There are at least three ways to reflect upon the passing of former President Jimmy Carter.
One way is to comment on how much our politics have changed since his election nearly a half-century ago. In 1976, Virginia stood alone: The Old Dominion was the only Southern state that didn’t vote for Carter. Times were different then: Southern pride was strong enough to overcome the South’s native conservatism in the Deep South but not in Virginia. Many otherwise conservative voters cast ballots for the candidate from Plains, Georgia even though he was not the most conservative candidate.
Perhaps Carter’s inability to carry Virginia was an early sign that parts of Virginia aren’t truly Southern at all. Carter ran well in rural Virginia — one of his biggest vote shares was Franklin County, where he took 63% of the vote — but lost in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Today’s electoral trends are exactly reversed, with Democrats dominant in Northern Virginia but almost obliterated in many parts of rural Virginia. In 2024, Kamala Harris took just 26.8% of the vote in Franklin County but carried the state on the strength of margins in Northern Virginia.
In 1977, when then-President Carter came to Roanoke to campaign for gubernatorial candidate Henry Howell, there were plans for him to travel on to Boones Mill for a walkabout. Those plans eventually got scrubbed, but supporters from Boones Mill were given special seating at the event — and got a special shout-out in his talk. Today, Boones Mill is best known for a former church that’s been converted into Trump Town that sells Donald Trump paraphernalia. The most recent Democratic candidate for president took just 24.3% of the vote in the town that would have welcomed Carter enthusiastically.
Nationally, part of Carter’s political legacy has been the primacy of the Iowa caucuses, which Democrats, in particular, are now trying to move away from. No one paid particular attention to those caucuses until Carter did; his unexpected win there helped make him a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 1976. Nowadays, every longshot candidate camps out in Iowa, hoping to do what Carter did. Carter was the first in a long series of candidates — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are the others — who have billed themselves as “outsiders.” By my count, five of our last eight presidents have styled themselves that way (the two Bushes and Joe Biden are exceptions). Carter was our first post-Watergate president and, in a way, Americans have been unhappy ever since. In no other profession is inexperience considered a selling point.
Another way to remember Carter is to comment on his policies during his single term, which voters clearly judged inadequate in 1980. During the energy crisis of the late 1970s, Carter called for more coal mining — that was something Democrats still did then — but he also pushed solar energy and put solar panels on the White House. Many of Virginia’s coal counties saw their populations increase in the 1980 census, interrupting an otherwise decades-long decline, as workers moved back home to Southwest Virginia. That didn’t last; neither did Carter’s push for renewables. Reagan took down his solar panels. Where might we be today if Reagan had embraced solar energy as a viable form of energy independence?
Carter was ridiculed for being weak and projecting American weakness abroad, with the seizure of the American embassy in Iran being the main talking point. That was undeniably a humiliation, although it’s unclear what some other American president would have done — and gotten our hostages out safely. Carter also signed off on what might have been the riskiest military mission any U.S. president has authorized: the Operation Eagle Claw mission to rescue the hostages. I read the book that Col. Charles Beckwith wrote, “Delta Force,” and came away convinced it would have been a bloody disaster. As it was, the aborted mission was a bloody disaster, just on a smaller scale, with eight American servicemen killed when a transport plane and a helicopter collided in the Iranian desert. One of those who perished was Sgt. John Davis Harvey of Roanoke. On the other hand, many of the high-tech weapons that Americans used to win the Persian Gulf War and subsequent wars were initiated under Carter, although it was Reagan who got the credit for the military buildup. After the Gulf War in 1991, Gen. Barry McCaffery declared “the war didn’t take 100 hours to win, it took 15 years.”
The third way to judge Carter’s place in history is to look at his post-presidency, which in many ways has been far more significant than his presidency. It was often said of Carter that while he wasn’t a great president, he might have been our nation’s best ex-president. Although Carter didn’t carry Virginia in either of his presidential campaigns, his ties to the state in his post-presidential years were longer and deeper than those of the candidates who over the years have carried the state.
Carter spoke at Roanoke College in 1984. He stopped in Roanoke on his way back from a vacation in Pennsylvania in 1985 — in typical Carteresque fashion, he stayed in a Days Inn and stopped in at a nearby Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. In 1990, he was in Vinton to speak at Precision Fabrics. In 1992, Carter spoke at Washington & Lee University to talk about poverty. And then in 2018, he was in Lynchburg for what might have been his most unusual appearance: delivering the commencement address at Liberty University, whose founder had been one of his most vociferous critics.
Those last two talks were 26 years apart, but a single thread connects them: the growing gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor.
Carter in 1992 at W&L: “The biggest discrimination in the world today is rich people against poor people. I doubt if you’ve heard anyone say that.”
Carter in 2018 at Liberty: “This disparity in wealth has gotten much greater, both within nations and between nations. Right now, for instance, eight people (six of them Americans) control more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion — half of the world’s total population.”
It’s that 1990 visit to Vinton that may best highlight Carter’s work as an ex-president. In the early 1980s, after he left the presidency, one of his former aides acquainted him with dracunculiasis, a waterborne disease carried by the Guinea worm, a vile little parasite that grows to 2 to 3 feet long within the human body and then tries to exit through whatever opening it can find. Some believe the Old Testament reference to “fiery serpents” killing the Israelites in the Book of Numbers is a reference to the Guinea worm. That aide, Dr. Peter Bourne, headed a United Nations program on safe drinking water and persuaded Carter to become the public face of a campaign to try to wipe out the Guinea worm. Carter agreed.
That visit to Precision Fabrics was to thank workers for helping make water filters that would filter out the parasite. The Roanoke Times reported at the time: “Precision uses a fine single-strand nylon yard made at Du Pont’s plant in Martinsville to weave a strong but lightweight and porous fabric on high-tech, air-jet looms in Vinton. The fabric is heat-set at a Precision plant in Greensboro, N.C., so it will maintain a tight weave. At another plant in Jamestown, N.C., it is cut into small squares that are used to filter drinking water that is drawn from rural lakes and ponds.” In all, Precision and the E.I. du Pont Co. donated upwards of $3 million worth of materials to the Carter Center for distribution in Africa, India and Pakistan.
Dr. Donald Hopkins is the Carter Center’s special adviser for Guinea worm eradication and accompanied Carter on that visit to Vinton. “The workers on the factory floor who controlled the weaving machines were very proud that they were weaving material for use in the GWEP [Guinea Worm Eradication Program],” Hopkins said by email to Cardinal News. “They normally wove material for parachutes and bullet proof vests, but said that on the days when they were weaving filter material for the GWEP they were especially careful, since they knew that if they made a mistake, with a flaw in the material, ‘a child in Africa might get Guinea worm.’”
When we Americans think of Carter the ex-president, we may think of his work with Habitat for Humanity. When Africans and South Asians think of Carter the ex-president, they may think of the man who has saved them from the scourge of the Guinea worm. In 1995, Carter negotiated a “Guinea worm ceasefire” during Sudan’s civil war to allow for medical care and health education about how to prevent infections. Eventually, nine million pipe filters were distributed in Sudan, one for each person considered at risk in the war-torn country. Carter made multiple trips to African countries to talk about how to combat the Guinea worm, as recently as 2010 in South Sudan. At the time Carter was 86. In 2016, Carter lectured in London about the worm. By then he was 92.
When his Carter Center took over the Guinea Worm Eradication Program in 1986, there were 13.5 million cases worldwide, all profoundly painful. When Carter visited Vinton, the countries where the worm was most prevalent were Ghana and Nigeria. Now, the worm is considered eliminated in both of those countries and 13 others where it had been present. Last year, the worldwide count of cases was down to just 14, scattered across a half-dozen countries in central Africa. So far this year, there are just seven. If the Carter Center manages to wipe out the worm, it would be just the second disease — after smallpox — to be eliminated.
Carter’s presidency was not particularly successful. But as an ex-president, he helped change the world. That ought to count for something in history.