(This was unique and some interesting comments follow it. – promoted by Christian Avard)
Vermont Exceptionalism
Vermont is exceptional. It is because it is the unique in the world: it was born free. Nowhere else ever was. How and why will follow, but, first a list of some of Vermont’s exceptional moments.
1777: Vermont’s first Constitution begins by banning slavery.
1798: Matthew Lyon goes to jail for criticizing John Adams under the Alien and Sedition Acts.
1824: Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, graduates the first African American from college in American history. His name: Alexander Twilight.
1836: Alexander Twilight elected to the Vermont Legislature, first African American elected to public office
1861-65: Vermont suffers the greatest per capita casualties in the war against slavery.
Sept, 1941: Vermont declares war on Nazi Germany three months before Pearl Harbor.
1953: Senator Ralph Flanders (R-VT) is first Senator to attack Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism.
1974: George Aiken ends a public career of over forty years of wisdom as Governor and U.S. Senator.
2000: Vermont creates the idea and fact of Civil Unions.
2006: Vermont elects first Socialist ever from any state to the U.S. Senate.
2009: Vermont legislates marriage equality. Not heterosexual marriage and gay marriage, but marriage.
Vermont is the only legitimate child of the Enlightenment. There were two bastards. France and the U.S. The French Enlightenment led to the French Revolution which was a mindless bloodbath leading directly to Napoleon’s tyranny and massive European bloodshed. With all the fine talk of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the U.S. was born with slavery which only was kind of ended by the bloody Civil War which the South still doesn’t know it lost. At least, the UK ended slavery through the legislative process and a generation before the Civil War.
Vermont found the balance between individual and community with the individual as member of a town. The mountains made grand estates impossible. Banning slavery as the first act set the tone for an entire history. Government was not the enemy; it was and is us.
It’s not a history of the rich and powerful. It’s also the young stoners sitting around ski hills and inventing the now Olympic sport of snowboarding. There are mountains with snow all over the world; yet, only a few places figured out how to have fun sliding down them.
At the end of my musical about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, I have Ethan say what I believe.
“When you drive into Vermont,
you don’t need a sign saying
‘welcome to Vermont,’
you know you’re here.
When you see the magnificent color
of the leaves in the fall,
you don’t need a postcard saying ‘greetings from Vermont’
to know where you are.
You don’t need Irving Berlin
to describe Christmas in Vermont,
you know what it’s like.
No one needs to tell you.
You’re Vermonters,
and you already know about
our towns and our town meetings,
our rivers and our mountains
and all the amazing things Vermont and Vermonters have done.
I love this place. Take care of it!”
Especially the first verse sounds like a hat tip to our groundbreaking billboard ban. In the spirit of your timeline:
1968 VT passes a total billboard ban and 3 states eventually follow suit. The law was premised on a commitment to public space
The issue of exceptionality has its limits though. I understand the instinct to feel that VT doesnt have any blood on its hands. But sometimes facts just get made up. Like the idea that Native Americans didnt have permanent settlements in VT was well ingrained in the state’s history teaching so much so that I learned it in 4th grade in the 1970s.
There’s another side, too, not so wonderful or exceptional. Like the awful treatment of Abenaki burial grounds — eventually a process was worked out, but before that, graves were desecrated by developers’ backhoes and bulldozers.
And then there was that nasty episode of so-called “Eugenics” which under the “leadership” of UVM Professor Harry Perkins encouraged the sterilization of females belonging to “substandard” families — which happened to be nearly all Abenaki or poor immigrants.
I’m sure there are other such episodes. We ain’t angels here, but sometimes we manage to get it right. If the thesis is that we get it right more often than other states, well, maybe.
NanuqFC
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. – Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Vermont also had debtor’s prisons way back in the early 19th century. They were a feature of the landscape, though the state that was the first to outlaw slavery, which was a bold step for the times, got rid of those as well.
Enjoyed the poem there of your saying what Ethan believed. That is one of the things about Vermont that caught me, how quirky and independent it is, compared to so much of America.
Yet, there is another side of Vermont that is rarely eulogized by the poets or found in the tourist brochures. This is the outback Vermont, those small specks of towns of dilapidated houses and rusty trailers with the skeletons and body parts of cars and pick-up trucks out front, collapsed barns still clinging by one or two shreds on to the houses or a few upright timbers, the men on probation or parole, and the women with half a dozen kids before they get out of high school, the welfare check seemingly the only visible means of support. I was up all around the Kingdom this weekend and really saw that in some of those out of the way places, which are all over Vermont.
But what Ethan believed is still really strong here. Thank god.