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.

In Person: Progressive Movements and the Vermont Way

An Evening of Green Mountain History with Greg Guma

Wednesday, Aug. 29, 7:00 p.m.
Vermont History Center, 60 Washington Street, Barre, VT 05641

Anticipating a recreation of Teddy Roosevelt 1912 visit to Vermont during his Progressive Party run for president, writer, editor, historian, activist and progressive manager Greg Guma comes to the Vermont History Center in Barre with an evening of stories and thoughts about the evolving nature of progressive politics in Vermont. Including a preview from the upcoming multi-part documentary, The Vermont Movie, and also:

     * How the Anti-Masons briefly took the state

     * Burlington’s first progressive mayor and an early fusion movement

     * Progressive Republicans in the 1930 and 40s

     * Phil Hoff’s Democratic breakthrough and civil rights fights 

     * Why the Green Mountain Parkway never happened

     * Speaking truth to McCarthy-ism

     * Plus, the rise of Bernie Sanders

For more information, please contact 

Tess Taylor, tess.taylor@state.vt.us 

(802) 479-8505 

or visit the Vermont Historical Society website. 

Local control, short terms and Vermont's citizen legislature

Ethan Allen, the unpredictable frontier rebel who rallied resistance during the revolution era, has exerted a powerful influence over Vermont’s image as a refuge for rugged individualists and defiant outsiders. Both the true and mythical aspects of his story have helped ingrain an affinity with rebels and independent thinkers.

House Chamber

Nevertheless, the political values that have more consistently influenced the state are accountability, local control and autonomy. Frequently crossing party lines, they have persisted from the time in which Vermont was known as reliably Republican, a place where not even FDR could win an election, to the decades since 1988, when Vermonters have voted for every Democratic presidential candidate.

Beneath the differing political labels is a common approach to governance. The state’s administrative structure is relatively centralized, but government has remained more accountable than most through the retention of short terms of office, a citizen legislature, and the pull of local control. 

Localism is a long cherished value. Even when Gov. Deane Davis, a Nixon Republican, backed a state land use law in the late 1960s, he felt the need to call it “creative localism.” Town Meeting has a powerful enduring influence, both practical and symbolic. As a last vestige of direct democracy, it holds out hope that self-government remains possible in the age of powerful administrative states. The stakes may be overstated at time, but the use of this forum – in some cases the only one available – can be a form of self-empowerment reminiscent of the early Jeffersonian impulse.

With Vermont’s “citizen legislature” meeting four days a week for up to five months, House and Senate members can still return to other work. Due to the state’s size, many of them can also drive home at night during sessions. The pay is modest, but the State House functions much like a graduate school for motivated students. Some are in training for higher office. Most stay in touch with their home base.

Nevertheless, political leaders have frequently advocated a proposal bound to alter the dynamic: a constitutional amendment to extend the terms of some or all statewide offices to four years. In the late 1950s a Commission to Study State Government – known as the “Little Hoover Commission” for its similarity to a federal effort in the 1940s led by the former president – concluded that forcing candidates to campaign for re-election so often was a waste of money and detrimental to the state’s welfare.

The necessary amendment failed in the legislature, but was brought back repeatedly over the next decades. In 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, it was voted down on Town Meeting Day.

Governor Snelling recommended four-year terms for the governor and lieutenant governor “as a team” in his 1983 inaugural address. His rationale was that the “structure and complexity of our society and the value of experienced administrative leadership” had both increased.

Many democratic and Republican leaders supported the idea, including all eight former Vermont governors still alive at the time. Supporters of longer terms frequently cited the increased expense of campaigns and the need for more continuity in program implementation.

The opposition was diverse and unusual, however, ranging from Secretary of State James Guest, a Democrat, and Senate Government Operations Chair Bill Doyle, a Republican, to UVM professor Frank Bryan and anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin. Once more the proposal, which would have required approval in two consecutive sessions and voter acceptance in a referendum, failed to make it out of the legislature.

Most other states extended terms of office long ago. Beyond a suspicion of politicians and the power of Vermont traditions, another reason that hasn’t happened in Vermont can be traced back to the last of the conventions called by the old Council of Censors.

When terms of office were doubled to two years in 1870, the amendment process was also changed. The legislature would henceforth initiate any constitutional innovations, but only once every ten years. This “time lock” provision was later shortened to five year intervals, but has remained a deterrent to rapid changes in the structure and processes of government.

                                                                                                            

Vermont doesn’t have a provision for referendum by public petition. In 1890, legislation approved the printing of Australian ballots by state government to be used at town meetings.  Since then, the state has continued to influence the nature of local politics. Lawmakers can request endorsement of a decision in a Town Meeting referendum, for example.  Exercising the authority to seek local opinion led to the enactment of the “local option” for alcohol in 1902, and to the defeat of the proposed Green Mountain Parkway in 1936.

Burlington's City Council in session.

These political traditions – local control, short terms and a citizen legislature – as well as small-scale, decentralist impulses, reflect Vermont’s fundamental commitment to individual autonomy. The original Greek idea is self-rule. Valued for its contribution to the search for truth and the functioning of a self-governing society, autonomy involves making conscious choices. Without this basic form of self-management democracy can’t succeed.

According to libertarian philosopher Murray Bookchin, who lived in Vermont for decades, Self-rule also applies to society as a whole. “Self-management is the management of villages, neighborhoods, towns, and cities,” he wrote. “The technical sphere of life is conspicuously secondary to the social. In the two revolutions that open the modern era of secular politics – the American and French – self-management emerges in the libertarian town meetings that swept from Boston to Charleston and the popular sections that assembled in Parisian quatiers."

Total individual autonomy can be an illusion. Whether acknowledged or not, all humans are influenced by social needs and impulses, cultural norms and values. But fundamentally, autonomy is a powerful aspiration that pulls human beings toward self-sufficiency, moral courage and personal development. It is the basic quest for identity, the search for self-actualization studied and debated by psychologists, theologians and social theorists.

In Vermont, this quest underpinned the struggles of early settlers against outside control during the revolutionary era. Active dissent began when they organized to declare themselves free of British rule and exploitation by land speculators. Since then, an instinctive preference for autonomy has fueled numerous Vermont campaigns of resistance and direct, sometimes dramatic challenges to state and federal overreach.

The Parkway That Never Was

March 3, 1936: Vermonters reject a road along the ridge of the Green Mountains in a Town Meeting Day referendum.

Vermont’s expanding tourist sector received support from the Works Progress Administration throughout the Depression years. In southern Vermont that meant the completion of routes 9 and 7. Various state parks and airports were also upgraded. The first ski tow rope in the country started operating in Woodstock in 1934, with George Aiken, then Speaker of the Vermont House of Representatives, in attendance. 

This sparked the expansion of seasonal employment in the commercial ski industry. Ski trails gradually crisscrossed the state, and wealthy visitors bought farms abandoned by those who could longer make a living on the land.

published map, 1935

One business-backed project did hit a snag, however, a proposed Green Mountain Parkway along the ridge of the famous mountain range. Among its main boosters was James Paddock Taylor, Executive Secretary of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce, who envisioned a beautiful, 260-mile ribbon of road extending from Canada to Massachusetts. Washington DC wanted it, and, according to Taylor and other influentials, so would most Vermonters once they understood the benefits. 

A major selling point was that construction would create jobs for some of the 16,000 Vermonters out of work. All the road’s backers needed was legislative approval of half a million dollars to purchase rights of way.

For Taylor and others who wanted the state to be more like the rest of the country, the parkway was viewed as a progressive initiative. It would create a new and modern state of mind. “The Parkway is a part of that program to get Vermont out of her valley-mindedness into the big view of things which should be expected from a mountain people,” Taylor wrote.

But many residents were suspicious, especially of President Roosevelt and his New Deal. They didn’t like the idea that the federal government would take control of 50,000 acres of land along the ridge of the state’s main mountain range, and preferred to see any extra money go toward fixing existing roads and bridges. Many feared that a nationally-controlled parkway would literally cut the state in half.

The Burlington Free Press thought it was a fine idea. “If our Washington Santa Claus wants to send us up ten millions to build a road over the side of our old Green Mountains, let’s graciously accept it and put the boys to work,” the paper chirped in a March 1935 editorial. But other papers, notably The Rutland Herald, weren’t convinced about the potential benefits. “The parkway would take tourists out of the valleys, where we can sell things to them, into the hills, where we can’t,” the Herald predicted. Half a million dollars was too much to borrow, an editorial added, and “a wilderness area now rich in game will be spoiled for hikes, sportsmen, horseback riders…”

Herald headlines of the time often played to public fears:

GASH ON THE MOUNTAINSIDE

ELIMINATION OF THE WOODLANDS

PROCTOR FEARS PARKWAY WOULD STRANGLE BUSINESS

TOLL GATES AT EVERY CROSSROAD

On December 14, 1935 the Vermont legislature finally met to consider the Green Mountain Parkway Act, designed to give the National Park Service jurisdiction over the necessary land and appropriate matching funds for the road. The debate was spirited.

One opponent called the promise of jobs propaganda and warned that the bill for construction would be passed on to future generations. A supporter replied, “Spending five hundred thousand dollars to get 18 million? I call that a pretty good deal. And as far as the argument that it will become a through way, that’s just ridiculous. Mister Speaker, Franklin County is unanimously in favor, and so is former governor Wilson.”

Another skeptic questioned whether the road would ever be completed. “The way it looks now,” he predicted, “one of two things will happen – either the whole country will go bankrupt or someone will step in and stop the spending. Either way, we’re stuck holding the bag.” Another said that people were “sending out an SOS. Heed it, I beg you, and let the people decide.”

The resolution passed but the advice was heeded. On March 3, 1936 the final decision was put before the people in a statewide referendum. Actually, the legislature was just asking voters to choose between two start dates – April 1, 1936 or five years later. But most people understood it was probably now or never.

When the votes were counted a convincing majority had rejected the federal government’s $18 million offer. There was strong support for the road in northern counties – Chittenden, Franklin, Grand Isle, Lamoille, and Washington – but it was roundly rejected in the south. As some opponents put it, they simply didn’t want the national government to become a large property owner and regulator of land in Vermont. The final vote was 31,101 in favor and 43,176 opposed.  

“Well, the people have expressed their opinion in no uncertain terms,” huffed the Burlington Free Press. “So that’s that.”

Was the decision enlightened or selfish, provincial or progressive, conservative or radical? It is difficult to categorize. Nevertheless, Vermonters had spoken, using their unique form of grassroots democracy – Town Meeting. 

At late as 1960, the National Park Service was still recommending the Green Mountain Parkway as part of an Appalachian Parkway system, but nothing came of it. University of Vermont political science professor Frank Bryan has argued that its defeat in 1936 was “the most democratic expression of environmental consciousness in American history, mythic in its defiance and radical in its implications – a Vermont that is green and rebellious.”

Burlington: The Public Power Story

James Burke, Burlington’s Democratic mayor for seven terms between 1903 and 1935, is commonly hailed as “father” of the Burlington Electric Department. Though his political rivals at the time often reminded the public that the idea hadn’t actually originated with him, Burke was indisputably the engine that pulled the new department along during its early years.

Municipal power had enormous appeal in the early 20th century. In Vermont, the legislature authorized Burlington to furnish electric power to local residents on December 9, 1902. This meant that the city could purchase needed land – by eminent domain when necessary – and issue bonds for the work.

Three weeks earlier, however, the lawmakers had also approved the incorporation of a privately-owned light and power company. Burlington Light and Power would subsequently compete with – and more than once sue – the city over the management of energy distribution.

The Moran Plant on Burlington's Waterfront once generated power,
but has been closed for the past 25 years. 

Public vs. Private Power

Burlington Light and Power was founded by men like B.B. Smalley and Urban Woodbury. Smalley was a wealthy Democrat who had run for governor in 1892. A corporation lawyer, banker and president of the Burlington Gas Light Company, he was also on the board of directors of the Consolidated Electric Company, which merged with his Gas Light Company in 1906.

Woodbury was one of Smalley’s closest business associates. President of Consolidated Electric and founding board member of the Gas Light Company, he was a war hero, a former mayor and lieutenant governor, and had diverse business interests. Two years after Smalley ran for governor as a Democrat and lost Woodbury ran as a Republican and, predictably, won.

In short, Mayor Burke had some powerful opponents.

Just a week after he was declared the legal mayor by the State Supreme Court in 1903, he went to the City Council to win backing for light plant bonds. Two days later, on June 11, he staged a special citywide meeting to vote on the proposed $150,000 investment.

Woodbury was there to speak against the plan, along with Elias Lyman, owner of the area’s big coal company and the local mass transit monopoly, Burlington Traction Company. Both were hissed by the crowd as they talked.

The voters said yes to Burke’s proposal. Less than two years later his daughter, Loretta, pressed a button at the bandstand in City Hall park, energizing two circuits of street lights with power from the just-completed plant. Within ten years Burlington was generating over one million kilowatt hours with a turbine generator.

Despite widespread local support for public power, owners of the competing power company didn’t cave in. In fact, when the city was on the verge of expanding the department in 1910, Burlington Light and Power made a competing bid to supply energy for street lights, public buildings and parks. After it was turned down, the utility company filed an injunction to prevent the city from issuing new bonds.

Mayor James Burke

The lawsuit was dropped after two years, since it wasn’t possible to prove that commercial lighting supplied by the city was increasing the public debt. The company’s hope of challenging the city’s legal right to compete had been dashed. But Light and Power did eventually take the city to court and win. The Supreme Court decision came in 1918, while Mayor Burke was temporarily retired. 

The basis of the case was an agreement forged by Burke between the city and the private utility back in 1904. To avoid duplication as demand for electricity increased, Burlington had agreed to share utility pole space with Light and Power. Since the city used more of its poles, the city department was supposed to pay a 20 cent per year fee for each wire attached.

In 1909, Burlington stopped paying. One claim was that its charter established a right to use the top of all poles without charge. Light and Power cried foul.  A contract was a contract, after all, and the city was its chief competitor. The court agreed. No matter what the City Charter said, the department had to pay up.

That small defeat didn’t change the direction in which the city was moving, however. When Green Mountain Power offered $1 million to lease the department for 20 years the city wisely declined. During those 20 years public power brought Burlington more than $2 million in profit. In 1953, the department officially became a city monopoly when it purchased GMP’s franchise.

Modern Times

The 30-megawatt coal-fired Moran Generating Station, named for Mayor J.E. Moran, was completed in 1954. Since its closing decades ago, the city has pursued various plans to convert it for recreation or other community use. Its future, and that of the department itself, briefly became issues in the 2012 mayoral race when, at the start of a tough mayoral campaign, Republican candidate Kurt Wright proposed the sale of BED to reduce the city debt.

In 2005, BED received a National Star of Energy Efficiency award from the Alliance to Save Energy. A House resolution congratulating BED on this achievement noted that “despite the city’s significant commercial expansion over the last 15 years, in 2004, Burlington used less electricity than in 1989, a feat that was made possible through BED’s innovative leadership as a promoter of energy efficiency.” It also assisted in avoiding the release of over 43,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.  

Today BED is the largest municipally-owned electric utility in Vermont. With more than 19,000 residential and commercial customers, it generates around $50 million in annual revenues, and provides power for the city and Burlington International Airport. Although exempt from local property taxes, the department pays around $1.5 million annually in contributions to the city, plus “indirect costs” that can reach $500,000. Mayor Burke’s vision of municipal energy production has gone farther than he could have imagined.

How Vermont Went Republican

July 13, 1854: The second US Republican Party is formed.

The 1840 Convention of the Vermont Whig Party was the largest ever staged in New England. Almost 20,000 people came to Burlington, attending an enormous parade in support of William Henry Harrison.

During the gathering Vermont Whig leader and US Congressman William Slade encouraged Party members to take a stronger stand on slavery. That January Slade had delivered the first abolitionist address ever made in Congress, calling for the immediate end of human slavery. Still, he felt that the country wasn’t ready for an abolitionist president.

Within two years, however, the growth of the anti-slavery Liberty Party convinced Slade to “abolitionize” Vermont’s Whigs. In 1842, therefore, the state Party’s platform called slavery a “moral and political evil” that should be removed.

When Henry Clay emerged as the Whig candidate for president in 1844, Vermonters were rightly suspicious about his position. Clay was equivocating on whether Texas should be annexed since it would eventually become another slave state. To compensate, the Whigs picked Slade to run for governor. Not only did he win, Clay carried the state. But Democrat James K. Polk became president.

As it worked out, annexation of the Lone Star State led to a war with Mexico, another decision Vermont Whigs opposed. In 1848, Green Mountains Whigs were again unhappy with their candidate. This time it was Zachery Taylor, a slave owner and hero of the Mexican War.

By this time Slade was fed up and decided to move on to the Free Soil Party. An outgrowth of the Liberty Party, it was strongly abolitionist – Free Soil for Free Men, it proclaimed – and drew its leadership from a coalition of Democrats, Whigs and former Liberty Party supporters. Although Carlos Coolidge, a Whig – and distant relative of future president Calvin Coolidge – defeated the new coalition in the governor’s race, the opposition of most Vermonters to slavery or its extension into new territories remained undiminished.

Political allegiances were shifting rapidly. Between 1849 and 1853, the state’s Democratic Party went into a steep decline. Joining forces with the Free Soilers had undermined their status as a credible alternative to the Whigs. In a desperate move, the Party’s leaders choose opposition to temperance as a cause. A temperance referendum had passed, but the vote was close and Democrats felt that it didn’t truly reflect public opinion. The real problem, though, was the Party’s unpopular position on slavery.

The turning point came in 1854 after a series of mass meetings was held across the state. The leaders at those spontaneous events weren’t the old political players but instead a group of insurgents. The state was at the edge of another political rebellion.

That summer the Whigs, split between realists and stalwarts, could only agree on a provisional slate to be headed by Stephen Royce, an abolitionist State Supreme Court Judge whose selling point as a gubernatorial candidate was that he had “never mingled in the slightest degree with party politics.” The Free Soilers, running this time under the “unionist” banner, looked to an elderly newspaperman, Ezekiel. P. Walton, who announced that he was ready to step aside for someone else.

The Democrats weren’t even in the running, further undermined by the nomination of Franklin Pierce for President. Pierce supported the return of runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as the Nebraska Act, which made slavery a blatant state’s right issue. Ironically, the Act had been proposed by former Vermonter Stephen Douglas. Rather than helping Democrats, the Illinois senator’s return home for a political appearance in February had accelerated the Party’s collapse in the state.

The timing was perfect for a new party that could appeal to the many Vermonters disillusioned with the political establishment. In June, Ezekiel Walton called for a mass state convention, and on July 13 around 600 people showed up at the statehouse in Montpelier to form the second state Republican Party in the nation.

“Our rallying cry shall henceforth be the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law,” its platform announced, “the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the prohibition of slavery in all the Territories of the United States, and the admission of no more slave states into the Union.”

Provisional Whig candidate Royce became the new party’s nominee and went on to win in November with 62 percent of the vote. By the next year the Republican Party had spread across the northern states and installed one of its own as Speaker of the US House.

In Vermont there was a brief challenge from the American Party, electoral arm of a growing nativist movement known as the Know-Nothings. But the Republicans managed to attract enough nativist support by attacking the Know-Nothing penchant for secrecy while sympathizing with its dislike of Irish immigrants. In a diluted form nativist sentiment was absorbed by Republican Party, finding expression later in exceptionalist rhetoric.

The state’s political landscape had been transformed, with confusion replaced by unity. In 1856, John Charles Frémont, the Republican candidate for president, won about 80 percent of Vermont’s popular vote. Two years later Pennsylvania reformer Thaddeus Stevens, a native Vermonter, re-entered Congress as a Republican and rapidly assumed leadership of the House, where his strong abolitionist sentiments and legislative skills gave him tremendous power.

Two years after that, in 1860, Vermonters gave Abraham Lincoln the largest margin of victory of any state in the nation. The Green Mountains remained solid Republican territory for the next 100 years.

Mormons and the Presidency

June 27, 1844: Joseph Smith is killed while running for President

Audio Podcast: Greg Guma on Mormon History and the Presidency
Mormons, the Presidency and the Bilderberg Way by Ronin Wolfe

Of the major religions – other than Muslim – people in the US are least comfortable with the prospect of a Mormon president, says a new Pew Research Center study. Even evangelical Christians, a core constituency for many a Republican hopeful, tend to see the Church of Jesus of Latter-Day Saints as a secretive, possibly heretical cult. Thus, if Mitt Romney does become the GOP’s nominee in 2012, this could be a tougher obstacle than his association with health care reform or his oft-discussed absence of authenticity.

On the other hand, there are a number of Mormon political heavy-weights, notably US Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Jon Huntsman – one of Romney’s rivals for the nomination, and five other senators, including both from Utah, Michael S. Lee and Orrin Hatch, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Tom Udall of New Mexico, and Dean Heller, who replaced John Ensign to join Reid in representing Nevada.

Romney’s ties to the Church are among the deepest. A fifth-generation Mormon whose ancestors were involved from the mid-1850s, he is a former lay bishop of Massachusetts' temple. But he isn’t the first Mormon to seek the presidency. That honor goes to founder Joseph Smith, a Vermonter by birth who struck out for the west in revival days.

The enthusiasm of 19^th century revival movements was contagious. Part of an evangelical surge known as the Second Great Awakening, many centered on Christian prophecies of impending doom. The prophecies faded but the righteous attitude and enthusiasm gave energy to diverse movements, from abolition to temperance and opposition to Masonic influence.

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont on December 23, 1805 but moved to New York before founding the Church in 1831. He began by announcing that an angel had given him a book of golden plates inscribed with a religious history of ancient peoples. Once “translated” by Smith their contents became The Book of Mormon.

Believers flocked to the new religion, but hostile neighbors forced Smith and his followers to keep moving, first to Ohio and then Missouri and Illinois. In Missouri the tensions broke into outright war. Hostile Missourians thought the Mormons were planning an insurrection and the governor said they should be "exterminated” or driven out. Smith next led them to Illinois, where they built a town on some Mississippi River swampland. There Smith became the mayor of a town he named Nauvoo and commanded an impressive militia.

He announced for President as candidate of the National Reform Party in early 1844. It was a long shot, since former President Andrew Jackson was engineering the nomination of Tennessee farmer, lawyer and political “dark horse” James Polk. The Whigs were backing Henry Clay, and the big issue was expansion – specifically the takeover of Texas and Oregon.

Smith’s party had emerged from the National Reform Association, a coalition of unionists, locofocos (a radical Democratic faction combining unionists and libertarians) and the Workingman’s Party, united in their concern about depression and “social degradation of the laborer.” What especially attracted Smith, however, was the Party’s policy focus – homesteading rights. National Reformers wanted legislation allowing workers and others to acquire public lands free of charge, state laws exempting farm land from seizure to collect debts, and restrictions on ownership of large swathes by the wealthy. Their slogan was “Vote the Land Free.”

Unfortunately, like many candidates before and since, Smith had some personal baggage. In his case it came in the form of romantic overtures he had made to the wife of a convert, William Law, a Canadian who quit the Church and publicly attacked the Mormon practice of polygamy in a newsletter. “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms,” wrote Law. Accompanied by the Nauvoo city marshal, Smith responded by destroying his accuser’s printing press. The governor charged him with inciting a riot and had him jailed.

On June 27, 1844, while Smith was drinking wine with his brother and some friends in a spacious cell in Carthage, Illinois, a mob surrounded the building. The prophet had a gun, a six shot “pepper-box” pistol, but a gang with blackened faces charged into his cell and opened fire, immediately killing his brother and the others. Smith almost escaped out the window. With shots coming at him from behind and below he plummeted two stories to the ground and then died.

Five men were tried for his murder. All were acquitted. But the Mormon church soon recovered when a new prophet emerged – a 43-year-old former housepainter and carpenter from Vermont named Brigham Young.

Thirty-seven years after Smith’s fateful race Chester Arthur succeeded where he had fallen short, becoming the first president from Vermont upon the assassination of President James Garfield. But Arthur was the Episcopalian son of a Baptist minister, and public attitudes had turned less tolerant in the intervening years. In his first Annual Message to Congress on December 6, 1881, Arthur called Mormon polygamy an “odious crime” and a “barbarous system,” urging legislation to stop its spread. By then Mormons were well established in Utah, Idaho, Arizona and other Western Territories. Attacks on polygamy peppered Arthur’s speeches throughout his presidency.

More than a century later, the Pew Research Center has concluded that 25 percent of American would be less likely to vote for a Mormon presidential candidate. The responses from white evangelicals are even less encouraging. More than a third reacted negatively to the idea of a Mormon in the White House. Among those, 63 percent said there is no way they will vote for Romney. University of Akron political scientist John Green claims that distrust among Christian evangelicals contributed to his 2008 loss in the Iowa caucuses.

During Romney’s 2008 presidential run he tried to defuse the issue and dispel doubts with a speech, a strategy used with success by John F. Kennedy when he spoke publicly about Catholicism and politics during his presidential run. But Romney's "Faith in America" talk in Texas mentioned his Mormon faith just once, raising questions about whether he was as comfortable with the issue as he suggested.

This time, he moved to preempt attacks by announcing on CNN that he is “not a spokesman” for the Church. Whether it will work remains to be seen.

This article is the third in a series adapted from The Vermont Way, a new study by Greg Guma to be released in 2012.