He grew up in a town named for the Earth’s primary mineral containing lead, which might explain his strength. Galena, Illinois, also was the home of nine Civil War generals, including Ulysses S. Grant, which might explain why he became a Marine and later was among the country’s most outspoken advocates for veterans of America’s wars. As a young man, he set dynamite explosives in a zinc mine, which might explain his appreciation for life above ground. He financed his education as a bartender, janitor and night watchman, which might explain his reverence for learning. He was my friend and teacher, which explains everything.
James Edward Wright — historian and college president, professor and mentor, a man of dry wit and moist tears, as comfortable deep in the archives as he was examining baseball box scores — died Monday. He was 83. He was the guiding light to generations of Dartmouth College students who flocked to his courses (almost always oversubscribed), who flunked his courses (there were more than a few), and whose lives and interests (some of them landed on Capitol Hill) were fostered by his courses.
Jim Wright shaped my week before his death darkened my week. I wrote two columns in that seven-day period. One was on the disgraceful way Americans treat the Indigenous peoples whose lives were disrupted, and in many ways ended, by the flood of European settlers in the Colonial period. I never would have had that perspective without the History of the American West course I took in the winter of my freshman year. The other column was on the midterm elections. I wouldn’t have been able to write that without the 20th-Century American Politics course I took in the spring term of freshman year.
That’s two columns, aided by two courses, both from freshman year. I hasten to mention: That freshman year was 50 years ago.
I’m not the only one. Jim was the quintessential teacher, in and beyond the classroom. We sat with him in the stands of Memorial Field cheering on the football team against our most reviled rival (none of us needs to be told it is Harvard). We called him and visited him, and he called and visited us, and not only because one spring evening I had tickets to a Pirates game.
He never forgot us, and in my case, he reluctantly forgave me, for I committed two sins.
The first was when I went to his office and told him I thought I would drop his 19th-Century American Politics course. I had a pitiful excuse: I was taking too many reading courses and didn’t think I could absorb another. Here is what Jim said, teaching me a lesson beyond the syllabus: “David, I made the syllabus hard to scare away some of the students. I didn’t think I would scare away the good ones.” The next time this space is cluttered with some obscure reference to Rutherford B. Hayes, you will know that I didn’t drop the course.
The second was more severe. It was the fall of 1975, the Red Sox were in the World Series, and I was offered a ticket to Game 6. I didn’t take it; I had a midterm in Jim’s course the next morning. That turned out to be perhaps the greatest game in Fenway Park history, when Carlton Fisk hit a home run in the 12th inning to force a seventh game. Years later, I confessed my bad judgment to Jim. “If I’d known that at the time,” he told me with a stern deadpan, “I would have given you an F.”
In time, I became a trustee of the college, and Jim became a finalist to be its 17th president. The vote I cast for Jim to become president of my college remains one of the votes I cherish the most.
Scores of us became close to Jim in a way that I hope college students today become close to their professors.
The day he died, Harvard Law professor Annette Gordon-Reed told me she had taken every Wright course possible. “It was such a privilege,” she said, “to have contact with him after I graduated and became a professor myself.” She won a Pulitzer Prize for her groundbreaking book on the Hemings family of Monticello.
Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire said, “His love for the history of New Hampshire and his unwavering commitment to veterans inspired my service as a member of Congress.”
And Delaware Gov. John Carney, who wasn’t a history major, nonetheless saluted him this week for shepherding Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to Dartmouth.
The Native American writer Louise Erdrich spent months with Jim working on a project about the westering process in Nebraska. She won a Pulitzer for her novel “The Night Watchman” and stood beside Bill Russell when the two of them were awarded honorary degrees at Dartmouth. She spoke, Russell listened.
Days before the end came, CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote to his mentor.
“I hope you know how much you and your friendship have meant to me,” he said. “Your class my freshman year inspired me to become a history major, a passion that has continued throughout my life … Your experience as a Marine helped shape my reverence for the sacrifice our service members make. And your friendship and support over the years has moved me in personal and profound ways.”
That is the kind of thing a public man writes in private with no expectation that it will ever be made public.
When Jim’s own mentor, Dartmouth President James Freedman, died in 2006, he spoke in a Rollins Chapel memorial service of “a friend who inspired, one who could elicit a smile in the down times, celebrate warmly in the good times, and who encouraged our aspirations to be higher for all times.”
Those were words from one Jim to another, about them both.
As the noted chemist Karen Wetterhahn lingered near death, before becoming only the second person in the 20th century to die of dimethylmercury poisoning after spilling the substance on her latex gloves in her Dartmouth laboratory, Jim sat at her bedside for hours, holding her hand. When, with his remarkable wife, Susan, by his side, Jim died at home, dozens of us were, symbolically, holding his hand in spirit, and in gratitude.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)