Plains talk: what Jimmy Carter's first bid for public office tells us about politics today.

Here's a surprise. Of course a book by Jimmy Carter* would be serious and high-minded, But this book is also well-written, sometimes funny, intelligent without being preachy, and canny about practical politics in a way that Carter himself, as president, rarely seemed to be. Turning Point is a short book compared to the tomes Carter has produced about his years in office, but it is the best thing he has ever written. I can imagine it being read years from now for what it shows about American life at a certain place and time. It is a shame that Carter could not have written such a book 20 years ago, when it could have affected our view of him as a politician. But it probably would have been impossible for him to do so even if he had tried, since the success of this book depends on a sense of historic and personal distance that Carter could not have developed until now.

The idea behind Turning Point may not sound promising. It concerns a several-month period in the fall of 1962, in which Carter decided to run for the Georgia State Senate. He encountered unusual obstacles (which make up most of the book's narrative), squeaked by them, and eventually won. Carter uses this race mainly as a vehicle for discussing two much larger historical trends. One was the transformation of state politi'cs, especially Southern politics, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its famous "one man, one vote" ruling, in the Baker v. Carr case in 1962. The other was the challenge to localized political tyranny and oppression--again, especially in the South--that began in the sixties. This challenge involved the "one man" ruling but included many other forces, most notably the civil rights movement later in the decade. In discussing these subjects, Carter has not produced a "policy" book in the conventional sense. He does not offer six-point action plans or detailed proposals for reform. But simply by describing vividly how things were in America's recent past, the book alters our sense of today's politics. Some achievements that we now take for granted--that American citizens are allowed to vote if they register and show up on election day--seem more impressive in light of Carter's tale. Other problems seem more intractable and depressing, since the book shows how long we have tried to cope with them.

Farewell to farms

In the first few chapters, Carter carefully and effectively explains how the pre-Baker v. Carr political universe worked. Starting in the late 19th century, as the Reconstruction era came to an end, the states of the old Confederacy developed various schemes to wrest power from freed blacks and return it to a conservative, white, rurally-based elite. Jim Crow laws, which denied blacks social and legal fights, were a major part of this process. A gerrymandered political system, which minimized the power of all urban voters, was also crucial.

In Georgia, this approach took the form of the "county unit" system. From the late 1800s until 1962, Georgia legislators and executive officials were elected under a system that gave each of the state's counties roughly equal voting power, with little regard to population size. (Technically, the largest handful of counties had six "unit votes" each; a group of middle-sized counties had four unit votes each; and more than a hundred tiny counties could cast two unit votes each.) A vote in populous Fulton County--of which Atlanta is a part--had about onefourth as much weight as an average vote in the state as a whole. It was as if the U.S. electoral college gave California six votes--and Wyoming, Delaware, Alaska, and Idaho two votes each, so that together they could outweigh California.

This system was skewed against the working class in general--rural politics was usually dominated by local business interests--and against blacks in particular, since it was impossible for them to vote in much of the hinterland. The natural result was to push Southern politics in a more racist and conservative direction than would otherwise have been the case. As late as 1958, a candidate could run successfully for governor of Georgia on the slogan, "No, Not One!" This referred to the number of black children who would be allowed into public schools or universities alongside whites. (As Carter points out, however, this same governor, Ernest Vandiver, complied when federal courts finally ordered the University of Georgia to admit two black students. Governors George Wallace in Alabama and Ross Barnett in Mississippi met similar orders with calls for "massive resistance.")

It now seems obvious and commonplace that governments should run on the "one man, one vote" principle, but Carter shows how revolutionary the concept was for the Georgia of 30 years ago. The Baker v. Carr ruling came down in March of 1962. It ordered states to reapportion their legislatures and revise their voting systems before the elections that same fall that is, with lightning speed, by normal political standards. (Reapportioning the U.S. Congress, after each decennial census, takes more than a year.)

The Georgia state government, like many others, proposed a number of stalling ploys, fake reapportionment plans, and other ways to avoid the shift in political power that the "one man" ruling was designed to cause. "The beneficiaries of the [old] system were the ones now charged with the responsibility of changing it," Carter says. "At the same time, they would be reducing drastically the relative voting strength of their own constituents. It was understandable that governors and legislators would do everything possible to circumvent or postpone the effect of the court's mandate." But federal judges rejected the bogus plans, one after another, and by late summer the state's politics was thrown wide open. Incumbent politicians suddenly were without districts; new seats were opened up. In these circumstances, a few weeks before the election, Carter decided to run.

Half a dozen years earlier, Carter had returned to his family's farm in Georgia, from his career in the Navy. One of the real achievements of this book is to make Carter plausible as a farmer--really, a peanutbusiness operator--in a way he has never been before. The autobiography he produced when planning to run for the presidency, Why Not the Best?, talked extensively about his rural childhood and his peanutgrowing days in Plains. But because it was so obviously a campaign document designed to promote his honest, Lincolnesque virtues when the smell of Nixon lingered in the air, the book left me feeling suspicious. It was impossible to know whether Carter was poor-boying it for effect, like AI Gore now talking about his "rural" youth or Dan Quayle about his hard-knocks training in the public schools.

In this new book, Carter refers to his farm life in an off-hand and basically believable way, as part of his explanation of the pros and cons of running for office. For instance, he says that the final reapportionment decision came at an awkward time for him.

He had to decide, in early September, whether he would make the ran. But:

During this harvest period we worked around the clock, buying and processing peanuts and ginning cotton. When they weren't in school, our three boys worked long hours with Rosalynn and me. For days at a time, we ate all our meals at the warehouse, and only went home for a brief shower every day or so. It was an incredibly busy season, during which we earned most of our annual income .... There was little time left for starting a new political career, and I was afraid that even to broach such a subject during that season might have precipitated a well-justified family revolution.

Nonetheless, Carter went ahead. He emphasizes in this book something muted in his earlier renditions of his life: that he came from a politically-active lineage and turned more or less naturally to politics. His father had served in the state legislature, and after he died Carter's mother, "Miss Lillian," was the party's choice to succeed him. (She declined.) In leaving the relatively cosmopolitan life of the Navy to return to southwest Georgia, Carter seemed always to have politics in mind. Before 1962, he had already become involved in school boards, with civic organizations, and--significantly--in resisting the White Citizens Council, which in turn was resisting integration. With the state senate thrown into turmoil he saw a bigger chance.

Most of the book is a narrative about what happened to Carter when he ran. It is, in a sense, a detective story with a climactic courtroom-showdown scene, so I won't give its crucial points away. It turns on the ability of one local tyrant, a political boss named Joe Hurst, to bend the rules of politics his way.

The district Carter ran in was the kind of rural fiefdom common at the time but rare today. Half its citizens received welfare payments. Joe Hurst delivered the welfare checks personally, to reinforce the sense of personal fealty to him. In return, he expected complete political obedience. In particular, he expected his dependents to vote according to his order-and to keep on voting, even after they had died or moved away. (The book contains intricate details on how the "graveyard voting" system worked back then.)

Carter, unsurprisingly enough, was not the boss's favorite for the election. The boss supported a man named Homer Moore, who had, in a sense, already been elected to the seat. Before the "one man" ruling, one state senator had represented three tiny, depopulated counties near Carter's home. They had worked out a rotation system in which the counties took tums naming the district's senator. Early in 1962, before it was clear that the reapportionment ruling would stick, Homer Moore had won a turn in the Senate under this scheme. After reapportionment, his county was combined with Sumter County, where Carter lived.

Moore appealed to voters with newspaper advertisements that now seem heartbreakingly quaint, telling them that he had been elected "fair and square" and deserved the seat. "If you believe in fair play, give Mr. Homer Moore the courtesy of serving the term he has already won," his ads said. Carter's ads sound like the man we came to know in the late seventies: "My opponent, to get your sympathy, is insinuating to the voters ... that he has already been elected as your Senator and that it is unfair for anyone from Sumter County to run against him. This is not true."

Homer Moore and his patron, Joe Hurst, did not bank solely on the electorate's courtesy. They went in for flagrant, large-scale fraud on election day--and won. Carter fought back with clever legal and political ploys, but the outcome remained uncertain until the following January, when Georgia's first "one man" Senate convened. After many hair's-breadth escapes, Carter was sworn in as a freshman senator.

Georgia on his mind

Why did Carter bother to write about this now, and why should anyone bother to read it? He says he wrote about the episode because of its explicit political lessons, concerning reapportionment, equal representation, and voter fraud. But the most enjoyable parts of the book are the indirect glimpses and casual descriptions it offers of a way of life that has vanished in a few decades' time.

Carter has shown signs of this descriptive gift before. In the most memorable part of Why Not the Best?, he recalled listening to the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight when he was a boy. The Rural Electrification Administration had not yet wired Carter's part of Georgia, so the family attached the radio to the car battery and listened from the porch. A group of local black people also stood outside and listened to the blow-by-blow account. After Louis knocked out Schmeling, whom Hitler embraced as a symbol of Aryan superiority, the blacks walked off quietly--and then, from the distance, the young Carter heard cheers and whoops go up.

This scene has no match in Turning Point, but countless little vignettes evoke an isolated life that has not survived the coming of TV networks, airplane travel, and a more homogenized national culture. In introducing the characters in his drama, Carter is always pointing out that one of them is the uncle of another, or that someone else was in cahoots with a neighbor's third cousin:

It is sometimes difficult for non-Southerners to understand how stable the population of rural communities had been since European settlers first moved into the areas five or six generations earlier. Most of our family members were direct descendants of these pioneers, mostly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the intermarriages and blood kinships in the neighboring towns were extensive and intricate. Rosalynn was one of the few such female residents in Plains who was not related to me, at least within the last 120 years or so. Later, when Sam Nunn was elected to the U.S. Senate during my term as governor, The Atlanta Journal ran a front page article describing how his. grandfather and my grandmother were first cousins.

Although never known as a humorist, Carter has a wry tone in much of the book. For instance, he describes the power of the Democratic party in the days before the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" peeled white voters away: "Since there was no viable Republican party except for a small coterie of political opportunists who distributed national patronage when a member of their party was in the White House, a Democratic nomination for office was tantamount to election. The word 'tantamount' was in fact in the vocabularies of even illiterate adults and small children."

At the end of his book, when it is time to spell out the political messages, Carter's points are subtler than those we associate with his time in office--and truer than much of what we hear from the usual political "experts."

One of the messages concerns familiar and unloved institutions. Lawsuits, intrusive federal judges, detailed regulations from Washington that affect how things work in your home town--by the nineties all of these things have come to seem like headaches. Readers of this magazine are familiar with examples of lawyers and regulators run wild. But Carter reminds us, in vivid detail, of the times and circumstances when outside "interference" was a godsend. If it had not been for an intrusive Supreme Court, citizens would not have had an equal right to vote. If it had not been for persistent and brave lawyers, bosses like Joe Hurst would have continued to get away with stuffing ballot boxes and sending the graveyard in to vote. There are local imbalances of power in today's America--in company towns and mining communities, in organizations that refuse to give minorities a chance--and outside "interference" remains the underdog's only hope.

At the same time, Carter is aware of the complications of reform. For his own political career, it was an unalloyed blessing when Joe Hurst's political machine was broken up. As a born reformer, Carter naturally feels that the end of "boss" politics has been a step toward better government. But he also says something insightful about the cost of this kind of progress. Even though Joe Hurst was a crook, "there is little doubt ... that Joe Hurst and his wife Mary, knew every black and white citizen in Quitman County .... Whatever criticism his fellow citizens might level at him, they all acknowledge that 'Joe took care of his people.' "Now that the Hursts of the political world are gone:

State officials are no longer as willing to concentrate government services like roads, schools, and job opportunities in the small counties. More important, the end of county bossism has resulted in a more impersonal and less caring relationship between local officials and their constituents. In the old days, everyone knew where to go with a problem, and the local boss had direct access to state officials, who had to be sensitive to his requests in order to get the unit votes he could deliver. Now, it is more difficult to understand the political chain of command or to follow it to a favorable decision.

Carter sounds atypically soft-headed about the bosses' ability to "concentrate government services" in small counties--that is, pure porkbarreling of the sort that Senator Robert Byrd has recently demonstrated by forcing federal agencies to move to West Virginia. But Carter is obviously talking about something real when he says that depersonalized, modern, bureaucratized government can be less responsive than old-style bossism.

Carter offers a similarly mixed and realistic perspective on race relations in general. In some ways, the America of 1992 is light-years ahead of the America in which Carter first ran for the Senate. (Thirty years ago when a black voter tried to register in Carter's home town, the registrar drove him away with a gun.) In other, obvious ways, race remains America's central problem. For instance, he says that "When I first ran for the Georgia Senate, there were many black families who owned their own farms and the implements needed to produce a crop." Now, as farm ownership has become more concentrated and corporatized, independent black farmers have virtually disappeared. "We did not realize at the time that the very act of solving one set of problems does not end all difficulties but rather changes their shape."

This summary of Carter's message may sound discouraging, because he obviously does not have prescriptions for all the racial and governmental problems he can diagnose. But at times when we're all short of answers, what is left is living one's life decently. With this book, as with everything else he's done since leaving office. Carter sets an example of a life lived well.