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Jimmy Carter at 100: Witness to change

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

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

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

No boom in Plains

Carter has seen the U.S. population nearly triple. The U.S. has about 330 million residents; there were about 114 million in 1924 and 220 million when 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 Carter has lived more than 80 of his 100 years. His wife Rosalynn, who died in 2023 at age 96, also was born in Plains.

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

When James Earl Carter Jr. was born, life expectancy for American males was 58. It’s now 75.

Presidential maps

NBC first debuted a red-and-blue electoral map in the 1976 election between then-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, and Carter, the Democratic challenger. But NBC’s John Chancellor made Carter’s states red and Ford’s blue. Some other early versions of color electoral maps used yellow and blue because red was associated with Soviet and Chinese communism.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that networks settled on blue for Democratic-won states and red for GOP-won states. “Red state” and “blue state” did not become a permanent part of the American political lexicon until after the disputed 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush.

Carter was 14 when Franklin D. Roosevelt made the first presidential television appearance. Warren Harding became the first radio president two years before Carter’s birth.

Attention shoppers

There was no Amazon Prime in 1924, but you could order a build-it-yourself house from a catalog. Sears Roebuck Gladstone’s three-bedroom model went for $2,025, which was slightly less than the average worker’s annual income.

Walmart didn’t exist, but local general stores served the same purpose. Ballpark prices: loaf of bread, 9 cents; gallon of milk, 54 cents; gallon of gas, 11 cents.

Inflation helped drive Carter from office, as it has dogged President Joe Biden. The average gallon in 1980, Carter’s last full year in office, was about $3.25 when adjusted for inflation. That’s just 3 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 Carter’s birth. The Voting Rights Act that widened the franchise to Black Americans passed in 1965 as Carter was preparing his first bid for Georgia governor.

Now, 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

For all the shifts in U.S. politics, some things stay the same. Or at least come back around.

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, Trump is promising the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, while tightening legal immigration. He has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

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

The law created the U.S. Border Patrol and sharply curtailed immigration, limiting admission mostly to migrants from western Europe. Asians were banned entirely.

An estimated crowd of 35,000 people gather for a noontime speech by presidential candidate Jimmy Carter in downtown Philadelphia on Oct. 29, 1976. AP PHOTO
Former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter answer questions on Oct. 7, 2019 during a news conference at a Habitat for Humanity project in Nashville, Tenn. AP PHOTO/MARK HUMPHREY
Former President Jimmy Carter greets attendees as he departs the funeral service for his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., on Nov. 29, 2023. AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON