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| You are in: Museum of History >> Hall of USA >> US Presidents >> Jimmy Carter | |
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Jimmy Carter
49th
President of the United States
39th under the US Constitution
JAMES EARL CARTER, JR. was born in Plains, Georgia on October 1, 1924. He was the eldest of the four children of James Earl Carter and Lillian Gordy Carter. His father was a peanut farmer and operated a small country store in the tiny farming community of 600 people and his mother was a nurse. Carter attended the local schools in Plains and graduated from Plains High School in 1941. He enrolled in Georgia Southwestern College, being the first member of his family ever to go to college. After a year, he enrolled in the Georgia Institute of Technology. As a boy, Carter received postcards of exotic ports sent by his uncle who was in the Navy, and he dreamed of attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis Maryland. His dream came true when he received an appointment through his local congressman. He graduated 59th in a class of 820 in 1946.
On July 7, 1946, Carter married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith, a girl he had know since high school who was his sister Ruth’s classmate and friend. The two had started dating the previous summer when Carter was home on leave from the Naval Academy. The couple had four children: John William (Jack) born July 3, 1947 in Portsmouth, Virginia; James Earl III (Chip) born April 12, 1950 in Honolulu, Hawaii; Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff) born August 18, 1952 in New London, Connecticut; and Amy Lynn born October 19, 1967 in Plains, Georgia.
Carter’s naval career began with service on battleships, and after two years he was accepted for submarine duty. He was assigned to the nuclear submarine Sea Wolf and later worked for Admiral Hyman Rickover, who made a lasting impression on Carter, on a nuclear engineering project. In 1952 Carter enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, New York, studying nuclear physics.
In 1953 at the death of his father, Carter resigned from the Navy and the family moved back to Plains, Georgia, to run the family business. They lived in public housing for the first year, with Carter running the business and his wife doing the bookkeeping. The first couple years were not easy but Carter became successful, starting a fertilizer business, a farm-supply operation, increasing his landholdings and acquiring a cotton gin and a peanut shelling plant. Carter’s political career began as he was establishing himself as a businessman. His father had always been politically active and in 1960 Carter won his first elective office, a seat on the local school board. When a new state senatorial district was created in the area during the legislative reapportionment of 1962, Carter decided to run for the seat. At first, it was believed that Carter had lost, but he proved that his opponent in the primary had broken voting laws by blatantly stuffing the ballot box. The resulting legal battle brought him victory in the primary and in the general election. He served two terms in the state senate and in 1966, he ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Georgia. He came in third, but immediately began to prepare for the 1970 campaign. He defeated former governor Carl Sanders in the primary and was elected governor in the November general election.
Carter was not eligible for a second term as governor, so about halfway through his four-year term, he decided he would seek the presidency of the United States. He began an exhausting schedule of campaigning as soon as his term ended, sensing the mood of the country was anti-Washington and the people were interested in an outsider who was untainted by the insider politics of the Nixon era. Carter promised to restore honesty and morality to the federal government. He gained credibility with early primary victories and received immediate attention from the press. He won the nomination on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention in New York and chose Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. Carter achieved a narrow victory in the November, 1976 general elections by sweeping most of the South, winning 297 electoral votes to incumbent Gerald R. Ford’s 241 and 40.8 million popular votes to Ford’s 39.1 million.
Carter was inaugurated on January 20, 1977, and after taking the oath of office, he and his family walked to the White House. One of Carter’s first acts as President was to pardon the Vietnam draft dodgers. He decreased the federal budget deficit, deregulated domestic oil prices and formed a Department of Energy. He improved bureaucratic efficiency and placed many women and racial minorities in senior government jobs. In foreign affairs, Carter stressed human rights as a principle of American policy. He facilitated the historic Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel and the treaty ceding the Panama Canal.
Carter faced his first major foreign policy problem in 1979. That January, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had ruled Iran for 37 years, was forced to flee the country in a takeover by followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Muslim clergyman. In November 1979, militant Iranian students stormed the U. S. embassy in Tehran, the capital of Iran. They took 66 Americans hostage. They soon released 13, but demanded a U.S. apology by the U.S. government for its support of the shah, his return to stand trial and the return of the billions of dollars he was said to have been hiding, before they would release the other 53 hostages. More than a year of negotiations with the militants did not secure their release, nor did a U.S. commando raid the following April. He had inherited an economy that was slowly emerging from a recession and he had severely criticized former President Ford fro his failures to control inflation and relieve unemployment. After four years of the Carter administration, both inflation and unemployment were worse than when he started. His relationship with the Congress, which was controlled by the Democrats, was often very strained.
The 1980 presidential campaign was overshadowed by the Iranian hostage situation and by Carter’s inability to secure their release. The ensuing presidential campaign was one of the most uninspiring in modern history. Carter’s opponent, California Governor Ronald Reagan was swept into office with a landslide victory with 51% of the popular vote to Carter’s 42%.
Ironically, Carter’s last major official action was to secure the release of the 53 American hostages in Iran. They were freed on January 20, 1981, the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.
Carter returned to his home in Plains, Georgia. He continues to remain active in human rights issues and has become the public spokesperson for numerous charitable causes, including Habitat for Humanity, which helps build low-income housing. He has written more than eleven books and teaches Sunday School and is a deacon in the Marantha Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia.
Presidents
of the Continental Congress
United Colonies of The United States
Peyton
Randolph
September
5, 1774 to October 22, 1774
and May 20 to May 24, 1775
Henry Middleton
October 22, 1774 to October 26, 1774
John
Hancock
October
27, 1775 to July 1, 1776
Presidents
of the Continental Congress
United States of America
John
Hancock
July
2, 1776 to October 29, 1777
Henry
Laurens
November
1, 1777 to December 9, 1778
John
Jay
December
10, 1778 to September 28, 1779
Samuel
Huntington
September 28, 1779 to February 28, 1781
Presidents of the United States
in Congress Assembled
Samuel
Huntington
1st President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
March 1, 1781 to July 6, 1781
Thomas
McKean
2nd President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
July 10, 1781 to November 5, 1781
John
Hanson
3rd President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
November 5, 1781 to November 4, 1782
Elias
Boudinot
4th President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
November 4, 1782 to November 3, 1783
Thomas
Mifflin
5th President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
November 3, 1783 to June 3, 1784
Richard
Henry Lee
6th President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
November 30, 1784 to November 23, 1785
John
Hancock
7th
President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
November 23, 1785 to June 6, 1786
Nathaniel
Gorham
8th
President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
June 1786 - November 13, 1786
Arthur
St. Clair
9th President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
February 2, 1787 to October 29, 1787
Cyrus
Griffin
10th
President of the United States
in Congress Assembled
January 22, 1788 to March 4, 1789
Presidents of the United States
under the
United States Constitution
George
Washington (F)
John Adams (F)
Thomas Jefferson (D-R)
James Madison (D-R)
James Monroe (D-R)
John Quincy Adams (D-R)
Andrew
Jackson (D)
Martin Van Buren (D)
William H. Harrison (W)
John Tyler (W)
James K. Polk (D)
David Atchison (D)*
Zachary Taylor (W)
James
Buchanan (D)
Abraham Lincoln (R)
Jefferson Davis (D)**
Andrew Johnson (R)
Ulysses S. Grant (R)
Rutherford
B. Hayes (R)
James A. Garfield (R)
Chester Arthur (R)
Grover
Cleveland (D)
Benjamin Harrison (R)
Grover Cleveland (D)
William McKinley (R)
Theodore Roosevelt (R)
William H. Taft (R)
Wilson Woodrow (D)
Warren
G. Harding (R)
Calvin Coolidge (R)
Herbert C. Hoover (R)
Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Harry S. Truman (D)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
John F. Kennedy (D)
Lyndon B. Johnson (D)
Richard M. Nixon (R)
Gerald R. Ford (R)
James Earl Carter, Jr. (D)
Ronald Wilson Reagan (R)
George H. W. Bush (R)
William Jefferson Clinton (D)
George W. Bush (R)
*President
for One Day
**President Confederate States of America
Research Links
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Presidential Libraries
Rutherford B.
Hayes Presidential Center
McKinley Memorial Library
Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum - has research collections
containing papers of Herbert Hoover and other 20th century leaders.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum - Repository of the records of
President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt, managed by the
National Archives and Records Administration.
Harry
S. Truman Library & Museum
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library - preserves and makes available
for research the papers, audiovisual materials, and memorabilia of Dwight and
Mamie D. Eisenhower
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library
Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum
Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation
Gerald R. Ford Library and Museum
Jimmy Carter Library
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
- 40th President: 1981-1989.
George Bush Presidential Library