Never a radical institution, Dartmouth College nonetheless provided education for a number of people described elsewhere at NH Radical History.
Nathaniel P. Rogers attended Dartmouth from 1811 to 1816. Playing football, he sustained an abdominal injury which affected him for the rest of his life and may have contributed to his death at an early age.
Stephen Symonds Foster graduated from Dartmouth in 1838. In his senior year, he was arrested and sent to jail for the first time. His buddy, Parker Pillsbury, later wrote that the jailing was prompted by Foster’s pacifist refusal to serve in the militia, but according to Foster’s wife’s biographer, the reason was rather less romantic. The issue was an unpaid $12.14 bill from a local clockmaker. A letter Foster sent protesting jail conditions touched off a successful campaign to end imprisonment for debt.
Arthur Bergeron, who became a leader of the Farmer-Labor Party and served as mayor of Berlin, graduated from Dartmouth.
Thomas Paul, Jr. graduated from Dartmouth in 1841 after attending Noyes Academy. By some accounts, he was the first Black graduate, by others the second.
Thomas Flynn, father of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, studied engineering at Dartmouth. According to Helen Camp, he was briefly suspended for refusing to rat on other students who were meeting secretly to demand the right to attend Catholic religious services. Tom Flynn left Dartmouth to support his family after his older brother died. He went to work at a quarry in Concord and with the Manchester Street Railway Company. After losing an election to be Manchester’s City Engineer in 1896, he moved with his family to Ohio, Massachusetts, and then New York.
Joe Dallet, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1927, went to Spain in 1937 to fight alongside the forces resisting fascism. He was killed in action on October 13, 1937.
The Dartmouth College Library’s special collections include papers of Dr. Willard Uphaus, Hugo DeGregory, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
