Carter grew up in Archery, near the better-known Plains, the eldest son of James Earl Carter, Sr. and Lillian Carter. The book reveals that the elder Carter was what political scientists now call an old-fashioned racist, whereas the man who became president was more influenced by his mother, who was more progressive on matters of race. This is from page 16:
Archery was a throwback to the nineteenth century. Jimmy’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., had a tenth-grade education before dropping out to join the army. In 1903, when Earl was only 10 years old, his father, William Archibald Carter, was shot dead during a violent brawl with a business rival. They had been arguing over who was the rightful owner of a desk. Earl was certainly not country “white trash”—but neither was he part of the southern plantation aristocracy. By the late 1920’s, he made more than a comfortable living growing peanuts, corn, and cotton and drawing “rents” from his Black tenants. He managed to expand his farm acreage even during the boll weevil blight of the 1920’s, which wiped out many cotton farmers.
Jimmy Carter was apparently a fan of William Faulkner. Here's a salient passage from page 20 of the Bird biography:
More than most white southerners, the rural folk of South Georgia had defied assimilation and loyalty clung to their native culture as a matter of principle. They had their own vernacular and distinctive accent. And they had their own religion, and unvarnished, evangelical southern Protestantism that affirmed the supremacy of the white race in society and patriarchy at home.
Two generations had passed since the Civil War, but that conflagration continued to define their collective identity. “The past is never dead. It's not even past”—so says Gavin Stevens, a character in Faulkner's novel Requiem for a Nun. Curtis Wilkie, a celebrated journalist from Mississippi who later covered the Carter administration, wrote in his memoirs, “We deliberately set ourselves apart from the rest of America during the Civil War and continue, to this day, to live as spiritual citizens of a nation that existed for only four years in another century.” The South had lost the Civil War but most if not all white southerners unashamedly celebrated what they revered as the “Lost Cause”. On the eve of the Civil War, Georgia was the South's leading slave state with some 462,000 slaves, or nearly 45% of the population. It was also the last southern state to rejoin the union, in July 1870. It was all about slavery. The South was preoccupied with a history heavily laden with questions about guilt, evil, and sin. History mattered to these Georgians.
Here is more on Jimmy Carter's father, known as Earl, at p. 21, plus an interesting defense of the father by Jimmy Carter's more progressive mother:
“Earl was a confirmed segregationist. “Jimmy Carter's daddy, I knew him before he died,” recalled Bobby Rowan, once a state senator from Enigma, Georgia. “He was a redneck, hard-nosed, hard-driving Southern plantation owner.” He called his African American tenants “niggahs.” but years later, Miss Lillian staunchly defended her late husband. “Oh, he said things,” she told a reporter in 1976. “He believed in the black man's inferiority, but he was no different from all those people around here and all over the country who are now trying to pretend they were never prejudiced. Earl would have changed... It annoys me to hear people denounce him when he was simply a Southern man who lived at a certain time.”
And from page 22, more historical context on the rural south:
Jimmy's childhood was steeped in the old South. It was then, and arguably has struggled to remain, a nation within a nation, a foreign province that just happens to exist within the boundaries of the Yankee realm. A conquered territory. In the words of W. J. Cash, the author of the deeply melancholic 1941 classic The Mind of the South, “The South is another land.” Carter himself read the book in the late 1940s. Cash wrote in the anguished voice of a southern intellectual from South Carolina, and his critical portrait of the states that embrace for doomed Confederacy is heartfelt and sadly poignant. He wrote of the South's capacity for violence, it's inherent intolerance and “attachment to fictions and false values.” But the region's greatest vice, he argued, was its “attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values... and despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.”
Cash was writing in the late 1930s, describing precisely the “sleepy old hamlets” in cotton fields that were scenery of Jimmy Carter's childhood. A belief in white supremacy permeated the red-baked clay earth of South Georgia. It defined the culture of Plains and other small towns across the old South. It was a culture that could foster both moments of gentleness and episodes of what the Mississippi journalist Willie Morris labeled “unthinking sadism.” Like Faulkner, Morris was one of a legion of astute southern writers who spent their writing lives exploring the curious gulf between the region’s “manners and morals, the extraordinary opposition of its violence and kindliness.” That was the way things were and, it seemed, always had been. The defining mystery of the future president’s childhood was how he nevertheless was molded into something quite alien from his South Georgian racist culture.
There are more passages that use the words "rural," "country," "redneck," and such, but I'll save those for a future post.
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