Turning Point
Carter, Jimmy
/ n October 1962, as President John F. Kennedy faced Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and took the world to the brink of World War III, the man who would occupy the Oval Office fifteen years later...
...The postwar tractor revolution pushed millions of rural people, especially black farmhands, into cities...
...In 1980, Pennington, then 58, lay dying of cancer in a St...
...Hurst grabbed the ballot box and left...
...The biggest problem was persuading Quitman County people to talk...
...As they walked out, Hurst yelled, "Let me see if you all have learned the right way to vote...
...In Georgia, federal judges ordered redistricting and a new election for the senate...
...If I ever catch you all voting wrong again, your house might burn down...
...We need only to mention Harry Truman, Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter and—let us pray—Bill Clinton...
...More important for his purposes, a 1962 Supreme Court compelled state legislatures, including Georgia's, to reapportion themselves...
...But Carter called a cousin in the newspaper business who tipped an Atlanta Journal reporter, John Pennington, who happened to be another farm boy out of Carter's Sumter County...
...They will choose a good man," he said...
...Petersburg, Florida, hospital, and the President of the United States paid a personal visit to cheer him up...
...then another ordered that neither Carter nor his primary opponent should be listed on the general election ballot, giving voters a free write-in choice...
...In Omsk I asked a sophisticated academic about local political organizing to chart the province's future...
...He reached into the box, pulled out their ballots, read them, and tore them up...
...A corrupt county boss stole enough votes to defeat him and seemingly end his political career before it began...
...T he legal deck was stacked against election protesters...
...And what were they doing to select a new leader after Yeltsin's term ends...
...3,000), on the Chattahoochee Riverbordering Alabama, phoned the opponent's campaign manager and announced he was going to "stuff the ballot box...
...Quitman Countians, freed from Hurst's domination, gave Carter a resounding victory, 448 to 23, and he won a clear endorsement in the whole seven-county district, 3,013 to 2,182...
...Pennington's stories made the Quitman County vote a statewide scandal...
...contacted by phone, they expressed amazement and umbrage...
...Next day Carter told his Quitman County supporters, "You people have lost contol of your own affairs...
...But as news of the Carter presence spread, some of Hurst's local opponents—there were a few—gathered a small delegation at poll-closing time to demand explanations...
...The manager remonstrated that it wasn't necessary, whereupon Hurst responded, "We do it every time, and I don't want my people to get out of practice...
...The day this petition was delivered, John Pennington broke a sensationalexposé in the Atlanta Journal...
...Indeed, people got up a petition signed by more than 10 percent of the county's registered voters denouncing the way the election had been conducted and asking Carter to continue his fight and help them clean up politics in their county...
...Top Hack Doc Hammond would lay the ballot on the counter saying, "Just scratch out Jimmy Carter's name...
...171...
...It looks like I've lost too, but if you will help me, I'll fight this to the end...
...Vote-stealing has been the journalistic crusader's grist in South Georgia for generations: sixteen years before, another Journal reporter had won a Pulitzer Prize exposing voting shenanigans in Herman Talmadge's home county of Telfair...
...Carter never forgot his debt to John Pennington...
...1 ndeed, Hurst broke about every elec- tion law voting on the at books the courthouse . He conducted in the Georgetown, without a booth, in a tiny office where he and his hacks could see how every voter marked his ballots...
...military men who had been away for years, and other former Quitman Countians living as far away as California and Virginia, had had ballots cast in their name...
...So on October 1, his 38th birthday, Carter announced his candidacy...
...James Madison, after watching a knockdown political contest in Orange County, Virginia, was moved to observe that democracy requires exercise to survive, just as an army requires drill and maneuvers...
...Jimmy Carter was making his first bid for electoral office, for a seat in the Georgia Senate...
...He showed that the dead had voted in the earlier Democratic primary...
...Most amazingly, 117 people out of a total vote of 773 lined up and cast ballots in perfect alphabetical order, "even down to the second and third letters of the last name," Pennington wrote...
...Two days before the election, Joe Hurst, boss of tiny, rural Quitman County (pop...
...We Americans elect 521,000 officials every six-year cycle to govern us...
...Carter sets his personal drama in the context of a tectonic shift in American life and politics...
...Without the fraudulent Georgetown box, Carter would have won by 75...
...All of which prompted one political figure to announce repeatedly on the chicken-andpea circuit, "When I die I want to be buried in Telfair County so I can remain politically active...
...He stands no more chance of succeeding in that effort than he did in 1962...
...Because he hailed from larger, more populous Sumter County, newly joined with six thinly populated rural counties, Carter figured he had a good chance, even though he was challenging an entrenched legislative veteran from the old rural district...
...No need, he said: "Moscow will send us good men" to govern...
...0 ne of the wonders of the American political system that holds foreigners in perpetual awe is its ability to heave up obscure strangers—to them—into the presidency who acquit themselves more or less adequately, and the heavens do not fall...
...Pennington—who was a friend and hero of this reviewer—scented a good story...
...The brass-knuckles/grassroots/political-legal-journalisticwarfare Carter depicts in Georgia is a kind of political exercise Russians have never known...
...Several people were listed as having voted twice...
...And thirty voters provided affidavits specific enough to impress any objective judge...
...the unsealed cardboard carton that served as a ballot box...
...Still striving, he ends his book with a plug for his Atlanta project, seeking to do on a one-city scale what no president has ever been able to accomplish: focus the several hundred federal, state and local government agencies and private organizations that deal with crime, poverty, bad housing, inadequate health care and unemployment into an orchestrated assault...
...Even today I find it amazing that so many were willing to endanger their financial and physical well-being to bring free elections to their county and to escape from domination by such a powerful man...
...That is the story the former president tells in Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age...
...He took six fresh ballots, scratched out Carter's name, and put them in the box: "That's the way you are supposed to vote," he told the old couple...
...They wait for politics to happen to them, instead of making it happen themselves...
...And who the blazes is "they," and who will pick them...
...The 1960 census marked the first time a majority of blacks lived outside the eleven old Confederate states, a change with vast consequences for both North and South...
...When the counting was over that night, Carter lost the Georgetown box by a margin of 214 votes, and in all seven counties by 139...
...Hurst threatened to throw Carter's pollwatcher into the river if he interfered, so the outsider silently made notes...
...Ultimately,, one judge threw out the Georgetown ballot box as fraudulent and declared Carter the legitimate Democratic nominee...
...Senator or not, Carter would vanish and they would still have to live with Boss Hurst, whose power would endure regardless of the senate race outcome...
...The locals promised not to yield—and they did not...
...By such favors to judges, prosecutors, and state officials, Hurst had won virtually unchallenged power for himself, and considerable wealth...
...The 1962 fight opened Carter's eyes not only to the ways the democratic process can be subverted, "but also to the capacity of men and women of good will to engage the system to right such wrongs...
...Against all odds, Carter chose to fight—and won...
...One elderly couple dared to take their ballots outside, marked them, folded them tightly, and dropped them in...
...Yet people did come forward," Carter writes...
...As Daniel Webster said upon the completion of his fifty-year career: "Nothing will ruin the country if the people themselves will undertake its safety...
...n October 1962, as President John F. Kennedy faced Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba and took the world to the brink of World War III, the man who would occupy the Oval Office fifteen years later was wrestling with another crisis...
...The reporter showed that dozens of voters had risen from the cemetery, marched to the polls in perfect alphabetical order, and cast their ballots...
...and nothing can save it if they leave their safety in any hands but their own...
...Reading Carter's memoir after a 4,000-mile rail journey across Russia in Year One of the Post-Soviet Era, I am vividly impressed with the awesome odds democracy faces...
...This is a potent point to ponder for those liberals who would rather trust five lawyers in Washington to create rights for us instead of the 7,500 state legislators, 90,000 schoolboard members, 120,000 or so county commissioners, and hundreds of thousands of mayors, councilmen, library board members, and such...
...Joe wants you to vote for Homer Moore...
...Carter's career—from peanut warehouse to White House in sixteen years, the first Southerner to win the presidency outright since 1858—constitutes the great Long March of American Politics, and though judgments differ on his four-year presidency, no one can ever take from him the sparkle of that triumph...
...From Tocqueville to Lord Bryce, foreign observers have marveled at the grassroots political competence of Americans...
...And one gentleman who had lost his right to vote because he was in Alabama's state penitentiary had apparently escaped, voted, and returned to his cell...
Vol. 26 • April 1993 • No. 4
