How Southern Is He?

I am a Southerner and an American.

--Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best?

The priorities seem implicit in the autobiography that Carter wrote as he set out on his presidential quest. Yet despite his credentials--boyhood in and manhood return to South Georgia, a couple of terms in the state legislature, the governorship--how much of a Southern stamp does Carter really have? After all, he left Georgia at 18 for the U.S. Naval Academy, was exposed there to everything from ballroom dancing to naval strategy, followed that with windows on the non-Southern world in such places as Oahu, Hong Kong and Schenectady, N.Y.

Carter does not fit many Southern stereotypes. He is not a hard drinker, poker player, or profane and garrulous see-gar-chomping raconteur. His humor is low key, his New South approach to voters is cooler than the delivery of the hot stump speechifiers of another era. Carter tells crowds: "When I'm in the White House, you'll have a friend there." In contrast, a prewar Georgia Governor and populist, gallus-snappin' Eugene Talmadge, was wont to tell his crowds: "Come see me at the mansion after I'm elected, and we'll set on the front porch and piss over the rail at them city bastards." Carter quotes Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan rather than traditional Southern heroes. He is more self-disciplined than many a Southerner, aloof to the point of loneliness.

Carter is a product of Georgia, and he moves easily in the two cities without which the state would be Alabama East. Atlanta and Savannah represent a wedding of the old and the new, and give Georgia the tone that distinguishes it from the rest of the South. Savannah drips with history, tradition and gentility. Atlanta is and was the transportation crossroads of the South. It is a city of stunning architecture, the regional headquarters of most of FORTUNE'S 500, cosmopolitan rather than provincial (only a quarter of the population is native-born).

While all this is part of Carter's world, he is a Southern farm boy at heart who still knows how to turn sweet-potato vines, chop cotton and pull peanuts, and who looks homeward to a hamlet so archetypically Southern that it is almost parody. Beyond that, he is a bucolic devotee of hunting and bird 'dogs, stock-car racing and rock music --notably backwoods Georgia's own Allman Brothers. Says he of Georgia rockers in general: "They're good boys. I understand them."

He is also a totally immersed Christian who knows his Bible, along with all verses of Amazing Grace, and considers neither religion nor kinship particularly joke-worthy. While Carter does not stem-wind like a "How long O Lord?" Frank Clement or Huey Long, he is a truly Southern orator. He is given to nostalgia, imagery and hyperbole. He declared in his acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden, for instance, that the U.S. income tax structure was "a disgrace to the human race."

TIME Correspondent Stanley Cloud, who has covered the Democratic candidate since last October, reports:

Carter is a melder. He has spent much of his life seeking the golden mean. His parents differed dramatically on everything from race to reading habits, and Carter apparently learned early that if he wanted to earn the approval of both of them, he would have to partition his personality to strike the best balance between them. The balance that he struck was nearly perfect.

On his father's side, he is Old South. His late father, "Mr. Earl," was a seigneurial landowner and entrepreneur who did not allow Negroes beyond his back door (Mr. Earl's father, in epic Southern style, was gunned down in an argument over ownership of a desk). Carter's mother, Miss Lillian, who was always more bookish, represented the New South, urging fair and open treatment for blacks, less stress on tradition and more attention to the times that are achanging.

Carter's success as a Southern politician has been based on his ability to sense that his personality, created in part by the push and pull of his parents' influence, reflected the mood of much of the contemporary South--a continued reverence for the past with a growing desire to "get shut" of it. On this basis, he campaigned for Governor, and, sensing a similar attitude in the nation as a whole, he is campaigning for President on this basis. If there is a problem now, it is that, while Carter's understanding of Southern attitudes is intuitive, his understanding of the national mood beyond the South is merely intellectual.

Like many other Southern moderates who were "moderate on race" long before that was socially acceptable, Carter was not a passionate crusader for civil rights in the years before he entered politics. On the school board, in his church and in the Plains business community, he did make small gestures --which required a measure of courage --in behalf of simple justice for blacks. But even in Plains, where the Carters were the leading family, he knew the limits of his power and authority, and did not seek to strain the tolerance of his white neighbors beyond the breaking point. Still, Southern white moderates who took small steps at great risk are held in higher esteem by many blacks than Northern liberals who took bold steps at little or no risk.

Carter has said that if there is a single political philosophy that he can be identified with, it is populism. Thus, he is an heir to the political movement that argued that poor, rural Southerners were being exploited by the banks and big businesses of Atlanta as well as New York. As he has moved up the political ladder, he has toned down this pitch, adding such distinctly unpopulist notions as good management, long-range planning, competence and other hallmarks of the age of technocrats. But lately he has put into his speeches a line that invariably gets the most applause: "I don't owe the special interests a thing. I owe the people everything."

It is this philosophy that links him, however uneasily and tenuously, with Black Congressman Andrew Young and Mississippi Publisher Hodding Carter III on one end of the South's political spectrum, and with George Wallace and Lester Maddox on the other end. That was the point Carter was attempting to make when he said in 1970 that Maddox "has compassion for the little man," and when he said that a Humphrey-Wallace ticket in 1972 "would do well in the South," and when he called himself "basically a redneck."

Culturally, Carter has very little in common with rednecks, but he understands what their fears are, what makes them tick. He understands that they want to think well of themselves and appeals to them to do so. He still has enough redneck in him so that they do not see him as a total alien. For all his sophistication, he has never quite shaken his discomfort in posh surroundings. In the Governor's mansion in Atlanta, visitors were often surprised to find him padding around the elegant halls in bare feet.

Carter in a real sense has used the South. He has adopted what he liked and what was useful to him and tried to reject what he did not like or was not useful. His view of himself and the world has been shaped in large part by a distrust of big money, power and government, the dedication to the heroic mythology of the Confederacy and its gentle traditions that were so often belied by violent reality, the fundamentalist religion, the romantic belief in the redeeming qualities of rural life, and the sense of the region's old isolation, poverty, backwardness and--above all--its preoccupation with race. He also believes the South has been misunderstood. In a speech at Emory University while he was Governor, Carter said: "One of the great afflictions on the South in the past ... is that ... politicians have underestimated the Southern people. This has caused the lack of... accurate analysis of the quality of the South ... by the rest of the nation and the world." However much Jimmy Carter may have been transformed by Yankee influences as an adult, the core of the man is Southern, and one of the most important causes that he identifies his candidacy with is the final, unqualified re-entry of the South into the Union.

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