BUILDING NORTH CAROLINA
“I regard a comprehensive educational program, properly implemented with road, health, and utilities programs, as the soundest insurance policy the state of North Carolina can underwrite for the protection of its future.”
How Do You Build a State?
The rural North Carolina that Jim Hunt was born into in 1937 lacked access to quality health care, public education, and basic infrastructure. Only 3 percent of the farms in the state had electricity.
The Hunt family believed in progressive reform, organizing farm families to improve community outreach and education. Hunt’s father—who graduated with a degree in wildlife management from the North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering, as NC State was then known—worked for the Soil Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His mother, a teacher, earned a degree in education from the North Carolina College for Women, now UNC–Greensboro.
The family worked on populist Kerr Scott’s 1948 gubernatorial campaign. In Scott’s “Go Forward” electoral platform, he advocated for rural electrification. Scott’s push to pave farm-to-market roads was to have a profound influence on the young Jim Hunt. Later, Scott made Hunt’s mother the first woman appointed to the North Carolina State Board of Health.
With the belief that smart, hardworking people can use the political system to work together, Jim Hunt’s career and agenda—championing education, technology, economic growth, and entrepreneurial partnerships—sprouted from these roots and helped seed a fairer, more prosperous state.
“North Carolina is known as ‘The Good Roads State.’ That is more than a reputation. It is a tradition. Fifty years ago Governor O. Max Gardner took over the old country roads. Thirty years ago Governor Kerr Scott got the farmers out of the mud.”
In the 1940s Jim Hunt’s father, James Baxter Hunt, and mother, Elsie Brame Hunt, helped organize local Grange groups, which were service organizations promoting the economic and social well-being of small agricultural communities. Demonstrating leadership potential from an early age, Hunt followed in his parents’ footsteps as a member of the Grange Youth, which provided opportunities to develop life skills and leadership through various educational programs.
In 1955 Hunt was elected as the state president of the Future Farmers of America. Through the FFA, he learned parliamentary procedure and public speaking.
Influences
William Kerr Scott
William Kerr Scott was the sixty-second governor of North Carolina (1949–1953) and a United States senator (1954–1958). Scott led an ambitious initiative to improve statewide public services such as roads, schools, public health, rural telephones, and electricity. During Governor Kerr Scott’s tenure, more roads were paved in North Carolina in four years than had been built in all the years prior to 1949. The percentage of farms with electricity increased from 3 percent in the late 1930s to 95 percent by the mid-1950s.
Frank Porter Graham
Frank Porter Graham was another great influence on Hunt’s formative political years. Known as one of North Carolina’s leading liberals, Graham was an educator and president of UNC–Chapel Hill from 1930 until he was appointed as United States senator by Kerr Scott in 1949. He was also the first president of the consolidated University of North Carolina. President Harry Truman appointed Graham to his Committee on Civil Rights in 1946.
Abraham Holtzman
Abraham Holtzman taught political science at NC State for more than forty-five years, inspiring his students to synthesize information, think independently, and engage in the historical narrative behind the political process. Hunt took Holtzman’s courses and sums up his influence: “Abe Holtzman made a profound impact on me and I think stimulated me to run for office, to choose the issues that I thought were important, to treat people right, and to give them an opportunity to be all they can be.”
Allard K. Lowenstein
Allard K. Lowenstein, after teaching at NC State for two years in the early 1960s, served as a New York congressman and was an important antiwar and civil rights political activist. Later calling it an eye-opening experience, Hunt heard Lowenstein deliver a passionate speech about the injustices of apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the American South at a National Students Association meeting in Columbus, Ohio.
Terry Sanford
Another of Governor Hunt’s mentors, Terry Sanford ran a successful 1960 campaign for governor that stressed the need for quality education. The General Assembly supported his plan with $100 million in improvements for public schools and the creation of public colleges in Wilmington, Charlotte, and Asheville, as well as a unified community college system. Nearly doubling the state’s investment in public education and working to expand Research Triangle Park, Sanford helped set the stage for North Carolina’s economic growth over the next several decades.“He had a missionary zeal, like his circuit-riding great-grandfathers. His father had it about improving the land. His mother, tutoring the farm boys everybody else had given up on. He believed that everybody can improve, and your job is to help them.”