“Then You Admit He’s Shrewd”: Miss Lillian, Amy’s Lemonade Stand, and Jimmy Carter’s Southern Populism. (Doonesbury and the Carter Years, Part IV)

During the 1970s, the Walden College football team’s huddle was a frequent site of political debate and a forum for one of Doonesbury’s central characters to express his personal brand of Republican politics. On 10 October 1976, Walden’s star quarterback B.D. used the huddle to solicit donations for his favorite charity, the Young Republican Club. When one player refuses to contribute because he’s “not even voting,” his teammate Terry, a self-professed “Carter man,” chastizes him for not supporting the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter. Terry is sold on Carter because he’s “real shrewd.” Moreover, Terry notes,  “If [Carter’s] elected, government will become as full of compassion and love and decency as the American people themselves, including lots of folks like me!” 

“But Terry,” Zonker points out, “you’re a mean, selfish bigot.”

“Then you admit he’s shrewd.” 

Welcome back to our look at how Doonesbury covered Jimmy Carter. Last time, we saw how Garry Trudeau used the voice of Baby Kim – herself a naive newcomer to American political culture – to spoof the Carter campaign’s framing of the candidate as a political outsider, untainted by the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, and Carter’s reputation as a political flip-flopper. This time out, we’ll see how GBT addressed a central pillar of that “outsider” persona during Carter’s 1976 Presidential campaign: his down-home, country-boy image. Carter’s brother Billy – a self-avowed “redneck” through-and-through – was arguably the most prominent representative of the Carter family to embody a particular set of Southern/rural cultural tropes, notably with his “Billy Beer” marketing deal. During the 1976 campaign, however, Trudeau focused on two Carter women, mother Lillian and daughter Amy, who, each in her own way, fed Carter’s image as a down-home alternative to button-down Establishment politics. 

Terry’s vision of what a Carter presidency would do for the country is a close paraphrase of Carter’s stump speech:

 … I want to see above all the same thing that you want, and this is something I say often, I mean it, I want to see us have a nation once again with a government that is good and honest and decent and truthful and fair and competent and idealistic, that is compassionate and is filled with love, as are the American people.

The passage became the spine of the conclusion to Hunter Thompson’s generally-enthusiastic profile of the candidate. Carter’s faith in the essential goodness of the American people resonated with Thompson and prompted him, perhaps for the last time, to overcome his core cynicism about electoral politics after Nixon and see a mainstream candidate as someone who could give good people the leadership they deserved. 

Presenting one’s politics as embodying the core values ostensibly shared by an imagined people is an inherently populist political tactic, and Carter ran a decidedly populist campaign. In our times, the word “populist” is most often associated with politicians like Donald Trump or Jair Bolsinaro, right-wing leaders who cultivate the worst and basest instincts of the masses as a means by which to attain and hold onto power. That said, appealing to the common values – and common sense – of everyday citizens in order to advance a left-friendly agenda has a long history. A common trope in populist politics of many stripes is an inherent distrust of expertise in favor of the “common sense” of everyday people. Trump and the larger right’s denigration of public health authorities during the COVID pandemic is an obvious example of this particular dynamic. GBT saw a similar tendency at work in the Carter campaign – though not in anywhere near as toxic a form as it has taken among mainstream Republicans today – and used it to poke fun at Carter. 

A weird thing about Trump’s populist appeal is that his biography and lifestyle have very little in common with the everyday people he claims to represent; he grew up rich, went to an Ivy, and it would be hard to imagine him, like his immediate Republican predecessor, gaining a degree of rural credibility by clearing brush or mountain biking. (Though he was perfectly comfortable stepping into the WWE ring, not something usually associated with an Ivy pedigree.) Jimmy Carter may have overplayed his history on the farm and underplayed the fact that he was a nuclear engineer, but he was – among other things – the real deal, a genuine country boy. But, as Playboy’s Robert Scheer noted in a profile accompanying his famous interview with the candidate, Carter “undoubtedly [loved] down-home fish fries. But another part of him [wanted] to exploit the hell out of them.”

And he did. Carter’s campaign “focused almost exclusively on [his] folksy roots,” emphasizing his “down-home” image: I clearly remember that as a kid I saw a newspaper story illustrated with a photo of the man in blue jeans, ankle-deep in peanuts with a shovel in hand. Highlighting Carter’s rural roots was a political choice, but it also reflected a larger cultural dynamic. At the start of the decade, Deliverance framed the rural South as an inherently dark and dangerous place; by the end of the 70s, “redneck chic” had permeated American popular culture.

…trendy white Americans across the country affected phony Southern drawls, dressed up in Levi’s and cowboy boots, sipped Lone Star and Pabst longnecks, tuned into Waylon and Willie, and hankered for meals of fried pork chops, grits, greens, and biscuits and gravy. 

Patrick Huber “A Short History of ‘Redneck:’ The Fashioning of a Southern White Masculine Identity.”

Jimmy called “Miss” Lillian Carter, the family matriarch, “the most influential woman in my life.” She played a key role in reinforcing the campaign’s folksiness. She was a remarkable woman, a nurse who, in 1966, as a 68-year-old widow, volunteered with the Peace Corps in India, working with leprosy patients and providing people with contraceptive resources and information. Miss Lillian, whom some journalists called “the most liberal woman in Georgia” had always followed her own path; she supported integration and was a delegate for LBJ at the 1964 Democratic convention, even as her husband opposed it. She was a devout Baptist, who, according to one report, founded a Sunday-morning Bible study group in lieu of attending regular service; she boasted about enjoying “a lot of things the ladies of the church think I shouldn’t … I smoke when I want to. I take a drink late in the evening.” 

Miss Lillian’s forthrightness – she once said that “there was really nothing outstanding about Jimmy as a boy,” and thought daughter Gloria was the smartest of her children – made her a favorite source for reporters looking for a colorful quote. That said, Scheer worried that Miss Lillian would be angered to know he had written yet another article highlighting how “friendly and natural” she could “[come] off in print.” Miss Lillian’s openness existed in tension with a genuine prickliness, and while she became something of a media darling, she held reporters in disregard. One oft-repeated story has her defining a “white lie” to a reporter: “Remember when I said ‘Welcome to Plains’ and how good it is to see you? That’s a white lie.” According to Scheer, she was especially leery of women reporters, whom she saw as “pushy,” but her general distrust of the media came through clearly when she told him that she “[didn’t] trust anybody” to tell her family’s story. 

Carter’s down-home image, and the role of the Carter family women in shaping it, were all central to the lead-up to his first Doonesbury appearance, which took place over a two-week-long arc that ran in September 1976. The strips focus on a pair of advisors who brief the candidate at his farm in Plains, Georgia on the eve of the presidential debates. The first, Sutton, is a foreign policy expert; he’s followed by Arthur Rumsey, a domestic policy advisor who used to work for Lyndon Johnson. 

In Trudeau’s account of Carter’s run, Miss Lillian becomes a gatekeeper between Establishment policy wonks and the inner sanctum of the campaign, and a vocal critic of the expertise these men bring with them. When Sutton arrives, she’s unimpressed; her son doesn’t need men like him to “tell him what’s wrong with the world,” it just needs “a lot more love … Then we wouldn’t have any Vietnam, or Ireland, or Lebanon or anything.” Miss Lillian’s belief that she has “known for years” what policy experts fail to grasp underlines Carter’s implicit connection to the common people, and the punchline hammers the point home: when Miss Lillian finally lets Sutton in, she tells him he could find the Democratic nominee for the presidency “out back, catchin’ frogs.” 

Sutton’s domestic-policy counterpart, Rumsey, also needs to get past Miss Lillian’s watchful eye before he can meet the candidate, and again, we see GBT poking fun at the campaign’s attempts to distance the candidate from the policy establishment, specifically here the people who had dragged America into tragedy in Southeast Asia. Carter regretted his lateness in criticizing the war; Trudeau reminds readers that as the campaign wore on, Carter tried to keep a healthy distance between himself and the policymakers responsible for that debacle. Miss Lillian recalls Rumsey being “a former LBJ advisor,” but he’s quick to disavow that part of his CV, telling her that he was “a DOMESTIC advisor … I didn’t have anything to do with the war.” Again, the central idea is that Carter represented an alternative to the political trauma of the recent past, and again Miss Lillian’s answer reflects a particular Southern charm: “Land’s sake, Arthur, I don’t care!”

Once they get past the watchful eye of the matriarch, Sutton and Rumsey must contend with another Carter woman who helped reinforce Carter’s rural cred. Miss Lillian spent much of the 1976 presidential campaign taking care of Amy, the eleven-year-old future First Daughter, whom she called “my heart.” Even as a child, Amy contributed to Carter’s down-home image thanks to the lemonade stand that she ran outside the Carter home. 

While reporters groused about Amy “raising the price to 10 cents at the stand in front of her parents’ house,” in Trudeau’s telling, Amy’s neighborhood enterprise becomes a small-time extortion operation targeting visiting dignitaries. A purchase of a glass of lemonade is the price of an audience with the candidate; when Sutton initially refuses a glass, she threatens to “tell Daddy.” (Unlike Miss Lillian and Carter himself, whom GBT, in keeping with his general practice with public figures in those years, depicted as off-panel voices, Amy is visible in the strip, complete with the rounded eyes meant to depict childlike innocence). For his part, Carter is equally amused and proud of how Amy has soaked “just about every visitor we’ve had” for fifty cents, unaware that she’s charging three dollars (sixteen bucks in today’s money) a glass. Sutton delivers a word of warning as he meets his counterpart Rumsey, on his way to meet the candidate: “Watch out for the kid with the coin-changer.”

Like Scheer, Garry Trudeau understood that Jimmy Carter had a complex relationship with his “country-boy” persona. It was no doubt a genuine part of who he was, but it was also something his populist campaign deliberately manipulated to sell a candidate to an electorate looking for something new after a decided loss of faith in the political establishment. Two years after Carter took the Oath of Office, The Dukes of Hazzard, a television adventure-comedy-drama about two “good ol’ boys” from Carter’s home state, debuted on CBS; by the time of his 1980 reelection campaign, the film Urban Cowboy helped spark a newfound mainstream popularity for pop-country music that saw artists like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton enjoy success with new audiences: peak redneck chic. Carter’s campaign and the media surrounding it seized the emerging mainstreaming of Southern rural culture as a force that they could harness as a political tool, and “cast” Miss Lillian and even young Amy into appropriate roles; Garry Trudeau managed to perfectly capture the way Carter balanced conflicting dynamics of genuine Southern hospitality and cynical manipulation. Terry was right: the man was shrewd.

Next time out, Carter, Sutton and Ramsey hash out policy specifics and a softball game breaks out. Stay tuned.