Among his many loyal supporters James
Burke was known as honest, fearless and filled with high ideals. His enemies
meanwhile questioned his motives and considered him dangerous. Describing his
speaking style, a writer for Vermonter Magazine once remarked, “The ideas were
expressed with the intensity of conviction that struck a popular chord in the
hearts of the proletariat among whom his strength has been greatest.”
Speaking for himself, Burke
proclaimed, “I believe in a progressive spirit, no going backward.”
Upon his death in 1943 the Burlington
Free Press, a frequent critic of Burke, called him “the grand old man of
Vermont Democrats," a tireless fighter “stirring the smoldering embers of
democracy when they seemed to be dying out.”[1]
Still, nothing lasts forever, and
the Queen City had already drifted back toward conservatism by the 1930s. The
Irish led a growing opposition, but Old Americans – “Yankees” with civic and financial
power who still clung to their sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority – continued to
dominate local culture. Upper class residents, many of whom literally lived up
“on the hill,” fought against unions and the minimum wage, and offered little
charitable assistance through their churches. People should “help themselves,”
they advised.
And they weren’t beyond covering
up their own faults. After a housing survey was completed in the 30s it was
quickly buried. Some of Burlington’s leading citizens, it turned out, owned
several of the shabbiest tenements.
Sociologist Elin Anderson
provided the most vivid portrait of the Queen City during the Depression years
in her award-winning study, We Americans, published by Harvard Press in 1937.
The city was conservative, rural and individualist, she concluded, a far cry
from the liberal, urban and socially-engaged place it would become a half
century later. In the 1930s it had lost personal neighborliness without gaining
impersonal mobility.[2]
The dominant social group was
still the Old Americans. Leading the opposition were the Irish, who cast their
lot with the “have nots.” Their Democratic leanings and Catholic faith sent up
red flags among the Yankees, and even some French Canadians viewed their
leadership as “officious and irksome.”
Anderson studied these three
groups, along with smaller Jewish, German and Italian communities, for three
years. The WPA paid the salaries of six local women who conducted hundreds of
in-depth interviews. One odd finding she noted was that the community believed
women, more than men, “preserved prejudicial attitudes.”
An unusual aspect of the study
was the auspices under which it was conducted: the Vermont Eugenics Survey. The
eugenicist, explained Anderson, is interested in “ethnic
adjustment” through “biological blending – intermarriage – of the most
desirable qualities of people.” In general, eugenics focused on
discouraging propagation by the so-called unfit, reflected in laws allowing
sterilization of “mental defectives.” At its worst, it gave support to the
concept of cultivating a “superior” breed or race, an idea linked to the rising
Nazi movement in Germany at the time.
Anderson made no such connections; in
fact, she scoffed at the notion of a “pure” American and denounced both Hitler
and Burlington’s anti-Semitic Silver Shirts. She also condemned a local nursery
school policy that allowed rejection of a child “solely because she is Jewish.”
Affiliated with UVM’s zoology
department, the Eugenics Survey began in 1925 with a three-year genealogical
study of 62 families with “outstanding defects, deficiencies and other bad
traits.” Included in this group were hundreds of paupers, illegitimate
children, and even some blind and paralyzed people. A few years before Anderson
arrived in Burlington, the Survey had lobbied the legislature to allow for
sterilization of the “feeble-minded.”
More constructively, Anderson’s
study delineated the prevailing social and ethnic “cleavages” and unmasked the
community’s WASPs, “stripping away some of the pretense by which the people on
top rationalize their position,” according UVM Sociology professor Jim Loewen.
“She emphasizes that the Old Americans set the status hierarchy and that what
they value sets the community values. That’s pretty hard-hitting. It’s saying
the Old Americans are racist, ethnicist, and classist, and get away with it
because the lower groups have false consciousness.”
The impact of “cleavage” between
the Irish and French Canadians was revealed in the response to one of
Anderson’s questions. Should one vote for the person “who is a member of one’s
own nationality” when deciding between two qualified candidate? The findings
said that French Canadians tended to vote Republican – with Yankees and, most
notably, against Irish Democrats.
The city remained divided along
Yankee-foreigner, Protestant-Catholic lines until the late 1950s. Political
gerrymandering helped maintain Yankee dominance. But by the late 1950s, a
political alliance was forged between moderate Republicans and conservative
Democrats to control city appointments and services. This open conspiracy,
known as the Republicrats, ran the City of Burlington for the next two decades,
right until the election of another progressive mayor named Bernie Sanders.
PREVIOUS CHAPTERS
[1]
Burlington Free Press, April
27, 1943.
[2]
Material for this section was
originally presented in The Way We Were,
a cover story written with Sue Burton that appeared in the September 24, 1987
issue of The Vermont Vanguard Press.
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