Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

John Davis Wirth (1936–2002)

2005; Duke University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-85-2-302

1527-1900

Frank D. McCann,

Youth, Politics, and Society

John Wirth was proud to be a native of New Mexico and one of the pioneer Brazilianists of the early 1960s. With his Harvard B.A. (1958, Magna cum laude) in hand, he had gone back West to study for his Ph.D. (1966) with John Johnson at Stanford. He turned a seminar paper into a seminal article (“Tenentismo in the Brazilian Revolution of 1930”) that appeared in this journal in May 1964. With this pioneering piece of research, he announced his entry into Brazilian studies. He went to Brazil with a dissertation project to study the politically active National Student Union, but to his dismay he found that its headquarters and archives had burned completely in the crisis of March–April 1964. With agility and determination, he came up with a new topic that studied Vargas-era developmentalism from the perspectives of international trade and the creation of the core industries of steel and petroleum. Truly, necessity proved the mother of invention. His dissertation was one of the earliest of that fertile 1960s crop and set a high standard for those that followed. The resulting book, The Politics of Brazilian Development, 1930–1954 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1970), was graced with the Bolton Prize in 1971.John believed that Brazilian studies would prosper best if we all cooperated in the task of expanding knowledge about the Brazilian past. Referring to some who behaved differently, he commented, in a personal letter in 1976, that “in a new field, where so little is known and there is so much to be done, the historian’s role is to add to, evaluate, and supplant prior research, not to tear it down and certainly not to make exaggerated claims about the merit of one’s own work. Modesty is a compelling virtue.”He joined Joseph Love and Robert Levine in an ambitious, groundbreaking project applying a common methodology to study the regionalism of São Paulo, Pernambuco, and Minas Gerais. John opted to do Minas because his wife Nancy had family ties there and because he felt an affinity with the Min-eiros and their mountainous land. As a New Mexican raised in Colorado and educated in a Vermont prep school, he understood how landlocked, rugged terrain could affect thinking and attitudes. By September 1977, his affection for Minas had reached the point that he wrote me that “I now consider myself much more a mineirista than a Brazilianist.” Minas Gerais in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (Stanford Univ. Press, 1977) won Honorable Mention in the Bolton competition in 1978. From a conference on the comparative history of urbanization at Stanford in the spring of 1977 he produced an edited volume (with Robert L. Jones): Manchester and São Paulo: Problems in Rapid Urban Growth (Stanford Univ. Press, 1978).John had a deep affection for Stanford and gave the university his consider able energy and imagination. The 1980s saw him directing Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies, as well as the Stanford-Berkeley Joint Center. The Brazilian seminars that he managed via the joint center became the West Coast analogue of the Brazil Seminar at Columbia University. At one point when the Spanish and Portuguese Department suffered a governance crisis, John stepped in as peacemaking chair. He chaired, for two terms, the editorial board of the press, insuring that it kept its high reputation for publishing Latin American themes. The culmination of his university service was the three years he served as vice provost for academic planning and development. He enjoyed introducing his students to the academic life and formed life-long friendships with many of them.While administering the center, he expanded his interests, editing The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History (Academic Press, 1982) with anthropologists George A. Collier and Renato Rosaldo. His fascination with public policy development and the research for his first book that touched on the politics of Brazilian oil led to his contributing a chapter on the creation of Petro-bras and editing Latin American Oil Companies and the Politics of Energy (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985). In addition to the Brazilian case, the book examined the origins and evolutions of the government petroleum companies in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. As it became clear that military rule was loosening, John summoned specialists to Stanford in 1983 and 1984 to discuss the changes that had taken place over the past decades and to speculate about the trend of events. Some of those session papers appeared in State and Society in Brazil: Continuity and Change (Westview, 1987), which he coedited with Edson de Oliveira Nunes and Thomas E. Bogenschild. In 1991 Stanford recognized his excellent contributions with the Gildred Professorship of Latin American Studies.He shared a deepening concern about environmental problems with his brother, former U.S. senator from Colorado Timothy Wirth. This led him to apply his keen analytical instincts to issues closer to home. From his New Mexican perspective, it was perfectly obvious that airborne pollution was a transnational, rather than a merely local, problem. This avid outdoorsman, masterful with a fly rod, was concerned about the advancing pollution in the Southwest and believed that scholars had a duty to turn activist when their research could provide solutions to society’s problems. He founded the North American Community Service program that placed youths in environmental, community development, and historic site preservation projects in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. As discussion of NAFTA heated up, he rethought Herbert Bolton’s 1932 argument for a common history of the Americas and actively embraced the trilateral union of the North American countries. He went so far as to offer a Canadian history course at Stanford, something that had not been done since the 1950s. He founded and headed the North American Institute in Santa Fe and gave his attention to questions related to the effects of pollution from smelters and power plants, and cross-cultural matters. He literally envisioned a new North American reality. His passion comes through in Environmental Management on North America’s Borders, coedited with Richard Kiy (Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1998), which ranged from Quebec to New Mexico and, especially, in Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution (Univ. of Kansas Press, 2000), which dealt with the cleanup of copper smelters on either side of the Grande Rio Bravo.It is fitting that John’s last book, Los Alamos—The Ranch School Years, 1917– 1943 (with Linda H. Aldrich) (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2003), allowed him to delve deeply into his own past. His father, Cecil, was a Ranch School teacher and ran its summer camp. John and brother Tim were marked by their years at the Ranch School. John did not see the finished book, which appeared shortly after his death. The Ranch School had been taken over by the government to become the site of the Los Alamos Atomic Laboratory, which event tied John emotionally to the greatest of all environmental problems. It is not surprising, given this background, that in 1994 President Clinton appointed him one of five U.S. members on the Joint Public Advisory Committee of the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation.John had a house in Atherton not far from Stanford, but his real home (which he liked to call his Shangri-La) was the marvelous hacienda-style house in Santa Fe that he and Nancy had inherited from her father, the famous New Mexican architect John Gaw Meem. It was a rare weekend that did not find him in Santa Fe. He displayed no symptoms and was ebullient as he flew to Toronto, Ontario, to give a lecture on Western explorer Zebulon Pike. During the talk, on June 21, 2002, he succumbed to a heart aneurysm.In our last telephone conversation, the day before he went to Canada, we talked about Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos (1944), and he joked about “Zé Carioca” teaching “Pato Donald” to samba and lamented that Canada had been excluded from that popular vision of the Good Neighborhood. To the last he was proud, in his jovial, self-depreciating way, of being “a charter member in the generation of Brazilianists which contributed substantially to the historiography of Brazil.” His untimely death was a tragedy for his family, his many friends, and Latin American studies. We are poorer without his charming humor, his wisdom, and his humanity.