Less than two weeks into his presidency, Jimmy Carter sat before a crackling fire in a cardigan sweater and asked Americans to make sacrifices in the face of natural gas shortages and a brutally cold winter. <\/p>\n
The speech would be ridiculed and mischaracterized for nearly half a century. To this day, Republicans invoke it as evidence of what they call a defeatist Democratic Party, especially Carter\u2019s exhortation for Americans to conserve energy by turning down the thermostat.<\/p>\n
Yet the speech built on similar themes articulated by Carter\u2019s two Republican predecessors, and it kicked off a landmark presidency for the cause of environmental conservation. Plus, it made a major fashion statement.<\/p>\n
In the nationally televised Feb. 2, 1977, fireside chat, his first speech to the nation since his inauguration, Carter started off with his trademark earnestness.<\/p>\n
\u201cTomorrow will be two weeks since I became president,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve spent a lot of time deciding how I can be a good president.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a time when the United States was overly dependent on foreign oil, and the new president said Americans \u201cmust face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he issued this challenge: \u201cAll of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we could save half the current shortage of natural gas. There is no way that I, or anyone else in the government, can solve our energy problems if you are not willing to help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two weeks earlier, on Jan. 21, his first full day in office, Carter had previewed the conservation pep talk, issuing a statement urging Americans to lower the thermostat \u201cto 65 degrees in the daytime and lower at night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conservatives have mocked Carter\u2019s message of self-sacrifice. Former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) has said it inspired him as a 12-year-old to become a Republican.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in the sixth grade, I turned on the TV, and I watched Jimmy Carter have a sweater on and tell me to turn the heating down,\u201d McCarthy said in a record-breaking 8\u00bd-hour speech in 2021. \u201cHe told me that the best days were behind us, that as an American I had to accept less. That wasn\u2019t how I was raised.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mostly lost to history is that Carter\u2019s predecessor, President Gerald Ford, made a similar plea when he unveiled his ill-fated Whip Inflation Now (WIN) plan in a 1974 speech: \u201cTo help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.\u201d And the year before that, in response to severe energy shortages brought on by the Arab oil embargo of 1973, President Richard M. Nixon urged Americans to lower their thermostats by at least 6 degrees to achieve a national daytime average of 68 degrees.<\/p>\n
But neither Republican president used a wardrobe accessory to reinforce their message. And many people have shorthanded Carter\u2019s message to \u201cPut on a sweater,\u201d although he never told anyone to do that. (Even the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library erroneously tweeted, in recognition of the first day of autumn a couple of years ago, that the former president \u201cencouraged Americans to turn the heat down to conserve energy and throw on a sweater instead!\u201d) Instead, sitting in front of shelves stocked with books, Carter made the point more subtly by sporting a cardigan himself, over a shirt and tie, in a look that resembled a college professor\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously their motives are different but President Carter is doing for sweaters today what Lana Turner did for them in the 1940s,\u201d Washington Post fashion editor Nina S. Hyde wrote in a story headlined \u201cPresident Carter, the Sweater Man,\u201d published on Feb. 5, 1977. \u201cProbably not since the hey days of that Sweater Girl have Americans been so aware of people wearing sweaters.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cIt\u2019s not likely that Carter was wearing a sweater merely for the warmth it provided but rather to underscore the informality of his fireside chat and to put across his message of energy conservation. \u2026 He was wearing a V-neck wool cardigan, sometimes called a \u2018grandfather sweater\u2019 since it sells best as a Christmas gift for older men.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hyde quoted designer Ralph Lauren as saying that Carter \u201cwore a sweater to establish his own identity. It should have an impact greater than a movie star on an athlete. It could change the etiquette of clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2012, Time magazine listed Carter\u2019s sweater among its top 10 political fashion statements, noting that the magazine predicted in 1977 that the cardigan \u201cmay prove to be the most memorable symbol of an Administration that promises to make steady use of symbolism.\u201d At the time, even an unnamed Republican \u201cinsider\u201d grudgingly conceded, \u201cHe was folks, and folks is in. I hate to say it, but from a purely analytical point of view, I loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everyone was as enamored with the sweater, which drew its share of taunts. A 1978 \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d skit, for example, featured Dan Aykroyd as a sweater-wearing Carter, giving a \u201cplant-side chat\u201d in honor of spring and urging Americans to burn 8 percent of their money to tamp down inflation.<\/p>\n
In fact, Carter also addressed inflation and several other topics in his fireside chat, although the thermostat remains the enduring image. And while his focus on conservation was ahead of its time, not all of Carter\u2019s energy proposals in that speech would pass muster with environmentalists today, including his plan to \u201cstress development of our rich coal reserves in an environmentally sound way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he did tout research on solar and other renewable energy sources and would install solar panels on the White House two years later. (Ronald Reagan then removed them.) Carter, who designated 56 million acres of Alaska wilderness as federally protected in 1978, is recognized today as one of the nation\u2019s most consequential environmental presidents.<\/p>\n
And when it came to conserving energy, Carter did as he preached, selling the presidential yacht the Sequoia and unplugging White House TV sets, according to PBS\u2019s 2002 \u201cAmerican Experience\u201d Carter documentary. In the film, his vice president, Walter Mondale, recalled with a laugh: \u201cHe turned off the air conditioners, and it was so hot in the White House, people would come in there \u2014 it was unbelievable. It would be a hundred above in there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Less than two weeks into his presidency, Jimmy Carter sat before a crackling fire in a cardigan sweater and asked Americans to make sacrifices in the face of natural gas shortages and a brutally cold winter. The speech would be ridiculed and mischaracterized for nearly half a century. To this day, Republicans invoke it as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}