James Parmelee Richardson
Parker Professor of Law Dies on March 24
LONG JIM we called him in his undergraduate days, when his 6-feet-5 figure marked his towering presence on the streets and in the halls of Hanover, and to the end of his days at Dick's House, March 24, he was still Long Jim to most of his college contemporaries. Born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, May 29, 1878, he was the son of Frank and Ella Parmelee Richardson. His ancestors on the Richardson side lived in Orford for two or three generations. The Parmelee family was one of a group which founded the town of Newport, N. H., about the middle of the eighteenth century. His maternal grandfather, Dr. Ezra Parmelee, graduated from -the Dartmouth Medical School in 1833. His uncle, Judge James Bailey Richardson, a benefactor of the College and for whom Richardson Hall is named, graduated from Dartmouth in 1857 and in 1895 became one of its trustees, the first to be elected by the alumni.
James P. Richardson was valedictorian of his class at St. Johnsbury Academy from which he graduated in 1895 and was valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth from which he graduated four years later with the degree of A.8., summa cum laude. He then entered Boston University Law School where his course was interrupted for a year by infantile paralysis from which he made a good though not a complete recovery. He graduated from Boston University in 1902 with the degree of LL.B., magna cum laude, was admitted to the Bar in Massachusetts that same year and practised law in Boston until 1917, being associated during that entire period (after 1910 as a partner) with the firm of Hale and Dickerman.
On June 24, 1908, he was married to Anna Louise Pullen of Newton, Mass., who was ever faithful in ministering to him through trying periods of illness. She and his sister, Mrs. A. E. Hunt of Newtonville, Mass., survive him.
In 1916 he was elected a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in which he had charge of the introduction and passage of an amendment to the state constitution to control outdoor advertising. This was carried through the Convention against bitter opposition and adopted by popular vote by the largest majority given to any of the twenty-two amendments proposed by the Convention.
In 1917 he accepted an invitation from President Hopkins to take the chair known as the Parker Professorship of Law and Political Science which had been held by the late Professor Colby since its establishment in 1885.
He entered this new sphere with the enthusiasm and initiative that were characteristic of his legal career. Now it seemed that his ambition to be an educator as expressed in a brief sketch of him in the '99 class Aegis was about to be realized. Having independent financial means through an inheritance from his uncle, he built what was then the finest house in Hanover in which there was always a warm welcome and abundant hospitality for all who entered through its unlocked front door. He soon became active in state politics and in 1918 was appointed by Governor Henry W. Keyes a member of the New Hampshire Executive Committee of Public Safety. In 1922 he was appointed by Governor Albert O. Brown a member of a committee to study the railroad problem in New England and to report to the governors.
SERVED IN STATE LEGISLATURE
In 1925 and again in 1927 he represented the Town of Hanover in the New Hampshire House of Representatives. During both sessions he was a member of the Judiciary Committee. Logical and effective in debate, he wielded strong influence in the consideration of important measures. After an exciting debate in which he took the lead in the defeat by a close vote of a bill to change the direct primary law, his speech was described in the press by a veteran reporter as the best heard in the House of Representatives for forty years. In 1927 he was appointed by Governor Winant a member of a special commission to study and report upon the system of taxation in the State of New Hampshire. In 1928 he was elected a delegate to the Republican National Convention but was unable to attend on account of an accident. Shortly before he was due to leave for the Convention and following a meeting of the State Tax Commission in Concord, he tripped and fell as he stepped from a telephone booth in the Eagle Hotel of that city and suffered a fractured hip. In 1930 he was appointed, also by Governor Winant, as one of a commission to investigate and make suggestions for the reform of the criminal laws of New Hampshire. From 1932 to 1938 he was Chairman of the Finance Committee of the Town of Hanover. In 1938 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress from the Second District of New Hampshire, running third in a list of nine contestants. He was a member of his District Draft Board in World War 11. In 1943 Norwich University conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D.
Other highlights in his career: In 1901 he was responsible for starting the custom of the annual Roundup of the Class of 1899, since held without interruption in Boston every year on the first Saturday in March. In 1911 he served with Ernest M. Hopkins on the committee which drew up the first constitution for the Dartmouth College Alumni Council of which he was one of the first members and Vice President in 1916. In 1912 he was President of the Dartmouth Club of Boston. In 1918-19 he was active in promoting the project of a Memorial Field dedicated to Dartmouth men who died in World War I and was a member of the committee which saw it through to completion. Since 1918, with the exception of one year, he was the Regent of the Kappa Kappa Kappa Society which occupied a prominent place among his interests. He was the author of a book relating the history of the Society, a bound volume of 230 pages published in 1942, the year of its hundredth anniversary. Since 1918 he had been a trustee of Kimball Union Academy at Meriden, N. H., and since 1923 a trustee of St. Johnsbury Academy. From 1919 to 1925 he was a representative of the faculty on the Dartmouth Athletic Council and during those years a member of the committees on football and basketball. To this he gave much of his time. Though never an active participant in athletics, Jim was an avid sports devotee and thoroughly enjoyed their administrative direction. In 1927 he was a mem- ber of the faculty committee which did the planning for the Baker Library. In 1927 he attained considerable notoriety because of publicly voicing an opinion, shared with others, that the conduct of the famous trial of Nicola Sacco ancl Bartolomeo Vanzetti was contrary to accepted standards of court justice. In 1937 with his younger colleague, the late Professor Harold J. Tobin, Jim helped to organize the movement known as Dartmouth-in-Politics, to make it less difficult for young alumni of the College to participate practically in political activities.
WAS HEAD OF WHIST LEAGUE
His life-long hobby was card playing, especially in games of the Whist family, now become nearly extinct. He began to play tournament whist while in law school, and continued to do so until the beginning of his last illness. He was active in the affairs of the American Whist League and was its president in 1927. At one time or another he held all the trophies of the American Whist League and the Atlantic Whist Association of which he was also president on two separate occasions.
Professor W. A. Robinson, long associated with Jim in the Department of Political Science, paid the following tribute to his colleague as a teacher:
"Those of us who were associated with Jim Richardson either as colleagues or as students will always member the jovial, helpful friend who for twenty years or more was one of the most effective members of the faculty before ill health and suffering made their tragic inroads. So quickly do College generations pass that it was something of a shock to many of us when the flag was lowered to half mast on the morning of March 24, to find how many students had never been in his classes or known him as a leading figure on the campus. This was the result of his steady decline in health since 1943 and the disruptive influence of the wartime curricular changes.
"Back in 1919 he once remarked that he "didn't carry the union card" when he became a member of the Faculty, and he regarded his appointment to a committee then engaged in the perennial task of tinkering with the curriculum as a mild form of hazing. His experience on this committee and in teaching the War Issues course of 1918-1919 had considerable influence on his subsequent teaching career. Like most men who graduated in the days when specialization played a smaller part in undergraduate education, he wanted his students to get a broad preparation either for later professional study or the routine of daily living and making a living. Despite his interest in law, he insisted that the training of lawyers or other professional men was not the function of the liberal college. The latter, he believed, should supply some elementary equipment to be used in later professional study and should endeavor above all to get men to think for themselves. His insistence on accuracy of statement and definition did not always impress his students as they should have done.
"If his formal preparation for college- teaching' had not been the conventional one, he possessed effective equivalents. He wrote and spoke good English. His experience as a lawyer had provided practical acquaintance with business and political problems. He had read widely in the fields of English and American history and biography and used them effectively in his own courses. Above all, he had a deep loyalty to the College and appreciated the opportunity to be of service to all concerned in its activities.
"He was, on the whole, a conservative Vermonter, who viewed some of the developments of recent decades with deep concern, but in his classes he never forgot that the great controversies which found their way into the printed records of the courts originated with the men who were working on the railroad, operating neighborhood stores in an age of ruthless competition or landing in prison as a result of ordinary human delinquencies or occasionally because of forces which they could not understand. Law and justice were not identical but there could be no justice in human affairs without effective lawmaking and law enforcement, and in a democratic country these were dependent on better educational standards. The undergraduate, properly educated, would be a better lawyer and above all a better citizen; that was the real opportunity and responsibility of institutions like Dartmouth.
DIRECTED COURSES ON CONSTITUTION
"His actual teaching did not include a wide variety of courses but they dealt with subjects where the instructor's personal training and interests gave a broad scope of opportunity. For many years he shared in the introductory social science coursesCitizenship and its successor, Social Science I, as well as the general course on American Government. He had personal direction of semester courses on the United States Constitution and the elements of law. The tributes which have flowed in during the past month from former members of these classes show that the college teacher is still playing an effective part in the preparation of successive generations for their responsibilities in the community."
With all of his many achievements there was much physical suffering in the life of Jim Richardson since his fateful accident in 1928. Malunions made necessary subsequent operations on his hip—one very serious. He also suffered a broken leg in an automobile accident and it was necessary for him to continuously have the support of crutch and cane. There were other infirmities which blocked what promised to be an even more outstanding career, especially in the field of politics.
Frustration, because of disabilities, of his natural urge for accomplishment, drew heavily on the reserve of his nervous system and added to bodily ailments, obliging him to seek relief at Dick's House where he had often been a patient and where he was confined for a year before the end.
Funeral services were held March 26, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church at Hanover of which Jim was a member and former singer in the choir. The Rt. Rev. John T. Dallas, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, officiated. Members of the Class of 1899 attending were Beal, Benezet, Chase, Clark, Parker and Storrs. A spray of flowers from his class was on the casket during the services and on its journey to St. Johnsbury for burial planned for later in the spring.
JAMES PARMELEE RICHARDSON '99
