[On November 2nd, 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected President. Perhaps the most delightfully straightforward person ever to hold the office nonetheless connects to a number of compelling contexts, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them. Leading up to a special weekend post on thi year’s midterm election results (which I don’t know when I’m scheduling the rest of the series)!]
On AmericanStudies contexts for three fraught and fascinating familial figures.
- Billy Carter: In yesterday’s post I discussed the evolving and amplifying role of the mass media in presidential elections; that role didn’t stop once the election was decided, of course, and a clear case in point is the media’s obsession with Jimmy’s good ol’ boy brother Billy. A gas and service station owner who unsuccessfully ran for mayor of their hometown of Plains in the same year that his brother won the presidency, Billy immediately capitalized on his newfound fame by publishing a book, Redneck Power: The Wit and Wisdom of Billy Carter (1977). He also became an alcoholic, famously consuming up to half a gallon of vodka and whiskey each day and taking such purposefully controversial actions as peeing on an airport runway while waiting for a Libyan delegation to arrive. A Libyan delegation, I should add, who eventually were paying Billy obscene amounts to lobby on their behalf, a relationship that President Carter forcefully disowned (as he did his brother in that moment as well). Hard to say whether that version of Billy was more created by the media or brought down by them, but it’s likely a combination of the two.
- Berry Gordy Jr.: While Billy was a close relative from whom Jimmy Carter eventually had to distance himself, Jimmy’s familial relationship with Motown Records founder Berry Gordy Jr. was a lot more complicated from the jump. They apparently shared a great-grandfather, a white Georgia plantation owner named James Thomas Gordy; that Gordy was Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian Gordy’s grandfather, and also at some point had an illegitimate child with an enslaved woman named Esther Johnson, from whom Berry Gordy Jr. was directly descended. It’s not clear to me when Jimmy and/or Berry became aware of their relationship to one another, which Jimmy’s son Jeff investigated and traced at length while compiling a family history; but according to Berry the two men did discuss it at a 1980 Democratic fundraiser, and began calling each other “cuz” after that. Obviously there’s a lot of the more painful parts of our collective past in this story, but I can’t lie, the thought of Jimmy Carter and Berry Gordy Jr. calling each other cuz makes me smile.
- Mary Prince: Not as much as this third relationship does, though. I hope you’ll check out that hyperlinked 2025 WRBL story on Prince, which details her more than five-decade close connection to Jimmy, his beloved wife Rosalynn, and their children. Every president is a human being, even if we might find that hard to believe with some of them; but very few presidents have really embodied what it is to be human, at its most complex best. Jimmy Carter’s finding and connecting with this young Black woman who had been wrongfully convicted of murder, served a jail sentence, and was struggling to make it upon her release; his bringing her into the Georgia Governor’s mansion and then the White House as a nanny to his children; and his and his wife’s lifelong friendship with her (“They trusted me with their whole hearts and soul,” Mary notes at the end of that story; “I miss them a lot”) are all about as inspiring as any relationship can get. If you take nothing else away from this week’s series, I hope you’ll remember the story of Mary Prince.
Next CarterStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
PPS. Also thanks to Jason Lee Guthrie for sharing his podcast on Carter!
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