How the United States changed during Jimmy Carter’s lifetime

The longest-living of the 45 men to hold the office of US president, Jimmy Carter, has already passed the century mark.

The 39th president, who remains under home hospice care, turned 100 on Tuesday, October 1, celebrating in the same southern Georgia city where he was born in 1924.

Here are some of Mr. Carter’s notable achievements, the nation and the world during his long life.

– Booms happen everywhere – but not on the Plains

According to Carter, the US population almost tripled.

The United States has approximately 330 million inhabitants; in 1924 there were about 114 million, and at the time of Mr. Carter’s inauguration in 1977, it was 220 million.

The world’s population has more than quadrupled, from 1.9 billion to over 8.1 billion.

By the time he became president, that number had already more than doubled to 4.36 billion.

That boom didn’t reach the Plains, where Carter spent more than 80 of his 100 years.

His wife Rosalynn was also born in Plains and died in 2023 at the age of 96.

Their town had a population of less than 500 in the 1920s and now has about 700; much of the local economy centers around its most famous residents.

When James Earl Carter Jr. was born, the average life expectancy for men in the U.S. was 58 years.

It’s now 75.

– Television, radio and presidential maps

NBC first presented a red-blue electoral map during the 1976 election between then-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Carter, the Democratic challenger.

But NBC’s John Chancellor turned Carter’s states red and Ford’s states blue.

Some other early versions of color electoral maps used yellow and blue because the color red was associated with Soviet and Chinese communism.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the networks settled on blue for states won by Democrats and red for states won by Republicans.

Red state and blue state did not permanently enter the United States political lexicon until after the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Carter was 14 when Franklin D. Roosevelt made his first presidential television appearance.

Warren Harding became the first president of radio two years before Carter was born.

– Attention buyers

There was no Amazon Prime in 1924, but you could order a self-assembly house from a catalog.

The three-bedroom Sears Roebuck Gladstone model cost US$2,025, or slightly less than the average worker’s annual income.

Walmart didn’t exist, but local convenience stores served the same purpose.

Stadium prices: loaf of bread, nine cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; a gallon of gas, 11 cents.

Inflation helped push Carter out of office, just as it dogged President Joe Biden.

The average gallon in 1980, Mr. Carter’s last full year in office, was about $3.25 U.S. dollars, adjusted for inflation.

That’s just three cents more than the current AAA national average.

– From suffragettes to Kamala Harris

The 19th Amendment, which granted voting rights to women, then almost exclusively white, was ratified in 1920, four years before Carter was born.

The Voting Rights Act, which expanded voting rights to black Americans, was passed in 1965 as Carter was preparing his first bid for governor of Georgia.

Now Carter plans to vote by mail for Vice President Kamala Harris.

She became 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 hanging on in part because he’s excited to see Harris make history.

– Immigration, isolationism and America First

Despite all the changes in American politics, some things remain the same.

Or at least come back.

Carter was born in an era of isolationism, protectionism and white Christian nationalism, elements of the right in the ongoing era of Donald Trump.

In 2024, Trump promises to undertake the largest deportation action in US history, while at the same time tightening legal immigration.

He said immigrants “poison the blood of our country.”

Five months before Carter was born, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924.

The act created the U.S. Border Patrol and sharply restricted immigration, limiting the admission of mostly Western European migrants.

Asians were completely banned.

Congress clearly stated its purpose: “to preserve the ideal of the homogeneity of the United States.”

In 1925 and 1926, the Ku Klux Klan organized marches on Washington, D.C., promoting white supremacy.

Trump also called for radical tariffs on foreign imports as part of his America First agenda.

In 1922, Congress passed tariffs to help American manufacturers.

After the stock market fell in 1929, politicians added the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, ostensibly to help American farmers.

The Great Depression happened anyway.

In the 1930s, as Carter gained political awareness, the right wing opposing Roosevelt was fueled in part by a movement opposed to international involvement.

The slogan of these conservatives: America First.

– Hobby USA and Mr. Carter

Mr. Carter is the most famous fan of the Atlanta Braves.

Jason Carter says the former president still enjoys watching his favorite baseball team.

In the 1990s, when the Braves made the October playoffs every year, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were often seen in the owner’s box with media mogul Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, Turner’s then-wife.

The Braves moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee between Carter’s unsuccessful bid for governor in 1966 and his victory four years later.

Then-Governor Carter sat in the front row of Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium on April 9, 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s career record.

When Mr. Carter was born, the Braves were still in Boston, their original city.

Babe Ruth just finished his fifth season with the New York Yankees.

To that point, he had hit 284 home runs (still 430 fewer than his career total), and the original Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruthbuilt, had been open for less than 18 months.

– Alcohol, Billy and Billy Beer

The ban was in place for four years when Mr. Carter was born, and would not be lifted until he turned nine.

The Carters were never heavy drinkers.

Only wine was served at state dinners and other functions at the White House, although there is a common misconception that they did so because of their Baptist customs.

It was more because Mr. Carter had always been frugal: he didn’t want taxpayers or the residence account (his and Rosalynn’s personal money) to cover the more expensive hard alcohol.

Mr. Carter’s younger brother, Billy, who owned a gas station in Plains and died in 1988, had other preferences.

When Carter became president, he launched his own brand, Billy Beer.

Press sources say that Billy Carter charged one of the breweries an annual license fee of 50,000 US dollars.

That is approximately US$215,000 today.

The president’s annual salary was then $200,000 and is now $400,000.

– Debt: Carter’s more frugality

The Times Square Debt Clock didn’t appear until I turned 60 and left the White House.

But for anyone counting the $35 trillion debt, Mr. Carter doesn’t deserve much mention.

The man who washed Ziploc bags for reuse added just under $300 billion to a national debt that was less than a trillion dollars when he left office.

– Other presidents

Carter has lived through 40% of U.S. history since the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and over a third of all U.S. administrations since George Washington took office in 1789, nine before Carter’s presidency, his own and seven since then.

When Carter took office, only two presidents, John Adams and Herbert Hoover, lived to be 90.

Since then, Ford, Ronald Reagan, Carter and George H. W. Bush have all reached at least 93 years of age.