On the National Day of Mourning for President Jimmy Carter, a reminder that humanitarian work, to repair the world, is needed now, more than ever.
(President Jimmy Carter convenes the opening meeting of the first Presidential Commission on Hunger in 1978. Harry Chapin, who persuaded Carter to create the first—and only—Hunger Commission of it’s kind in US History, is the bushy haired guy pictured in the top right of the photo. Bess Myerson, former NYC Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, is seated in the white jacket, in the center of the photo.)
Tomorrow is the National Day of Mourning for President Jimmy Carter who died just before 2025 began, at 100 years old.
Over the past several years, as he endured brain cancer, the death of Rosalyn, his wife of 77-years, and long-term hospice care, Carter has quietly, often silently, been teaching all of us a daily lesson on the dignity of dying after living a deeply purposeful and humanitarian life.
The National Day of Mourning for Jimmy Carter, will be attended by world leaders and ordinary citizens who had great admiration for his life of self-less service, and it comes in one of history’s most jarring juxtapositions, on the day before President-elect Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions will be affirmed by a Court, making him the first Felon ever elected to the Presidency, and the most self-serving individual to ever occupy the Presidency.
The contrast between moral good and evil—fundamental values in which Carter, a devout Christian, believed deeply—could not be more clear. Even many of the white, fundamentalist Christians who supported both Carter and Trump will have to sit up and take notice.
While we all love the later years of Jimmy Carter, I was never a big fan of his as either a candidate for President, or as President.
With the exception of his commitment to renewable energy, and his brokering of the Camp David Peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1977, Carter was too politically conservative for me; too much of an incrementalist; not the kind of tough, crusading advocate for justice, human rights and the Rule of Law that many of us craved, following the corrupt times of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Watergate.
Post-presidency, Carter would grow into a towering international human rights leader, and as a Jew uncomfortable with Israel’s lurch into right-wing fundamentalism, I applauded his early and courageous conclusion that the Israeli government’s deprivation of equal rights for Arab-born Israelis and Palestinians, amounted to Apartheid. Other Jews condemned Carter for his candor.
Years later, he would rail against the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, as heralding the establishment of the United States as an oligarchy, for sale to the highest bidder. Trump’s 2024 election, with a quarter-of-a billion dollar campaign contribution from the world’s richest man who does billions of dollars of business with the federal government, only proved Carter to be prophetic once again.
But, back in 1974, Democrats, across the country swept into near veto-proof power in Congress in the mid-term elections, adding 49 new seats in the House, giving them a commanding 291-seat majority; in the Senate, Democrats picked up 4 seats, producing a filibuster-proof majority of 61.
With the rise of progressivism in Congress few Democratic activists wanted a milquetoast candidate for President in 1976, even if the candidate was a Washington outsider with a winning smile who promised he’d never lie to us.
Many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted a tough, populist champion like Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma, or Rep. Mo Udall from Arizona to lead the Democratic National ticket in 1976. To many, Jimmy Carter was just far too cautious.
Even singer/songwriter Harry Chapin, who would later persuade Jimmy Carter to create the nation’s first and only Hunger Commission, and himself served on that unique Commission from 1978-1980, had his doubts.
Chapin was a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention for the fiery liberal and environmental advocate Rep. Mo Udall, who advocated breaking up Big Oil and enacting National Health Insurance. Udall finished second to Jimmy Carter in six presidential primaries.
A few years back I interviewed social activist Bill Ayers, a former Catholic priest in the great social justice tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and the Berrigans.
Ayers, a NYC-area radio DJ and an authentic “radical priest”, co-founded World Hunger Year (WHY) with Harry Chapin in 1975. It was the team of Bill Ayres, Harry and Sandy Chapin and former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, which brought the idea of creating the very first US Hunger Commission to the newly-elected President Carter.
Harry Chapin’s family—with ancestors like his grandfather Kenneth Burke, the literary giant and semanticist, and his great-aunt Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Workers movement, was far more radical on social issues than many fans of Harry’s music were, and much more of an ardent advocate for change than Jimmy Carter, who, oddly, liked the lyrics of many of Bob Dylan songs for social change.
Chapin was determined to “do something” with his life—in addition to his music—and was eager to use his celebrity to alleviate hunger and suffering.
In my 2018, interview with Bill Ayres, Harry’s hunger-fighting partner, Ayres told me that:
“ What Harry didn’t like about Carter for one thing, was that he stacked the Pres. Hunger Commission with a whole bunch of people who were not the people who were going to solve hunger. But, the people that were on from the Congress were people we knew—Leahy, being the primary one, Rick Nolan (from Minnesota), the other Dem; Ben Gilman, the Republican, and Bob Dole. Dole grew up in Kansas during the Great Depression, when farmers were losing their farms. We (WHY Hunger) honored him and Senator George McGovern one night. Dole told me that “my Republican friends have never forgiven me for allowing food stamps to be free.”
Among the Commission members for whom Chapin had little patience was it’s Chair, former Xerox Corporation Chairman Sol Linowitz who, Harry believed, was watering down this historic Hunger Commission’s final report and only paying “lip service” to the underlying causes of hunger. Chapin and two other progressive members of the Commission—Senator Leahy and Rep. Nolan—were frequent dissenters on key sections of the Presidential Hunger Commission Report.
In one notable dissent of the report, published 45 years ago, Harry and his two colleagues protested:
“The most glaring issue not addressed is the most important—the interrelationships between our economic and governmental policies and hunger…
Only through expeditious action emanating from the highest levels of policymaking can we hope to map out an integrated program identifying the near-term, intermediate and long-range components of a comprehensive strategy to alleviate hunger…Poverty, not hunger, constitutes the central strand in the web of underdevelopment.”
Many of the Commission’s corporate members were not willing to push the envelope that far, nor did they share Harry’s single-mindedness of purpose for immediate action.
Bill Ayres described it this way:
“Harry never missed a meeting. (Despite a crushing performance schedule). I went to some of meetings with him. I listened. A whole bunch of people that Carter had chosen. Some good, some not so good. Bess Myerson never came.”
By the summer of 1980, after the final Hunger Commission report was published and put on a shelf, and Jimmy Carter’s attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran failed, Chapin began to get disillusioned. He saw Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate for President, as an uncaring & opportunistic charlatan, and Carter as a decent and well-meaning human being, but an ineffective public official.
Harry was passionate about federal action on poverty as essential to tackling world hunger, and became frustrated by the lack of urgency coming from others.
Bill Ayres summed it up well:
“Yes. And part of that was– let’s go to Washington and shake the tree! So the presidential hunger commission was a real breakthrough. Nobody had done that before. Again, that was Sandy’s idea. And it was a Presidential Commission on WORLD Hunger, so it was not Domestic Hunger so much. The Commission’s work went from1978-1980, when they finished their work and put out a document. The document didn’t go anyplace because Reagan got elected.”
“ Harry and I watched the 1980 election results together and we cried, and I said, “Shit. 3 years down the drain.” But he didn’t see it that way. He said, “Nope. We got to get back again and fight the bastards some more!” He wasn’t giving up.”
Harry Chapin never did give up; nor did Bill Ayres, the Chapin family, WHY Hunger, or any of the Harry Chapin Food Banks around the country…nor did Jimmy Carter. Some 45 years after the creation of the only Presidential Hunger Commission in US history, and five decades after the creation of WHY Hunger, the work of fighting hunger, poverty and powerlessness envisioned by Harry and Sandy Chapin and Bill Ayres continues, assisting thousands of families struggling to survive, and increasing food security for millions more.
Carter and Chapin came from dramatically different families, cultures and backgrounds, with sharply different personalities and approaches to social and political change. Yet, their lives’ work and legacies intertwined during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, and beyond.
The year after Carter lost the Presidency, Harry Chapin lost his life in a tragic car crash at the age of 39. But Chapins’ work of reducing food insecurity and empowering the hungry lives on, as does Jimmy Carter’s extraordinary international efforts in advancing public health, ensuring democratic elections abroad, and his undaunted domestic work through “Habitat for Humanity,” still providing housing security for many of this country’s most vulnerable families—many of the same families who have come to rely upon the Harry Chapin Food Banks for their next meals.
Harry Chapin and Jimmy Carter were an unlikely, but powerful, ticket for long-term, structural change, and their lives, and legacies, are instructions for all the good that decent human beings can bring into this world, despite enormous challenges.