James B. Hunt Jr., a one-time Wilson County farm boy who rose to become one of the dominant figures in 20th-century North Carolina politics, has died, Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt, his daughter, announced on Dec. 18.
“It is with deep sadness that I share the passing of my beloved daddy and hero, former Governor Jim Hunt,” Rachel Hunt said in a statement Thursday. “He devoted his life to serving the people of North Carolina, guided by a belief that public service should expand opportunity, strengthen communities, and always put people first. His leadership and compassion left a lasting impact on the lives of countless North Carolinians.”
He was 88. Elected to an unprecedented four terms as governor, Jim Hunt was a hard-driving chief executive who led efforts to lift a state out of its legacy of rural poverty by improving its public schools and modernizing its economy.
More than any figure, Hunt drove the state’s policy agenda in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, focusing on the pioneering Smart Start preschool program and seeking to upgrade an underfunded, and sometimes underperforming public school system.
Memorial arrangements for Hunt will be shared in the coming days, Rachel Hunt said.
“To our family, he was a loving husband, dad, and granddad whose kindness and steady hand shaped our lives in immeasurable ways. We are profoundly grateful for the outpouring of love and support as we mourn and celebrate his extraordinary life” she said in an announcement.
Hunt also shared a statement from the Hunt family:
“Our family is deeply saddened to share the passing of James B. Hunt, Jr. He was a beloved husband, father, grandfather, and public servant, whose life and work touched so many across our state. We are thankful for the prayers and support for our family during this time.”
Hunt was part of a new breed of Southern governors who proved adept at holding together conservative and moderate white voters while also appealing to the new Black electorate. Others of that generation included Jimmy Carter of Georgia, Reubin Askew of Florida, Dale Bumpers and Bill Clinton of Arkansas, John West of South Carolina and William Winter of Mississippi.
Hunt concentrated on the two secular creeds of the New South – improving the public schools and industry hunting.
He would also reshape the North Carolina’s governor’s office, transforming it from one of the weakest in the country, by convincing first the legislature and then the voters to give governors the veto and the ability to serve two successive terms.
Dee Dee Passmoer reads from books with Governor Jim Hunt’s in 1978. File photo
Hunt’s terms in office
Hunt would win election after election – elected lieutenant governor in 1972, governor in 1976 and again in 1980, governor in 1992 and again in 1996. But he would meet his match in 1984, when he tried to defeat Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, the other major North Carolina political figure of the era and his chief nemesis.
“If you really love being governor, you don’t get tired of doing it, because it’s the best job in the world in so many ways,” Clinton said of Hunt shortly before Hunt left office in 2001.
“There’s nobody in my adult lifetime in the United States who has served as a governor who has done more for education, children’s health or the long-term economic interests of a state than Jim Hunt,” Clinton said.
Governor Jim Hunt photographed in 1980. Robert Willett [email protected]
Raised on country roads
Hunt was born in Greensboro in 1937, but he was raised on a tobacco and dairy farm near the tiny Wilson County town of Rock Ridge in what was then a poor, segregated South of tenant farms, country stores, and mule-driven plows.
Hunt grew up doing farm work and attending revivals, church picnics and corn shuckings. His father, James B. Hunt Sr., was a soil and water conservation agent who helped start the local Grange and a farmer’s co-op. His mother, Elsie Brame Hunt, was an English teacher and librarian. They were college educated – a rarity during that time – active members of the Marsh Swamp Free Will Baptist Church and teetotalers.
They were also Roosevelt New Dealers and rural progressives – believing in the power of government to help people improve their lives through better roads and schools and extending electric and telephone lines to the countryside. His parents were active leaders in the Grange, a progressive farm organization, and they were supporters of such Tar Heel progressives as Gov. Kerr Scott and Sen. Frank Porter Graham.
In 1950, 13-year-old Jimmy Hunt, as he was then known, watched with fascination as the heavy equipment paved Highway 42, the road that ran by the Hunt family farm.
Like dusty roads across North Carolina, the tar being laid down on Highway 42 was part of populist Gov. Scott’s ambitious farm-to-market road building program.
In today’s world of four-, six- and eight-lane interstate highways crisscrossing North Carolina, it is hard to fully appreciate the importance of paving dusty two-lane country roads.
“When you lived on a dirt road as I did, probably the biggest thing that could happen in your life is to get a paved road,” Hunt recalled decades later. “I remember people used to get stuck in the middle of the dirt road, the mud was so bad. The dust in the summer when everything was dry – you couldn’t keep the washing out on the lines. We didn’t have any dryers in those days. Country people would just give their right arm to have their road paved.”
“I stood up at the end of the driveway and watched the road-paving machines come along and pave my country road,” Hunt said. “It just hit me – if you work in politics you can do some wonderful things to help people – tangible things that people really need and want.”
The country road is now called Governor Hunt Road.
Studies at NC State
Hunt grew up as a driven, high achiever. He was the quarterback on a six-man football team, and at halftime, while still wearing his helmet and pads, played the trumpet in the band. He was also captain of the basketball team, senior class president, yearbook editor and class valedictorian at his small high school.
He was state president of the state Future Farmers of America and the state Grange Youth. He met his future wife, an Iowa farm girl named Carolyn Leonard, while attending a national Grange convention in Ohio. During their courtship, Hunt would frequently hitchhike 36 hours, a switchblade in his pocket for protection, to visit her.
The two married while Hunt was a sophomore at N.C. State University in Raleigh and they had the first of their three children while they were students.
Attending N.C. State, a land-grant college, was a natural for a farm boy like Hunt. Hunt earned both an undergraduate degree in agricultural education and a master’s degree in agricultural economics. His thesis was “Acreage Controls and Poundage Controls: Their Effects on Most Profitable Production Practices for Flue Cured Tobacco.”
But it was politics more than poundage controls that intrigued Hunt. As a student, he would visit the General Assembly to watch debates and would take notes on important issues. Even as a farm boy, Hunt would practice giving speeches while plowing the fields.
Photographs of that period show Hunt as a serious, self-possessed young man. He served an unprecedented two terms as student body president. He was part of a clique of farm-boy politicians who a generation later would run the state as lawmakers and Cabinet members – a group that included Phil Carlton, Eddie Knox, Tom Gilmore, J.K. Sherron, Wendell Murphy and Norris Tolson.
Even as an undergraduate, people marked Hunt as something special.
“After the first day in class, I came home that night and said to my wife, ‘I’ve got a young man in my class who one day will be governor of North Carolina,” recalled Abe Holtzman, an N.C. State political science professor.
Governor Jim Hunt raises his arms for applause after signing a $3.1 billion bond referendum to be places on the ballot this fall for universities and community colleges. Higher education leaders, college students, alumni and others gathered at the Capitol grounds in support of the bill. File photo
Politics and business
As a graduate student in 1960, Hunt worked in the gubernatorial campaign of Terry Sanford, serving as state chairman of the College Young Voters for Sanford.
The early 1960s were heady days for Democrats. In Raleigh, Sanford was an activist and innovative governor, while in Washington, President John F. Kennedy was creating excitement with his New Frontier.
After a year at UNC law school, Hunt moved his family to Washington where he worked as college director for the Democratic National Committee, traveling around the country organizing.
“I learned a lot about how you do campaigns,” Hunt said. “I learned how the Kennedys worked. I learned how you went at it full bore. They meant business about politics.”
Although trained as an economist and a lawyer, Hunt spent most of his career as a professional politician. And he mastered the business of politics.
Hunt wrote the precinct-organizing manual for the state Democratic Party and by 1968, was conducting workshops across North Carolina on organizing.
“I know how to do it,” Hunt would say about political organizing after he had left the governor’s office after his fourth term. “I know it like the back of my hand.”
Returning to Carolina to finish law school, Hunt experienced one of the few reversals in his life. He failed the State Bar exam, which he blamed on spending too much time working in the 1964 gubernatorial campaign of former federal Judge L. Richardson Preyer.
Surprised by the setback, Hunt took time off for public service. Unable to enroll in the Peace Corps because they did not accept married couples, Hunt spent two years with his family in the Himalayan nation of Nepal where he worked as a Ford Foundation economic advisor. He and his family lived in a foundation-provided house with mud walls with electricity provided two or three hours per day and no telephone. They boiled water to avoid dysentery and took pills to avoid malaria. Their third child was born in a missionary hospital in Katmandu. Thirteen-mile walks to a nearby village were common, as was stretching out on a sleeping bag on the floor under mosquito nets for weeks at a time while on the road.
“I hope he doesn’t forget the poverty he has seen in Nepal and elsewhere,” his mother, Elsie, told an interviewer shortly after he was elected governor.
Studying the economics and society of a developing country as an outsider, Hunt said, gave him a broader perspective on how institutions worked and the role of education and economic development in improving people’s lives. Nepal was a small-enough country that he could meet with the top ministers of the country and business leaders.
“That is where I started to do my real serious thinking about how you build and develop an economy,” Hunt said.
Later, when Hunt would become governor, he would push for public expenditures to develop new industries in the state. He would create in the Research Triangle Park two major public-private partnerships – the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina and NC Biotechnology Center. And he would create the Centennial Campus at N.C. State to allow private industry to house research units on state-owned land.
Hunt’s pro-business political philosophy was also beginning to take shape. Unlike his hero, Scott, Hunt would never be a populist railing against the big corporations. He would be an ally of the big banks and large utility companies and other big businesses in the state, many of whom he would recruit for his pro-education efforts – and who would also help finance his political career.
“Instead of just dividing up the pie differently, and fighting over the pie, we have to grow the pie,” Hunt said.
Lieutenant governor campaign
One of the lessons of Nepal, Hunt said, was that leaders could not just sit in their office in the capital and administer government. To be effective, Hunt said, leaders needed to use their bully pulpit and travel constantly among their constituents to sell their ideas. During his 16 years as governor, Hunt would become famous for his nonstop travel around the state.
Returning to Wilson in 1966, Hunt passed the bar exam, set up a law practice and quickly began building a political career. In 1968 he was elected president of the Young Democrats Club, an organization that many Tar Heel politicians, including Sanford, used as a political stepping stone.
When civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Hunt, as a member of the Good Neighbors Council, was one of the few white people who participated in a candlelight vigil, marching from a Black church to the Wilson County courthouse for prayers.
Two years later, Gov. Bob Scott appointed Hunt to chair a high-powered commission charged with reviewing and revising the state party’s rules.
By late 1970, Hunt was weighing his moves. He ruled out running for the state legislature because his law partner, Russell Kirby, was already in the state Senate. Hunt looked at running for attorney general and secretary of state before deciding to run for lieutenant governor.
To make the jump from small-town lawyer to governor-in-waiting, Hunt needed a powerful political sponsor.
He found one in Bert Bennett, a Winston-Salem oil distributor, who had helped put Sanford in the governor’s mansion in 1960 and had served as state party chairman. Bennett and Sanford had failed to elect Richardson Preyer governor in 1964, but they had kept their network together.
It was during the Sanford campaign that Bennett got to know two ambitious NC State politicos: Hunt and Carlton.
Carlton was Bennett’s favorite, but it was Hunt who had what Bennett liked to call “a fire in the belly” to run.
“There was no question about the eagerness,” Bennett said. “He had the burning desire. When you are a natural and you work like hell – that is a hard combination to beat.”
During his 1972 campaign for lieutenant governor, Hunt estimated that he traveled 100,000 miles in his car and shook so many hands – a quarter million by his calculation – that his hands would swell up and his elbows would be sore.
The Bennett organization helped make Hunt lieutenant governor in 1972 and governor in 1976.
Republican tide
Hunt’s political career was born during a powerful Republican tide that propelled into office Jesse Helms and Jim Holshouser, North Carolina’s first Republican senator and governor of the 20th century.
At age 35, Hunt was the highest elected Democrat in state government and the Democrats’ leading spokesman.
The rise in Republicanism would influence Hunt’s political career, making him a careful if not cautious politician who rarely took risks, unlike some of his Democratic heroes such as former Govs. Kerr Scott or Sanford.
One misstep could mean disaster for Hunt and the Democrats in an increasingly Republican environment. So Hunt learned to rely on extensive public opinion polls, to talk guardedly, to outwork his opponents and rarely stray from the political middle.
With the backing of the Sanford-Bennett machine, Hunt easily won the 1976 Democratic primary by defeating two millionaires – conservative Ed O’Herron of Charlotte and liberal George Wood, a state legislator and businessman from Camden County, as well as state Sen. Tom Strickland of Goldsboro. Hunt’s timing could not have been better. With the Republicans still reeling from the Watergate scandal, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was elected president.
Hunt was also fortunate to have a weak opponent. Hunt easily defeated David Flaherty, a Massachusetts-born textile executive who had served in Holshouser’s Cabinet, by a stunning 65%-34% margin.
Pushing education policy as governor
On a bitterly cold and windy day in January 1977, Hunt started his long run as governor with a six-minute inauguration speech.
The common thread running through Hunt’s marathon political career was early-childhood education.
As lieutenant governor, he helped push through the legislature a state kindergarten program – an initiative that was also backed by his two predecessors.
During his first term as governor, he put into place the Primary Reading Program, which placed reading aides in every classroom in grades 1-3. During his last two terms, Hunt supported Smart Start, another early childhood program designed to give preschoolers from impoverished backgrounds a better start in life.
But there were other efforts as well. He raised teacher salaries to the national average. He expanded Sanford’s efforts to provide programs for the brightest students by creating the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, the first state-supported residential school for science and math students in the country. Each week, he would spend an hour tutoring a student at Raleigh’s Broughton High School.
He began a regimen of testing and school report cards, trying to instill more accountability into schools.
Near the end of his reign, Hunt was still pushing the state to do better, calling for North Carolina to set a goal of having the best schools in the nation by 2010.
After pumping billions more into education, there were indications that Hunt’s efforts paid off.
Between 1992 and 2000, North Carolina led the nation in improvement in mathematics in the 4th and 8th grades, as measured by standardized tests. Texas Gov. George W. Bush cited Texas’ increase in the same test scores – second only to North Carolina during that period – during his 2000 presidential bid.
Hunt came to be regarded as a national expert on education, his advice sought by elected officials across the country. During his eight years “in the wilderness” between his stints as governor, Hunt chaired a national board that created a certification program for teachers. And when he stepped down as governor for the last time, he created an institute at UNC-Chapel Hill to help elected officials across the country reform their own education systems.
Moderate on taxes, tough on crime
There was little that was striking about Hunt; he was of average height and build. Editorial cartoonists loved to enlarge his pompadour in their caricatures, routinely inserting a comb in his hair. Hunt had the relentless sincerity of an evangelist or an encyclopedia salesman, always preaching about how we need to help “the lil’ children.” Rarely did he let glimpses of humor shine through.
Because he never seemed to let his hair down in public or in private, some came to see Hunt as a bit plastic.
His workaholic hours were the stuff of legend, with aides, legislators and others accustomed to receiving post-midnight or early-morning calls.
“He just loves it,” Bennett said. “He loves the game. He loves politics. He loves being governor. He’s a natural and there’s no person on earth who works harder at it. He’s lucky as hell, but he makes a lot of his own breaks.”
Like other Southern moderates, Hunt was adept in walking a thin tightrope of holding white moderates and attracting Black voters. He would invoke conservative cultural values, frequently summon the blessings of God in his speeches and ban the serving of alcohol in the Executive Mansion.
When he ran in 1976 he pledged not to raise taxes, and he kept his pledge in his first term. But in 1981, he supported a 2¾ cent increase in the motor-fuels tax in what he has described as his most difficult battle as governor. When the country experienced an economic recession in 1982, Hunt cut spending and froze the salaries of state employees and teachers rather than raise taxes.
He presented a tough image on law-and-order issues, strongly supporting the death penalty and rarely granting clemency to death-row inmates. He created the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, and started the most extensive prison construction program in state history.
He won plaudits from conservatives when he withstood an international pressure campaign by liberals to pardon the Wilmington 10, nine Black men and one white woman convicted of firebombing a grocery store and conspiring to shoot at police during a racial disturbance in the port city in 1970. Among the ten was the Rev. Ben Chavis, who would later become national president of the NAACP. In typical Hunt fashion, he compromised and reduced their sentences in 1978. A federal court later overturned their convictions.
When Republicans won control of the state House in 1994 during a national GOP landslide, they proposed the largest tax cut in North Carolina history. Hunt trumped them by proposing even larger tax cuts, including eliminating the sales tax on food that Sanford had pushed through a generation earlier.
While many liberals ground their teeth at Hunt’s conservative feints, Hunt had few doubts about his own beliefs.
“I am a progressive who believes in providing full and equal opportunity for all people to become all that they can be and all God wants them to be,” Hunt said after his governorship. “I believe government has major responsibilities in making that happen. But public leaders should also encourage the private sector and the faith sector.”
Besides supporting education, Hunt showed his progressive side in his appointments, naming the first Black Cabinet secretary, former Chapel Hill Mayor Howard Lee, and appointing Rep. Henry Frye of Greensboro to the N.C. Supreme Court, where he rose to chief justice.
Hunt vigorously lobbied for state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment for women, and backed a state fund to provide abortions for poor women. He pushed through reforms of the State Utilities Commission to make the regulatory body less of a tool of the power companies.
The Hunt machine
Hunt was no political reformer. Hunt’s method was to harness the power of the old political machine, and use it to advance education and economic development.
Hunt assembled the last of the old-fashioned statewide political organizations. It was based in part on political patronage and pork barrel spending: the hiring of highway workers in the mountains, the appointment of judges, the distribution of roads and thousands of appointments to boards and commissions.
The main cog in the Hunt machine was the old Sanford organization headed by Bennett. After taking office, Hunt swept out hundreds of Republican state government workers and replaced them with loyal Democrats. Hunt sharply increased the number of state workers under his patronage control. And his political lieutenants were masters at putting the arm on state workers for political contributions.
Keeping his political machine fed would sometimes get Hunt into trouble. Hunt was embarrassed when it was disclosed that one of his political appointees, Mather Slaughter, was writing memorandums evaluating the political loyalties of various sheriffs.
There was more controversy when it was learned that $1 million in training money was funneled to two companies controlled by Hunt supporter Wilbur Hobby, the state AFL-CIO president, who later went to jail for misusing the money.
The Hunt organization relied on local leaders it designated as “keys,” borrowing a system used by Sanford. During his 1984 challenge against Helms, Hunt’s lieutenants estimated they had 50,000 and 60,000 volunteers working in the campaign across the state.
Throughout Hunt’s political career, there were complaints from Democrats that he cared less about the party than about creating and maintaining a parallel organization loyal to himself.
Once in office, Hunt’s separate organization allowed him to quickly consolidate power. In 1977 he overrode the opposition of conservative Democrats such as Lt. Gov. Jimmy Green and former U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin Jr. to convince first the legislature, and then the voters, to pass a constitutional amendment allowing governors and lieutenant governors to serve two consecutive terms.
He later pushed through a second constitutional amendment giving governors the power to veto bills passed by the legislature. North Carolina had been the only state whose governor had no veto powers. Hunt never vetoed a bill. He didn’t need to.
He was adept at using the bully pulpit to sell his program, at rewarding lawmakers who supported him, and at being connected to the Democratic grassroots and business leadership across the state which he could call upon when necessary.
By the end of his first term in 1980, Hunt had become so powerful that he simply steamrollered his opposition. When former Gov. Bob Scott – apparently piqued at Hunt for not appointing him president of the community college system – ran in the Democratic primary, Hunt defeated the bearer of one of North Carolina’s most famous political names by a 70-29 margin.
Despite a national Republican landslide in the fall of 1980, Hunt easily won. He defeated Republican I. Beverly Lake Jr., a future chief justice of the state Supreme Court and the son of a segregationist gubernatorial candidate, by a 62-37 margin.
Hunt was increasingly regarded as unstoppable at home and a rising star in national politics.
In recognition of his growing status, Hunt was appointed in 1981 as chairman of a national Democratic Party commission that rewrote the rules of the presidential nominating process, ensuring elected officials would be delegates and making the process more deliberative. At the time, the changes were described as a “centrist coup” designed to move the Democratic Party more to the middle. It was those rules that created the so-called “superdelegates,” that 36 years later would help Hillary Clinton capture the Democratic nomination for president.
The time seemed ripe for Hunt to step on to the national stage.
Hunt vs. Helms showdown
It seemed inevitable that the two major figures of Tar Heel politics would clash in 1984 when Helms was up for reelection. The two men represented different political strains in North Carolina politics. Hunt was the bearer of the Kerr Scott, Graham and Sanford tradition, while Helms was in the tradition of a long line of conservatives including Furnifold Simmons, Josiah Bailey and Ervin.
Hunt was prevented under the state Constitution from running for a third consecutive term. If Hunt could go to Washington as the giant killer, could the presidency be far behind?
The Hunt-Helms race produced a clash between the two dominant North Carolina political figures – and two powerful political machines – of the last three decades of the 20th century.
Their contest lasted not months but years. The campaign set a national record in spending for a Senate race; rivaled the 1950 Senate race of Willis Smith against Graham in personal viciousness; and left many North Carolinians exhausted and disenchanted with politics.
The first Helms ads began in April 1983, an astounding 19-month marathon advertising campaign that broke only for a week at Christmas.
Although Helms – by his own polls – started the race 25 points behind Hunt, the race began to tighten in October 1983, when Helms launched a heavily publicized filibuster against legislation making King’s birthday a national holiday. For several days, Helms attracted headlines as he hammered away at the slain civil rights leader’s alleged communist connections.
The King holiday was not only an important issue. One could argue that it was the defining issue in the race – the one that fundamentally altered the chemistry of the election. The Hunt campaign’s polling found that the best predictor of how people would vote in the race was how they viewed the King holiday.
The Helms campaign also ran a series of TV commercials exploiting one of Hunt’s vulnerabilities – his desire to seem to be all things to all people.
The Helms ads were short and simple. They laid out Helms’ view on a controversial issue such as the King holiday, school prayer, school busing and a nuclear freeze, and then asked the question: “Where do you stand, Jim?”
“I’m Jesse Helms, and I want you to know where I stand,” Helms said in one ad. “I oppose the Martin Luther King holiday. Where do you stand, Jim?”
Soon people everywhere could recite the “Where Do You Stand, Jim” mantra just like an advertising jingle for Coca-Cola or some other popular commercial product.
Helms reinforced that image by describing Hunt in speeches as a windshield-wiper politician who went “first one way and then the other.”
With polls showing Helms forging into the lead, the Hunt campaign in June toughened the edge on their commercials. They began portraying Helms as an extremist, tying him to pariah nations around the world, from Argentine dictators to the apartheid regime in South Africa, to death squads in El Salvador.
The Republican Party threw its weight behind Helms. President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush and more than 30 Republican senators campaigned for Helms.
On the campaign trail, Helms, the consummate outsider, would remind voters of his close ties to Reagan and his chairmanship of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
The campaign had a macabre twist. Just four days before the election, Velma Barfield, a 51-year-old grandmother, was executed in Central Prison. She had been convicted of killing her boyfriend by giving him arsenic poisoning and had admitted killing three others.
The execution drew national attention, in part because of the political implications in the Senate race and because Barfield was the first woman put to death in the United States in 22 years. Hunt’s decision not to grant clemency disappointed some of his liberal supporters, but may also have gained him some conservative backing.
On the final day of the campaign, Helms flew around the state and tied Hunt to “homosexuals,” “labor union bosses” and “crooks.” And he said Hunt would only win if he got “an enormous bloc vote” – Helms’ euphemism for Black voters.
“The man is not to be trusted,” Helms told reporters in Charlotte. “And I hope that he never has another day in public office after he’s finished his term as governor.”
In the end, Hunt failed to convince a majority of North Carolina voters that Helms was a political extremist.
Starting the race 25 points behind a popular governor who owned a well-oiled political machine, Helms defeated Hunt by a 52-48 percent margin.
Helms was swept back into office as part of a national Republican landslide. Reagan carried the state with 62% of the vote, providing Helms with strong coattails.
In a 2004 file photo, former Governor James B. Hunt Jr., left, talks with Raymond Gilmartin, President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Merck & Co., after Gilmartin spoke at luncheon sponsored by the Institute for Emerging Issues at the North Raleigh Hilton. Ethan Hyman [email protected]
Second act
With the election of Republican Jim Martin as governor in 1984, Hunt watched a rising Republican tide during his eight years out of political office. Hunt went to work as a corporate lawyer for the firm of Poyner and Spruill, where he earned triple his governor’s salary of $103,012. He commuted daily from his Wilson County cattle farm, The Tarheel Double H, to his Raleigh law office.
He remained in the public eye, staying involved in education causes and bringing national speakers to the Emerging Issues Forum, a two-day seminar he had created at N.C. State.
David Broder, the dean of Washington political journalists, wrote that Hunt might well have been the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988 if he had not lost to Helms four years earlier.
Democrats urged Hunt to run for the U.S. Senate in 1986 and 1990 and for governor in 1988, but he declined. By 1990, though, Hunt began to seriously consider a second act in his political career.
As the 1992 election approached, many Democrats privately worried that the charismatic Republican Lt. Gov. Jim Gardner would easily defeat the leading Democratic contender, Lacy Thornburg, the folksy, tobacco-chewing attorney general.
The decision of the politically driven Hunt to reenter surprised few of his friends. Even when he was out of office, he named one of his prize Simmental bulls “governor.”
Hunt proved adept at changing with the times. He had risen in politics in the 1970s with an old-fashioned political organization that relied on courthouse organizations. But by the 1990s Hunt was relying more on high-priced media campaigns funded by business leaders.
His politics had also shifted subtly to the political right, reflecting the national change that had occurred in the Reagan era.
Hunt still called for spending more money on the public schools. But he also mixed in conservative themes. He criticized the Democratic-controlled General Assembly for raising taxes in 1991 during the recession, saying the budgetary shortfall was “sheer government mismanagement.”
Hunt easily defeated Thornburg by a 65-27 margin in the Democratic primary and took aim at Gardner.
In the general election, Gardner accused Hunt of being a big spender and being soft on criminals.
But Gardner’s business failures in the 1970s had hurt him, and Hunt won the support of important elements of the state’s business community, including the major banks, which had backed Martin for eight years.
“State government should be run like a business,” Hunt said during one debate with Gardner. “But I hope you don’t get to run it like one of your businesses.”
There was one startling development in the closing days. The Gardner campaign disclosed that a Hunt supporter had been listening on her police scanner to calls between Gardner and key supporters that were made on cellphones. The political snooping was discovered when a jilted former boyfriend exposed the Hunt supporter’s electronic eavesdropping. Although Hunt was never tied to the operation, a close political advisor and longtime friend, former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Phil Carlton, pleaded guilty to illegally receiving transcripts of the phone conversations.
Despite the revelations about the eavesdropping, Hunt easily defeated Gardner by a 53-43 margin.
Gardner was the strongest opponent Hunt faced in his four elections as governor.
Former Governor Jim Hunt goes into his office at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice law firm in Raleigh everyday. His current schedule keeps him almost as busy now, as when he was running the state. 2002 N&O file photo by Corey Low [email protected]
Education, taxes and crime
Hunt’s second act in politics was once again dominated by education.
Convinced that many children started school way behind their classmates and never caught up, he started the preschool initiative, Smart Start, which provided an array of programs to provide children with better health and child care.
The seeds for Smart Start were planted one day back in Wilson County, when Hunt was between his terms as governor.
“I remember going by a shack near my farm, and I kept seeing this little child there,” Hunt recalled. “It was the middle of the winter, but he wasn’t wearing anything but a diaper. He was wandering aimlessly on the front porch, and he was holding a bottle, always empty, trying to suck out one last drop of milk. He looked malnourished. He was certainly cold. I never once saw an adult come out for that child, wrap him up in warm clothes, and take him back inside. In my mind, that child became the poster child for Smart Start.”
He also pushed through a $1 billion program to raise teacher salaries to the national level over a four-year period.
As always, Hunt balanced his progressive impulses with a conservative message. When concern about crime mounted in 1994 across the country, Hunt called a special session of the General Assembly to pass a package of anti-crime laws.
During the 1994 elections, there was a national Republican landslide – a backlash against Clinton’s over-reaching national health care program and several congressional scandals. Voters elected a Republican majority both to the U.S. House and to the U.S. Senate.
Nowhere in the country were the tremors from the Republican landslide more strongly felt than in North Carolina, with the Republicans gaining control of the state’s congressional delegation and the state House.
Hunt shifted quickly to his right. After the Republicans proposed their major tax cut, Hunt proposed and pushed through the legislature the largest tax cut in Tar Heel history. He also co-opted the Republicans by seizing the issue of welfare reform – requiring people to get off public assistance and helping them get back into the workforce.
When Hunt gave his State of the State address to the General Assembly in 1995, Republicans jokingly asked who would give the Democratic response.
While many Democrats openly scoffed at his ideological gymnastics, Hunt proved to be a Democratic firewall, preventing a complete Republican sweep of the state.
In 1996, Hunt easily won reelection, defeating state Rep. Robin Hayes of Concord by a 56 to 43 margin.
Under Hunt’s leadership, the Democrats edged their way back from the precipice. By 1998, they won back control of the state House.
Hunt did not attempt to name his successor in 2000. But he left the Democratic Party strong enough so that another moderate Democrat, Attorney General Mike Easley, followed him.
In January 2001, Hunt and his wife Carolyn, holding hands, walked away from the inaugural parade almost unnoticed.
Jim Hunt’s legacy
There had been dynasties in North Carolina politics before – the Simmons Machine and the Shelby Dynasty. But in many ways, Hunt was a one-man dynasty dominating Tar Heel politics for a generation.
He was thrust on the state stage by the liberal-leaning 1960s-era political organization headed by Sanford and Bennett.
Hunt mastered the old-time politics of courting powerful cigar-smoking courthouse bosses, winning over city machines in Black neighborhoods, and providing political patronage to highway workers in the mountains.
But by the time he returned to power in the 1990s, North Carolina’s politics had changed, becoming more urban, sophisticated, television-oriented and Republican.
Hunt learned to operate in that environment as well. He patched together coalitions of Democratic-leaning interest groups including teachers, organized labor, and African American leaders. But he also reached out to the executives of Charlotte banks, the high-tech companies of the Research Triangle and other business leaders – many of whom helped Hunt raise the estimated $30 million to $35 million he needed to finance his campaigns.
Hunt likely appointed 12,000 people to state boards and commissions. He appointed hundreds of judges. By the end of the century, many of the young lieutenants of Hunt’s political organization had risen to power.
He accomplished this as the South, including North Carolina, was becoming more Republican. When he first became governor, 73% of North Carolina’s voters were registered Democrats, 23% Republican and 4% unaffiliated. By the end of his last term, the state was 49.9% Democratic, 34 percent Republican and 16% unaffiliated.
Hunt kept the Democratic Party afloat during a Republican tide with his ideological nimbleness.
“A lot of Democrats really detest Jim Hunt,” said Chris Scott, then the state AFL-CIO director. “That is because they view him as somebody who does not do what the Franklin Roosevelt Democratic Party would have done. But I really admire his skill in reaching out beyond the normal circles that the Democrats travel in.”
But even as he became more conservative, Hunt remained committed to his central goals of improving North Carolina’s public schools, enforcing civil rights and bringing in new jobs.
“Jim Hunt’s achievement was to figure out how to survive in the changing economy and the changing political landscape of the South and still remain a Democrat,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill. “He picked his spots. He broadened his base. Yet he remained a Democrat.”
After leaving the governor’s office, Hunt joined the Raleigh office of the state’s largest law firm, Womble, Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, where from the 21st floor he could keep his eye on the Capitol. Hunt spurned entreaties from Washington that he run for Helms’ seat in 2002.
Instead, Hunt continued his interest in improving public education, serving on numerous state and national boards. The project closest to his heart was the newly created James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy in Chapel Hill. Hunt envisioned it as a place where governors, corporate CEOs, legislative leaders and others could come to learn how to improve the public schools.
In his later years, he kept an office in the futuristic Hunt Library on Centennial Campus, which includes a gallery telling Hunt’s history. The library is among the most visible parts of Hunt’s legacy.
Hunt evolved into the role of North Carolina’s senior statesman and wise man. But he and Carolyn never left their modest farmhouse. And he was never too big to knock on doors at election time in Wilson County precincts.
Raised on a dairy farm without wealth or connections, Hunt’s career was a testament to the power of persistence, persuasion, and an ability to make others see the virtue of his vision of the state.
Rob Christensen wrote about North Carolina politics for The News & Observer for 45 years. He is the author of two award-winning histories of Tar Heel politics and most recently wrote a history of The N&O and the Daniels family. He can be reached at [email protected].
This story was originally published December 18, 2025 at 5:02 PM.
