Jimmy Carter at 100: A century of change for a president, the United States and the world since 1924

Jimmy Carter is already the longest-lived of the 45 men in office as US president and is about to celebrate his centennial.

The 39th president, who remains in home hospice care, turns 100 on Tuesday, Oct. 1, celebrating in the same southern Georgia town where he was born in 1924.

Here are some notable milestones for Carter, the nation and the world over the course of his long life.

Carter saw the U.S. population nearly triple. The USA has around 330 million inhabitants; There were about 114 million in 1924 and 220 million when Carter was inaugurated in 1977. The world's population has more than quadrupled, from 1.9 billion to over 8.1 billion. By the time he became president, the number had already more than doubled to 4.36 billion.

That boom didn't reach Plains, where Carter lived for more than 80 of his 100 years. His wife, Rosalynn, who died in 2023 at age 96, was also born in Plains.

Their town had fewer than 500 residents in the 1920s and has about 700 today; A large part of the local economy revolves around its most famous residents.

When James Earl Carter Jr. was born, the life expectancy of American men was 58 years. Today she is 75 years old.

NBC first presented a red-blue electoral map in the 1976 election between then-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Carter, the Democratic challenger. But NBC's John Chancellor turned Carter's states red and Ford's blue. Some other early versions of colored voting cards used yellow and blue because red was associated with Soviet and Chinese communism.

It wasn't until the 1990s that networks chose blue for states won by the Democrats and red for states won by the Republican Party. “Red State” and “Blue State” only became a permanent part of the American political lexicon after the controversial election between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000.

Carter was 14 when Franklin D. Roosevelt made his first television appearance as president. Warren Harding became the first radio president two years before Carter was born.

In 1924, there was no Amazon Prime, but you could order a build-your-own house from a catalog. The three-bedroom Sears Roebuck Gladstone model cost $2,025, which was slightly less than the average annual salary of a worker.

Walmart didn't exist, but the local general stores served the same purpose. Standard prices: loaf of bread, 9 cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; Gallon of gasoline, 11 cents.

Inflation helped push Carter from office as it pursued President Joe Biden. The average gallon, adjusted for inflation, was about $3.25 in 1980, Carter's last full year in office. That's just 3 cents more than AAA's current national average.

The 19th Amendment, which extended the right to vote to women – then almost exclusively white women – was ratified in 1920, four years before Carter was born. The Voting Rights Act, which extended voting rights to black Americans, was passed in 1965 as Carter prepared his first run for governor of Georgia.

Now Carter is ready to cast an absentee ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris. She would become the first woman, the first Black woman and the first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office. Grandson Jason Carter said the former president is holding on in part because he's excited about the chance to see Harris make history.

Despite all the changes in US politics, some things remain the same. Or at least come back.

Carter was born in a time of isolationism, protectionism and white Christian nationalism – all elements of the right in the ongoing era of Donald Trump. In 2024, Trump promises the largest deportation operation in US history while tightening legal immigration. He said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Five months before Carter's birth, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. The law created the U.S. Border Patrol and severely restricted immigration, limiting entry primarily to migrants from Western Europe. Asians were completely banned. Congress clearly stated its purpose: “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” The Ku Klux Klan followed in 1925 and 1926 with marches on Washington to promote white supremacy.

Trump has also called for sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, part of his “America First” agenda. In 1922, Congress enacted tariffs to help U.S. manufacturers. After stock market losses in 1929, lawmakers introduced the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in 1930, ostensibly to help American farmers. Nevertheless, the global economic crisis followed. In the 1930s, as Carter became politically conscious, the political right that opposed FDR was driven in part by a movement opposed to international engagement. These conservatives’ slogan: “America First.”

Carter is the Atlanta Braves' most famous fan. Jason Carter says the former president still enjoys watching his favorite baseball team.

In the 1990s, when the Braves played in the playoffs every October, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were often seen in the owner's box with media mogul Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, Turner's wife at the time. The Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta between Carter's failed run for governor in 1966 and his victory four years later. Then-Gov. Carter was sitting in the front row of Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium on April 9, 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth's career record.

When Carter was born, the Braves still lived in Boston, their original city. Ruth had just completed his fifth season with the New York Yankees. By that point, he had hit 284 home runs (still 430 fewer than he had hit in his entire career) and the original Yankee Stadium – “The House that Ruth Built” – had been open for less than 18 months.

When Carter was born, Prohibition had already been in effect for four years and wasn't repealed until he was nine. The Carters were never heavy drinkers. At state dinners and other White House events, they served only wine, although it is a common misconception that they did so because of their Baptist customs. This was more because Carter was always frugal: he didn't want taxpayers or the private account (his and Rosalynn's personal money) to cover more expensive hard drinks.

Carter's younger brother Billy, who owned a gas station in Plains and died in 1988, had different tastes. When Carter became president, he marketed his own brand, Billy Beer. News sources reported that Billy Carter stole a $50,000 annual royalty from a brewer. That's about $215,000 today. The president's annual salary was then $200,000 – today it is $400,000.

The debt clock in Times Square didn't appear until Carter was in his early 60s and had left the White House. But for anyone counting the $35 trillion in debt, Carter doesn't deserve much mention. The man who washed Ziploc bags to reuse them added less than $300 billion to the national debt, which was under $1 trillion when he left office.

Carter has lived through 40% of U.S. history since the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and more than a third of all U.S. administrations since George Washington took office in 1789 – nine before Carter became president, his own and seven since.

When Carter took office, only one president, John Adams, had reached 90 years of age. Since then, Ford, Ronald Reagan, Carter and George HW Bush have all lived to be at least 93 years old.

___

Follow Barrow at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP