A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety

by Jimmy Carter

  In addition to growing cotton, corn, soybeans, and wheat, I decided to plant all our permitted acreage of peanuts as seed, and to concentrate on the Virginia Bunch 67 variety, which had done best during the previous year. I obtained as many seeds directly from the experiment station breeders as possible, so my produced peanuts could be certified the next two years as pure seed for other farmers to plant. We had normal rainfall in 1955 and were able to settle most of our unpaid accounts. We paid taxes on $3,600 of income. We first struggled just to make a living and then began to invest our profits into expanding our business. During the next few years I bought spreader trucks and began to apply fertilizer in customers’ fields, and I improved the equipment used to purchase and process peanuts and corn at harvesttime. In the winter months I did as much of the work as possible in designing and building new storage facilities, dump pits, elevators and conveyor belts, and equipment to remove rocks, dirt, and sticks from harvested peanuts that came from my fields and those of customers.

  Producing seed peanuts evolved into a major source of income, and I was soon contracting with other farmers to produce seed on their land for me to process in a shelling plant of my design. I sold my high-quality seed to farmers in an expanding area of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. I also concentrated on learning everything possible about the entire seed business and was elected president of the Georgia Crop Improvement Association, responsible for the statewide production and distribution of seeds of all varieties, including corn, cotton, wheat and other grains, soybeans, grasses, and even pine trees. On my own farm and those of neighbors, I continued to concentrate on peanuts, and one year I produced sixteen varieties of this one crop. I realized later that I could have enlarged my business more rapidly and become wealthier with additional loans, but I guess the effect of growing up during the depression years made me excessively cautious about being in debt.

  My mother and siblings decided to sell me some of their portions of land from my father’s estate, and we were able to buy additional farms, including those that had been owned by Rosalynn’s family. She and I accumulated about 3,200 acres of land, divided roughly into two tracts, one acquired by our ancestors in 1904 and the other in 1833. My mother and brother, Billy, became minor partners in the farm supply business, and our three sons, when big enough, drove trucks and helped with the handling of peanuts and other crops. I built enough warehouses to hold about fifteen thousand tons of peanuts, which were stored from harvesttime in the fall until we shelled them for commercial use or for seed. I bought a cotton gin and built storage facilities for cotton, corn, and small grains. I learned to blend specific formulae of liquid fertilizers and could fill a “prescription” for a given tract of land to match its needs after samples of the soil were analyzed. By the early 1960s, Carter’s Warehouse could provide almost anything needed by local farmers, and we could purchase, process, and market the crops produced in our area. It was a family operation that evolved over twenty-three years, until I was elected president and put all our commercial affairs into a blind trust.

  Producing seed peanuts evolved into a major source of income and I was soon contracting with other farmers to produce seed on their land for me to process in a shelling plant of my design.

  I became reasonably proficient in farming, forestry, business management, and leadership in statewide organizations related to these duties. I also tried to master as many skills as possible, including construction with wood, steel, and concrete, and the maintenance of our equipment. It was hard work, twelve months a year, but I enjoyed the challenges, and our multiple businesses prospered. I became deeply interested in environmental issues by meeting challenges on our own land and working with others.

  We moved out of the housing project after the second year, and in 1956 rented what has always been known in our community as the “haunted house.” It is about a mile west of Plains and on the road that goes by the farm on which I spent my boyhood. Just a couple of hundred yards from the local cemetery, this was a place to be carefully avoided after nightfall, and the people who lived in our rural community would evade the danger zone by walking down the railroad tracks instead of the dirt road. The house was built about 1835, when the first white settlers came into the area to replace the Native Americans who had been forcibly moved west to Oklahoma and beyond during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. There were reports of abnormal activities there, including numerous sightings of a white-gowned woman wandering around in the attic, holding a lantern.

  A man named Tink Faircloth, who worked as a mechanic for Rosalynn’s father, had lived there for a few years. I went hunting at night with him and his hounds for raccoons and opossums, and he said he was wakened several times by strange canine noises. From the bedroom window he could see a large black dog with his hounds, but each time he went through the back porch and opened the screen door, the visiting dog had disappeared. Finally late one afternoon the dog remained in the yard, looking up at Tink as he approached, wagging his tail in a friendly manner. Somewhat cautiously, Tink reached out to pet the black dog, but there was nothing there.

  The owner of the haunted house later was Dr. Thad Wise, the oldest of three brothers who were physicians and owned and operated the hospital in Plains, where my mother had come to be trained as a registered nurse. The head nurse was Ms. Gussie Abrams, my godmother and a good friend of my parents. Married to another man, she had lived there for several years with Doctor Thad. Their cook, Inez Laster, reported that all of them would see a strange woman approach the house, but when they looked at her directly or spoke to her, she would turn and disappear. Inez claimed that this went on for more than a year, and that often there would be knocking on the front door but no one would be there. She would have quit, she said, but her employer reassured her about safety and she needed the income.

  When Doctor Thad became quite ill, Ms. Abrams asked me to come out and stay with her, and she and I went into the kitchen one evening so she could fix me some supper. I remember that she liked to make a hole in a thick slice of bread, put it in a greased frying pan, fill the hole with a broken egg, and cook it. As I was watching this process, Doctor Thad’s dogs outside began making noises I had never heard before—something like a pack of wolves howling in concert. We looked out and saw them all sitting on their haunches, looking at the sky, and producing the weird mournful cry. When we went into the bedroom, we found that Doctor Thad had just died. Somehow, the dogs were grieving for him.

  Rosalynn and the boys reported many strange events and unexplained sounds while we lived there, but we never had any serious confrontations with creatures of the spirit world. One day while playing in the attic, our sons discovered a hidden room between the floor and the ceilings of the rooms below, with almost six feet of headroom. There was only a small chair in the space. We surmised that there had been a mentally impaired woman kept there by the family in earlier times, who may have wandered around with a lantern.

  Rosalynn and I now had time for some recreational activities, which had rarely been possible during my navy years. We bought golf clubs and began hitting balls in the field behind our house. After a few weeks, we joined some friends and drove to Dawson, where we played on the nine-hole course that was operated by the American Legion. We heard about a square dance club that met every Friday night and were soon enjoying these sessions with almost a hundred other members from the surrounding rural area. The club’s name was Meri Legs, from American Legion. Dancing was strenuous and challenging, as one or two new steps were added each week to our repertoire. Wearing distinctive attire, we joined other clubs at state conventions and made many new friends. This membership was to change my life.

  We were also active in Plains Baptist Church, and soon both of us were teaching Bible lessons every Sunday morning. I was elected as one of the twelve deacons who were responsible for the affairs of the congregation, always submitting final decisions to be made by the assembled members. Rosalynn had been a Methodist, but she joined our churc
h and was immersed in Baptism.

  During the time I served on the Sumter County Board of Education, the schools in Georgia were still racially segregated, but within these rigid social boundaries I wanted to equalize educational opportunities as much as possible. I suggested that we five board members visit all the schools so we could better understand conditions in the classrooms, and the other members agreed. Our first visits were to the white students and faculties, and we were quite satisfied with the two schools that included students at all levels and three others in rural areas that had only elementary students. They were nice brick buildings with adequate desks, recreation, music and art facilities, and up-to-date textbooks.

  The school superintendent informed us that there were twenty-six schools for black children, the large number necessary because buses were exclusively for white students and classes had to be within walking distance of black children’s homes. When we visited them we quickly learned that students had to share textbooks, which were tattered hand-me-downs from white schools; classes were conducted in rooms in churches and in some of the larger houses; there was no music or art instruction and few desks. I remember most vividly that many older students were sitting on tiny stools or chairs. Absenteeism was prevalent because attendance standards were quite low and not enforced since many children had to work in the fields during school months or because their parents were illiterate and saw no benefits from classroom teaching.

  After a few of these visits, the other board members declined to make any further excursions. With the advent of the civil rights movement, the state legislature began to make an effort to show that the “separate but equal” national policy was becoming somewhat more equal in order to preserve the separate. School buses were finally authorized for black students, but there was a legal requirement in Georgia that their front fenders be painted black so that everyone would know that the passengers were not precious white children. In 1955, with the first stirrings of racial unrest, the Georgia Board of Education fired all teachers who were members of the NAACP and directed that no teacher could serve who did not support racial segregation.

  Although the school integration decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education came the year after we returned home, “separate but equal” was not challenged or changed in our community. Having witnessed President Truman’s end of segregation in the military, Rosalynn and I supported in a relatively unobtrusive way the evolutionary process of ending the more oppressive elements of racial distinctions in our community. I volunteered to head an evangelism effort sponsored by Billy Graham, using a motion picture that encouraged all people to work together as equals in our Christian faith. I formed a biracial steering committee and was not very surprised when no white church would permit us to have racially mixed planning sessions. We met in an abandoned schoolhouse in Americus, the county seat, and followed the rules and procedures that Billy Graham prescribed, including the use of radio and newspaper advertisements. On the final evening of the crusade, hundreds of black and white people watched the film in the local theater together, and several dozen viewers accepted Jesus Christ as savior. Some of the more conservative white men participated without restraint. There were a few other prominent citizens in the county who shared our more moderate beliefs, including the president of Georgia Southwestern College, the county attorney, and the owner of the only local radio station.

  As the race issue and civil rights protests became more prominent, Rosalynn and I found our previously ignored progressive attitude to be more controversial. One morning when I drove into the only service station in town, the owner refused to put gasoline in my pickup truck. I had to install an underground tank and pumping station to service our private vehicles and farm trucks. Later, about a dozen of my best customers came to my warehouse office, reminded me that they had been close friends of my father, and offered to pay my annual membership dues in the White Citizens’ Council. This organization had been formed in Mississippi, rejected the violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and was publicly sponsored by Georgia’s U.S. senators, our governor, and all other statewide political officers. I refused to become a member, and they told me I was the only white man in the community who had not joined. A sign was put on our office door one night, COONS AND CARTERS GO TOGETHER.

  Our oldest son finished high school in 1965, and our family took a two-week automobile trip through Mexico. When we returned, not a single customer came into our office, and I finally learned that members of the John Birch Society had been to the county agricultural department, obtained a list of our customers, and informed each that I had been away in a Communist training camp to learn how best to integrate the public schools. I quickly visited each one and explained what we had been doing, and most of our more loyal customers returned. The college president and radio station owner remained under such pressure that they moved away. I briefly considered leaving Plains too, and accepting one of the many offers I had received from shipbuilders that would have utilized my knowledge of nuclear power and my top secret security clearance, but the economic pressures dissipated as we capitalized on the wide geographical area now covered by our seed peanut sales and other business contacts. These racial struggles now seem like ancient history.

  After five years in the haunted house, we bought a lot on the edge of Plains and built a home of our own in 1961. An architect produced a design on which Rosalynn and I agreed, two skilled local carpenters supervised the construction, and some hired hands from our farming operation and I helped with the manual labor. The plans called for no moldings around the doors, windows, or at the tops of walls, so each board had to be cut to an exact fit, but the total cost was only ten dollars a square foot. With good crops, we paid off the mortgage in three years.

  As the years passed, I achieved the status of an accepted community leader, as a Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher, Boy Scout leader, chairman of the county board of education, a member of the regional hospital authority, and district governor of fifty-six Lions Clubs in our region. I had also been chosen to fill statewide positions of leadership in my farming and seed business. Unlike in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other Southern states, our public schools in Georgia began to integrate without violence or disruption. White parents who still opposed racially integrated classrooms sent their children to one of the many private academies that sprang up throughout the South. The bitter debates and animosities subsided, and eventually almost all our customers resumed their trade with our warehouse. Throughout the 1960s, however, public school integration remained a demagogic issue among political candidates in Georgia, and Plains High School, like most others, did not enroll its first black students until 1967.

  Local and State Politics

  Although my father had served in the state legislature and our family members were loyal Democrats and publicly supported local and state candidates, I had never had any interest in seeking public office and took no part in politics except to join my mother—and most Georgians—in supporting Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy. I decided to run for office in 1962, after the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that all votes had to be weighted as equally as possible. This resulted in the termination of Georgia’s “county unit” system, where some rural votes equaled one hundred votes in urban areas. As part of the state’s response, seats in the Georgia Senate that had rotated every two years were replaced by permanent ones, with much more power and prestige. I decided, somewhat quixotically, to help save the state’s public school system—threatened with closure if it was racially integrated—by becoming a senate candidate. I was changing from my khaki work clothes into a coat and tie when Rosalynn asked if I was going to a funeral. It seems inconceivable to me now, but I had not consulted her about my plans, and replied that I was going to the courthouse to qualify as a senatorial candidate and to place an announcement in the local newspaper. Rosalynn was pleased and excited by my decision, which she did not question.

  The general presumption wa
s that candidates elected under the old system would be chosen, so only ten days were allowed for campaigning before the special election. Our new senate district comprised seven counties, with a total population of about 75,000. I had some posters and calling cards printed and began to go from one county seat to another, visiting the newspaper offices and radio stations in the area and speaking to any civic club that would accept my request. It was during a slack time of year for farming, and Rosalynn and my brother, Billy, ran the office while I was away.

  We were having a one-week revival at our church, and the visiting pastor was staying with my mother. When I stopped by to tell her of my plans, the preacher asked, “Why in the world would you want to become involved in the dirty game of politics?” After thinking for a few moments, I responded, “How would you like to be pastor of a church with 75,000 members?”

  My opponent was Homer Moore, a warehouseman and peanut buyer from my mother’s hometown whom I knew and respected as an honest business competitor. Each of us had a natural advantage in our home community, and I already knew a lot of farmers and Lions Club members. Another key factor that helped me overcome my late decision was that members of our square dancing group came from most of the same area that the senatorial district covered, and they gave me strong support.