Episode 22: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter
Show Notes
Overview:
Today’s episode is all about the 1970s. Which means we’re talking about two presidents today: Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. As you’ll soon hear, the 70s are hard. They were a time of transition, and historians often treat it as such, as a bridge between the raucous sixties of Vietnam and Nixon to the era of self-gratification and glitz that was the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. Now, that might not be fair to this decade, which historians are increasingly unpacking and exploring, seeing it as more than a bridge, but a destination itself. Albeit, let’s all agree from the start, a destination with some seriously mockable hair and fashion choices.
We’re talking about two presidents this week, well in part because while every President deserves their due, the truth is Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had the unfortunate fate of being positioned between two presidents of tremendous consequence. That’s a shame really because while both Ford and Carter are recalled for their less than stellar handling of truly intractable problems, they were also perhaps two of the most upstanding and admirable men to ever reside in the White House.
So, who were these guys? Gerald Ford’s path to the Oval Office was unusual, he being as you no doubt already know the only Vice-President ever to take over due to resignation. His path to politics, however, was actually pretty textbook, and made him an experienced powerbroker in Washington for years before anyone outside of real estate agents had ever heard of the Watergate. Raised by a loving mother and step-father—he had little relationship with his biological dad, but a warm one with his dad-by-choice—Ford excelled at pretty much everything. He epitomized the scholar-athlete of his day, excelling in the classroom at the University of Michigan and as an offensive lineman on its football team, Ford was good enough to be offered contracts by a couple of pro teams upon graduation. This being the era when pro football players had to get off-season jobs to make ends meet, he went to Law School instead, by way of football, becoming an assistant coach at Yale University in hope of gaining admission to its prestigious school. He eventually did, graduating third in his class in 1941.
Yes, 1941. Ford had gone back to Michigan to practice law when Pearl Harbor happened, and subsequently spent four years as an officer on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. He excelled in the service, and came back home to Michigan to run for Congress, winning a seat as a Republican in 1948. His constituents sent him back for another twelve terms, with Ford rising in power and influence along the way, becoming house minority leader in 1965, the highest-ranking Republican in the House, where he led as a moderate—able to bridge the liberal Rockefeller and conservative Goldwater wings of the party. Loyal, smart, and known for his integrity even by those he disagreed with, he became Vice-President in 1973 when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace. He then became president the year later when Nixon did the same, making Ford unique among presidents for having never actually been part of a winning national ticket. Ford oversaw the end of Vietnam, and a new era of anxiety in American society that forbode change on the horizon. 1974 was the first year of the entire twentieth century when Americans imported more than they exported, and 1974 was also the high-water mark for the real purchasing power of blue collars wages for a generation. Change was coming.
So was Ronald Reagan, who challenged Ford for the Republican nomination and nearly won, leaving Ford ultimately to lose a tight race in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. Born in Georgia, he holds the distinction of being the first American president born in a hospital. Bet you didn’t know that! He grew up on a small farm which lacked indoor plumbing and electricity, which wasn’t that unusual in the Great Depression to be honest, Jimmy graduated first in his class in High School and ultimately winning a coveted spot to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, from which he also graduated near the top of his class in 1946.
Carter was an engineer. Every president since Truman wielded the power of atomic and then nuclear weapons, but Carter is perhaps the only one we’ve had who truly understood how they worked. He served under Captain Hyman Rickover as part of the team tasked with building the country’s first nuclear submarines, and it was Carter’s job to teach nuclear engineering to the elite crew. He left the Navy in 1953, largely because his father passed away and somebody needed to come home to run the family farm.
That sentence might just be Carter in a nutshell: smart, and duty-bound. He brought the farm back form the brink of bankruptcy, joined the local church, and the joined the Georgia State Senate in 1962 just as the South was being transformed by desegregation. He lost his first bid for Governor in 1966, in fact, to a man who proudly told every crowd of potential voters that he’d never allow blacks into one of his businesses and who vigorously opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That man won in ’66. But Carter won the long game, joining with evangelical Christian voters in particular to eke out a winning electoral coalition in 1970, pledging in his inaugural address that Georgia would end segregation on his watch.
That got him national attention, and arguably made him more popular across the country than in Georgia itself, perfectly positioned in the end to win the presidency in 1976 by running, in the wake of Watergate remember, as the candidate of good governance, honestly, and spiritual virtue.
His presidency was hard. He governed during a time of energy crises, gas shortages, a reignition of the Cold War after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and then of more immediate concern to most Americans, after the Iranian Revolution led that same year to the taking of the American embassy in Teheran and with it American hostages. He told Americans they needed to buckle down in the face of these challenges, to work harder, save more, to put aside materialism for more intangible goals of citizenship, sacrifice, and public service.
Yeah, you can see why he wasn’t all that popular in 1980 when he ran for re-election, losing to Ronald Reagan who told Americans they could in fact have it all. There’s a lot more that happened during these two unusual administrations, and we were lucky indeed to have two marvelous historians to guide us through this complicated decade.
We first spoke to Professor Jefferson Cowie of Vanderbilt University, author of what really is THE standard book for political, social, and labor upheaval in the 1970s, the aptly named: Staying Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.
We then spoke to one of our own, Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson, a former CPH Post-doc and author of the forthcoming Making Made in China: The Transformation of U.S. China Trade in the 1970s, which Harvard University Press is bringing out later this year.
Together our conversations highlighted two themes:
The 70’s were a period of transition. It really is the best word to describe a decade which saw the cross-current of so many critical trends, especially on matters of race.
Second, when we talk about race and the presidency, it’s good to remember again that it’s not just a domestic tale.
Guests:
Dr. Jefferson Cowie is a social and political historian whose research and teaching focus on how class, inequality, and work shape American capitalism, politics, and culture.
His most recent book, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, is a broad stroke reinterpretation of twentieth century American politics that was just published in January 2016. Another book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, draws together a unique combination of labor, politics, and popular culture into a vibrant narrative about the decline of class in American political culture. It received a number of “best book” awards and citations, including two of the profession’s most prestigious: the 2011 Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History, and the 2011 Merle Curti Award for the Best Book in Social and Intellectual History.
An earlier transnational history, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, charts the relocation of one firm through four different cities, two countries (U.S. and Mexico), and a great deal of social upheaval. The book received the 2000 Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History. Cowie has also written numerous articles and edited volumes, including, with Joseph Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization.
In addition to his scholarship, Cowie’s essays, reviews, and opinion pieces have also appeared in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Ed, American Prospect, Politico, Democracy, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune, Inside Higher Ed, Dissent, and other popular outlets. He is also the recipient of several fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies and Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. He has appeared in a variety of media outlets including C‐Span’s Booknotes, CNN’s The 1970s, NPR’s Weekend Edition, as well as other documentaries and radio broadcasts.
Prior to coming to Vanderbilt in spring 2016, Cowie taught at Cornell University for 18 years, where he also served as Chair of the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History in the ILR School. For four years he lived on the Cornell campus with his family as the inaugural House Professor and Dean of William Keeton House, a living and learning community of three hundred students. A passionate and dedicated educator, Cowie has garnered a number of teaching awards during his career.
Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson is an historian specializing in the history of capitalism, U.S.-China relations, and the history of the U.S. in the world. Born in Sydney, Australia, She’s lived and worked in a number of parts of the globe: Amsterdam, Charlottesville, Los Angeles, Guilin, Dallas and now New Haven where she am a Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57 Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. She is proficient in Mandarin.
Her research explores the relationships between trade, diplomacy, and labor. Her first book, Making Made in China: The Transformation of U.S.-China Trade in the 1970s (under contract with Harvard University Press for Fall 2021), reframes our understanding of two historical narratives of this decade that are usually told separately: deindustrialization in the United States and rapprochement between the United States and China. Bringing these two changes into conversation, Making Made in China explores how businesspeople from both countries—especially Chinese traders, Chinese Americans, maverick entrepreneurs, and suited executives from huge U.S. corporations—negotiated a new trade relationship after more than twenty years of isolation. Using Chinese and English language sources, including never-before-used U.S. corporate papers, she argues that the interests of U.S. capitalists and the Chinese state gradually converged during this decade — at the expense of U.S. labor and aided by U.S. diplomats. Taking bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, she shows how tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, and business in the 1970s lay the foundations of early twenty-first century globalization, symbolized by labels on goods across the globe declaring “Made in China.”
Visit Dr. Ingleson’s website.
Follow Dr. Ingleson on Twitter.