Former President Jimmy Carter died Dec. 29 at age 100. Elected as an outsider bridging from the Nixon and Ford administrations, Carter served as president from 1977 to 1981. In his retirement, he was widely seen as an exemplar of activism for democracy around the globe.
Penn Today spoke with historians Mary Frances Berry and Brent Cebul, and those conversations have been edited for clarity. Former University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Dean Robert H. Mundheim and political scientist Brian Rosenwald submitted their written recollections and thoughts.
Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history and Africana studies emerita in the School of Arts & Sciences (SAS), served as assistant secretary for education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration, and Carter later appointed her to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
I’ll always remember the first time I met with President Carter. At the start of his presidency, when I was chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he invited me and a few higher education leaders to come to the White House to talk about what we thought were important issues going forward. He had this sweater on—I call it his sweater period—because he was concerned about energy and conservation and tried to keep the heat low. He sat there, listened, and took notes, and asked just a few questions. I was impressed by the attention he paid and the kinds of questions that he asked, and I thought he might not be a bad guy to work for.
Working with the president, I remember the conversations we had around questions of race and inequity more than anything. As a Southerner coming from Georgia and being what I thought of as a reconstructed racist—someone from the South who is white, who’s rebuilt their ideas of race after living in an environment where certain negative racial assumptions were always made—I always remember a speech he gave to a mostly white group of high school students from around the nation about the need for ending racial discrimination. He did it in a very enlightened and engaged way. People said he didn’t know how to make good speeches, but he made a good one that day.
When he took office, he did something very unusual. He appointed Patricia Roberts Harris as the first Black woman cabinet secretary. He appointed Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans as assistant secretaries and to other important positions around the government. His famous attention to detail was evident in trying to normalize affirmative action. He also had a very activist advisor named Midge Costanza who was the first woman to be a senior assistant to the president. One of her jobs was to keep all the advocacy groups and interest groups in connection with and informed about the president. She got the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to have the National Gay Task Force present testimony in an official meeting. They announced that it was the first time any lesbian or gay organization was able to give public testimony in one of the agencies of the federal government. The task force gave a presentation about how the commission might add discrimination against LBG people. The event was a milestone.
I give high marks to Carter as president and his post-presidential commitment to justice. He is one of the fighters. Admiral Hyman Rickover, who founded our nuclear sub command, used to come visit me to chat about improving K-12 education when I was assistant secretary for education. He would always remind me that Jimmy Carter was the smartest student he ever had at the Naval Academy and the smartest naval officer he had ever known. I’ve been acquainted with several presidents and other public officials, and he’s one of the finest presidents and most honest and self-critical public office holders I’ve ever known.
Brent Cebul, assistant professor of history in SAS, researches 20th century United States history with interests in political history and state building, urban history, political economy and capitalism, race and inequality, federalism, and business-state interaction. His latest book, “Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century,” devotes two chapters to Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter had many lives across the political spectrum. Today we think of him as a liberal humanitarian. He was a stalwart critic of Israel and its treatment of Palestine and the occupied spaces; he had his volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity and became the conscience of the nation in many ways after his presidency.
But lots of scholars now regard him as Reagan’s progenitor. It was Carter, for instance, who began the push for deregulation as president. He deregulated the airline and trucking industries, which were crucial steps toward the free market and neoliberal politics that we have today.
As for his presidency, he tends to be framed as a failed liberal: hapless, overwhelmed by details and unable to act. But his pre-presidential period, where he’s really making a name for himself in the ’60s and ’70s, reveals him to be a remarkably canny, shrewd, and in many ways ruthless political operator.
He also was the template for the modern outsider politician. That was how he campaigned for governor of Georgia in 1969. He was going to take on the petty special interests. It was precisely because he was what he claimed to be, a peanut farmer, not some insider, that he was uniquely positioned to clean up the mess that the government in Georgia had become. Then, in the aftermath of Watergate it became a key part of his pledge of his candidacy for president. Since then, almost every successful presidential candidate has borrowed from Jimmy Carter’s playbook, running as an outsider who was going to clean up Washington.
He also grappled with our first major energy crisis in the country. His most famous speech, the so-called malaise speech, was supposed to be about the energy crisis of the 1970s and the ways in which our energy choices were driving inflation, all things that are very resonant with our contemporary moment.
But part of what Carter does in that speech, showing him as part of the self-help culture of the 1970s, is that he spends a lot of time criticizing his own leadership style and saying that he hasn’t been a strong leader the country needs but in a way that he could exhort Americans to look inside themselves and find change within themselves. There’s a poignant series of lines from the speech where he talks about our worship of things, our need to define ourselves by what we own rather than who we are. He was linking that to what’s going to become the climate crisis and is raising significant questions about our materialist culture. Part of what he’s saying here is that we need to do some real soul-searching.
The other side of it is that he was consistently unwilling to advocate for strong government policies to assist in that soul searching. As a sort of diagnostician, he was often on the money, but in terms of prescribing solutions he often retreated towards individualistic or personal modes of politics that ultimately were utterly not up to the task of meeting the energy crisis or inflation or many of the crises of the ’70s.
Brian Rosenwald is a political historian in SAS and project manager of the Red and Blue Exchange, which is committed to expanding the range of ideological and partisan perspectives to which Penn students are exposed.
Not enough attention is paid to how Jimmy Carter’s mistakes, rhetoric, philosophy, and unwillingness to operate according to the basic rules of politics dealt a death blow to liberalism and his party.
Carter consistently responded to a parade of problems—most especially stagflation, the combination of skyrocketing inflation, high unemployment, and a stagnant economy—by preaching sacrifice and reminding Americans that “government cannot solve our problems.” In his most famous speech, he derided consumption and urged Americans to drive less. He cast aside liberal campaign promises; his 1979 proposal for national health insurance, for example, was both stingy and belated.
Carter’s tough medicine starkly contrasted with the philosophy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of Democratic liberalism. Roosevelt also governed during tough times and urged sacrifice. But he paired it with a bevy of government programs to help those suffering and a vision of government as a friend and ally.
Carter’s prescription also bore little resemblance to Ronald Reagan’s conservatism. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan derided Carter’s calls for sacrifice. He promised Americans that he’d get government off their backs, unleash the economy, and give them a tax cut, so they could get back to consuming and enjoying a high standard of living.
This dichotomy flipped American politics. Republicans went from being the “Scrooge Party” that preached fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets to the one that pledged to cut voters’ taxes, while Democrats went from dangling programs and initiatives to make life easier to Carter telling Americans to make do with less.
It’s not surprising voters chose Reagan’s promise of a higher standard of living. Carter’s reminders that the federal government couldn’t fix the nation’s ills told them that liberalism could no longer offer anything to improve their lives. History may have proved him right about the nation’s energy problems, health care costs, and more. But Carter’s foibles and failure to accept basic political axioms opened the door for Reagan to change America’s public philosophy—while shattering an already shaky Democratic coalition. By the time a Democrat regained the White House 12 years later, the political landscape constrained what the party could do to expand the social safety net, reduce inequality and more.
Carter went on to have an exemplary post-presidency full of good works, and some recent accounts have tried to rehabilitate his presidency. But his role in the rise of conservatism overshadows his policy achievements and continues to reverberate to the present.
Robert H. Mundheim, former dean of Penn Carey Law School and emeritus professor of law, served as general counsel to the U.S. Treasury Department during the Carter administration and helped secure the release of the 70 American hostages in Iran.
The interaction with President Carter I most remember occurred as we were coming close to negotiating the release of the U.S. hostages held in Iran. The Bank of England had agreed to hold and transfer the Iranian assets the U.S. had frozen. The Bank wanted an indemnity, and the N.Y. Fed seemed the best organization to provide it.
The N.Y. Fed’s lawyer who was with us in Algiers said he could not opine that the Fed had the power to give the indemnity. White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, the Fed lawyer, and I were on the phone discussing whether the N.Y. Fed’s lawyer might be persuaded to approve the provision of the indemnity when President Carter suddenly intruded on the call and said, ‘We have to do everything we can to free the hostages. Don’t be stupid and stop objecting.’
The N.Y. Fed. lawyer fainted. We had about six hours of sleep in the previous 72 hours and apparently the stress of the presidential command was too much. President Carter talked a little later to the chair of the N.Y. Fed, a former undersecretary of the Treasury, and the agreement to indemnify was provided and the release of the hostages occurred.
As I reflect on President Carter, I think he stands out particularly for his behavior after his presidency concluded. He did not use that time to increase his personal wealth or to build his reputation. He was sincerely interested in addressing human issues. The best example for me was his Habitat for Humanity projects. They sought to help respond to housing needs of poorer people. Although raising money was an important aspect of the effort, President Carter also actively pitched in by working on the building of houses and encouraged others also to provide that kind of help. That is an effective model which benefits those who are to be helped and the helpers.
