Jimmy Carter's "An Hour Before Daylight".
One marked contrast between the recent political conventions was the presence of former presidents. The Republicans had none, (excepting the candidate), not even the very-much alive George W. Bush, or past candidates such as Mitt Romney. The Democrats had two, plus Hillary Clinton, not to mention the current president, Joe Biden. There was additionally a representative of a fourth, Jimmy Carter, to say that he will be happily voting for Kamala Harris in the fall. It speaks to the extremist journey the Republican party has been on, compared to much more conventional (sorry!) path of the Democrats, with recognizably consistent values and respect for character and institutions, both their own and those of the country at large.
None of these Democratic leaders grew up rich. Each was formed in modest circumstances, before joining the meritocracy and working their way up. The Democratic party is now generally viewed as the party of educated people, government workers, and minorities, against the Republican coalition of the very rich and the very poor. One might summarize it as strivers through the educational system, as opposed to strivers through the capitalist system. For one group, being kind, smart, and hard-working are the annointing signs of god, while for the other, it is being rich. Some (usually Republicans) may think these are equivalent, but the current candidates demonstrate the opposite.
This theme is exemplified by the career of Jimmy Carter, who worked his way through Annapolis and a naval career partly spent in the naval nuclear program under Hyman Rickover, then worked his way to the Georgia governorship, the Presidency, and then kept on working through retirement, churning out books and doing good works. The finest of his books, (which are, frankly, a mixed bag), is apparently his memoir of his early life and environment, "An Hour Before Daylight". The theme, for me, was work- hard work. Carter grew up on a large farm, and worked constantly. The book's title comes, naturally, from when the farm day starts. There are pigs to feed, eggs to collect, cows to milk. There are fields to plow, trees to chop down, fences to mend, products to sell, and supplies to buy. The work was evidently endless, as it is on any family farm, and while Carter tells of many swimming, hunting, amorous, and other expeditions, it is the cycle of chores and worries around the farm that was clearly formative.
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| Jimmy with family, in his Sunday best. |
But he was not the hardest worker. His family owned a lot of land, and in this segregated time during the depression, had numerous sharecropping tenants and employees, all black. Carter comments gingerly about this system, balancing his worship of his father with clear descriptions of the hopelessness of the tenant's position. They worked without dreams of attending Annapolis, or inheriting a large estate. Rather, debt was the typical condition, as the Carters ran the supply store as well as owning the land. Carter looked up to many of these employees and tenants, and recounts very close and formative relations throughout his childhood, with both black children and adults. At least until he was drawn, as the system had designed it, into the segregated churches and schools.
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| Jimmy at his most intense, a naval graduate. |
It is hard to grasp, in our heavily urbanized and regulated existence, where work is a 9-5 job and we dream of weekends, family leave, remote work, and retirement, how much work went into a normal existance like this on a farm. Success depended not only on unstinting work, but on an even temper, shrewd foresight, family support, good community relations (including church attendance), and a lot of luck. The wealth and power of the US was built on this kind of scrabbling for economic survival and advancement. The capitalist system continually applied the screws, lowering prices for cotton when too much was being produced, a particular crisis during the depression. Carter tells of the continual inventiveness that his family devoted to new ventures, like selling flavored milks, roasted pecans, sugar cane syrup, boiled peanuts, and tomato catsup, all from their own crops. Not everything was successful, but there was a continual need, even in this out-pf-the-way rural area, to meet the market and keep coming up with new ideas for making money.
Most of all, Carter speaks with pride of his and his family's work. It provided their sustenance, and their relationships, and was thus intrinsically and automatically meaningful. Headed by a benevolent regime, at least as he understood it under his parents, it was an ideal world- busy, endlessly challenging, stimulating, and productive. This is what we need to think about in these end times of the loneliness epidemic and the plague of homelessness and meaninglessness. Religion was a strong presence, but hearing Carter tell it, it weighed relatively lightly on him and his family, (other than sister Ruth, perhaps, who became a renowned evangelist), being more a solace to the poor than a spur to the well-to-do. Their meaning came more from their community and their many and varied occupations. So when people speak of basic income programs, one has to ask whether that really addresses the problem. Much better might be a guaranteed job program, where everyone is offered basic work if they can not find it in the private sector. Productive work that benefits the community, along the lines of the WPA projects of the depression. Work is critical to meaning and mental health, as well as to our communities and nation.
