Jimmy Carter lost Illinois by almost 93,000 votes in 1976, yet defeated Gerald Ford to become president. Four years later native son Ronald Reagan beat Carter by more than 376,000, though Reagan fell just shy of 50% statewide.
Following news of Carter entering hospice care in February 2023, I researched his visits to Illinois. When he died Sunday I revisited that work. Fittingly, we’d just spent time with my wife’s grandmother, born a few months before Carter in 1924 and still living on her own, hosting multiple generations for Christmas cheer.
Carter’s Presidential Library and Museum (jimmycarterlibrary.gov) has easily searchable records, including a diary from Aug. 20, 1979, – a week after I was born – detailing stops on the Delta Queen in Savanna and Fulton, the latter at Mississippi River Lock and Dam 13. (The Reagans have a Fulton connection as well: his parents were born there and married at the Catholic church rectory, 98 years before my wife and I rented a house across the street.)
The American Presidency Project, part of the University of California, Santa Barbara (presidency.ucsb.edu), contains speeches of Carter the candidate: October 1976 remarks at a Pulaski Day dinner in Chicago and later at the Quad Cities airport, one week before the election.
“America is not a melting pot,” Carter said in Chicago. “It’s more a beautiful mosaic where different kinds of people with different customs and different dreams and different memories, fit together and share our strength toward a high and a common goal. Therein lies the uniqueness of America. …
“What matters is why we came here, and what we do when we come. And what our lives can mean to give our children a greater grasp of the world. A realization of our place in God’s kingdom, and a hope that our lives can be meaningful to fellow human beings, who search as we have for a fuller realization of individuality, freedom, liberty, commonality of purpose, an absence of discrimination, truth, justice, honor and equality of opportunity. In what is still, and what I hope will always be, the greatest nation on earth.”
I’ve never aspired to run for office, but covering a few presidential campaigns produced jealousy over just how much of the country politicians get to experience firsthand and appreciation for how memories of their brief visits to otherwise anonymous communities can still resonate decades into the future.
My hometown of Libertyville hosted John F. Kennedy in October 1960. Many readers my age and older have similar stories in all corners of Illinois with politicians of all stripes. It’s a touch we’re largely losing owing to multimedia and polarization, but hopefully, these brief moments are not altogether gone from Prairie State history.
• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. Follow him on X @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.
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