Learning to Love Patriotism Again, as Jimmy Carter Turns 100

2024-10-01 08:20:03

In 2017, I traveled with my two teenage children to Plains, Ga., from Jacksonville, Fla., to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church.

My son Gibson asked for this trip to celebrate his 17th birthday. A fierce and unusual admirer of the Carter presidency, he’d recently written a high school history paper on Jimmy Carter’s Administration and the rise of arch-conservatism, and we had all been rattled by Donald Trump’s “carnage” inauguration address that month.

The three of us spent a pastoral Saturday roaming around Plains, visiting Carter’s childhood home and peanut farm, his brother Billy’s gas station and the train depot that became the presidential campaign headquarters in 1975. We stood as a southern family in the Carter visitor’s center, housed in the high school where the future President and First Lady were students. We admired Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize and took pictures of sitting at a replica of his Oval Office desk. As we wandered from exhibit to exhibit, it was easy to fall back to 1976.

I was a 10-year-old in Jacksonville that year when the American Bicentennial permeated everything—television, magazines, clothing, commemorative this and that. Not just coins, spoons and the like, but our Avon lady could sell us perfume in a bottle shaped like Betsy Ross sewing the flag or soaps with George and Martha Washington’s likeness molded onto them. I could dig around in the Cheerios box to get first dibs on the Stars and Stripes stickers or send away for a Bicentennial scratch-and-sniff coloring book with my Applejacks.

It felt like a patriotic party that the whole country was invited to. I was all in. As my mama used to say about me, you aren’t happy unless every day is a parade, and for once it felt like it was.

And I was a very earnest child—as evidenced by my own ways of celebrating the Bicentennial, which included learning military hymns, memorizing the Gettysburg Address, and staging a variety show on the carport attached to our cinderblock home. My best friend played Thomas Jefferson and I was Ben Franklin, our pant legs shoved awkwardly into our knee socks, trying to make it look like we were wearing breeches. The most remarkable part of the whole thing was not that the neighborhood kids actually showed up, but that not a one made fun of us, at least not to our faces.

What I was most proud of though, were the four poems I wrote honoring our country’s birthday, with which I won the northeast Florida Girl Scouts regional talent show at Camp Kateri. This was no mean feat, since among my competition was a girl who played “One Tin Soldier” on her flute and another who performed a karate routine to the song, “Kung Fu Fighting.”

But it wasn’t just the Bicentennial that had me aflutter with patriotism.

A southern peanut farmer, hailing from the same state as my daddy’s side of the family going back to the 17th century, was running for President.

And his appeal ran deeper than his familiar drawl. Despite being deeply religious, Jimmy Carter didn’t come across as judgey. When he spoke, it was with a steady calm and a good-natured intelligence. I felt inexplicably proud, as though he and his family were our better-off relations.

I’d lie in bed that year and dream up scenarios in which our paths would cross, say, like the Carter campaign was coming to Jacksonville and we’d be chosen as the average American family for them to spend an evening with. Because we both wore glasses and loved to read, I knew his daughter Amy and I would hit it off, maybe over a game of Parcheesi, and before you knew it, I’d be flying off to the White House for sleepovers.

I found it disappointing that despite all my perceived commonalities, my daddy still didn’t vote for him. But in our fifth-grade class election, I did—probably my first act of rebellion against my father. That said, I do remember daddy announcing that he was glad to finally see a Southern man on TV who wasn’t depicted as a halfwit all the time.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when my understanding of what it meant to be patriotic came to mean something different entirely.

I felt it in 1979, when conservative Christians organized into voting constituencies. I felt it too in the “Republican Revolution” of ’94 when Newt Gingrich presented his Contract for America, and definitely in 2009, when the Tea Party was up in arms about Obama. By 2016, when Trump became President, it was as though the Republican Party had absconded with patriotism completely, and a large part of Christianity to boot.

By the time Jan. 6 happened, I figured the idea of patriotism could never, ever again mean what it used to. Instead of a sense of shared pride, it seethed with anger and coveted control.

But on that day in Plains in 2017, it was impossible to not feel patriotic in the nostalgic sense, not to find “fresh faith in an old dream,” to quote President Carter himself.

The next day, sitting in the pew with my children while Jimmy taught us Sunday school, then having our picture taken with him and Rosalyn after church, made the 10-year-old girl in me grin as though it were 1976 all over again. I couldn’t help but wonder, as Plains disappeared in the rear-view mirror, if it were still possible that someone like him could ever be President again.

It’s been eight or so years since that pilgrimage. I’m remembering it now because, in the speeches Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have delivered in Minnesota, Arizona, and Nebraska, I hear echoes of the same aims Carter spoke of—that “the test of government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few, but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who depend on it.” And also, of course, because Uncle Jimmy (as I respectfully and longingly call him) is turning 100 on Tuesday, and is proof positive that the good can live to see the impact of their endeavors spread throughout the world.

Even more than I did in the town of Plains that day, I have fresh faith in that old dream that suddenly feels new again.