#american presidents

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 29, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 30, 2024

Former President Jimmy Carter died today, December 29, 2024, at age 100 after a life characterized by a dedication to human rights. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died on November 19, 2023; she was 96 years old.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, in southwestern Georgia, about half an hour from the site of the infamous Andersonville Prison, where United States soldiers died of disease and hunger during the Civil War only sixty years earlier. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.

Carter’s South was impoverished. He grew up on a dirt road about three miles from Plains, in the tiny, majority-Black village of Archery, where his father owned a farm and the family grew corn, cotton, peanuts, and sugar cane. The young Carters and the children of the village’s Black sharecroppers grew up together as the Depression that crashed down in 1929 drained away what little prosperity there was in Archery.

After undergraduate coursework at Georgia Southwestern College and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carter completed his undergraduate degree at the U.S. Naval Academy. In the Navy he rose to the rank of lieutenant, serving on submarines—including early nuclear submarines—in both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.

In 1946, Carter married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s, who grew up in Plains. When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission and took his family back to the Carters’ Georgia farm, where he and Rosalynn operated both the farm and a seed and supply company.

Arriving back in Georgia just a year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Carter quickly became involved in local politics. In 1962 he challenged a fraudulent election for a Georgia state senate seat, and in the runoff, voters elected him. The Carters became supporters of Democratic president John F. Kennedy in a state whose dominant Democratic Party was in turmoil as white supremacists clashed with Georgians eager to leave their past behind. Kennedy had sent troops to desegregate the University of Mississippi.

Carter ran for governor in 1966, the year after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. He lost the primary, coming in third behind another liberal Democrat and a staunch segregationist Democrat, Lester Maddox, who won it and went on to win the governorship. When Carter ran again in 1970, he emphasized his populism rather than Black rights, appealing to racist whites. He won the Democratic primary with 60% of the vote and, in a state that was still Democrat-dominated, easily won the governorship.

But when Carter took office in 1971, he abandoned his concessions to white racists and took a stand for new race relations in the United States. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he told Georgians in his inaugural speech. “No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

His predecessor, Maddox, had refused to let state workers take the day off to attend services for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral; Carter pointedly hung a portrait of King—as well as portraits of educator Lucy Craft Laney and Georgia politician and minister Henry McNeal Turner—in the State Capitol.

Carter brought to office a focus not only on civil rights but also on cleaning up and streamlining the state’s government. He consolidated more than 200 government offices into 20 and backed austerity measures to save money while also supporting new social programs, including equalizing aid to poor and wealthy schools, prison reform and early childhood development programs, and community centers for mentally disabled children.

At the time, the state constitution prohibited Carter from reelection, so he built recognition in the national Democratic Party and turned his sights on the presidency. In the wake of the scandals that brought down both President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as many of their staff, when it seemed to many Americans that all of Washington was corrupt, voters welcomed the newcomer Carter as an outsider who would work for the people.

He seemed a new kind of Democrat, one who could usher in a new, multicultural democracy now that the 1965 Voting Rights Act had brought Black and Brown voters into the American polity. Like many of the other civil rights coalitions in the twentieth century, Carter’s supporters shared music reinforced their politics, and Carter’s deep knowledge of blues, R&B, folk, and especially the gospel music of his youth helped him appeal to that era’s crucially important youth vote. Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills & Nash, Nile Rodgers, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, as well as the Allman Brothers, all backed Carter, who later said: “I was practically a non-entity, but everyone knew the Allman Brothers. When they endorsed me, all the young people said, ‘Well, if the Allman Brothers like him, we can vote for him.’”

Elected by just over 50% of American voters over Republican candidate Gerald R. Ford’s count of about 48%, Carter’s outsider status and determination to govern based on the will of the people sparked opposition from within Washington—including in the Democratic Party—and stories that he was buffeted about by the breezes of polls. But Carter's domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat once said that Carter believed an elected president should “park politics at the Oval Office door” and try to win election by doing the right thing. He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.

Carter began by trying to make the government more representative of the American people: Eizenstat recalled that Carter appointed more women, Black Americans, and Jewish Americans to official positions and judgeships “than all 38 of his predecessors combined.”

Carter instituted ethics reforms to reclaim the honor of the presidency after Nixon’s behavior had tarnished it. He put independent inspectors in every department and established that corporations could not bribe foreign officials to get contracts. He expanded education programs, establishing the Department of Education, and tried to relieve the country from reliance on foreign oil by establishing the Department of Energy.

Concerned that the new regulatory agencies that Congress had created since the mid-1960s might be captured by industries and that they were causing prices to rise, Carter began the deregulation movement to increase competition. He began with the airlines and moved to the trucking industry, railroad lines, and long-distance phone service. He also deregulated beer production—his legalization of homebrewing sparked today’s craft brewing industry.

But Carter inherited slow economic growth and the inflation that had plagued presidents since Nixon, and the 1979 drop in oil production after the Iranian revolution exacerbated both. While more than ten million jobs were added to the U.S. economy during his term—almost twice the number Reagan added in his first term, and more than five times the number George H.W. Bush added in his—inflation hit 14% in 1980. To combat that inflation, Carter appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve, knowing he would combat inflation with high interest rates, a policy that brought down inflation during the first term of his successor, Ronald Reagan.

Carter also focused on protecting the environment. He was the first president to undertake the federal cleanup of a hazardous waste site, declaring a federal emergency in the New York neighborhood of Love Canal and using federal disaster money to remediate the chemicals that had been stored underground there.

Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as a national monument, saying: “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Coming after Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and support for Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose government had systematically tortured and executed his political opponents, Carter’s foreign policy emphasized human rights. Carter echoed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights established by the United Nations, promising he would promote “human freedom” while protecting “the individual from the arbitrary power of the state.” He was best known for the Camp David Accords that achieved peace between Israel and Egypt after they had fought a series of wars. Those accords, negotiated with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel paved the way for others. Carter credited the religious faith of the three men for making the agreement possible.

Carter also built on his predecessor Nixon’s outreach to China, normalizing relations and affording diplomatic recognition of China, enabling the two countries to develop a bilateral relationship. While commenters often credit President Reagan with pressuring the Soviet Union enough to bring about its dissolution, in fact it was Carter who negotiated the nuclear arms treaty that Reagan honored and who, along with his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a major breach in international relations. He cut off grain sales to the USSR, ordered a massive defense buildup, and persuaded European leaders to accept nuclear missiles stationed in their countries, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said was a significant factor in the dissolution of the USSR.

To Carter also fell the Iran hostage crisis in which Muslim fundamentalists overran the American embassy in the Iranian capital Tehran, seizing 66 Americans and holding them hostage for 444 days, in return for a promise that the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, whom Carter had admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment, be returned to Iran for trial. Carter immediately froze Iranian assets and began secret negotiations, while Americans watched on TV as Iranian mobs chanted “Death to America.” A secret mission to rescue the hostages failed when one of the eight helicopters dispatched to rescue the hostages crashed, killing eight soldiers. Before he left office, Carter successfully negotiated for the hostages’ return; they were released the day of Reagan’s inauguration.

Carter left office in January 1981, and the following year, in partnership with Emory University, he and Rosalynn established the Carter Center, an Atlanta-based nongovernmental, not-for-profit organization to advance peace, health, and human rights around the world.

The Carter Center has supervised elections in more than 100 countries, has helped farmers in 15 African countries to double or triple grain production, and has worked to prevent disease in Latin America and Africa. In 1986, when the Carter Center began a program to eradicate infections of the meter-long Guinea worm that emerges painfully from sufferers’ skin and incapacitates them for long periods, 3.5 million people a year in Africa and Asia were infected; in 2022 there were only 13 known infections, in 2023 there were 14. So far in 2024, there have been 7, but those will not be officially confirmed until spring 2025. In a 2015 interview, Carter said he hoped to outlive the last case.

President Carter said, “When I was in the White House, I thought of human rights primarily in terms of political rights, such as rights to free speech and freedom from torture or unjust imprisonment. As I traveled around the world since I was president, I learned there was no way to separate the crucial rights to live in peace, to have adequate food and health care, and to have a voice in choosing one’s political leaders. These human needs and rights are inextricably linked.”

In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” When journalist Katie Couric of The Today Show asked him if the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me, I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

In his Farewell Address on January 14, 1981, President Jimmy Carter worried about the direction of the country. He noted that the American people had begun to lose faith in the government’s ability to deal with problems and were turning to “single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected.” This focus on individualism, he warned, distorts the nation’s purpose because “the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”

Carter urged Americans to protect our “most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” and to advance the basic human rights that had, after all, “invented America.” “Our common vision of a free and just society,” he said, “is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater even than the bounty of our material blessings.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[crumbledmountains]

i humbly request additions to my presidents photo collection

[blueberry-bubbles130]

Showing historical figures fanfiction of them:

American politician edition!

Please select one of these figures and explain why you have chosen them in the reblogs.

I’ve read a bit of fanfiction of a few of these politicians. Most of these are presidents, because despite studying a decent amount of American history. I can only add a certain amount of answers to the poll.

[xoxo-bunnydumpling]

Other Americans: I'd be so mad if we had a King that spent all our taxes on a party for himself

Me, knowing we pay former presidents amd First Ladies a salary for the rest of their natural lives: Yeah that's crazy GUESS WHAT STUPID SHIT WE PAY FOR THAT BENEFITS US NOT AT ALL *insert political and socioeconomic info dump here*

If you didn't know...

The Former President's Act ensures a lifetime pension/salary for, uhhh former presidents (the name is super on the nose) roughly equal to that of a Cabinet secretary which (thanks Google!) is $226,000 as of 2022. They used to also be given 10 years of Secret Service protection but that's lifetime now as well.

Pensions are not unheard of in private sector jobs at all, but...when was the last time YOU made $226,000 a year? Just saying.

EAT THEM.

[kennedylamb]

𝙺𝚎𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚍𝚢𝚕𝚊𝚖𝚋'𝚜 𝙸𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚍𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 !!

hello hello !! my name is olivia - and this is my jfk posting blog ✮⋆˙

i don't have too much to say here, other than this tumblr exists as a sort of public personal archive for my favorite jack kennedy content. i spend quite a bit of time looking at the kennedy archives, and basically, i get so excited about him that i need a place to put it.

though i do love the kennedys, this blog will probably contain moreso fellow cold war-era presidents as opposed to other members of the kennedy family. (bobby kennedy... may end up being an exception to this.)

anyways, thank you for reading !!

[r1yxhh444]

𝑱𝒐𝒉𝒏 𝑭. 𝑲𝒆𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒅𝒚

the 35th president of the United States, was the ultimate golden boy. charming, brilliant, and endlessly charismatic. With his perfect smile and effortlessly cool demeanor, he made politics look glamorous. A lover of poetry, adventure, and the finer things in life, he spoke of moon landings and a brighter future with irresistible confidence. But behind the polished image, whispers of secret rendezvous and high-society scandals only added to his allure.

[citizenscreen]

100 years ago today, President Calvin Coolidge became the first President to deliver a radio address from the White House. #OnThisDay

[kindest-little-fella-in-town]

that relatable feeling when you don’t want to do more work in class so you attempt to create former president woodrow wilson x also former president john tyler brokeback mountain yaoi fanart on ms paint instead

if these computers are monitored i’ll cry btw

[onesleepyboii]

i’m really sad rn because no one understands why i find jfk hot and every time i tell someone they stare at me like i’ve said the same words that caused the devil to be cast aside like another mosquito getting its wings cut off and left to suffer

[digitalyarbs]

The Real Face of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s reconstructed life mask. The mask was cast of his head and upper torso by John Henri Issac Browere in 1825. yarbs.net

[parzival911]

"In the time of darkest defeat, victory may be nearest." -- William McKinley to his friend editor George Frease (November 4, 1890)

Just in case it doesn't weave its way into my upcoming video. Truer words seldom spoken; after all, a mere six years later, McKinley won his first election as President.

A reminder when all else fails, when all seems lost, the dark dissipates to greet the dawn.

[macaron-n-cheese]

I made this stupid tierlist. 5 hours of my life well spent /s.

[blueberry-bubbles130]

Okay people you know the drill by now. Showing historical figures fanfiction of them:

American Politician edition. Round two!

I never once in my years of existence that I would ever read a fanfiction that had Jimmy Carter and Abby Lee Miller in it. But here we are.

[sofiaflorina2021]

RIP 39th U.S. President, Jimmy Carter (1924-2024)

Rest in peace, 39th President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter (1 October, 1924-29 December, 2024).

Your works in the field of human rights will always be remembered and appreciated.

[r1yxhh444]

༊*·˚𝒂𝒃𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒎𝒆༊*·˚

✦ 𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒆: 𝑹𝒊𝒚𝒂𝒉

✦ 𝑨𝒈𝒆: 𝟏𝟕!!

✦ 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒔: 𝒔𝒉𝒆/𝒉𝒆𝒓

✦ 𝑩𝒊𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒅𝒂𝒚: 𝒇𝒆𝒃 𝟐𝟎!!

✦ 𝑳𝒐𝒄𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏: 𝑼𝑲

✦ 𝑩𝒂𝒔𝒊𝒄𝒔

✧ 𝑶𝒄𝒄𝒖𝒑𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏: 𝑺𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕 - 𝒂𝒔𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑳𝒂𝒘𝒚𝒆𝒓

✧ 𝑯𝒐𝒃𝒃𝒊𝒆𝒔: 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈, 𝒂𝒓𝒕, 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒄, 𝒇𝒂𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒐𝒏, 𝑼𝑺 𝒑𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒔/𝑼𝑲 𝒑𝒂𝒔𝒕 𝒓𝒐𝒚𝒂𝒍𝒔, 𝒉𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚, 𝒑𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒔 (𝒆𝒕𝒄!!)

✧ 𝑭𝒂𝒗𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒆 𝒔𝒉𝒐𝒘𝒔: 𝑨𝑪𝑺, 𝑺𝒖𝒊𝒕𝒔, 𝑮𝒓𝒆𝒚𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒐𝒎𝒚, 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒅𝒂𝒅, 𝑰𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒏𝒐. 𝟗, 𝑳𝒂𝒘 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝑺𝑽𝑼

✦ 𝑩𝒍𝒐𝒈 𝑰𝒏𝒇𝒐

✧ 𝑻𝒚𝒑𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝑩𝒍𝒐𝒈: 𝑱𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒂 𝒑𝒖𝒃𝒍𝒊𝒄 𝑫𝒊𝒂𝒓𝒚

✧ 𝑫𝑴𝒔/𝑶𝒑𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝑨𝒔𝒌𝒔?: 𝒀𝒆𝒔!!

✦ 𝑶𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓

✧ 𝑴𝑩𝑻𝑰 / 𝑬𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒂𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎: 𝑬𝑵𝑻𝑱-𝑻

✧ 𝑪𝒖𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒓 𝒔𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒔: 𝑨-𝑳𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒍 𝒑𝒐𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒔, 𝒆𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆, 𝒔𝒐𝒄𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒚

✧ 𝑳𝒊𝒏𝒌𝒔: 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑𝒔://𝒍𝒖𝒗𝒙𝒙𝒏𝟏𝒄𝒐𝒍𝒆.𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒅.𝒄𝒐

[sailerboy]

Of presidential concern!

Did you know that there are two kinds of coup. The formal definition of these are.

A self coup is when we elect someone and he has a determination to stay in power.

A plain coup, is an illegal and overt attempt by a military organization or other government elites to unseat an incumbent leadership.

Let’s assume we elect someone who broadcasts that you will never have to vote again. I assume he wants to become someone like leaders in Venezuela, Africa, Russia, North Korea..for example. He will have control of the justice system, and possibly all constitutional rules plus foreign policy. And if the main government court gives him the power to legally let out the rioters like men in the January 6 insurrection , the self coup turns into a plain coup.

If our justice system gives him the power, then he can legally justify murder, and other types of revenge on constituents, the public, the opposing party and on opposing states by stating that he has the justification.

I hope this is not what America is coming to. I am just thinking of what will my country be like if a leader tries that tactic. We could have no free speech, less military to protect us, less central and personal services and freedom, more individual costs due to tariffs and control of the taxing system.

Does this ring a bell?