The Last Gasp of the Old South

Passing of Rosalynn, and Now Jimmy Carter

A Word on Rosalynn (and now Jimmy):

I like to tell stories. I especially like to tell stories about my granddaddy, mostly because he liked to tell stories. It’s easy to talk about people who like to talk, but its the people who tell the most by what they do that often have the most to say. The world lost someone recently who was emblematic of a culture, a way of life, and a time that has long since passed. Good ole country folk aren’t being made at the rate we are losing them and going with them is an ethos that’s not replaceable. In the same way those trying to replace the floorboards in old houses can’t match the grain because the trees which provided the lumber just don’t exist. You can’t synthetically reproduce time. As Rosalynn Carter met her savior this past week she represented a failure of the generations of southern democrats who followed her similarly down-home husband.

In an essay considering the effect of this lady of perpetual grace the name Bill Clinton is not one we should spend much time on, yet it’s hard to talk about the opportunity the South had in the rise of the sun belt politician without their most infamous failure. How did we end up in this place where Mrs. Carter’s death has us thinking about a lecherous old coot?

I was in a meeting recently where it was noted that the organization I am working for and with is always on the cusp of doing something well only to have circumstances often beyond our control scuttle the advancement. There was a book written in the mid-90s called Dixie Rising by Peter Applebee which painted a bright picture of the future of the South buoyed by the optimism of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Everything was smelling roses. However, that olfactory perception proved short-lived. Here in 2023 its more pulp plant than Little Debbie.

Tying Mrs. Rosalynn’s story into this is as common as it is foundational. It’s always comforting to know that something your grandaddy told you wasn’t a matter he just kind of either made up or uniquely experienced. In describing her upbringing in 1930s rural Georgia Mrs. Rosalynn noted that she had no real understanding of what it meant to be poor. It wasn’t that she grew up in wealth or in an established family. It was that everyone else around her had as little as she had, and no one cared or realized what that meant, at least until good-meaning people came from outside and expressed the nature of their want.

Losing her father early in life led to her taking on more responsibilities in the home as the oldest of her siblings. Rather than moving young Rosalynn to abandon the expectations of culture she instead readily used the advantages of her trial to be a godly helpmeet to her mother, which enabled her to maintain that blessing as she took on her role as the wife of a Navy man, governor, president, and father. Her quiet, assured dignity Jimmy often credited as being the motivation he needed to move forward in the work they did together. When he lost the presidential race in 1980 neither of them lost who they were, as is often the case with men that do not have the Christian support which the Carters had in spades.

In every way that can be laid on Rosalynn’s account. In some important measure the real winner of the Reagan administration were the millions of people helped through Habitat-for-Humanity and the other charitable works the Carters spearheaded, almost exclusively without any financial or otherwise personal benefit. I have a firm belief that when the history of the United States is written and we have the Tom Holland’s of the future examining what went right and what went wrong in our empire the Carter will stand out because of their normalcy in the midst of the insanity of the twenty-first century.

They never forgot where they came from, because they never left living there, in heart, mind, and soul. That’s a big difference from the other small town governor who went on to be president. Not only does Bill leave Hope and embrace Washington, his wedded partner never understands her role in the story. It can’t be blamed on his upbringing. Rosalynn lost her dad at 13, Bill at three months, but both had an indomitable mother who witnessed well to them. There is a common saying in the South about living above your raising. It has nothing to do with money, or even class. It’s an authentic humility which never forsakes nor forgets the simplicity of life. If you follow Bill’s story from Arkansas to Harvard and back to Arkansas his return is parasitic. It’s all calculated for something else. There is no goal oriented with Hope, it’s to use Hope as a launching pad for worldly success. Hillary, Chicago-made and with the broad shoulders issued in the windy city never looks or feels comfortable among the great unwashed. She hates the deplorables long before they block her ascendancy to eternal power. Her time as the first lady of Arkansas are filled with stories of back-biting and sneering.

As much as Bill is known for his charisma Hillary is known for her coldness, I guess opposites do attract. She is always in his shadow and even when she herself is seeking a place in history it’s Bill that gets in her way. They loathe one another with the heat of a thousand suns, yet stay together because a leech needs a host. There is a reason why Bill is always looking outside the marital bed for companionship and then heads off to an island to escape the home he had made with his own hands. While he inherited the bigamist ways of his departed father, the sins finding their roost in the heart of the son, he also brought out the wanderlust native to a man who never wanted to be from Arkansas.

That searching and emptiness exhibits for us the real difference between the son of Hope and the daughter of Plains, and why the South is in the condition it is in today. Instead of being at peace with its agrarian heart there is a longing to have the materialism of the northern soul, and that we have received in spades. We now have all the trappings of New York with all its industrial dross. Life has a way of imitating art. When you draw up a future as a young man that involves seeking a yoke among the oxen of a different plow it should surprise not that it grounds you under its weight. Bill lives now in the wreckage of his lust, not with the bride of his youth, but the partner of his power. No one at his death will speak of the works of his time in the subtle tones of jealousy, but with the mocking credulity of waste.

It does not excuse Bill’s philandering to note there is much to be learned from the fact Jimmy’s greatest sin was committing adultery in his heart. He couldn’t imagine running around on Rosalynn because no woman could compare to the beauty of her wholeness as a wife and a partner. When we hear that they were married for seventy-seven years there is nothing about that number that we find surprising. Jimmy and Rosalynn loved one another. Well did they both heed the commentary of Solomon:

“Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers with thee. Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love”.-- Proverbs 5:15-19

But where did they learn that, and more importantly where did Rosalynn become that? Adultery is nothing new, hence the citation of wisdom from three-thousand years ago which warns against it. In her own re-telling of life growing up in the rural South she notes that what enabled her family to survive the loss of her father was the fact that the community stepped-up to help. They did so often in ways that were not perceptible to a young lady. Social structures that don’t need explained are the most helpful. The in-born opportunities provided by churches, fraternal organizations, and small-towns usually involve people neither asking openly nor assuming their presence. Things just sort of happen and everyone gets taken care of without anyone else being the wiser. There is a mindset there which is hard to teach, and once that generation which encouraged it passes by it is not something easily replaceable.

To be fair it’s not like poor ladies of the South were having cotillions and finishing schools to learn how to be hospitable. Their dads didn’t run the chamber. It was a skill learned by watching and doing. Rosalynn spent her entire adult life witnessing to this and her political peers who abandoned the home for the legislature have seen fit to destroy it, but Mrs. Carter never struck me as the kind of person who did what was right because others might see her, in fact the very idea someone was writing about her life and way would be unseemly. It’s part of what makes her passing so sad.

Both of my West Virginia grandparents were born in 1930. They voted Democrat from ages twenty-one to my grandaddy’s death in 2011 and as far as I know my sainted Nanny still pulls a solid-D lever. She does so not because she’s some purple-haired progressive, but because she, as she put it to me somewhat recently, is not and never will be a Republican. To understand that mindset we have to understand who Rosalynn Carter was. Southern. Democrats were their own breed. They died more so out of necessity than need. Their own leadership hated them because they stood for a way of life that was in competition with the urbanization favored by the new leaders of the party. When Jimmy Carter ran for governor in 1970 he courted the George Wallace voters, while at the same time reaching out to African- Americans. No lover of segregation he still saw the kind of man and woman that would support Wallace as being someone he could work with, primarily for the reason they were the folks he grew up with. He knew their heart and what it was they were really wanting while maybe not endorsing their methods.

His neighbors in Plains identified the growing industrialization of the United States with the hollowing out of the small-towns which had produced fine young men and women like Rosalynn and Jimmy. The Democrat party had an opportunity when Bill became the avatar to speak to those trials, yet they made a conscious decision to move another direction abandoning the bitter-clingers to the GOP. The problem is most of these folks are Republicans, because they don’t care about you anymore than the SDA-ruled DNC. Maybe Jimmy could of done more in his post-presidency life to fix that, but he didn’t because that’s not what people from Plains do. Rosalynn’s death puts a period on a lot more than her life. It marks the end of era, a time where those of us who aren’t really Republicans don’t really have anywhere to go. Yet, her death also reminds us of something very important.

Jimmy didn’t engage in that because I think he saw something during his presidency that evidenced that the world which produced a Rosalynn was already dead. The only hope was not Bill and his New South, but it was the way the two love-birds from Plains showcased their faith in the powerful witness of the small things of life. If we can learn anything from Rosalynn and her legacy it probably can be summarized in some other bible verses. While there are those in my theological camp who may point to some allowances on the Carters towards the battle lines of American Christianity there is much to be said for what the apostle James notes in his letter, of which we take our leave:

“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.” -- James 3:13-18

Blessings in Christ,

Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Pastor, Bethany ARP Church