I concluded that a centenarian President awaited another day opportunity once Jimmy Carter entered hospice. Jimmy Carter again defied expectations.
Lyndon Johnson was seen as a Southerner, but those of us in the Deep South regard Texas as ambiguity a la Border States and Florida. Miami and areas north on the Atlantic Coast are no more Southern than suburban New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Amarillo, Midland, Odessa, and El Paso have as much in common with Laurel and Lafayette County as — the song “Route 66” says — “Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.” Northern Virginia is no land of moonlight and magnolias: If Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s boys are Sons of the South, my Confederate ancestors would antagonize me from the afterlife, imploring that I be anything other.
Between the Civil War and the Carter Administration, only Woodrow Wilson — born in Staunton, Virginia, raised in Augusta, Georgia and Columbia, South Carolina, graduate of Princeton University, and Governor of New Jersey — occupied the Oval Office as a Southerner.
Jimmy Carter is unquestionably Southern. Kai Bird’s outstanding biography “The Outlier” (2021) is the best book that I have read this decade: Carter’s father was as expected for a man of his time and place. Carter’s mother “Miss Lillian” was a freethinking renegade, no less Southern than her husband but hardly stereotypical.
The four Carter children were defined by their maverick mother more than their father who embodied the feudal mindset that Mississippians prefer forgotten.
Jimmy Carter emerged from the misfortune which was Lester Maddox — quoting Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”:
“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show with some smart-ass New York Jew. And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox. And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too. Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool…”
Carter exemplified future possibilities rather than failures of the Civil War. Time liberated Carter from the Sisyphean task of denying that the South had been vanquished, with never a snowball’s chance in hell of emerging victorious as an agricultural society arrayed against an industrial society.
Jimmy Carter suffered derision that Yankees have visited upon Southerners for time immemorial. Georgians in the White House were treated like “The Beverly Hillbillies” in 1962.
The fiction of Carter White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan leering at the cleavage of the wife of the Egyptian Ambassador to Washington, Madame Ashraf Gorbal, imploring “I have always wanted to see the pyramids,” was vintage Randy Newman:
“We got no-necked oilmen from Texas
And good ol’ boys from Tennessee
And college men from LSU
Went in dumb — come out dumb too.”
The best of the Carter White House —what Southerners could be — was overlooked by people seeking to defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980, endeavoring to airbrush our accomplishments “out of the photograph”.
Six months into his Presidency, on July 21 and 22, 1977, Jimmy Carter visited Owen Cooper — former President of the Mississippi Chemical Corporation and the Southern Baptist Convention; father of longtime Northsider Nancy Gilbert — in Yazoo City. Mississippians had not mattered since Lord knows when.
Former First Lady Carroll Waller told me that the Carters and Wallers were “best of friends in the Southern Governors Association when Jimmy and Bill were Governor;” unsurprising being deeply down-to-earth, devout Baptists of enduring decency. The Waller offspring are as humble and sincere as anyone in North Jackson, evincing public servant personae that elected officials and their families ought to model instead of the Divine Right of Kings.
History is made today, Tuesday October 1, 2024, while I write on the centennial of Jimmy Carter’s birth.
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, exemplary ex-President, Jimmy Carter demonstrated that the South could rise again, not as the failed South that lost the Civil War but as proud Southerners triumphing over adversity, surmounting shortcomings, by learning lessons after humiliating defeat.
Jimmy Carter made us proud. Let us offer Prayers of Thanksgiving for the life of the 39th President of the United States, unarguably an outstanding American.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
