Kevin Mattson

There is a whole slew of letters in the Carter Library, and all of them basically say that I'm going to do something. I'm going to take your lead. And with that language of war, I'm going to take your lead and I'm going to do something basic to my everyday life. I'm going to walk to work. I'm going to bicycle.

I'm going to do all these things that are going to help us get through this energy crisis. And the speech boosts Carter's polling by about 10%. People react favorably and say, yeah, I'm ready to do this. I'm ready to join in. I want to be a part of the cause.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, 10 days or so later after giving the speech, Jimmy Carter fires his entire cabinet. And it's much to the shock of people who are saying, wait, what's this all about? He's projecting now a style of being like disorganized. So his polls dropped down. So he's got like, you know, maybe about 10 days in which the poll numbers are looking good. And then suddenly they crash.

And it's a person who's basically an advisor to Ronald Reagan, Richard Werthlin, who's Reagan's pollster. And he said at the moment, I knew once the speech was given that we were going to win in 1980 and that Ronald Reagan was going to beat Jimmy Carter. Because... People don't like to hear about malaise.

They want a leader who projects a much more happy sort of style, which Reagan obviously did terribly well.

They want a leader who projects a much more happy sort of style, which Reagan obviously did terribly well. And they don't want to be scolded. They don't want to be told what's wrong with them. And Reagan starts to build this thing where he's saying there's nothing wrong with the American people. The problem is with the leadership. Now, it's not just Reagan. He's facing opposition from Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy basically says something similar to Ronald Reagan. You know, the American people should not be blamed for their problems. We need better leadership than that. So Carter gets kind of nailed on both sides of the political spectrum. And that's where Carter just sinks. There's no going back at that point in time.

And obviously the election is not too far off where he does take a pretty big hit and loses the White House.

Absolutely. Reagan's the president who calls Vietnam an honorable cause. And it's Reagan who projects the kind of smiley face politics that I think makes him leap to the front. Actually, in the Carter Library are the solar panels that Ronald Reagan ripped down from the White House. Reagan represents the make-believe idea that there really is no energy crisis. There's nothing wrong.

We can continue to rely upon foreign sources of oil. We can drill in the Arctic refuge or wherever. That sort of... Easy hopefulness is, I think, what defines Ronald Reagan.

I don't think Carter ever regretted. regretted giving the speech. He did regret the cabinet firings. He did say, I remember in his memoirs, that that was a big mistake. But the speech itself, no, I think he'd stand by it. I think he would say, I basically... did what I should have done.

And I got badly injured because I had people on the different ends of the political spectrum attacking me in the same ways. And I had the mainstream press basically saying that I had made a big mistake. And that's also where you start to hear the term that's never used in the speech malaise being used is in magazine articles that cover the speech.

Basically, what he says at one point in time is that if I have to become a citizen again, I'm fine with that.

His life after losing was full of public service. I mean, he's probably the president who's done the most on public service running down the chain of presidents. I'm not hitting upon anyone who I think really honestly took up the role of a citizen in improving his society other than Jimmy Carter.

and challenging and difficult things we've ever done.

Habitat for Humanity, a lot of the universal human rights activities that he's been involved in, I think they showed to him that there's a role for politicians to play in legislating and stuff like that, but citizens have a responsibility to doing work that might be even more important, which is caring for one another, having solidarity with others, sacrificing on the ground.

He was not being dishonest when he said, okay, I'll be a citizen instead of the president.

Probably. There's an element of where he's far ahead of his time and that perhaps we're seeing a kind of reenactment. Although, you know, the other obvious thing is that we're so much more polarized now than than we were when Jimmy Carter gave the speech. I mean, this is still the time in which Carter could, you know, talk to Republicans and be on a good basis with them.

And where the kind of public mistrust, at least in terms of partisanship, hasn't gotten out of whack the way it has today.

Consumerism and the want of things was creating an unsustainable world and the oil crisis was making that clear to people and staring them in the face.

I think so.

The reason that I wrote the book was because I found that my undergraduates who read it for the first time were so amazed by the spirit behind it and that they wished that they had a president in their own day and age, and this was during the reign of George W. Bush, that they wished they had a president who told the truth, who was honest, who was forthcoming, who called people to action.

I think that for sure there are people who are yearning for getting around all the polarization, confronting problems seriously, and finding some sense of unity in a process of self-sacrifice. Now, I say that with a cautionary tone because I was alarmed at how with the pandemic, Americans' individualism came out again in full force, right?

You can't force me to do something that's for the collective good. That makes me wonder how much we still have any of the kind of spirit that sits behind the speech.

How many times have we heard a president in the past take on the selfishness of consumerism and say it's a significant problem for Americans? And the fact that he called individualism into question was, again, what made the speech exceptional. You usually don't use that line, you know, because Americans like to think of themselves as individuals.

And here he was attacking that and showing his shortcomings. So I think that that's probably back to why I get more and more entranced in the content of the speech. I started wanting to kind of dig down deeper because I think I had never seen a president in the United States call into question the consumerist lifestyle that Americans are known for.

It's July 15th, 1979. The thing that Carter just stated is pointing to something that's really disturbing to a lot of Americans, which are these long gas lines that are forming at gas stations.

And what happens on these gas lines, people are getting in fist fights. There's a woman who puts these pillows up under her dress to make it look like she's pregnant so she could cut into the line and say, I need gas for me and my unborn child. And then this pillows fall out. People start to throw things at her. I mean, it's just total chaos.

One of the things that they would do at these gas lines is that the gas attendant would take a poster and say, last car and put it on the window of where if they went past that they would run out of gas. And people would jump into the cars, take the signs, put them back 25 spaces so that other people could get gas. And it was kind of like individualism coming to the fore in a really ugly way.

I mean, the threats of violence, the actual violence, people just looking for their self-interest. I think that kind of was one of the key things that made Jimmy Carter really worry about individualism and consumerism is that it could lead to such awful fights that were being engaged in by normal, ordinary Americans.

Well, here was a president taking on the central issue of the problems of consumerism and pointing to Americans that something had to be changed in the way that they behaved on a daily basis.

That's, I think, the foremost issue that's on Carter's mind that's happening in the streets of the country at this time.

He did install solar panels on the White House, and I think it was kind of a practical thing. I mean, it would reduce energy costs, obviously, and reliance upon foreign oil. It reminds me also of an early episode in Jimmy Carter's presidency, and he's fairly famous for this, where he sits with a cardigan sweater with a fireplace next to him.

And he basically says, turn down the thermostats because we're wasting energy.

It symbolized both I'm the president of the United States, but I'm going to do something. He's doing stuff concretely in his own behavior. I mean, I can't read how Americans would respond to that, but I think they would think at least he's not a hypocrite. He's actually putting his money where his mouth is.

And there's something to that that I think makes Jimmy Carter attractive as we look back upon both him and what's followed in his wake.

The distrust that he's, I think, talking about there amongst the general American public is really strong. And he's basically saying, we made mistakes. I made mistakes. We're all making mistakes, which again shows the kind of radical nature of this speech is that he's sharing the blame. But he's also saying that things like Watergate and Vietnam, you can't just slough them off.

they are things that leave a huge imprint on American political culture. So I think that there's a kind of growing distrust he's trying to address and trying to push back on.

He's got this mix of touting traditional values in contrast with the consumer culture that dominates at this time. To take that on, to put that front and center, saying essentially, you know, let's stop paying attention to all the scenes in the gas lines. Let's get beyond that sort of stuff and realize that there's something much deeper that's troubling.

And that is a reliance upon consumer goods and trying to seek our own happiness out of all the things that we want to get. Keep in mind that Jimmy Carter was notorious for teaching Sunday school. He has a kind of minister's tone in some of these passages.

But I don't think that he's just simply blaming or scolding the American people because he prefaces everything with pointing out to his own faults. Usually people who are scolding don't say, I'm also a part of the problem.

We're going to have to sacrifice. I think that's the bottom line, is what Carter's saying. He's calling people back to sacrifice, and he's saying, you know, there are things we can do in our day-to-day lives. We can turn down the thermostat. We can try not to drive our cars everywhere we go. I think that he sees a way to get back to a better place, but it's going to take sacrifice.

It's going to take people doing something in their ordinary lives. And that's, again, a rarity. I think that, you know... Where do we see our government actually interacting with ordinary citizens to actually push through a policy that includes, at least in part, sacrifice and living within one's means?

You can really hear the war language there, you know, mobilize, I'll be your leader, but we have to sacrifice and pay attention to one another. What he wants to aim for is to build a kind of simpler society, maybe one where consumption wasn't so widespread and taking things over. But also at the same time, it's got to push back against our over-reliance upon foreign sources of oil.

I think that that has to just be called a contradiction. I mean, the speech opens up with such a long treatment of all the problems that the country faced historically. To turn it around on the kind of optimistic note, if anything, that's the part in the speech that every time I read it, I'm like, you know, you've set out a pretty difficult course to chart.

And to just kind of slough it off and say, well, we have the confidence we can do it. We've done it before. I think that's the part of the speech, at least for myself, that rings slightly hollow.