A Government as Good as Its People

Jimmy Carter

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9781610751704
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Biographien

A Government as Good as Its People, first published in 1977, presents sixty-two of the most notable public statements made by President Carter on his way to the White House. Formal speeches, news conferences, informal remarks made at gatherings, interviews, and excerpts from debates give a vivid glimpse into the issues of the time and the deeply held convictions of Jimmy Carter.

1

Governor of Georgia

1971–1974

From Plains to Atlanta

It is a long way from Plains to Atlanta. I started the trip four and a half years ago, and with a four-year detour, I finally made it. I thank you all for making it possible for me to be here on what is certainly the greatest day of my life. But now the election is over, and I realize that the test of a leader is not how well he campaigned but how effectively he meets the challenges and responsibilities of the office.

Our country was founded on the premise that government continually derives its power from independent and free men and women. If it is to survive, confident and courageous citizens must be willing to assume responsibility for the quality of our government at any particular time in history.

This is a time for truth and frankness. The next four years will not be easy ones. The problems we face will not solve themselves. They demand the utmost in dedication and unselfishness from each of us. But this is also a time for greatness. Our people are determined to overcome the handicaps of the past and to meet the opportunities of the future with confidence and with courage.

Our people are our most precious possession, and we cannot afford to waste the talents and abilities given by God to one single Georgian. Every adult illiterate, every school dropout, every untrained retarded child is an indictment of us all. Our state pays a terrible and continuing human and financial price for these failures. It is time to end this waste. If Switzerland and Israel and other people can eliminate illiteracy, then so can we.

The responsibility is our own, and as governor, I will not shirk this responsibility.

At the end of a long campaign, I believe I know our people as well as anyone. Based on this knowledge of Georgians—north and south, rural and urban, liberal and conservative—I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over. Our people have already made this major and difficult decision, but we cannot underestimate the challenge of hundreds of minor decisions yet to be made. Our inherent human charity and our religious beliefs will be taxed to the limit.

No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice. We Georgians are fully capable of making our own judgments and managing our own affairs.

We who are strong or in positions of leadership must realize that the responsibility for making correct decisions in the future is ours. As governor, I will never shirk this responsibility.

Georgia is a state of great natural beauty and promise, but the quality of our natural surroundings is threatened because of avarice, selfishness, procrastination, and neglect. Change and development are necessary for the growth of our population and for the progress of our agricultural, recreational, and industrial life. Our challenge is to insure that such activities avoid destruction and dereliction of our environment.

The responsibility for meeting this challenge is our own. As governor, I will not shirk this responsibility.

In Georgia we are determined that the law shall be enforced. Peace officers must have our appreciation and complete support. We cannot educate a child, build a highway, equalize tax burdens, create harmony among our people, or preserve basic human freedom unless we have an orderly society.

Crime and lack of justice are especially cruel to those who are least able to protect themselves. Swift arrest and trial and fair punishment should be expected by those who would break our laws. It is equally important to us that every effort be made to rehabilitate lawbreakers into useful and productive members of society. We have not yet attained these goals in Georgia, but now we must.

The proper function of a government is to make it easy for people to do good and difficult for them to do evil. This responsibility is our own. I will not shirk this responsibility.

Like thousands of other businessmen in Georgia, I have always attempted to conduct my business in an honest and efficient manner. Like thousands of other citizens, I expect no less of government.

The functions of government should be administered so as to justify confidence and pride.

Taxes should be minimal and fair.

Rural and urban people should easily discern the mutuality of their goals and opportunities.

We should make our major investments in people, not buildings.

With wisdom and judgment we should take future actions according to carefully considered long-range plans and priorities.

Governments closest to the people should be strengthened, and the efforts of our local, state, and national governments need to be thoroughly coordinated.

We should remember that our state can best be served by a strong and independent governor, working with a strong and independent legislature.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have a right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend upon it.

William Jennings Bryan said, “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice. Destiny is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

Here around me are seated the members of the Georgia Legislature and other state officials. They are dedicated and honest men and women. They love this state as you love it and I love it. But no group of elected officers, no matter how dedicated and enlightened, can control the destiny of a great state like ours. What officials can solve alone the problems of crime, welfare, illiteracy, disease, injustice, pollution, and waste? This control rests in your hands, the people of Georgia.

In a democracy, no government can be stronger or wiser or more just than its people. The idealism of the college student, the compassion of a mother, the common sense of the businessman, the time and experience of a retired couple, and the vision of political leaders must all be harnessed to bring out the best in our state.

As I have said many times during the last few years, I am determined that at the end of this administration we shall be able to stand up anywhere in the world—in New York, California, or Florida—and say, “I’m a Georgian,” and be proud of it.

I welcome the challenge and the opportunity of serving as governor of our state during the next four years. I promise you my best. I ask you for your best.

Inauguration Address
Atlanta, Georgia
January 12, 1971

An Inner Urge

. . . Instilled within me and within your hearts is an acknowledgment sometimes not spoken. There is a mandatory relationship between the powerful and the influential and the socially prominent and wealthy on the one hand, and the weak, the insecure, and the poor on the other hand.

This is a relationship not always completely understood. I don’t completely understand it myself. But I know that in a free society we do see very clearly that one cannot accept great blessings bestowed on him by God without feeling an inner urge and drive to share those blessings with others of our neighbors who are not quite so fortunate as we.

Lions’ Convention
Jekyll Island, Georgia
June 8, 1971

Things I Want to Change

I’ve got a good business, and I’ve got a lot of employees, and I make good money, and I can see that the functions of a state government and the local governments don’t particularly matter to me in a direct way. My children and I and my wife are not on welfare, so except for saving the taxpayers’ money, I don’t really care in a personal way, as far as my own family is concerned, if the Welfare Department does a good job or the Labor Department or Vocational Rehabilitation or Corrections or Pardons and Parole or Probation. Those things don’t make any difference much to my own family, nor to the powerful, wealthy people who have always run the state government. But they do have a direct impact and it makes a lot of difference to the ones who are dependent on the state government to make sure that they can overcome handicaps with which they may have been born, either being born in poverty or being born and not having a chance to have a good education or being born on a peanut farm or being born black or being born with a hearing or speech deficiency or maybe deformed in some way.

People deserve every right to take whatever talent they have and develop it and to have a chance to appreciate themselves and to stand with a degree of human dignity and say, “I’m a man, just like the next fellow, and I have desires and I have needs and I have accomplishments that I can perform. And I have talent that God has given me, and I want my talents to be developed and used just like the next fellow. And I live in a free country, but quite often I haven’t been completely free.”

That’s the kind of need and the kind of frustration that the state government is supposed to meet, and I’m trying, through this Goals for Georgia program, to get ideas from different people all over the state, who would tell me: “Governor, I think our state ought to do this and hasn’t been doing it,” “I’ve got a retarded child at home, and he’s been on the waiting list for Gracewood for eight years, and I haven’t got him in yet,” or “I hold a job and I don’t think I’m getting an adequate chance to be promoted,” or “I have a chance for a better job across town, and I can’t get over there because it costs too much,” or “I’m a mother, and my husband is dead, and I’ve got these kids, and I don’t have a place to keep them during the day so I can support myself,” or “I see the State Highway Department paving streets on the nice side of town, and the street that goes by my house is not even paved.”

Well, those are the kinds of things I want to change, and I can’t change them by myself, because in a lot of ways I can’t look at government with different ideas and different viewpoints; and I want to have a way to get harnessed and put before my eyes as governor the suggestions on how we can make Georgia’s government a better government. We’ve got a lot of progress that we can make in our state, and I intend to make it.

Goals for Georgia
Kennedy School
Atlanta, Georgia
July 1, 1971

Preserving Georgia

. . . We don’t have any inclination to attract a new industry to Georgia who is dependent upon a special tax break or privilege at the expense of his neighbors who have been here many years. We don’t ask you to come here to be a new neighbor of ours if you expect cheap labor. And we don’t expect you to come here in Georgia to be a new neighbor if you anticipate any despoiling or derogation of the land or the air or the water within which we must live.

Red Carpet Tour
Macon, Georgia
April 5, 1972

The Women in My Life

. . . Someone asked me as I came in if I felt in the minority, and I said, “Well, I have felt this way almost all of my life.” My mother is a registered nurse, and when we grew up on the farm, she was always a dominant factor in our family. After my father’s death she became, instead of less active, more active, and at the age of sixty-eight she announced to the family that she had just joined the Peace Corps, and she spent two years in India helping Mrs. Gandhi. You might think that she was the most dominant female factor in my life, but that is not true. There’s my wife, Rosalynn, whom I married a little more than twenty-five years ago, whom I love more now than I did when I married her, and who helped me in 1970 to personally visit, look in the eye, talk to, meet, and ask for the help of more than six hundred thousand Georgians. And when I went in one direction, early in the morning, she went in a different one, and she visited the factory shift lines, walked in and out of the stores and shopping centers, and worked in a very remarkable way to help me be governor. You might think that she was the most dominant female factor in my life, but that is not true. After we had been married years and had three ugly boys in our house, we tried again after a fourteen-year argument, which I finally won, and we now have a four-year-old daughter named Amy. And Amy is the female dominant factor in my life.

League of Women Voters
Atlanta, Georgia
May 1, 1972

Unfulfilled Dreams and Crushed Hopes

. . . There are unfulfilled dreams and crushed hopes in our society. And one of the major responsibilities of any man or any woman with a major opportunity for public service is to remove those constraints. . . .

I know the affliction of a child who goes into the first grade to meet intense competition when that child has no physical or mental affliction but suffers an almost equal affliction from the fact that in his own home he has never seen a book, he’s never heard a bedtime story, or he’s never heard, perhaps, his own parents speak correct English. And he finds himself, at the beginning of a ten-year legally required educational experience, almost doomed to a daily proof by the Establishment that he’s an inferior person because he cannot compete with children of superior opportunity.

I know also the problem of a child who reaches the third or fourth grade who can’t read and write and who must, until he’s sixteen, experience each day what must be an absolutely horrible experience of seeing the other children studying mathematics and English and literature and history and civics, when it’s all a foreign language to that child.

I also recognize the problem we face with many of our young who have the talent and the ability but don’t find the opportunity to pursue their education beyond the high school years, or who quite often lack the proper counseling at home or at school. And the combined deprivation which exists from these needs afflicts us all.

Higher Education Awards Banquet
Atlanta, Georgia
May 9, 1972

The Two Most Regressive Taxes

. . . The two most regressive taxes, the two which fall heavily on the workingman or the retired people with fixed incomes, are the sales tax and the property tax. Anybody who says he is going to lower your property taxes fifty dollars a year and then raises what you pay in sales tax by a hundred dollars a year with a one-cent increase is not your friend. I am not a party to that sort of con game. I never have been, and I never will be.

Georgia State AFL-CIO Convention
Savannah, Georgia
October 18, 1972

Those Who Are Frozen in Heart and Mind

. . . There are conflicts in society: the rich versus the poor, the South versus the North, the black versus the white, the worker versus his employer, the small businessman versus the multinational companies, the liberal versus the conservative. But I think one of the strongest and most persistent conflicts lies between those who are frozen in heart and mind and who have become perpetually old on the one hand, and those who are still young at heart on the other hand.

I am not talking about the number of years that you might have lived, because there are some in this audience today, even though you might only be in your teens, who are already old, who think that you have arrived at a station in life that’s adequate because God blessed you.

Your father and mother may be wealthy; you may not ever have been hungry; you may be socially prominent; you may be assured of a college education and a good income for the rest of your life; you may be satisfied with the present or prospective niche that you envision for yourself in society. And you may feel that you don’t have to be concerned about those less fortunate than you and those who, because you might occupy a position of leadership in the future, might be dependent on having their own destinies improved by your own actions.

But if you occupy that position and attitude, you are already old. You may be seventeen years old, but you are already old because your mind and your heart have been closed.

Georgia YMCA Youth Assembly
Atlanta, Georgia
April 20, 1973

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