Raised in a wealthy family of peanut farmers in the southern town of Plains in Georgia, Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree and joined the United States Navy, where he served on submarines. After the death of his father in 1953, Carter left his Naval career and returned home to Georgia to take on the reins of his family’s peanut-growing business. Despite his father’s wealth, Carter inherited comparatively little due to his father’s forgiveness of debts and the division of the estate among the children. Nevertheless, his ambition to expand and grow the Carters’ peanut business was fulfilled. During this period, Carter was motivated to oppose the political climate of racial segregation and support the growing civil rights movement. He became an activist within the Democratic Party. From 1963 to 1967, Carter served in the Georgia State Senate, and in 1970, he was elected as Governor of Georgia, defeating former Governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary on an anti-segregation platform advocating affirmative action for ethnic minorities. Carter remained as Governor until 1975. Despite being little-known outside of Georgia at the start of the campaign, Carter won the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination and entered the presidential race as a dark horse candidate. In the presidential election, Carter defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford in a close election.

On his second day in office, Carter pardoned all the Vietnam War draft evaders. During Carter’s term as president, two new cabinet-level departments, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, were established. He established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II), and the return of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. On the economic front he confronted persistent stagflation, a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and slow growth. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the invasion, Carter escalated the Cold War by ending détente, imposing a grain embargo against the Soviets, enunciating the Carter doctrine, and leading an international boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In 1980, Carter faced a primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy, but he won re-nomination at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Carter lost the general election in an electoral landslide to Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. Polls of historians and political scientists usually rank Carter as a below-average president.

Early life

James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, at the Wise Sanitarium (now the Lillian G. Carter Nursing Center) in Plains, Georgia, a hospital where his mother was employed as a registered nurse. Carter was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.[5] He was the eldest son of Bessie Lillian (née Gordy) and James Earl Carter Sr. Carter is a descendant of English immigrant Thomas Carter, who settled in Virginia in 1635. Numerous generations of Carters lived as cotton farmers in Georgia. Carter is also a descendant of Thomas Cornell, an ancestor of Cornell University’s founder, and is distantly related to Richard Nixon and Bill Gates.[6]

Plains was a boomtown of 600 people at the time of Carter’s birth. Carter’s father was a successful local businessman, who ran a general store, and an investor in farmland. He previously served as a reserve second lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps during World War I.

The family moved several times during Carter Jr.’s infancy.[5] The Carters settled on a dirt road in nearby Archery, which was almost entirely populated by impoverished African American families. They eventually had three more children: Gloria, Ruth, and Billy. Carter got along well with his parents, although his mother worked long hours and was often absent in his childhood. Although Earl was staunchly pro-segregation, he allowed his son to befriend the black farmhands’ children. Carter was an enterprising teenager who was given his own acre of Earl’s farmland where he grew, packaged, and sold peanuts. He also rented out a section of tenant housing that he had purchased.[5]

Education

Carter attended the Plains High School from 1937 to 1941. By that time, the Great Depression had impoverished Archery and Plains, but the family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies, and Earl took a position as a community leader. Young Jimmy was a diligent student with a fondness for reading. A popular anecdote holds that he was passed over for valedictorian after he and his friends skipped school to venture downtown in a hot rod. Carter’s truancy was mentioned in a local newspaper, although it is not clear he would have been valedictorian anyway.[7] Carter’s teacher, Julia Coleman, was an especially strong influence. As an adolescent, Carter played on the Plains High School basketball team; he also joined the Future Farmers of America and developed a lifelong interest in woodworking.

Naval career

Carter had long dreamed of attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In 1941, he started undergraduate coursework in engineering at Georgia Southwestern College in nearby Americus. The following year, he transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and he achieved admission to the Naval Academy in 1943. He was a good student but was seen as reserved and quiet, in contrast to the academy’s culture of aggressive hazing of freshmen. While at the academy, Carter fell in love with his sister Ruth’s friend Rosalynn Smith, whom he would marry shortly after his graduation in 1946.[8] He was a sprint football player for the Navy Midshipmen.[9] Carter graduated 60th out of 820 midshipmen in the class of 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree and was commissioned as an ensign.[10] From 1946 to 1953, Carter and Rosalynn lived in Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, New York and California, during his deployments in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets.[11] In 1948, he began officers’ training for submarine duty and served aboard USS Pomfret. He was promoted to lieutenant junior grade in 1949. In 1951 he became attached to the diesel/electric USS K-1, (a.k.a. USS Barracuda), qualified for command, and served in several duties including Executive Officer.[12]

In 1952, Carter began an association with the US Navy’s fledgling nuclear submarine program, then-led by Captain Hyman G. Rickover. Rickover’s demands on his men and machines were legendary, and Carter later said that, next to his parents, Rickover was the greatest influence on his life.[13] He was sent to the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C. for three-month temporary duty, while Rosalynn moved with their children to Schenectady, New York. On December 12, 1952, an accident with the experimental NRX reactor at Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories caused a partial meltdown resulting in millions of liters of radioactive water flooding the reactor building’s basement and leaving the reactor’s core ruined.[14] Carter was ordered to Chalk River to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor.[15] The painstaking process required each team member to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for a few minutes at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease development of a neutron bomb.

In March 1953 Carter began nuclear power school, a six-month non-credit course covering nuclear power plant operation at Union College in Schenectady,[11] with the intent to eventually work aboard USS Seawolf, which was planned to be one of the first two U.S. nuclear submarines. However, Carter’s father died two months before construction of Seawolf began, and Carter sought and obtained a release from active duty to enable him to take over the family peanut business. Deciding to leave Schenectady proved difficult. Settling after moving so much, Rosalynn had grown comfortable with their life. Returning to small-town life in Plains seemed “a monumental step backward,” she said later. On the other hand, Carter felt restricted by the rigidity of the military and yearned to assume a path more like his father’s. Carter left active duty on October 9, 1953.[17][18] He served in the inactive Navy Reserve until 1961, and left the service with the rank of lieutenant.

His awards included: the American Campaign Medal; World War II Victory Medal; China Service Medal; and National Defense Service Medal.[20]

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Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of his predecessor’s administration, and left office with considerable popularity.[1] As a Coolidge biographer wrote: “He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength”.

From 1948 to 2018, mainstream scholars have ranked Coolidge as a below-average president. He is praised by advocates of smaller government and laissez-faire, while supporters of an active central government generally view him less favorably, though most praise his stalwart support of racial equality.[3]

Birth and family history

John Calvin Coolidge Jr. was born in Plymouth Notch, Windsor County, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, the only U.S. president to be born on Independence Day. He was the elder of the two children of John Calvin Coolidge Sr. (1845–1926) and Victoria Josephine Moor (1846–1885). Coolidge Senior engaged in many occupations and developed a statewide reputation as a prosperous farmer, storekeeper, and public servant. He held various local offices, including justice of the peace and tax collector and served in the Vermont House of Representatives as well as the Vermont Senate.[4] Coolidge’s mother was the daughter of a Plymouth Notch farmer. She was chronically ill and died, perhaps from tuberculosis, when Coolidge was twelve years old. His younger sister, Abigail Grace Coolidge (1875–1890), died at the age of fifteen, probably of appendicitis, when Coolidge was eighteen. Coolidge’s father married a Plymouth schoolteacher in 1891, and lived to the age of eighty.[5]

Coolidge’s family had deep roots in New England; his earliest American ancestor, John Coolidge, emigrated from Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, England, around 1630 and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts.[6] Another ancestor, Edmund Rice, arrived at Watertown in 1638. Coolidge’s great-great-grandfather, also named John Coolidge, was an American military officer in the Revolutionary War and one of the first selectmen of the town of Plymouth.[7] His grandfather Calvin Galusha Coolidge served in the Vermont House of Representatives.[8] Coolidge was also a descendant of Samuel Appleton, who settled in Ipswich and led the Massachusetts Bay Colony during King Philip’s War.[9]

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She was elected to the Wasilla city council in 1992 and became mayor of Wasilla in 1996. In 2003, after an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor, she was appointed chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, responsible for overseeing the state’s oil and gas fields for safety and efficiency. In 2006, she became the youngest person and the first woman to be elected Governor of Alaska.

Since her resignation as governor, she has endorsed and campaigned for the Tea Party movement as well as several candidates in multiple election cycles, prominently including Donald Trump for president in 2016. From 2010 to 2015, she provided political commentary for Fox News. On April 3, 2014, Palin premiered her TV show, Amazing America with Sarah Palin, on the Sportsman Channel, which ran until February 12, 2015.

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Romney was born to American parents living in the Mormon colonies in Mexico; events during the Mexican Revolution forced his family to flee back to the United States when he was a child. The family lived in several states and ended up in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they struggled during the Great Depression. Romney worked in a number of jobs, served as a Mormon missionary in the United Kingdom, and attended several colleges in the U.S. but did not graduate from any of them. In 1939 he moved to Detroit and joined the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, where he served as the chief spokesman for the automobile industry during World War II and headed a cooperative arrangement in which companies could share production improvements. He joined Nash-Kelvinator in 1948, and became the chief executive of its successor, American Motors Corporation, in 1954. There he turned around the struggling firm by focusing all efforts on the compact Rambler car. Romney mocked the products of the “Big Three” automakers as “gas-guzzling dinosaurs” and became one of the first high-profile, media-savvy business executives. Devoutly religious, he presided over the Detroit Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Having entered politics by participating in a state constitutional convention to rewrite the Michigan Constitution during 1961–1962, Romney was elected Governor of Michigan in 1962. Re-elected by increasingly large margins in 1964 and 1966, he worked to overhaul the state’s financial and revenue structure, greatly expanding the size of state government and introducing Michigan’s first state income tax. Romney was a strong supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement. He briefly represented moderate Republicans against conservative Republican Barry Goldwater during the 1964 U.S. presidential election. He requested the intervention of federal troops during the 1967 Detroit riot.

Initially a front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 1968 election, he proved an ineffective campaigner and fell behind Richard Nixon in polls. After a mid-1967 remark that his earlier support for the Vietnam War had been due to a “brainwashing” by U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Vietnam, his campaign faltered even more and he withdrew from the contest in early 1968. After Nixon’s election as president, he appointed Romney as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Romney’s ambitious plans for housing production increases for the poor, and for open housing to desegregate suburbs, were modestly successful but often thwarted by Nixon. Romney left the administration at the start of Nixon’s second term in 1973. Returning to private life, he advocated volunteerism and public service, and headed the National Center for Voluntary Action and its successor organizations from 1973 through 1991. He also served as a regional representative of the Twelve within his church.

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Raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan by his parents George and Lenore Romney, he spent 2 1⁄2 years in France as a Mormon missionary, starting in 1966. He married Ann Davies in 1969, and they have five sons. By 1971, he had participated in the political campaigns of both parents. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brigham Young University in 1971 and a joint JD–MBA from Harvard University in 1975.  Romney became a management consultant and in 1977 secured a position at Bain & Company. Later serving as Bain’s chief executive officer (CEO), he helped lead the company out of a financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded and led the spin-off company Bain Capital, a highly profitable private equity investment firm that became one of the largest of its kind in the nation. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) throughout his adult life, he served as the bishop of his ward (head of his local congregation) and then as stake president near Boston.

After stepping down from Bain Capital and his local leadership role in the LDS Church, Romney ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 Massachusetts election for U.S. Senate. After losing to longtime incumbent Ted Kennedy, he resumed his position at Bain Capital. Years later, a successful stint as President and CEO of the then-struggling Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics led to a relaunch of his political career. Elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney helped develop and then signed into law the Massachusetts health care reform legislation, the first of its kind in the nation. It provided near-universal health insurance access through state-level subsidies and individual mandates to purchase insurance. He also presided over the elimination of a projected $1.2–1.5 billion deficit through a combination of spending cuts, increased fees and closing corporate tax loopholes. He did not seek reelection in 2006, instead focusing on his campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Though he won several primaries and caucuses, the eventual nominee was Senator John McCain. Romney’s considerable net worth, estimated in 2012 at $190–250 million, helped finance his political campaigns prior to 2012.

Romney was the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election. He won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, becoming the first Mormon to be the presidential nominee of a major party. He was defeated by incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 2012 general election, losing the electoral college by 332–206. The popular vote between the two major-party nominees was 51%–47% in Obama’s favor. Romney kept a low profile for a while after the election, but later became more visible politically.

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