How the US has changed in Jimmy Carter’s lifetime

Already the longest-lived of the 45 men to serve as US president, Jimmy Carter has reached the century mark.

The 39th president, who remains under home hospice care, turned 100 on Tuesday October 1, celebrating in the same south Georgia town where he was born in 1924.

Here are some notable markers for Mr Carter, the nation and the world over his long life.

– Booms most everywhere — but not Plains

Mr Carter has seen the US population nearly triple.

The US has about 330 million residents; there were about 114 million in 1924 and 220 million when Mr Carter was inaugurated in 1977.

The global population has more than quadrupled, from 1.9 billion to more than 8.1 billion.

It already had more than doubled to 4.36 billion by the time he became president.

That boom has not reached Plains, where Mr Carter has lived more than 80 of his 100 years.

His wife Rosalynn, who died in 2023 at age 96, was also born in Plains.

Their town comprised fewer than 500 people in the 1920s and has about 700 today; much of the local economy revolves around its most famous residents.

When James Earl Carter Jr was born, life expectancy for US males was 58.

It is now 75.

– TV, radio and presidential maps

NBC first debuted a red-and-blue electoral map in the 1976 election between then-president Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Mr Carter, the Democratic challenger.

But NBC’s John Chancellor made Mr Carter’s states red and Mr Ford’s blue.

Some other early versions of colour electoral maps used yellow and blue because red was associated with Soviet and Chinese communism.

It was not until the 1990s that networks settled on blue for Democratic-won states and red for Republican-won states.

Red state and blue state did not become a permanent part of the US political lexicon until after the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W Bush.

Mr Carter was 14 when Franklin D Roosevelt made the first presidential television appearance.

Warren Harding became the first radio president two years before Mr Carter’s birth.

– Attention shoppers

There was no Amazon Prime in 1924, but you could order a build-it-yourself house from a catalogue.

Sears Roebuck Gladstone’s three-bedroom model went for 2,025 US dollars, which was slightly less than the average worker’s annual income.

Walmart did not exist, but local general stores served the same purpose.

Ballpark prices: loaf of bread, nine cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; gallon of petrol, 11 cents.

Inflation helped drive Mr Carter from office, as it has dogged President Joe Biden.

The average gallon in 1980, Mr Carter’s last full year in office, was about 3.25 US dollars when adjusted for inflation.

That is just three cents more than AAA’s current national average.

– From suffragettes to Kamala Harris

The 19th Amendment that extended voting rights to women, almost exclusively white women at the time, was ratified in 1920, four years before Mr Carter’s birth.

The Voting Rights Act that widened the franchise to black Americans passed in 1965 as Mr Carter was preparing his first bid for Georgia governor.

Now, Mr Carter is poised to cast a mail ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris.

She would become the first woman, first black woman and first person of South Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.

Grandson Jason Carter said the former president is holding on in part because he is excited about the chance to see Harris make history.

– Immigration, isolationism and America First

For all the shifts in US politics, some things stay the same.

Or at least come back around.

Mr Carter was born in an era of isolationism, protectionism and white Christian nationalism, all elements of the right in the ongoing Donald Trump era.

In 2024, Mr Trump is promising the largest deportation effort in US history, while tightening legal immigration.

He has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

Five months before Mr Carter was born, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924.

The law created the US Border Patrol and sharply curtailed immigration, limiting admission mostly to migrants from western Europe.

Asians were banned entirely.

Congress described its purpose plainly: “preserve the ideal of US homogeneity”.

The Ku Klux Klan followed in 1925 and 1926 with marches on Washington promoting white supremacy.

Mr Trump has also called for sweeping tariffs on foreign imports, part of his America First agenda.

In 1922, Congress enacted tariffs intended to help US manufacturers.

After stock market losses in 1929, politicians added the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, ostensibly to help American farmers.

The Great Depression followed anyway.

In the 1930s, as Mr Carter became politically aware, the political right that countered FDR was driven in part by a movement that opposed international engagement.

Those conservatives’ slogan: America First.

– The US and Mr Carter’s hobby

Mr Carter is the Atlanta Braves’ most famous fan.

Jason Carter says the former president still enjoys watching his favourite baseball team.

In the 1990s, when the Braves were annual features in the October playoffs, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were often spotted in the owner’s box with media mogul Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, then Mr Turner’s wife.

The Braves moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee between Mr Carter’s failed run for governor in 1966 and his victory four years later.

Then-governor Mr Carter was sitting in the first row of Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium on April 9 1974, when Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run to break Babe Ruth’s career record.

When Mr Carter was born, the Braves were still in Boston, their original city.

Babe Ruth had just completed his fifth season for the New York Yankees.

He had hit 284 home runs to that point (still 430 short of his career total) and the original Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruth Built, had been open less than 18 months.

– Booze, Billy and Billy Beer

Prohibition had been in effect for four years when Mr Carter was born and would not be lifted until he was nine.

The Carters were never prodigious drinkers.

They served only wine at state dinners and other White House functions, though it is a common misconception that they did so because of their Baptist mores.

It was more because Mr Carter has always been frugal: He did not want taxpayers or the residence account (his and Rosalynn’s personal money) to cover more expensive hard alcohol.

Mr Carter’s younger brother Billy, who owned a Plains petrol station and died in 1988, had different tastes.

He marketed his own brand, Billy Beer, once Mr Carter became president.

News sources reported that Billy Carter snagged a 50,000 US dollar annual licensing fee from one brewer.

That is about 215,000 US dollars today.

The president’s annual salary at the time was 200,000 US dollars — it is now 400,000 US dollars.

– The debt: More Carter frugality

The Times Square debt clock did not debut until Mr Carter was in his early 60s and out of the White House.

But for anyone counting the 35 trillion US dollar debt, Mr Carter does not merit much mention.

The man who would wash Ziploc bags to reuse them added less than 300 billion US dollars to the national debt, which stood below one trillion US dollars when he left office.

– Other presidents

Mr Carter has lived through 40% of US history since the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and more than a third of all US administrations since George Washington took office in 1789, nine before Mr Carter was president, his own and seven since.

When Mr Carter took office, just two presidents, John Adams and Herbert Hoover, had lived to be 90.

Since then, Mr Ford, Ronald Reagan, Mr Carter and George HW Bush all reached at least 93.