Already the longest-lived of the 45 males to function U.S. president, Jimmy Carter is about to attain the century mark.
The 39th president, who stays underneath dwelling hospice care, will flip 100 on Tuesday, Oct. 1, celebrating in the similar south Georgia city the place he was born in 1924.
Here are some notable markers for Carter, the nation and the world over his lengthy life.
Carter has seen the U.S. inhabitants practically triple. The U.S. has about 330 million residents; there have been about 114 million in 1924 and 220 million when Carter was inaugurated in 1977. The world inhabitants has greater than quadrupled, from 1.9 billion to greater than 8.1 billion. It already had greater than doubled to 4.36 billion by the time he turned president.
That increase has not reached Plains, the place Carter has lived greater than 80 of his 100 years. His spouse Rosalynn, who died in 2023 at age 96, additionally was born in Plains.
Their city comprised fewer than 500 folks in the Nineteen Twenties and has about 700 at this time; a lot of the native economic system revolves round its most well-known residents.
When James Earl Carter Jr. was born, life expectancy for American males was 58. It's now 75.
NBC first debuted a red-and-blue electoral map in the 1976 election between then-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Carter, the Democratic challenger. But NBC's John Chancellor made Carter's states purple and Ford's blue. Some different early variations of colour electoral maps used yellow and blue as a result of purple was related to Soviet and Chinese communism.
It wasn't till the Nineties that networks settled on blue for Democratic-won states and purple for GOP-won states. “Red state” and “blue state” did not become a permanent part of the American political lexicon until after the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.
Carter was 14 when Franklin D. Roosevelt made the first presidential television appearance. Warren Harding became the first radio president two years before Carter's birth.
There was no Amazon Prime in 1924, but you could order a build-it-yourself house from a catalog. Sears Roebuck Gladstone’s three-bedroom model went for $2,025, which was slightly less than the average worker’s annual income.
Walmart didn’t exist, but local general stores served the same purpose. Ballpark prices: loaf of bread, 9 cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; gallon of gas, 11 cents.
Inflation helped drive Carter from workplace, because it has dogged President Joe Biden. The common gallon in 1980, Carter’s final full yr in workplace, was about $3.25 when adjusted for inflation. That's simply 3 cents greater than AAA's present nationwide common.
The 19th Amendment that extended voting rights to women — almost exclusively white women at the time — was ratified in 1920, four years before Carter's birth. The Voting Rights Act that widened the franchise to Black Americans passed in 1965 as Carter was preparing his first bid for Georgia governor.
Now, Carter is poised to cast a mail ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris. She would become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office. Grandson Jason Carter said the former president is holding on in part because he is excited about the chance to see Harris make history.
For all the shifts in U.S. politics, some things stay the same. Or at least come back around.
Carter was born in an period of isolationism, protectionism and white Christian nationalism — all parts of the proper in the ongoing Donald Trump period. In 2024, Trump is promising the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, whereas tightening authorized immigration. He has stated immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Five months before Carter was born, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. The law created the U.S. Border Patrol and sharply curtailed immigration, limiting admission mostly to migrants from western Europe. Asians were banned entirely. Congress described its purpose plainly: “preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” The Ku Klux Klan followed in 1925 and 1926 with marches on Washington promoting white supremacy.
Trump also has called for sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, part of his “America First” agenda. In 1922, Congress enacted tariffs intended to help U.S. manufacturers. After stock market losses in 1929, lawmakers added the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, ostensibly to help American farmers. The Great Depression followed anyway. In the 1930s, as Carter became politically aware, the political right that countered FDR was driven in part by a movement that opposed international engagement. Those conservatives' slogan: “America First.”
Carter is the Atlanta Braves' most famous fan. Jason Carter says the former president still enjoys watching his favorite baseball team.
In the 1990s, when the Braves were annual features in the October playoffs, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were often spotted in the owner's box with media mogul Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, then Turner's wife. The Braves moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee between Carter's failed run for governor in 1966 and his victory four years later. Then-Gov. Carter was sitting in the first row of Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium on April 9, 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth's career record.
When Carter was born, the Braves were still in Boston, their original city. Ruth had just completed his fifth season for the New York Yankees. He had hit 284 home runs to that point (still 430 short of his career total) and the original Yankee Stadium — “The House that Ruth Built” — had been open lower than 18 months.
Prohibition had been in impact for 4 years when Carter was born and wouldn’t be lifted till he was 9. The Carters have been by no means prodigious drinkers. They served solely wine at state dinners and different White House features, although it is a widespread false impression that they did so as a result of of their Baptist mores. It was extra as a result of Carter has all the time been frugal: He did not need taxpayers or the residence account (his and Rosalynn's private cash) to cowl costlier onerous liquor.
Carter’s youthful brother Billy, who owned a Plains fuel station and died in 1988, had completely different tastes. He marketed his personal model, Billy Beer, as soon as Carter turned president. News sources reported that Billy Carter snagged a $50,000 annual licensing payment from one brewer. That's about $215,000 at this time. The president’s annual wage at the time was $200,000 — it is now $400,000.
The Times Square debt clock didn’t debut till Carter was in his early 60s and out of the White House. But for anybody counting the $35 trillion debt, Carter doesn’t benefit a lot point out. The man who would wash Ziploc baggage to reuse them added lower than $300 billion to the nationwide debt, which stood under $1 trillion when he left workplace.
Carter has lived by 40% of U.S. historical past since the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and greater than a 3rd of all U.S. administrations since George Washington took workplace in 1789 — 9 earlier than Carter was president, his personal and seven since.
When Carter took workplace, only one president, John Adams, had lived to be 90. Since then, Ford, Ronald Reagan, Carter and George H.W. Bush all reached at the very least 93.
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