Carter and the Church

Plains, Ga.—The first reaction has to be: How did he do it? How did anyone who grew up in a lost and dusty place like Plains in the middle of a countryside so desolate and uninteresting it is almost beyond folklore ever manage the back-breaking job of getting out of a trough like this all the way to the White House? Abraham Lincoln was raised in a log cabin, but a log cabin was the normal environment of the Midwest in the early nineteenth century. Plains, in the landscape of late twentieth century America, is not normal as the home of a President of the United States.

You approach the place on a nondescript two-lane highway which runs through rolling red earth—the soil is the one beautiful thing—raggedly fenced with post and wire. The farmhouses and weatherbeaten barns sway in the wind against the skyline. The trees grow low on cut-over land, often smothered by the kudzu vine, an ironic legacy of New Deal anti-erosion projects. The only real trees are in the graceful pecan groves. The fields lie plowed, awaiting the planting of peanuts and cotton. Along the road there is hardly a sign of human business, hardly a gas station or a roadside stand.

NK

About the Author

Nicholas King

Featured Tags

Plains, Ga.—The first reaction has to be: How did he do it? How did anyone who grew up in a lost and dusty place like Plains in the middle of a countryside so desolate and uninteresting it is almost beyond folklore ever manage the back-breaking job of getting out of a trough like this all the way to the White House? Abraham Lincoln was raised in a log cabin, but a log cabin was the normal environment of the Midwest in the early nineteenth century. Plains, in the landscape of late twentieth century America, is not normal as the home of a President of the United States.

You approach the place on a nondescript two-lane highway which runs through rolling red earth—the soil is the one beautiful thing—raggedly fenced with post and wire. The farmhouses and weatherbeaten barns sway in the wind against the skyline. The trees grow low on cut-over land, often smothered by the kudzu vine, an ironic legacy of New Deal anti-erosion projects. The only real trees are in the graceful pecan groves. The fields lie plowed, awaiting the planting of peanuts and cotton. Along the road there is hardly a sign of human business, hardly a gas station or a roadside stand.