By Andrew WestDOVER — If you turn back the pages of time in the Daily State News archives, you will find some intriguing coverage of the 1976 election and Jimmy Carter’s improbable rise to the presidency.
We’re reminded that newspapers are the first draft of history. Take this headline from
Nov. 3, 1976:
“A year ago today, it was ‘Jimmy who?’”
The short story recalled the newspaper’s coverage 12 months earlier of the future president’s whirlwind tour of Delaware, drawing small crowds in Dover, Georgetown and New Castle.
The piece referred to him as the “then-still-relatively-obscure Georgia governor and peanut farmer.”
“The crowds,” the story said, “were light because most Delawareans were still asking ‘Jimmy who?’”
Mr. Carter’s campaign was built around getting in front of voters. He had visited 44 other states before arriving in Delaware.
Turning the wheel of the microfilm back to 1975, Mr. Carter’s tour stop in Georgetown was featured on the front page, with a photo of then-Sussex County Democratic Party chair Frank B. Calio Jr. accompanying him on The Circle.
A State News reporter flew with Mr. Carter on the “barnstorming hop” around the state that day. Later, the Carter campaign, short on funds, surprised the newspaper with a bill for a share of the chartered plane’s cost.
President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard M. Nixon, school desegregation, historic inflation and unemployment at 8% nationally were on the minds of voters. In Georgetown, Mr. Carter made a point to address the nation’s farm policies, saying uncertainty in grain prices and Ford administration policies only benefited speculators.
He received a hearty round of applause when he said he would send Earl Butz, then U.S. secretary of agriculture, “back where he came from.”
“What’s best for the family farmer,” Mr. Carter to Sussex Countians, “is exactly what’s best for the average consumer.”
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On an amusing note, Mr. Carter’s 1975 visit didn’t make it above “the fold.”
The top story that day was about a Wyoming woman’s fears that a UFO — “moving fast from one side of the sky to the other” — was chasing her down the backroads of Kent County.
In hindsight, it’s perhaps easy to suggest that Mr. Carter’s visit might have been a better lead story. But you also might guess a UFO scare would sell more papers.
In a separate column, State News legend Jim Miller wrote, “If you do not believe a Delaware woman who attended church in Maryland, who can you believe?”
Mr. Miller’s column was a lighthearted twist on Mr. Carter’s visit with tight security — which included 11 Secret Service members — and the alien threats.
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President Joe Biden, who was the first U.S. senator to endorse future President Carter, will deliver a eulogy at his memorial service at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday.
Their relationship started in 1974. Mr. Biden, then 31, was making a name for himself in the Senate after upsetting Republican J. Caleb Boggs in the 1972 election. It was during the time of Watergate and the unpopular war in Vietnam.
President Carter recounted the meeting when he made a campaign fundraising appearance for then-Sen. Biden in 1978. It was a $1,000-a-couple dinner at Padua Academy in Wilmington.
“We had a chance to talk for several hours at the Governor’s mansion,” said President Carter of their first meeting in Atlanta. “I felt a little bit ill at ease. I thought that Joe should have been talking to my children instead of to me. He’s about my oldest son’s age.
But I sat and listened to Joe for 2 or 3 hours that night, talking about his own campaign and the kind of people who helped him and the mechanism that he used in Delaware to win what apparently was a hopeless political battle. And he expressed to me then his deep confidence in the Delaware people and a sense that if he could reach them directly, even on a shoestring budget and without any substantial media advertising, that he felt that I could do the same on a nationwide basis.”
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In Delaware, Mr. Carter took 52% of the vote in the 1976 election. His win in Sussex County that year was the last for a Democratic Party presidential candidate.
The 1976 election was a unique one in Delaware.
That year, Republican Pete du Pont unseated Democratic incumbent Sherman Tribbitt in the gubernatorial race.
And, in one of only six instances in the state’s history, Delawareans elected a member of the opposite party as lieutenant governor. Democrat James McGinnis was the winner.
Meanwhile, the state Senate and House of Representatives were dominated by Democrats.
The State News headline the day after the election: “State Government Will Have Split Personality.”
