter had decided he would run for president. Unlike his last-minute entries into his races for state Senate and governor, Carter pursued a lengthy, carefully thought-out run for the White House. Since he was term-limited as governor at the beginning of 1975, he was able to devote himself full-time to the campaign.
He was essentially unknown outside of Georgia. When a poll was taken in August 1975, Carter finished in 13th place on the Democratic side — which was actually an improvement over the year before, when he didn’t register at all. His great innovation as a candidate was recognizing the boost he could get from the Iowa caucuses, which were moved in 1976 from May to January.
In 1972, George McGovern's close finish in Iowa helped lend his campaign credibility, although he had spent only a day and a half in the state. Carter practically lived in Iowa, tirelessly driving down country lanes to visit isolated voters and try to win them over. He actually finished second, behind “uncommitted,” but finished well ahead of any other candidate. That win propelled him to victory in New Hampshire, the Democratic nomination and then the presidency. “Other candidates targeted major primary states and wrote Iowa off as unimportant,” wrote consultant Kandy Stroud. “Carter blitzed the state 110 times.”
Carter, with his image as an outsider and a scrupulously honest man, managed to meet the moment, when Americans were disillusioned with government due to Vietnam and Watergate. “I owe the special interests nothing,” he said during his campaign announcement. “I owe the people everything.”
He kept close counsel, with the so-called Georgia mafia he brought to Washington unable to help him undo a system dominated by insiders. They weren’t well-enough connected to bend that system to the president’s will. Carter continued to feel that as the chief executive, he was a kind of tribune of the people, speaking on their behalf to “bypass the big shots,” but Congress had no interest in deferring to an imperial president, particularly in the wake of Watergate. “Carter’s reputation as a domineering governor raised red flags on Capitol Hill,” Motter writes.
Echoing his experience as governor, Carter appointed what were then record numbers of women and Black judges to the federal bench, but this did not help him politically. In 1976, Carter carried 10 of the 11 states of the Confederacy; four years later, he carried only Georgia, with Ronald Reagan taking 61 percent of the white Southern vote.
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