Almost President: The Impossible Dream of Howard Dean

Running for president is a body-and-soul-challenging job. Campaigns begin years before the election, and candidates are caught in an endless race around the country, repeating the same phrases and self-congratulatory arguments as they fight to out-fundraise and out-spend one another. It was therefore no surprise that, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses in January 2004, Howard Dean looked a bit squeezed out on the campaign trail.

      After more than a decade as Vermont Governor he was running for president as a feisty outsider, challenging the Bush administration about the conduct of the Iraq War while riding an Internet-driven wave of anti-incumbent anger.

     In spite of Vermont’s often prickly relationship with the national government, other politicians from the Green Mountains had contemplated running after the unexpected presidential terms of Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge. In 1881 Arthur became president after James Garfield was shot at a Washington railway station by an unstable officer-seeker. Coolidge served for five years after Warren Harding dropped dead in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, in the midst of a goodwill tour. 

Phil Hoff broke through 1962.

     In the late 1930s Republican George Aiken, a former Vermont governor and US Senator, toyed with the possibility of challenging Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thirty years later Phil Hoff leapt into the national spotlight briefly as the first Democratic governor to break with President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War. In summer 1968, Hoff galvanized the party with a moving speech to the General Assembly eulogizing Robert Kennedy, who had been assassinated in June. When the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Hoff’s name circulated as a “protest” candidate for vice president. But he was conflicted and worn down by a decade of political struggles and did not pursue it.

     Howard Dean had fewer internal conflicts. The son of a Republican Wall Street executive, he grew up in affluent surroundings, mostly in East Hampton, and attended an exclusive boarding school. At Yale he opposed the Vietnam War but wasn’t a protester, then drifted for a while before briefly becoming a stockbroker. That didn’t satisfy a nagging desire to help people, however, so he enrolled at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a school in the Bronx famous for its community-based approach.

     Once he completed med school, the next challenge was finding a place for his residency. Vermont was not his first choice, but its size offered a way to combine practicing medicine with political engagement. His first significant move was to help launch the Citizens’ Waterfront Group, which fought for a bike path along the shore on Lake Champlain and locked horns with the administration of Bernie Sanders, an Independent who had unseated a Democratic mayor.

     The bike path campaign took years but ultimately succeeded beyond his dreams. In the meantime, Dean learned the ropes from established Vermont politicians. “They shaped me into a pragmatic Democrat,” he wrote in a political autobiography. “I was friendly with the younger, more liberal Democrats because they were my age, but I didn’t vote with them. I didn’t relate to their political sensibilities.”

     By 1982 he was chairing the Chittenden County Democratic Committee and running for the state House of Representatives. “The District was in Burlington, and it was the most liberal, working-class district in the state,” he wrote. “There was a very strong Progressive Party in the ward and no Republican Party whatsoever. So, interestingly, I ended up running against a candidate to my left in my first election.”

     In the legislature Dean joined a group of young, moderate Democrats and Republicans known as the “blue shirts,” focused on education issues, and became minority leader in only two years. By 1986 he was ready to run statewide. Looking at the available options – lieutenant governor or a race for Congress against moderate Republican Jim Jeffords – he chose the easier path. Fortunately for Dean, the current lieutenant governor, Peter Smith, wanted to run for governor.

     In 1990, Dean passed on the opportunity to run for governor himself, but ended up in office anyway due to the sudden death of Richard Snelling. Reviewing his accomplishments over the next decade, Dean has stressed balancing the budget, building a surplus, land conservation, health care for most children under 18, and an early intervention program that reduced childhood abuse. On some issues he resisted demands from the left, however, and was generally known as a centrist.

     His response to calls for same-sex marriage was indicative. On December 10, 1999 the State Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Vermont, that gay couples had a right to the same benefits provided to straight couples and told the legislature to deal with appropriate implementation. Sensing political peril, Dean initially expressed some discomfort with the idea of gay marriage. But the legislature moved forward and made Vermont the first state to legalize civil unions. Dean signed the bill, but without a public ceremony, apparently in the hope of cooling down the atmosphere. It didn’t happen. Gay rights activists felt cheated, and an anti-gay backlash almost cost him re-election in 2000.

     In retrospect, Dean asserts that he was committed to marriage equality for all. “That’s why I knew I had to work for civil unions,” he wrote in 2003, in the midst of his presidential race. “I never viewed the bill as a gay rights issue. I signed it out of a commitment to human rights, and because every single American has the same right to equality and justice under the law that I have.” Whatever the reasons, he benefited in the long run. Wealthy gay supporters, especially in the Fire Island beach community, were early and generous contributors to his campaign.

     By the time civil unions became Vermont law in 2000, Dean was already considering a presidential race. But he passed on it that year, and waited until the end of his last term as governor two year later to begin building an organization. He also made sure Al Gore wasn’t running again.

     Early on, Dean tapped into an Internet-based strategy, meetups, and used the concept to organize supporters across the country. “We were seeing a phenomenon where the effort was owned and directed by the people who supported it,” he explained. He was also discovering a new way to raise money. By June 30, 2003, he had raised almost $8 million, beating his rivals and advancing to the top candidate tier. A week before that, he officially announced in front of a standing room only crowd on Church Street.

     “On that stunning early summer day,” he recalled, “I stood in front of more than thirty thousand Americans who had gathered in Burlington and, via the Internet, across the country…In many ways, that speech on June 23 was the culmination of what I had learned in a year of listening to the American people.”

Dean campaign lit, 2004

     By August Dean was the hottest political story in the country, the wild card of the upcoming presidential race. In cover features published simultaneously on August 11, both Time and Newsweek declared him the candidate to watch. Time was circumspect, titling its cover “The Dean Factor” and inside headlining his “cool passion” as an “unlikely spokesman for the anti-Bush left.” Newsweek was more provocative. Dean pointed angrily at an unseen audience as the cover headline asked, “Howard Dean: Destiny or Disaster?” Inside, Jonathan Alter’s coverage telegraphed the fear among establishment Democrats that “if Dean does win the nomination, his liberal supporters will put their Birkenstocks on the gas pedal and drive the party right over the cliff, a la George McGovern in 1972.”

     Back in Vermont, many residents were perplexed. This was a new Howard Dean, no longer the moderate who often frustrated progressives. Now he was, as Alter described him, “the fire-breathing neopopulist” calling on liberals to “Take your country back.”

     In Dean’s book, released a few months later, he chided fellow Democrats for “actually empowering the radical right” by being afraid to “stand up to the Republicans and their radical agenda.” He defined his cause as “the Great American Restoration – the restoration of our ideals, of our communities, and of our nation’s traditional role as a beacon of hope in the world.” Dean had become governor by accident, but was running for president with gusto and purpose.

     Six months later, on the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, he was still pushing as hard, and pulling out the stops by spending Sunday morning with President Carter in Georgia. Then he flew back to caucus-land for a rare appearance with his wife. He had focused on Iowa early, risking $300,000 to air the first TV ads. Everything looked set for an early victory.

     But groups like the Club for Growth had something else in mind. In early 2004, the Club came up with a strategy designed to turn what was starting to look like a Frank Capra movie, Dr. Dean Goes to Washington, into a horror-fantasy. In an ad released by the conservative anti-tax group shortly before the crucial caucuses, two actors, playing an elderly couple, were asked to describe the threat looming over the country.

     Responding directly to the camera, the “husband” said, “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading…” Then the “wife” jumped in with, “body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs.”

     It was strong stuff, a perverse yet brilliant blend of dark comedy and cultural hate speech, so effective that the Club didn’t have to pay much for airtime. The news networks were more than willing to provide free play. As CNN’s Judy Woodruff explained on January 9, “This is so catchy, we love to run it over and over again.”

     Club for Growth President Steve Moore readily admitted that the goal was to re-brand Dean as a tax-hiking elitist. The theme would have been developed more if he had become the nominee, and was cleverly recycled in 2008 to fit Obama. Columnist Austin Bay outlined the script in a mid-January 2004 essay, arguing that Dean was the candidate of “that cadre of angry American leftists struggling with a nasty case of '60s nostalgia and their failed elitist ideology.” In this version of the race, narcissist baby boom radicals were using “pop socialism” to extend “government coercion.”

     “These ‘progressives’ wish America were France,” Bay wrote. “Whether tenured in the Ivies, ensconced in editorial positions or pulling in trial lawyer and Hollywood bucks, these late middle-age Volvo drivers long for L'Age D'Or, when smoking dope and calling US soldiers babykillers made you ‘hip’." Calling the idea that the US war on Iraq might have been a mistake another sign of “tie-dyed dogma,” he concluded that the Dean campaign was dangerous “brain-zapped foolishness.”

     Dean endured similar assaults throughout his campaign, and not just from other candidates and isolated columnists. In addition to a barrage of negative campaign ads directed against the frontrunner, a majority of nightly network newscast evaluations of Dean were negative, while three-quarters of the coverage given to the other candidates was favorable, according to research conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. In 2003, only 49 percent of all on-air evaluations of Dean were positive, while the rest of the democratic field collectively received 78 percent favorable.

     By January 19, 2004, most of the candidates were ready to say and do anything to survive. A few hours before the caucuses, John Kerry wondered aloud whether John Edwards was “out of diapers” when he (Kerry) came back from Vietnam. He had to apologize, since Edwards was 16 at the time. In frigid weather, steelworkers were showing painted chests for Dick Gephardt. Wesley Clark, not in the caucus but gaining ground nationally at the time, was hugging George McGovern in New Hampshire. Edwards and Dennis Kucinich meanwhile struck a deal to pool delegates. Treating caucus-goers like tradable commodity, they agreed that the candidate with the best early showing in a caucus would get the other’s support to meet the 15 percent viability threshold for actual delegates.

     In a weird counterpoint, the Bush administration was pushing for caucuses in Iraq. As the US tried to get the UN back into the process of reconstructing the devastated country, thousands of angry Shiites were taking to the streets. Their demand was free elections, but their leaders admitted that the goal was an Islamic state. The fear was that a public vote, being demanded by the Shiite majority, would lead to a less-than-friendly government. The subtext was that caucuses made it easier to manipulate the outcome.

     CNN analysts issued a forecast for Iowa hours before anyone voted. On Crossfire, Democratic insiders Paul Begala and James Carville, as well as conservative Robert Novak, predicted that Kerry’s late surge would overwhelm Dean. Edwards was given third place and Gephardt was consigned to oblivion. Dean sounded over-confident, but there was uncertainty among his active supporters, nicknamed the Deaniacs. Volunteers in at least three cities were handing out flyers that charged Kerry wasn’t electable, his wife was too rich, and Ralph Nader wouldn’t step aside if he was the nominee. It came across as desperate.

     Days earlier, Dean Campaign Director Joe Trippi had claimed to have 40,000 definite supporters lined up to attend the caucuses, virtually guaranteeing first place. (He was off by half.) Over the weekend, volunteers flooded the state, buzzing around in orange hats. It would be a test of whether “Generation Dean” was for real. For the candidate, it was a reality check on a dream that dated back years.

     Waiting for the numbers, Tom Brokaw noted that politics today is about cultural values, and that Dean’s message had become confused – he was an “outsider” with more key endorsements than anyone else, an angry guy whose wife didn’t want much to do with his campaign. In short, an uncertain image had undermined his message and, more important, his perceived electability. According to a focus group led by Frank Luntz, Dean’s support had tanked, largely because people found him testy, even mean – partially based on a last minute shouting match with a critic that made Iowa TV news.

     Kerry and Edwards were staging an upset. But Dean had also squandered his lead, and too many questions were being raised about his electability, key factors apparently favoring Kerry and Edwards. Early opposition to the Iraq war didn’t turn out to be a strong enough argument; both anti-war and young Iowans found Kerry as attractive as the former Vermont governor.

     Nevertheless, becoming the frontrunner had already allowed Dean to launch and fund a national campaign. Thus, losing in Iowa didn’t necessarily have to spell doom. But it did allow the media to question his claims to be leading a broad-based movement, and set the stage for Kerry to beat him in New Hampshire. Even spending millions more on TV ads wouldn’t be enough to overcome another month like the last.

     And then, when he could have been hopeful but humble, Howard Dean went on national TV to thank his supporters and unexpectedly turned into a cartoon character, a snarling Hulk who rasped out a fierce determination to beat any rivals, shouting out their home states with a frightening sneer. Columnist Howard Fineman was generous when he called it “a little nutty.” CNN’s senior analyst Bill Schneider concluded that “people looked at Howard Dean, and they didn’t see a President.”

     Boston’s Mike Barnacle was blunt: “That guy’s not going to the White House.”

Can a Vermonter make it? Bernie Sanders may try next.

Bush strategist Karl Rove and the religious Right wanted the 2004 presidential race to be about values – things like patriotism, optimism and heterosexual marriage. Actually, they hoped to convince enough people to swallow the administration line, ignore uncomfortable facts, and embrace an evangelically-infused 1950s vision of the country. But the election ended up being about much more, including security, deception, gay marriage, decency, and the all-important presidential variable known as “likeability.”

     Howard Dean’s incandescent sprint became a warning: Be prepared for the unexpected. By winning the so-called “invisible primary” – the fundraising and organization-building race that happens before any votes are cast – he looked like a “frontrunner” quite early, probably too soon. In the end his support turned out to be demographically thin and easy to undermine. In early 2004 he went from “hot” to “not” in less than a month.

     Like the outbursts of Barack Obama’s former minister Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Dean’s so-called “rant” after the Iowa caucuses – instantly infamous as the “I have a scream” speech – was the hot clip on TV and the Internet for weeks, the focus of endless late night jokes. Within five days, the “scream heard round the world” was played almost 700 times on US television networks. As Dean’s poll numbers tanked, critics concluded that he simply didn’t have the “temperament” to be president. The emphasis shifted from which candidate had the most compelling message to which would be more “electable.” Dean was being winnowed out.

     Struggling to turn disaster into opportunity, the embattled candidate spent the next days blanketing the networks with interviews, appearing with his wife, joking about his performance on late night TV, even distributing video tapes of a warm and fuzzy interview with Diane Sawyer to more than 100,000 New Hampshire residents.  It began to work. Some people realized that the criticisms of Dean were exaggerated.

     But Kerry seized the moment to step above the fray, stressing his “gravitas” and showcasing manly skills by playing Hockey and piloting a helicopter. Like a contender on the reality show Survivor, he was showcasing his value to the tribe. The following Tuesday, when New Hampshire primary votes were tallied, the strategy paid off. Kerry repeated his Iowa performance, pulling in 39 percent. Dean made a partial comeback with a convincing second place finish. His speech that night was more sedate, yet still defiant.

     The immediate casualties were Wesley Clark, who skipped Iowa to spend weeks alone in New Hampshire – only to come in a weak third, and Joe Lieberman, stuck in fifth with less than 10 percent after virtually living in the state for a month and bragging about “Joe-mentum.” Neither immediately gave up but both were on the critical list.

     On February 18, after coming in third in Wisconsin, Dean finally acknowledged that his campaign had "come to an end." Yet he urged people to continue voting for him. The idea was that Dean delegates could still influence the party platform. On March 2 he won the Vermont primary, but it was over.

     After the 2004 election Dean became chairman of the Democratic National Committee, creating a “50 State Strategy” designed to make Democrat congressional candidates competitive in normally conservative states.  The approach bore fruit in the 2006 midterms; Democrats took back the House and picked up seats in the Senate from normally Republican states. In 2008 Barack Obama made Dean’s strategy the backbone of his campaign.

     On April 7, 2009, over a veto from Dean’s gubernatorial successor Jim Douglas, the Vermont legislature became the first in the country to allow marriage for same-sex couples.  An UCLU study concluded that the decision would boost the state’s economy by more than $30 million over three years, and that, in turn, would generate $3.3 million more in fees and sales taxes and create 700 new jobs.

     After Dean dropped out of the presidential race, some analysts said he had been assassinated by a hostile media. It was partly true. But they couldn’t have done it if Dean hadn’t supplied some bullets. Throughout the campaign he insisted on shooting from the hip and often fell into gaffes. Another notion, that his campaign had fundamentally changed the Democratic Party, took much for granted. It was about as convincing as the assumption that Ralph Nader’s presence in the race would broaden public discourse. Nader was refused entry into major debates, rarely appeared on television, and didn’t make it onto the ballot in many states.

    After 9/111, many people argued that “everything” had changed. Not so. Some things continued as usual, including not-so-subtle manipulation of public opinion and the primary election process.

The First Third Party

How the Anti-Masons Challenged Secrecy and Elites

In 1826 William Morgan, a 52-year-old Freemason and printer from Batavia, New York, became dissatisfied with his local lodge and announced his intention to publish the details of Masonic rituals. When his plan became known, however, Morgan was seriously harassed. That September he was seized by unknown parties, taken to Fort Niagara, and never seen again.

Although Morgan’s fate is unknown, it was widely believed at the time that he had been kidnapped and killed by fellow Masons, a suspicion that only increased the existing hostility toward the order and led to the formation of the first national third party in the United States.

Spreading rapidly from upstate New York across New England and west, the Anti-Mason movement introduced innovations like nominating conventions and the adoption of party platforms. By 1831 the new political party was so popular that Vermont elected an Anti-Mason governor, demonstrating both the depth of public opposition to elite power and how far a single-issue movement can go.

Morgan’s disappearance led more people to conclude that Freemasons were not loyal citizens. Since most Masons were judges, businessmen, bankers and politicians, ordinary folks began to view the group as a powerful, anti-democratic secret society. Others suspected links to the occult and ceremonial magic. One persuasive argument was that the secret oaths administered by lodges could bind members to favor each other over “outsiders.” When the trial of the alleged Morgan conspirators was mishandled and Masons successfully blocked further inquiries, even more concluded that they controlled key public offices, abused their power to promote the interests of the fraternity, and were violating basic democratic principles.

Popular outrage spread as people decided to challenge what they now considered a conspiracy. In western New York, citizens attending mass meetings in 1827 resolved not to support any Mason for public office. The National Republicans, heirs of the Jeffersonian faction, were weak in New York at the time, and shrewd political leaders used anti-Mason feelings to create a new party to oppose the rising “Jacksonian Democracy,” which favored a more powerful president, expansion of the right to vote, a patronage system, and geographical expansion. The fact that Andrew Jackson was a high-ranking Mason and frequently praised the Order further fueled suspicion. One of the most prominent Anti-Masons was former President John Quincy Adams, who wrote a series of stern letters condemning the institution after Morgan’s disappearance.

Numerous Anti-Masonic papers were published, school readers and almanacs were distributed, and Anti-Mason book stores and taverns opened. In some churches it became a religious crusade. The excitement soon extended as far west as Northeastern Ohio. In some parts of that state, lodge halls were destroyed by mobs; property and records were carried away, Masons were ostracized and their businesses closed.

A national anti-mason organization was planned as early as 1827, when New York leaders attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade Henry Clay, a former Mason, to renounce the Order and head the movement. His slippery reply to an inquiry about his opinion of the group was that he had become a Freemason as a young man, but hadn’t given the order any attention for a long time. In fact, Clay was a former Grand Master but the growth of an opposition movement had led him to practically disown it.

In the 1828 elections the new party proved unexpectedly strong, eclipsing the National Republicans in New York State. Within a year it had broadened its base, becoming a champion of internal improvements and protective tariffs. In August 1829 Anti-Mason delegates met in Montpelier for what became Vermont’s first political convention.

When an Anti-Mason convention met in Philadelphia in September 1830 it adopted the following platform:

“The object of Anti-Masonry, in nominating and electing candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, is to deprive Masonry of the support which it derives from the power and patronage of the executive branch of the United States Government. To effect this object, will require that candidates besides possessing the talents and virtues requisite for such exalted stations, be known as men decidedly opposed to secret societies.”

One of the leading Anti-Masons was Thaddeus Stevens, a Vermont native of Danville who made his name in Pennsylvania and later emerged as a leading abolitionist, founder of the Republican Party, and post-Civil War activist for civil rights and stiff retribution against the south. Attending the Anti-Mason Party’s first national convention, he attracted notice with his strong speeches and oratorical style. In one of them, “On The Masonic Influence Upon The Press,” he deplored the lack of publicity given to the convention and attributed that as well to Masonic influence.

“Look around,” Stevens proclaimed. “Though but one hundred thousand of the people of the United States are Free Masons, yet almost all the offices of high profit and honor are filled with gentlemen of that institution. Out of the number of judges in the State of Pennsylvania, eighteen-twentieths are Masons; and twenty-two out of twenty-four states of the Union are now governed by Masonic chief magistrates. Although not a twentieth part of the voters of this commonwealth, and of the United States are Masons, yet they have contrived, by concert, to put themselves into eighteen out of twenty of the offices of profit and power.

In 1833 Stevens was elected to the Pennsylvania legislature on the Anti-Masonic ticket, where his legislative talents quickly showed themselves. An excellent debater with a devastating wit that cut his opposition to shreds, he knew how to maneuver behind the scenes – and bide his time.

Vermont’s Anti-Mason Moment

William A. Palmer was no newcomer to politics. He was a popular Jeffersonian Democrat and former judge who had already represented Vermont in the US Senate by the time he ran for governor on the Anti-Mason ticket in 1831. Vermonters had elected another Anti-Mason to Congress and chosen more than 30 members of the movement to represent them in the General Assembly. Still, it was a shock to the establishment when Palmer led in the popular vote. It took nine ballots in the state legislature before he won.

The next year in Baltimore the national party conducted the first presidential nominating convention in US history. Anti-Masonic candidate William Wirt, a former Mason, subsequently won 7.78 percent of the popular vote – and Vermont’s seven electoral votes. William Slade, who would later become Vermont governor as a Whig, was sent to Congress as an opponent of Masonry and slavery.

Since the state still had one-year terms of office, Palmer ran and won again, but still could not attract a majority of the vote. This time it took 43 legislative ballots before he was re-elected.

In 1834, he won on the first ballot, but only because the other political parties, anticipating the collapse of the Anti-Masons, were competing to win over its constituents. Palmer also led in the 1835 vote. But this time he couldn’t convince the legislature. After weeks of wrangling and 63 ballots the lawmakers declared themselves deadlocked and turned to Silas Jenison, a former Anti-Mason official and winner of the Lieutenant-Governor’s race. The rest of the Anti-Mason ticket was endorsed by the Whigs.

The opposition to Palmer was due primarily to his Democratic leanings and a belief that he intended to support Democrat Martin Van Buren for president the next year.

Gridlock in Vermont’s General Assembly over Palmer’s elections became so disruptive that it led to a Constitutional Convention and the amendment that created the State Senate. Criticism of the unicameral legislature wasn’t new and proposals for a second chamber dated back to 1793. But in 1836 the idea of reducing the power of the House finally achieved critical mass. The Convention stripped it of “supreme legislative power.”

Crucially, bankers backed the change, mainly with the expectation that two chambers would be easier to handle, circumstantial evidence that in opposing the Masons the movement was also confronting the banks. The general public mainly thought the House had become too arrogant, intransigent and uncooperative.

Governor Palmer believed that secret societies were “evil.” But he didn’t take radical stands in his public speeches. In his first inaugural address, he declared the intention to appoint only men who were “unshackled by any earthly allegiance except to the constitution and laws,” and suggested legislation to prohibit the administration of oaths except “when necessary to secure the faithful discharge of public trusts and to elicit truth in the administration of justice.” He wanted to “diminish the frequency” of oaths because of the “influence which they exercise over the human mind.”

For Vermont Anti-Masons, the use of secret oaths represented an invasion of the “civil power of a sovereign state” and a violation of liberty. In June 1833, at the height of movement, the Anti-Mason State Convention passed a dozen resolutions defining its position. The first of these, underlining a core commitment to accountability, said “that an institution which veils itself in secrecy and shrinks from the light of truth and public scrutiny – which imposes in its midnight recesses, partial monopolizing, immoral and illegal oaths, backed by the penalty of death upon its votaries – which confers upon its members aristocratic and kingly titles, directly in the face of the constitution – and which aims in its organization, its obligations, and its whole spirit, at the erection of a privileged order in the land, at the expense of the equal rights of the rest of the community, is anti-republican in all its features and deserving the execration of every friend of his country.”[1]

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, the high point of Thaddeus Stevens’ Anti-Mason period came on January 18, 1836. Prominent Masons who had previously refused to appear before his committee in the Pennsylvania legislature were being compelled to testify. Among them were ex-Governor George Wolf; George M. Dallas, who was Masonic Grand Master of Pennsylvania at the time and ten years later became Vice President under James Polk; and Joseph R. Chandler, editor of the United States Gazette, published in Philadelphia. When ordered to answer questions the three powerful men refused.

In response they and 23 other witnesses were placed in the custody of the House Sergeant-at-Arms. After several days, when some of the Whigs broke with the Anti-Masons, the prisoners were released and Stevens’ campaign ended.

In 1835, when the State Anti-Masonic Convention endorsed William Henry Harrison for President, Stevens initially refused to accept it because Harrison wouldn’t pledge to use the government to go after the Masons. By then he stood almost alone in trying to press the Anti-Masonic agenda on a national basis. Due to his dogged efforts to keep the party alive, he could not secure enough support to be elected to Congress until 1848.

Vermont’s Anti-Masons ultimately succeeded in forcing the lodges to close – at least for a while. But that left the state party with less reason to exist, In 1836 Vermont’s Anti-Mason leaders, including future governor Slade, joined the new, anti-Jacksonian Whig Party.

In Pennsylvania, following the election of an Anti-Mason governor a state convention was held in Harrisburg to choose Presidential Electors for the 1836 election. The Pennsylvanians picked Harrison for President. Vermont’s convention followed suit. But when national Anti-Masonic leaders couldn’t even get Harrison to say that he definitely was not a Mason, they called a separate convention. Held in Philadelphia in May 1836, it was a divisive gathering. A majority of the delegates agreed that the purpose of the party remained anti-masonry but opted not to back a national ticket.

Anti-Mason Joseph Ritner was governor of Pennsylvania from 1835 to 1838. By the end of his time in office the organization was in seriously decline, its members gradually uniting with the Whigs and later the Republicans. The party’s third and final National convention was held in Philadelphia’s Temperance Hall in November, 1838. Almost entirely engulfed by the Whigs, the gathering unanimously supported Harrison for President and Daniel Webster for Vice President. When the Whig National Convention chose Harrison and John Tyler, the Anti-Masons did nothing and soon vanished.

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[1] Proceedings of the Anti-Masonic State Convention, Montpelier, June 26-27, 1833, Knapp & Jewett Printers.

Times of Cleavage: The Age of Burke 5

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

Intro and Power Struggles

Attempted Fusion

Censoring Red Emma

The Public Power Story

On the Waterfront

Comeback Trials

[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.

Comeback Trials: The Age of Burke 4

For most people 60 was a reasonable age to slow down. But James Burke was just getting started in 1908 and made a quixotic gubernatorial run against Newport timber man George Prouty.

     Only 50 people attended his opening campaign speech, delivered during an August electrical storm. In that campaign he called for revision of the tax system, a license law on liquor, new highways throughout the state and an eight-hour day for workers. The Republicans ignored him and Prouty suggested that so few differences existed between the two parties that “there is danger of more apathy than should be in a presidential year.”

     But Burke’s real problem was that Vermont Democrats had turned away from their party’s nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan[1] and William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s chosen successor, breezed into office.  So did Prouty, who moved up after a term as lieutenant governor under Fletcher Proctor. Nevertheless, just a few months later Burke was major again, defeating Walter Bigelow by 18 votes. It was his first two-year term after the city’s charter was amended.

James Burke

     In spite of his populist activism, Burke’s support waned again and he was defeated in 1911. Two years later he was back in power, defeating A.S. Drew and calling for a major revision of the city charter. Now he wanted a “commission system” that would place management under the control of a small number of elected administrators.[2]

     When Burke became Burlington postmaster in 1915, rather than enter another mayoral race, it seemed a safe bet that his political career had finally ended. During the next years he lobbied for women’s suffrage and promoted war bonds, but local politics proceeded without him. Leadership of the Democratic Party passed to J. Holmes Jackson, a dentist who served four terms as mayor and ran for governor in 1924.

     But Burke’s retirement turned out to be temporary. When he was elected Burlington’s sole representative to the state legislature – the same year Jackson ran for governor – Burke began pushing for state approval of a city retirement fund and a building department. Within a few months he was also running for mayor again – for the 11th time.

     Burke’s political career still had another 10 years to run. But this phase was, in many ways, the most painful. At first his own party didn’t support him, persuading him to run as a Citizens party candidate. He attributed the rejection to the presence of Republicans at Democratic caucuses.

     When Jackson defeated Burke in the Democratic caucus of 1929, the Irish elder protested after the vote. “I have played the game square,” he said. “I came here tonight resolved to abide by the action of the caucus but when I see the place packed with Republicans, I refuse to accept the decision.”

     That year he ran unsuccessfully as an independent; Jackson had both the Democratic and Republican lines. Burke argued in vain that the city was overburdened with loans, overdrafts and excessive bonding, and warned about the consequences of the city’s growing debt.

     By the end of the year the stock market crashed and the Depression was on the horizon.

     Burke was back in the legislature in 1930, and returned to the Burlington scene as a Citizens candidate for mayor the following year. This time, with more than 800 people jamming City Hall for the Democratic caucus, he came out on top. A week later his Democratic opponent, Jackson, was nominated as the Republican candidate, and defeated Burke in the general election.

     The partisan power plays were signs of a deeper, more ideological struggle. Burke and his “working class” allies were disturbed by the boom-town atmosphere in Burlington, characterized by slogans such as “bigger, busier, better Burlington.” During the late 1920s the city had embarked on a building spree in hopes of becoming a convention center. Burke opposed projects such as Memorial Auditorium on economic grounds, and in his mayoral bids called for a “rigid economy,” meaning a lean city budget and a less speculative attitude.

     In 1933 his time came – again. The Depression had reached its depth, and his nemesis, Jackson, was too ill to seek another term. About 1,000 people attended both the GOP and Democratic caucuses. At the latter Burke, by this time 83 years old, handily defeated his former protégé Hugh Finnegan, who immediately pledged “absolute” support.

     The candidate promised a “sound economy and honesty.” Victory over the Republican hopeful, William Wilson, came easily. Handling city affairs in a time of economic crisis, on the other hand, required hard decisions. Expenditures had to be cut, including municipal salaries, and local government was forced to accept the sad fact that almost $100,000 in unpaid taxes was “uncollectible.”[3]

     If there was any doubt that this “progressive era” was over, Burke laid it to rest in June 1934 when 500 workers at the Queen City cotton mill went on strike. Local textile workers were in the vanguard of a national protest. But Burlington’s mayor, who had enjoyed the support of the Building Trades Union in his early mayoral campaigns, ordered the strikers back to work, warning that they would receive no relief from the city if they refused.

     The workers held out until the fall. But once the strike was over the union was left divided by discrimination against ex-strikers, disillusionment and ideological battles.

      Combining conservative and liberal tendencies, Burke ran a tight local administration while, in his role as city representative, proposing a cooperative savings and investment plan and encouragement of para-professionalism. Still, the strains of the time led to disaffection.

     Burke was defeated in his 1935 and 1937 mayoral bids, each time by a larger margin. The latter campaign was his last.

Next: After Burke - The Politics of Cleavage

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[1] It was Bryan’s third run for president and his opponent William Taft was running on Roosevelt’s record. At a time of peace, prosperity and Republican trust-busting Bryan’s agrarian radicalism had lost some of its appeal. He didn’t carry a single state in the Northeast. Bryan’s position on evolution was also becoming known. In a 1905 speech, he said Darwinism represented the “law of hate” and that, if it was true, “we shall turn backward to the beast.”

[2] Mayor’s Message to the Board of Aldermen, 1914.

[3] Mayor’s Message to the Board of Alderman, 1933.

Attempted Fusion: The Age of Burke 2

James Burke’s political vision stretched beyond the borders of Burlington by 1906. He was deeply embroiled in an effort to wrest control of the governor’s office from the Republicans. To attempt this he forged a delicate personal alliance with Percival Clement, railroad tycoon and owner of the Rutland Herald, who was warring with Proctor marble interests. A joint ticket emerged with Democrat and Independent candidates, and Clement at the top.

     That summer, as Burke traveled the state attacking Republican graft and rule, he continued to call President Roosevelt “the greatest Republican since Lincoln and the greatest Democrat since Jefferson.”

     The Burke-Clement alliance was largely rooted in political expediency. Both men wanted to be governor and knew that no Democrat could win statewide. Both had also been mayors, Clement in Rutland, though his control of the Rutland Railroad didn’t ease negotiations about the Burlington waterfront, which was owned by Clement’s line and Central Vermont. But there was also an ideological affinity that bridged the class barrier between them. Both were ardent supporters of the “local option” to issue saloon licenses and vocal critics of graft by marble and coal interests dominating the GOP.

     The day Theodore Roosevelt found out he was going to be president he was riding with Clement on his railroad. The Vice President had been visiting Vermont Lieutenant Governor Nelson Fisk at Isle LaMotte when word came through that the President had been shot. By 1906, Roosevelt was on the attack against the beef, oil and tobacco trusts, while in Vermont Clement was warring with marble interests, especially Fletcher Proctor, the Republican candidate for governor.

     Burke had won another term as mayor over Walter Bigelow, the 40-year-old chairman of the state Republican Party and night editor at the Burlington Free Press.  He saw a “bright and glorious future” for the city and wanted people to move beyond “a narrow or partisan point of view.” But the logic of progressive reform impelled him to influence the movement Clement was building.

     At first it was called the “Bennington idea,” referring to the town where a petition first circulated for Clement to lead an independent movement that aimed to “save the state” after 50 years of Republican rule. But Clement’s supporters decided that a fusion with Democrats was essential, so they tried to induce Burke to join the ticket.

     He wasn’t persuaded. Giving Clement the Democratic nomination would effectively put him in control of the party. If a Democrat won the presidency in 1908, Clement would get to hand out patronage. Thus, Burke remained a potential candidate for governor himself even after a Barre Democrat agreed to join Clement on a slate.

     The Democrats were still divided on June 28, the day of both the Independent and Democratic state conventions in Burlington.

     While the Independents convened in City Hall and the Democrats met at the armory, a joint committee worked out an agreement to divide the state ticket. The Democrats would field candidates for one half of the slate, Independents would take the rest. After accepting the Independent nod Clement walked with Burke to the Strong Theater for a joint assembly.

     Debate on fusion was heated, some people accusing Burke of opposing the idea because he couldn’t head the ticket. Speaking for himself, Burke reminded the audience that he had backed fusion under Clement four years earlier. But the “local option” for alcohol[1] was no longer a galvanizing issue and Clement was, after all, still basically a Republican.

     The Democrats rejected Burke’s advice and approved a joint slate headed by Clement and Democrat C. Herbert Pape. With more than a thousand people packing the theater, Clement took center stage, Burke at his side, and launched into a long, fiery attack on the Republic machine, the marble companies, and the inefficiency and graft that was robbing the people.

     Burke actively backed Clement’s war on the Proctor Republicans, spending much of his time that summer on the campaign trail. As usual, his rhetoric was rich with praise of Roosevelt.

     “Reform is in the air,” he shouted from the back of the candidate’s private train, “and Vermont will share in the benefits that come from the general revolt being made against ring rule and graft.” He envisioned a popular coalition of Lincoln Republicans and Jefferson Democrats that would wipe out party lines. It might even combat corporate lobbying on labor issues like the nine-hour day and minimum wage.

     But Fusion was defeated by Republicans united behind Proctor in November. And the following March, Burke came up short in his first mayoral race in five years – to Walter Bigelow. The defeat was devastating for political allies who lost their jobs and watched old opponents return to power.

     Clement eventually became governor in 1918 – as a Republican. 

See also: Censoring Red Emma and The Public Power Story

Next: On the Waterfront

[1] In 1902 a referendum gave towns the option of granting licenses. Four years later the authority was transferred to the Secretary of State, and in 1917 to the Commissioner of Taxes. In 1921, the old liquor laws were repealed and replaced by a system that conformed to the 18^th Amendment. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, the state re-assumed the power to regulate the sale and use of alcohol.

Opting Out: Sovereignty, Decentralism and the Secessionist Impulse

By Greg Guma

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, “Green Mountain Politics: Restless Spirits, Popular Movements.”

The idea of defying the forces of centralized power and wealth can be seductive, especially if you live in a small, isolated place with a reputation for being contrary and the sense that it’s different, even exceptional.

In Congress, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders has reflected this perspective, challenging corporate secrecy and the powers of international financial institutions by forging alliances that cross traditional lines. When that strategy was attempted in Vermont during the late 1970s, the two ends of the political spectrum also found common ground, in that instance by embracing decentralism. Both sides discovered that they agreed on a preference for small scale energy production to mega-plants, widespread ownership of land and business, and removal of “government barriers.”

Things became complicated, however, when the discussion shifted to welfare, environmental regulation, affirmative action, and abortion – none of these easy topics. The difficulty was that the same arguments for decentralization and sovereignty that sounded progressive in some cases could be used in support of isolationism, unfettered capitalism and discrimination.

In 2003, as former Vermont Governor Howard Dean was running for president, former Duke University professor Thomas Naylor launched a related but more ambitious movement, the Second Vermont Republic. Its aim was to dissolve the United States and, in particular, to return Vermont “to its status as an independent republic.” Lincoln had persuaded the public that secession was unconstitutional and immoral, Naylor argued. “It’s one of the few things that the left and right agree on. We say it’s constitutional – and ultimately it is a question of political will: the will of the people of Vermont versus the will of the government to stop us.”

Historian Frank Bryan, whose 1989 book with Republican thinker John McClaughry called for restructuring the state’s democracy along decentralist lines, has argued that “the cachet of secession would make the new republic a magnet" and "people would obviously relish coming to the Republic of Vermont, the Switzerland of North America.”

Naylor said the question wasn’t “if” but “when.”

Vermont attorney and historian Paul Gillies was skeptical, “It doesn’t make economic sense, it doesn’t make political sense, it doesn’t make historical sense,” he said. “Other than that, it’s a good idea.” And Vermont archivist Gregory Sanford claimed that some of the arguments for secession, in Vermont at least, were based on “historical facts of dubious reputation.” The State Archives often receive requests for copies of an “escape clause” in the Vermont Constitution, which supposedly allows Vermont to withdraw from the US.

“The truth, drawn from documents, is less satisfying; there is no, nor has there ever been, such an escape clause,” Sanford asserted.

Still, the underlying issue isn’t whether there is legal authority, but why millions of people across the country consider secession a reasonable and attractive idea. A 2008 Zogby poll commissioned by the Middlebury Institute, a think tank studying “separatism, secession, and self-determination,” indicated that that 20 percent of Americans thought “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede from the United States and become an independent republic.”

More than 18 percent told pollsters that they “would support a secessionist effort in my state.”

Leaving the Empire

In Vermont, the argument has been “that the US has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable – it’s too big, it’s too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens,” according to Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a publication that emerged to cover secession and related issues. “Congress and the executive branch are being run by the multinationals. We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war. If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system,” argue Williams and Naylor, “the only constitutional way to preserve what’s left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire.”

As its history demonstrates, this quirky state has been fertile ground for such “outside the box” thinking in the past. It didn’t immediately join the United States, remaining an independent state for almost 15 years. It was also the first state to ban slavery.

Explicit constitutional authority aside, it came close to separating from the new Union before and during the War of 1812. Between 1809 and 1812, Federalists and other opponents defied national policies, flirting with secret societies, secession and other forms of dissent. In 1813 Vermont elected a governor who rejected the necessity of war. Martin Chittenden’s refusal to let the state's troops defend the lake emboldened the British. In October 1814, although Chittenden stopped short of supporting secession, Vermont delegates were among those who responded to a call by the Massachusetts legislature for a convention in Hartford to consider more extreme options.

Seventeen years later it was the first state to elect an Anti-Mason governor during a period when opposition to elites and secret societies was growing. The Anti-Mason movement lasted only a decade, and most of its members eventually joined either the short-lived Whig Party or the more durable Republicans. But along the way it expressed an emerging anti-monopoly philosophy and, on a practical level, initiated changes in the way political parties operated.

This wasn’t the only time a short-lived political movement produced unexpected change in the US. In 1912, the new Progressive Party, formed by Theodore Roosevelt when he lost the Republican nomination to William Howard Taft, led to the election of Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt soon left his own party, but it continued under the leadership of Robert La Follette. Although La Follette’s run for president in 1924 netted only 17 percent of the vote, he won in his home state of Wisconsin, and successful reforms were implemented there.

Secession advocate Kirkpatrick Sale has described decentralism as a “third way,” evident in bioregional movements, cooperative and worker-owned businesses, land trusts, farmers markets, and a variety of grassroots initiatives. Assessing whether Vermont could “go it alone,” author Bill McKibben has argued that “functional independence would be the proper first step, and useful in its own right.” He also has provided a list of practical projects to help create more food self-sufficiency, energy independence, and local economic power.

On the other hand, the 2008 election of Barack Obama and the global nature of many pressing problems has also convinced McKibben that “any political independence movement is going nowhere now.” Therefore, his advice is modest: to build affection and trust by sharing information and making small but effective moves in the right direction.

Before he died Second Vermont Republic founder Tom Naylor defined secession – or independence, as some supporters of the movement prefer – in idealistic terms, as a rebellion against empire designed to retake control from big institutions and help people care for themselves and others by “decentralizing, downsizing, localizing, demilitarizing, simplifying, and humanizing our lives.”

In some ways, it’s reminiscent of the Decentralist League, which ultimately disbanded when its Left wing opted for electoral politics and its Right signed on for the Reagan “revolution.” In the meantime, however, it did suggest some of what might unite people who find the current national and global order unsustainable and dangerous. Taking aim at centralized power and wealth, it asserted that decentralism is the best way to preserve diversity, increase self-sufficiency, and satisfy human needs.

“Decentralists believe in the progressive dismantling of bureaucratic structures which stifle creativity and spontaneity, and of economic and political institutions which diminish individual and community power,” the League’s Statement of Principles said. The political platform included support for local citizen alliances; widespread ownership of industry by employees; a viable and diverse agricultural base; a decent level of income for all; education that stresses self-reliance, creativity, and a combination of learning and work; technologies that increase energy self-sufficiency; and mediation of disputes rather than reliance on regulations and adversary proceedings.

While promising in theory, its demise underlined the fragility of such a left-right alliance. Similar difficulties have faced the Second Vermont Republic. For the more recent movement the first significant controversy involved an accusation by the Southern Poverty Law Center that Naylor and other Vermont secessionists were talking to an allegedly racist group, the League of the South.

Critics pounced, and Seven Days, the liberal Vermont weekly that was distributing Vermont Commons as an insert, decided to end the arrangement. Labor groups demanded the removal of offensive web links, disassociation from certain groups or individuals, and a statement clearly opposing racism, fascism, bigotry, and discrimination. There was no evidence that Vermont secessionists actually condoned such things, but they were being forced to prove it.

In a 2009 article for Vermont Commons, educator Ron Miller attempted to define the difference between progressive and conservative decentralists. Supporters of Vermont secession are motivated by opposition to war, exploitation, and government violence, he explained. These “liberal decentralists” support equality, human and civil rights, nonviolence and multiculturalism. “Conservative decentralists,” in contrast, are usually free market libertarians who are hostile to cultural change. The former welcomed some aspects of the Obama presidency, the latter viewed it as a deadly threat to liberty and identity.

Left-leaning decentralists face a paradox, Miller argued. Expansion of the federal government had led to social progress in the past, “but always at the cost of siphoning off local, state and regional sovereignty.” There is also the risk that bad leaders will do appalling damage, or that progressive reforms spark such an extreme reaction that civil dialogue is impossible. The federal government hasn’t resolved most conflict, he wrote. It has merely papered over deeply held but divergent values.

The solution he proposed was to have Vermont, or a confederation of progressive states, break away and “become a model of enlightened governance.” What about the conservative, “red” state regions? Since past progressive reforms have failed to transform southern culture or conservative populists he suggested leaving them to “live by the values they prefer.” But that sounded a bit like saying it would be acceptable for almost half the US – or half the world, for that matter – to live under repressive conditions and various forms of fundamentalism.

Sovereignty and Nullification

By 2011 secession organizations were organizing across the United States and a dozen states had active movements. Even more legislatures were debating laws designed to “nullify” federal actions in areas from gun control and health care reform to marijuana possession and overseas troop deployments.

In Alaska, even though the State Supreme Court held in 2006 that secession is illegal, the secessionist Independence Party has influenced state politics. Former Governor Sarah Palin’s husband was a member and she publicly endorsed the party while in office. Hawaii’s sovereignty movement has won small victories, and Georgia’s State Senate passed a resolution in 2009 endorsing the right of states to nullify federal laws. If Congress ever dares to restrict gun rights, that resolution added, the federal government will cease to exist.

In April 2009, Texas Governor Rick Perry directly threatened secession at a protest of the recently launched Tea Party movement. Afterward, a Rasmussen poll of Texans found that almost one third thought the state had the right to secede – although, at that point, only 18 percent actually backed such a move. According to Vermont secession leader Naylor, “Although thirty or so states now have some form of independence movement, in most states it’s all talk and no action. Some so-called secession movements are little more than computer websites.”

At the time he said that Vermont and Texas were the most notable exceptions, Naylor acknowledged. By 2013 Tea Party Republicans in at least seven states were introducing legislation that challenged federal authority or flirted with secession.

A related, larger and predominantly conservative movement has pursed nullification. If the federal government fails to check itself, goes the argument, it’s up to the states to call a halt. This rebellion rests on the theory that the states created the national government. Therefore, they have the right to judge the constitutionality of federal laws and potentially refuse to enforce them. Nullification was used when American Colonists nullified laws imposed by the British. Since then states have used nullification to limit federal actions, from the Fugitive Slave Act to unpopular tariffs.

Vermont had direct and dramatic experience with nullification early in its history. In November 1850 the state legislature approved a so-called Habeas Corpus Law that required officials to assist slaves who made it to the state. The law rendered the Fugitive Slave Act effectively unenforceable. It was a clear case of nullification, a highly controversial concept even then.

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier suggested such tactics, while Virginia governor John B. Floyd warned that this form of resistance could push the South toward secession. President Millard Fillmore threatened to enforce federal law in Vermont through military action if necessary, but nothing happened.

Even earlier, support for nullification emerged in reaction to the Sedition Act and the jailing of Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon. These two events prompted the Kentucky Resolve of 1798, written by Thomas Jefferson, and the almost identical Virginia Resolve penned by James Madison. In Section One of his version, Jefferson wrote:

“Resolved, that the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principles of unlimited submission to their General Government; but that by compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes, delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self Government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force . . . . That the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common Judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well as of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.”

In simple English, this meant that federal authority wasn’t unlimited, and if it went too far government actions need not be obeyed. The national government wasn’t the “final judge” of its own powers, Jefferson suggested, and therefore various states had a right to decide how to handle federal overreach. Madison’s Virginia version declared that, in the case of a deliberate and dangerous abuse of power, states not only had a right to object, they were “duty bound” to stop the “progress of the evil” and maintain their “authorities, rights and liberties.”

Ten years later, after Jefferson enacted a trade embargo as president in response to British maritime theft and kidnapping of sailors, legislatures nullified the law using his own words and arguments. On February 5, 1809, the Massachusetts legislature declared that the embargo was “not legally binding on the citizens of the state” and denounced it as “unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional.” Eventually, every New England state, as well as Delaware, voted to nullify the embargo act.

In August 2010, the Missouri legislature used similar logic to reject the health care mandate in the Democrat’s health care reform, followed by a flood of legal challenges from state officials. In recent years, several states have also either passed or proposed legislation or constitutional amendments designed to nullify federal laws in the areas of firearms and medical marijuana. Many who support this approach cite the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Attempts to discredit nullification as a tactic by branding its leaders extremists, wingnuts and “tenthers” hasn’t dissuaded them. On the contrary, several state legislatures have introduced 10th Amendment resolutions that serve “Notice and Demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.”

Nullification advocates can point to some limited successes. After the REAL ID act was signed by President Bush in 2005, more than two dozen states passed laws or resolutions denouncing it or refusing to comply. In response, the feds postponed its enactment. In Wisconsin, groups like the Grandsons of Liberty lobbied lawmakers to nullify health care reform by amending the constitution so that the state could opt out. According to the John Birch Society-backed magazine New American, activists in 28 states were involved in similar campaigns as of 2010.

Concern about guns rights has also fueled the movement. The Firearms Freedom Act (FFA), which challenges the federal government’s authority to regulate firearms, passed in Montana and Tennessee, and has been considered in at least 11 other states. The bill says that firearms made and retained in-state are beyond the authority of Congress under its constitutional power to regulate commerce. The federal position is that such laws are unconstitutional. In response to state campaigns the Department of Justice filed a brief in federal court against the FFA.

Another strategy, especially if the federal government ever tried to block nullification efforts by threatening to withhold funds, is a proposed State Sovereignty and Federal Tax Funds Act, which has been introduced in several states. The objective is to place state governments between federal tax collectors and individuals. The goal: to stop the flow of money to the feds before they can use it to intimidate a state. But before things get that far, nullifiers calculate that the threat of such legislation could be enough to make the feds back down on any threats to cut off funding.

Bridging the Divide

The Tea Party movement, sparked in 2009 by widespread disapproval of the federal government’s bailout of mortgage defaulters, grew into a tidal wave of anti-big-government sentiment that helped the Republican Party regain control of the US House in 2010. Supporters said the movement marked a return to core values; critics called it reactionary and possibly racist. In part funded by wealthy interests who saw it as a way to advance their own deregulation, limited government agenda, the Tea Party was a loose association of fiscal conservatives, fundamentalists and libertarians.

A March 2010 poll estimated 37 percent support for its basic agenda. But that figure has dropped, especially since the recent Tea Party-fueled government shutdown. In any case, the movement encompasses contradictory impulses, from libertarian orthodoxy and neo-isolationism to populist anger directed at elites, deficit spending and any perceived foreign threat to US interests.

Some liberals, leftists and Democrats have written off the Tea Party’s anti-federal rebellion as a purely Republican tactic. But there were also liberal nullification campaigns to decriminalize marijuana and bring National Guard units home from wars overseas. “Bring the Guard Home” legislation, for example, would require a state’s Governor, and/or the legislature, to evaluate the legality of orders for National Guard deployments and give them the chance to allow or deny the deployment.

Nullification has clearly exerted influence on federal policies at times. But secession is another matter. Can it happen? Not according to at least one US Supreme Court Justice, the conservative Antonin Scalia. In 2006, he responded to a letter from screenwriter Daniel Turkewitz, who was developing a script about a secessionist movement in Maine. He wrote to all of the justices but only Scalia replied. And the message was that a legal showdown in the Supreme Court could never happen.

“If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War,” Scalia said, “it is that there is no right to secede.”

Even assuming that is true, the Court’s refusal to revisit the issue is not apt to quell the anger roiling in many parts of the country, or stop anti-federal, independence, secession, and nullification movements from attempting to rally people with the hope that they can prevent an “evil,” or just morally and economically bankrupt, government from seizing more power. Or even roll it back. Part of what unites these upsurges is clearly anger; another part is distrust and disbelief. They simply don’t have faith in most political institutions anymore, especially “big government.”

On the other hand, the left and right have been culturally polarized for generations, disagreeing passionately (sometimes violently) over moral issues, racism, abortion, immigration, climate change, and controlling the distribution of wealth as well as power. In fact, they often perceive very different “realities.” Post-2008 one side decided that President Obama was a socialist, maybe even a Muslim Manchurian Candidate. The other said he was at best a political sell out, and in some ways was doubling down on the mistakes of the previous administration. One side says climate change is a hoax, or at least exaggerated, and the government should institute literacy tests for voting. The other sees ecological (or economic) catastrophe just around the corner, thinks guns should be strictly controlled, and says states should seize public resources as “trustees” of the commons.

There is some common ground between the two ends of the political spectrum, beginning with the idea that in the face of oppression (however you define it) withdrawal of consent can make a difference. The idea is that disengagement, whether gradual or sudden, is preferable to sticking with the team, staying the course, remaining faithful to or engaged with a system in which you no longer believe. Even active resistance is justified if necessary.

Left-wing protestors have often used civil disobedience tactics and generally embrace the philosophies of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Early Vermonters resisted outside control, government pressure to wage war, and human slavery. Tea Party activists have taken selected pages from the same play book, but so far appear to question the value of tolerance and peace.

Maybe these political “outliers,” a disparate collection of  subcultures and “extreme” or “alternative” movements, will someday seize what the media like to call the narrative – aka mass perceptions – and join together long enough to sell the idea that it is time to call an end to the Union. Game over. Bring down the curtain.

It’s more complicated, obviously. But with the United States looking like an empire in decline, militarily overstretched, crippled by long-term debt and frequently on the brink of a crisis, maybe it will happen someday. And if any place does take “the road less traveled,” it may well be Vermont, the “reluctant republic,” fertile ground for original thinkers, common sense tolerance, and independent idealism, a cantankerous maverick that wasn’t sure it wanted in from the start. 

There’s even a bumper sticker: Most Likely to Secede.