Fifty years ago, before the internet and smartphones, most Americans received their news from a handful of sources — the three major television networks, two or three national newspapers and their local dailies — and, therefore, collective memory was a real thing, not as scattered or fleeting as it is today.

So what happened in 1974 informed votes in 1976, when Americans made Jimmy Carter the 39th president of the United States.

In 1974, a scandal-scarred Republican named Richard Nixon resigned the presidency to avoid being impeached. A month later, his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon of any and all crimes in the attempted coverup of his administration’s connection to the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building.

Ford said he granted the pardon in the nation’s best interest. But a nation that had grown cynical — from a long war in Vietnam that Nixon had promised to end; from the corrupt practices of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, former governor of Maryland; from Nixon’s efforts to stop the investigation of the Watergate scandal — did not buy Ford’s high-minded claim.

To many, the pardon suggested the president was above the law. It appeared to have been arranged in return for Nixon’s resignation. And the most cynical among us believed Ford had agreed to the pardon a year earlier, when Nixon picked him to replace Agnew.

So people remembered this in 1976, when Ford ran for election. It was the year of the nation’s bicentennial, and, as if to restore pride in the country, a majority of voters looked for someone new, a real Washington outsider.

Enter James Earl Carter Jr., a Naval Academy graduate, a Democrat of Georgia, son of a peanut farmer and the state’s former governor. Carter won, though his victory over Ford was narrow.

For most of his first year in office, Carter enjoyed high approval ratings. But stuff happened. A lot of stuff. Bad stuff.

There was a revolution in Iran that caused a slowdown in oil production, and that caused an energy crisis in 1979, the second one in six years. The Iranian revolution also inspired the takeover by militants of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 52 American hostages, a crisis that lasted more than 400 days.

After a disastrous attempt by the U.S. military to rescue the hostages, many Americans who had voted for Carter expressed bitter outrage at the failure. The president’s reelection appeared to be doomed.

There were other developments: An inflationary cycle that had started during Ford’s time continued, unemployment grew, as did interest rates. (The average rate on a first mortgage was 11.2% in 1979.) There was also the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and, in response, Carter’s call for an international boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow.

The 39th president’s approval rating plunged into the low 30s as he faced the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, the former Hollywood actor and California governor.

Then, on Election Day 1980 came the march of the Reagan Democrats in eastern Baltimore County, perhaps the clearest sign anywhere in the country that Carter would be a one-term president.

The east side was the stomping ground of Don Hutchinson, a Democrat and the county executive at the time. Hutchinson visited polling places and talked to poll workers and voters. Times had been tough in Essex, Dundalk and Middle River for those who had worked in Baltimore’s traditional industries — steel, iron, port shipping and auto manufacturing. They had little patience for Carter’s sermons about a national malaise and a “crisis in confidence.”

There was a robust turnout of blue-collar workers and their kin at every polling place. What Hutchinson heard from voters that day was loud and clear: They were determined to fire Jimmy Carter. People who had voted for Democrats for decades switched to Reagan the Republican. Many never switched back.

Reviewing his four years, January 1977 to January 1981, it’s clear that Carter’s defeat was guaranteed by both circumstances beyond his control and by bad luck. (The disastrous military operation to free the hostages in Iran in April 1980 — eight U.S. service members were killed in an air accident and their bodies left behind in the desert — was likely the last straw for most Americans.)

Reagan won in a landslide. The hostages were freed on the day of his inauguration, though he had little to do with it. The record shows that Carter had negotiated tirelessly with Tehran, but that the Iranians deliberately stalled the release of the hostages. In the book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” journalist Mark Bowden wrote that the Iranians had decided to accept a deal and send the hostages home, “but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch.”

So that was the end of the Carter presidency.

But not the end of Jimmy Carter. He became a respected former president, a superb role model, an author, an inspiring humanitarian.

News of his home hospice care arrived with Presidents’ Day 2023. But last month, at age 100, he managed to vote in the 2024 presidential election for Kamala Harris. He died Sunday. Despite the bruises he incurred during the rough patch of history that marked his administration, Jimmy Carter will be remembered as a man who served the nation honorably — never impeached or forced to resign, never vulgar, never scornful of the law, modest, humane and decent.

Have a news tip? Contact Dan Rodricks at drodricks@baltsun.com.