Jimmy Carter and NC were a perfect match — until tobacco and UNC came between them

In North Carolina’s small towns and countryside, Jimmy Carter looked like a different kind of Democrat in 1976 — the first major presidential candidate from the Deep South since before the Civil War, a political moderate and a devout Southern Baptist.

Carter would accomplish what no Democratic presidential candidate has done in nearly a half century since — carry North Carolina by a landslide.

But the honeymoon would not last.

After four years in the White House, many Tar Heels soured on Carter, as his administration clashed with the state’s leaders over smoking and tobacco and efforts to end the vestiges of segregation in the University of North Carolina system.

“I thought the world of him personally, and still do,” former four-term Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt told his biographer, Gary Pearce, several years ago. “But I thought that a lot of the people in the White House with him didn’t work with Congress very effectively and that he didn’t necessarily handle his politics particularly well.’’

Carter died Sunday at age 100, McClatchy and other news outlets reported. No cause was announced. He had entered hospice care in February 2023. Tributes poured in after his death from members of both parties, including Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who called him “the epitome of what it means to be a true public servant in and out of office” and “a kind, calm, giving and sincere man of faith.”

Before Carter, the Democratic outlook in North Carolina looked as desolate as a moonscape. The two previous Democratic presidential nominees — liberals Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern — had failed to crack 30% of the state’s vote.

Carter first demonstrated his ability to connect with North Carolina voters in the state’s Democratic primary in March 1976. The primary featured an Old South/New South confrontation between Carter and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, best known for his segregationist stands.

Wallace called Carter “a McGovern, card-carrying liberal’’ and blasted him for hanging a portrait of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the Georgia Capitol when he was governor. Wallace called King “a communist-associated civil rights agitator.’’

Carter gladly took credit for hanging the portrait when he spoke at St. Augustine’s College, a historically Black campus in Raleigh.

Carter easily defeated Wallace, trouncing him by a 54% to 35% margin, winning 86 counties and helping end Wallace’s national ambitions.

Baptist faith and Southern accent

Part of it was Carter’s cultural appeal – from his Southern accent to the fact that his sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, an evangelist and faith healer, lived in Fayetteville.

It was during the North Carolina primary that Carter first talked at length about his deep faith and what he called his “profound religious experience’’ in 1967. In Winston-Salem, Carter said, “I spent more time on my knees the four years I was governor in the seclusion of a little private room in the governor’s office, than I did in all the rest of my life,’’ according to journalist Jules Whitcover. Such talk won him converts in the South, but it made some people in the north uncomfortable.

When he returned to North Carolina as president, he would be greeted by such hand-painted signs as “Jesus Loves You Jimmy,’’ propped up against an idle tractor in a Wilson County tobacco field.

Carter was a Sunday school-teaching Southern Baptist in a region where Protestants dominated,” wrote Tom Eamon, a political scientist at East Carolina University. “North Carolinians welcomed the symbolism of a God-fearing man walking out of a small-town Baptist church on Sunday morning, a candidate of faith and deep abiding morality.’’

In the fall, Tar Heel politicians readily climbed on board the Carter train. In the past, leading Democrats fled from their presidential nominee for fear it would jeopardize their own chances. But in 1976 they scrambled to appear on the stage with him and used his likeness in their campaign brochures. They were all Jimmy Carter Democrats.

“Won’t it be great to have a president who doesn’t speak with an accent?’’ Carter would say with his famous grin.

Among Carter’s admirers was Hunt, who appreciated Carter’s ability to build a broad coalition that included African Americans and conservative rural whites, and who enthusiastically embraced him when he ran for governor in 1976.

Carter carried North Carolina with 55% of the vote over Republican Gerald Ford. No Democratic presidential nominee since has won a majority in the state, let alone a landslide like Carter. (Democrat Barack Obama carried the state in 2008 with a 49.7% plurality.)

But Carter’s popularity in North Carolina would soon hit turbulence.

Tobacco flap

On Jan. 11, 1978, Joseph Califano, Carter’s secretary of health, education and welfare, launched the most serious anti-smoking effort ever, saying cigarettes were killing 320,000 Americans each year from heart and lung cancer. He called for anti-smoking public service TV commercials and an increase in the federal tobacco tax, and urged school superintendents to launch their own anti-smoking efforts.

In the 1970s, tobacco was still king in North Carolina — holding the same privileged position as oil in Texas or automobile manufacturing in Michigan. The state not only grew the most tobacco, but its factories also produced the most cigarettes. Many of North Carolina’s leading colleges, hospitals and foundations were founded with tobacco money, and money from cigarette profits greased the state’s political machinery.

The anti-smoking campaign created a political backlash. Soon there were bumper stickers that read: “Califano is Dangerous to My Health’’ and “Califano Blows Smoke.’’ Jim Graham, the long-time agriculture secretary, hung a sign in his office that read: “Thank You for Smoking.”

The state’s two top Democrats, Hunt and Sen. Robert Morgan, met with Carter in February 1978, to warn him that the anti-smoking campaign was damaging both his reelection chances and the party’s efforts to unseat Republican Sen. Jesse Helms that year.

Califano refused to back off, despite gentle hints from the president. Carter seemed to undercut his Cabinet secretary during two appearances in North Carolina. Speaking in Winston-Salem in March 1978, he declared that it was an honor to be in the “greatest tobacco state in the world.’’ And in August while speaking in Wilson, he talked about his family producing “the two greatest crops in my life – peanuts and tobacco.’’

“I asked Joe Califano to come down here with me,” Carter quipped in Wilson. “But he told me that North Carolina makes more bricks than cigarettes.’’

Califano would later say Carter fired him because of pressure from North Carolina Democrats and other tobacco-state politicians. A decade later, Califano said, Carter apologized to him, saying that his secretary was right on the issue.

“You don’t see me crying,’’ Hunt said when asked about Califano’s ouster.

But tobacco was not the only point of contention between the Carter administration and North Carolina.

Segregation and UNC

In a yearslong dispute, the Health, Education and Welfare department pressured North Carolina to eliminate the vestiges of segregation in the 16-campus UNC System. The campuses had been desegregated for two decades, but most Black students still attended historically Black colleges and universities, and most white students attended historically white institutions. There was broad agreement that the facilities at the five HBCUs in the system were inferior to those on the 11 white campuses.

The Carter administration wanted to eliminate duplication, such as the nursing programs at UNC-Greensboro and at nearby N.C. A&T State University, an HBCU. Hunt countered by agreeing to forgo a proposed tax cut and investing the $40 million into improving the HBCUs.

To influence public opinion, Califano sent top HEW officials to North Carolina for a well-publicized tour of the historically Black campuses, pointing out the leaky roofs and inadequate laboratories. The governor said he was troubled by what the federal officials found, but privately was upset with the visit, which he viewed as unwarranted interference.

This was, as historian William Link wrote, “an exceedingly complex story that defies any easy characterization as a conflict between integrationists and Southern segregationists.’’

Both sides dug in, and the issue was not resolved until Republican President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, with Helms strongly lobbying for the federal government to reach a settlement that favored UNC.

Despite the conflict, top North Carolina Democrats maintained cordial relations with Carter. Hunt was photographed jogging with the president at Camp David. He supported Carter in 1980, against his Democratic primary challenge by Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Carter’s strong support for the Panama Canal Treaty — a process begun under previous administrations — would have consequences in North Carolina. In the treaty, the U.S. agreed to turn over control of the canal to Panama.

The canal was also used to help defeat Sen. Morgan, a Carter ally and Canal Treaty supporter, in 1980. The Helms forces ran a campaign focusing heavily on Morgan’s support for the treaty and tying him to Carter.

Reagan, the former California governor, carried North Carolina in 1980 by a 49.3% to 47.18% margin. It is impossible to say how much the tobacco and UNC issues hurt Carter, because there were other factors in the race, including the Iran hostage crisis, a gas shortage and a troubled economy.

But Carter’s rise — in which North Carolina played a part — was, according to Whitcover, “a signal that first-class political citizenship had come to Dixie.’’

This story was originally published December 29, 2024 at 4:37 PM with the headline "Jimmy Carter and NC were a perfect match — until tobacco and UNC came between them."