 Let me see, I can look at my cheat sheet on how many years, 29 at the Savoy Theater we were just talking about. And then prior to that, he was the co-owner. Prior to that, he was programming director for the Green Mountain Festival. And he's taught film history at Burlington College, Community College Informatica, I'm a college teacher, Lifeline Learning Institute, and so on. And he was our presenter for all the films of stage back pre-pandemic. And I remember that winter because we had to keep canceling because of storms. So anyway, so this is Rick, and he's going to be presenting our kickoff to this 23 Vermont Reeds, which is the Red Scare in the Green Mountains. And so this book, last night at the Telegraph Club, talks about two young women coming of age and falling in love. And it was 1954, and it was not a safe place. And so the paragraph in the back of the book just reads, Red Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily, and she is the protagonist of the book. And so deportation loomed over her father, and so this couple risks much to both be their authentic selves. And, you know, there's a lot of other themes in the book. You know, I think about feminism, Lily had just this passion for science and rocket science and space exploration. Her aunt, of course, in those days you could get married or you could have a career. You couldn't have both, you know. So any woman that wanted to pursue any kind of whatever. Especially science. You know, she was basically signing up as they called it back in the day, spinster life. So, you know, there's the feminist, there's the LGBTQ, there's certainly the McCarthyism that we're going to be talking about, xenophobia, and so forth and so on. So we're kicking off our Vermont Reeds last night at the Telegraph Club, 23 Reeds, with this program with Rick, and we're thrilled to have him. And I think I'll let you introduce what you're going to be talking about. Yeah, and I forgot to say, I'm Judy Byron, the adult program coordinator. So that's just for your information. Thank you, Rick. And just let me know when I need to dim the lights and I'll do that. You know, I'm not sure we really need the lights. Okay. Well, you know, there's quite a bit of ambient light from there. That I can't help. No, no, no. I mean, that's good. Let's see what this looks like with the lights off. Got it. And we can dim, which is this. That's great. We can see you. That's great. That's great. It's fine right now, but there is a reflection of the light. That's why. Oh, here? No, from that. This light reflects on the screen. I'm not sure if anybody says they're not like that. Yeah, that's better. That's good. That's even better. Yeah. Okay. And how is that? Do you want the screen down on that one? Okay. Hi, everybody. You all turned out tonight. This is a talk that's based on a book that I wrote and published. 2018 came out. And it's a kind of an overview of what happened in your mind. I got very interested in this topic. And discovered that except for little bits here and there, nobody had ever written anything complete about it. So I was in the grand tradition of people who write books or make paintings or write movies because they want to create the work that they wanted to read or say. Anyway, so I'm going to talk about how this book came to be and what is in it. And that will be our context for studying what happened in this state during this time. And I'm going to start with the title. I discovered over the years that people use the terms McCarthy era and Red Scare interchangeably. Over the years, I have come to really prefer Red Scare. The one thing is dramatic. It's got color. It's got that word scare that talks about exactly what happened rather than a McCarthy era being just one era of many, the Pleistocene or Mesozoic era or the World War I era. And if you look at a timeline of, let's say, 1946 to 1960, you'll find that the period where McCarthy dominated the headlines was actually the spring of 1950 to the fall of 1954. So you see with a TV, my pointer doesn't work. On the screen it does, but not on a surface anyway. A lot of people think that McCarthy started this anti-communist hysteria and it was a bandwagon that people jumped on. And actually the bandwagon was already in motion and he jumped on. And that's why my book begins in 1946 with the collapse of the wartime alliance between the U.S. and the USSR. And it goes to 1960, which is my final chapter in the book, which is kind of a gateway to a new era. But the other reason I like Red Scare is that it takes the focus off one person. And that person is Senator Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin, who nobody outside of Wisconsin had really heard of until he won his Senate election in 1948. So during the spring of 1950, he held up a piece of paper saying, I have in my hand the names of and the number kept changing, how many communists there were in the State Department. By that summer, the term McCarthyism had come into being. And most sources credit that the invention of the term McCarthyism with this wonderful man, his name was Herbert Block, better known as Herblock, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. We can't really see everything, but this is a sample Herblock cartoon from 1950. He always portrayed McCarthy with a bucket of tar and a brush that was dripping with tar. And this refers to all the contradictory statements that he has made. And the heading is, stop ganging up on me. So when I was looking, starting my research on this book in 2017, I ran into a friend on the street who is a historian. And I said, I'm working on a book about the Red Scare. And his response was the first one or the second. And that's when I realized that there was such a thing as the first Red Scare that is used to describe the time between the end of World War I and 1925, say. In fact, Judy, I don't know if you have the new book by the historian Adam Hochschild. It's called American Midnight. And it's about this era where the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian government in 1917 caused an incredible wave of hysteria in America. And Hochschild's point was that hundreds and hundreds of newspapers, socialist newspapers all over the country were shut down. Socialist office holders were driven out of office. And his point is that American society is still paying the price for marginalizing these kind of left-wing opinions that were part of everyday discourse in the TNs. So as my historian friend said, as long as there have been communists, there have been anti-communists. So we go back. Here are two cartoons. One is from like the TNs. The other is like maybe 1905, and this other is the TNs. The legend on each of them is put them out and keep them out. In the first case, an animus anarchist bomb thrower at the gates of civilization. And the other is, you can't see it here. It says, Rens, the torch, Anarchy, the sword, Bolshevism. So this was very much a fear. Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist rabble-rouser, was deported back to Russia. And she didn't make any friends in Russia either. She wound up having to leave the Soviet Union to go to Paris. Eugene Victor Debs was the head of the US Socialist Party. And he won four million votes in the 1920 presidential election, campaigning from jail, where he had been put for arguing against the US entry into World War I. So any kind of labor activism, as long as there was labor activism, was tarred with this brush of anti-communism. It was a cartoon from the New York Evening Telegram that strikes and walkouts lead inevitably disorder, Bolshevism, chaos, and who knows what. So this next artifact is... I just saw it hanging in somebody's bathroom the other day. Maybe you've seen it before. Does this look familiar? So this is an ad from the Scott Tissier Company. And the copy is, if you don't have a clean bathroom, workers are going to complain among themselves. And you know what that leads to. So they have a point, you know, of course. Anyway, just like the communist threat was used to drive a wedge into the labor movement. So it was once World War II ended to drive a wedge into all kinds of other areas of American politics. So this is the speech in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri where Winston Churchill coined the term Iron Curtain. And many people say point to this date as the beginning of the Cold War. Being a movie person, I have given a talk about the Hollywood Blacklist. And the question I get often about the Blacklist is, well, where was McCarthy in all this? And I said this was 1947. McCarthy wasn't even around in the Senate. But this is when Hollywood writers were called in front of the House of American Activities Committee and under the charge that they were getting the Blacklist subversive messages into Hollywood movies. So the communist threat was also used to drive a wedge in the civil rights movement. Here's a famous billboard. You can see this is a photo. This is a billboard that was seen all over the South. The communist training school, the so-called communist training school, maybe some of you have heard of it. It was called the Highlander Folk Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a labor-organizing school that started by an incredible man named Miles Horton. And he and a few others started this school strictly as a labor-organizing school. And they realized that they were winning all these labor fights for segregated unions. And sometime around World War II, they started becoming a civil rights and labor-organizing place. And they noticed that in labor-organizing, often the thing that got everybody's spirits up on the picket lines were songs. So anybody who came to Highlander to do a workshop, what songs have you learned and they would in turn pass the line? This is where the song We Shall Overcome had its birth at the Highlander Center. It was one of the only places in Tennessee where blacks and whites could sit down together. And Rosa Parks did not come out of nowhere just saying, I've had enough. I'm going to not give up my seat on the bus. I'm going to go to the Highlander Folk School about six months before the Birmingham bus boycott. So anyway, that's just a kind of an overview of the part that anti-communism has played in the era that we're going to be talking about. So how did I get interested in all this? Fair question. My parents, and this is taken in the early 30s. They were both New York City school teachers and they were both children of... Sorry. We now interrupt this program. My parents were both children of Eastern European immigrants, children of the Depression, and you have to remember putting ourselves back in the mind of the Depression. It was obvious to a lot of people that the capitalist system did not work. Whatever it is, something's got to work better than this with looking at all the people who are unemployed. So there were a large variety of outlets for people to join on the left, whether it was the socialists or at that time the communists were split into the Trotskyites and the Stalinists and so on and on it goes. So my parents were what I would call at the time rank and file communist party members. That is, they were really interested in union organizing, especially in the Teachers Union in New York City. They were both active. And the Communist Party also attracted people who wanted to do something about racial inequality. It was the Communist Party who hired attorneys to go down south and defend people like the famous Scottsboro Boys. So my father had the unlucky experience of having one of his favorite students grew up to be an informer for the Senate Internal Security Committee. His name was Harvey Matusso. He became one of McCarthy's right-hand men. And the way it would work is that the House Un-American Activities Committee would announce they were taking a panel to, let's say, Cleveland to investigate communist infiltration into the labor unions there. They would send an advanced person to Cleveland and they would meet with the various industrialists or whatever and they would say, who's giving you problems here? Who are the troublemakers? And they would have the hearing, public hearing, and Harvey Matusso would get up on the stand and said, I saw this person, I saw that person at the Communist Party meeting. He just purged himself top to bottom and then had a change of heart and wrote this book. Of course, nobody, no respectable publisher would touch it. In 1954, so it was a left-wing publisher who got it out there. He recanted, but it was too late for all the people who he named. And I found out later that it was at a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into communist subversion, infiltration in New York City public schools, both high school and college, that Harvey Matusso named my father. Earlier that morning, as it turned out, he had named Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Tom Paley, all the people, all the left-wing folk musicians who had been active. So my father was in good company. Anyway, he saw the writing on the wall that he was going to get fired from his teaching job. And so he went into private business, running an art supply store. My mother, they didn't get around to my mother until two years later. And by that time, things had calmed down just a bit. She could go before this committee and say, I'll tell you anything you want to know about myself, but I'm not going to name anybody. And she was able to keep her job. She taught art until she retired. But I was finally old enough to kind of hear about all this when I was a teenager in the 60s. And they were very open with me, my parents were. And I came to realize that a lot of my family history, all the decisions that were being made as a family really had their roots in this terrible era from the late 40s through the 50s. So it was always in the back of my mind. I moved to Vermont in 1970. I had this stereotypical image that many people did of, oh, Vermont, totally Republican state, very conservative, full-time establishment, whatever. I didn't know I was moving at a time when the earth was changing. Phil Hoffa just finished his terms. Dean Davis, who's quite a liberal Republican in many ways. Patrick Lay, he was about to win his first Senate run. Bernie Sanders was about to make his run. So I got very interested in what had happened in Vermont. And in the late 80s, I ran into two people who, turns out, shared my interest. One was Richard Hathaway, who taught history first at Goddard College and then at the adult degree program in Montpelier. And Michael Sherman, who was just about to take over as head of the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier. So I forget how this idea came about, but the three of us decided to put on a weekend conference, 1988, and Richard and Michael, being the historians, said, OK, we should have a panel on this. We should have a panel on that. And I, at the time I was, you know, they had really full-time, responsible jobs in the adult world. I was just running a movie theater. So I'll be the researcher. I'll, you know, go into the state law library where they have all the microfiche machines. Who's had experience with microfiche machines here? It's stiff neck, headache, you know, the whole thing. But, you know, the hours go by when you find yourself in June 1954 and say, oh, that was happening. That was happening. Oh, look what's playing at the Paramount Theater. I had a really kind of buckle down. Anyway, this conference was a really big success, but I was always aware that we had just scratched the surface. And I said, you know, one day I will get back to this. And that day came finally when my wife and I sold the Savoy Theater in 2010. And Michael Sherman at that time was no longer running the Historical Society, but he still is, to this day, the editor of the Vermont History Journal, the official publication of the Society. And he really encouraged me to keep doing some research. And so when the idea for this book happened, I already had all the material from this conference. It was videotaped, it was audio taped. Some of the audio tapes were actually transcribed. Thank you so much. And so I really had something to work with. So what I'm going to do is kind of tell you what our panels were at the conference, because these were the first chapters that I wrote. And then what we didn't cover at the conference that turned out to be equally as fascinating. So I was going through, speaking of the summer of 1954, going through the microfiche machines, and it came upon this headline, Vermont farmer cites fifth amendment when questioned on a red status. And so I had two immediate thoughts. Who is this Vermont farmer? Is he still alive? And if he's alive, will he come to our conference? So I had a big shock when I read the first paragraph and found out that this Vermont farmer was, in the years subsequent, got very well known for being something other than a Vermont farmer. It was William Hinton, the author of the classic book on the Chinese Revolution, Fan Shen. William Hinton, and there he is testifying, he was in his 30s. A graduate of Cornell, who had majored in agriculture, went to the rural rehabilitation agency after the war to work in China to kind of get things back on track in the war-torn areas of China. He had become a real fan of writers like Edgar Snow and others who had been to China. And Hinton was very taken with the idea of the Chinese Revolution that they were still on their long march when he got there in 1946. So he was already quite sympathetic to the aims of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In the meantime, I found out that William Hinton came from a really, truly amazing family. His mother founded the Putney School. Her name was Carmelita Hinton. This is a photo from the late 40s. And she had started the school in the early 30s, one of the pioneering progressive schools, one of the first co-ed private schools. And she was a disciple of the educator John Dewey. I felt that students should be taken away from rote learning and to actually learn by doing. It was a working farm. So students were expected to help gather the sap for a sugaring. They were expected to clean out the barn at 5 a.m. And it was quite an amazing place. That's William Hinton's sister Joan in the middle there. She had been an atomic scientist. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was recruited to go to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and participate in what was happening there. She was one of a few scientists who were present at the first atomic bomb tests in New Mexico, but then were totally horrified when the bomb was actually dropped on Japan in World War II. So she said, I'm done. This is not what I want to be doing. In the meantime, her brother was in China and said, there's plenty for you to do in China. Can you use somebody with your skills? And by the way, do you remember that roommate of mine at Cornell who you liked? His name was Sid Enxt. So Joan Hinton and Sid Enxt actually got married at Yanan, where Mao Zedong's headquarters were. So William and Joan Hinton were two of the few Americans to be in China in 1949 when the big changeover happened. In 1953, it had sort of come to the attention of certain people in the government that, oh my god, there's an atomic scientist who never came back. She's in China. Little did they know, she was 10 miles from the nearest town with no electricity, totally into communal life. But at the same time, her brother William decided for personal reasons it was time for him to come back to the United States. So he came back in 1953 and upon his arrival, he came through Canada at St. Albans. All the thousands of pages of notes that he had taken that became Fan Shen were confiscated. And soon he was called to testify in front of the committee. He thought they were really trying to get at his sister. But he ended up taking the fifth 75 times. And he just would not give them the time of day. So this is one episode that kind of ties in with the last night at the Telegraph Club. The incredible fear that went through the U.S. government with the change in leadership in China and the finger pointing at whose fault was this that the communists took over. We're going to return to that theme in a little while. This man is Alex Novikov. And this was another chapter. He was the only high-profile academic firing in the state of Vermont. In other states, especially at state universities, there was a lot of professors who lost their jobs. In Vermont, only one. And as it turned out, he was testifying also the same week that my father testified in Washington because he was a professor of Brooklyn College. And they were investigating communist subversion of the U.S. city colleges. But anyway, he had testified in front of the Senate. And Jenner is Edward Jenner from Indiana, who was equally as anti-communist as McCarthy and had the chairmanship of this Senate committee. So Novikov refused to answer questions. And there's a wonderful book by a woman who turned out to be who gave, William Hinton gave our keynote address at the conference. But this person, Ellen Shrecker, wound up giving the final speech at our conference. She wrote a book called No Ivory Tower, which is a history of how the Red Scare affected academia. And she said things followed a pattern, especially at state universities and colleges. Somebody was named in front of a committee. And then the trustees of that college or the politicians in the state would come to the universities and say, well, what are you going to do about it? And that's when they would appoint the committee to look into it, or they would call the professor up to the office and say, you know, it would be better if you resigned. It took a very brave college president to say, you know what, we aren't going to do anything about it. These people were hired to teach English or science or whatever. And so people like Harold Taylor, who was the president of Sarah Lawrence College, Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago. But at UVM, the president, Robert Boardman, his name was, appointed a faculty conference, should Novikov keep his job? And they voted, yes, he should keep his job. And then the legislature said, if you don't do something about this, we are going to cut our funding for UVM next year. So the president said, well, I think we'll appoint a new committee. So then they got, they pulled in the trustees and, you know, these various people. And what they went up saying to Novikov, oh, Jenner. So this is McCarthy with his brush. Nixon and Jenner carry, carry on lads. That's what the caption is. So UVM put the question to Novikov, if you tell us what you didn't tell the committee, you can keep your job. And he said, no way. At the same time, the Einstein School of Medicine in New York was just starting. And they hired Novikov away from UVM and where he went on to achieve all kinds of academic honors. He eventually got an honorary degree and a full apology from UVM around 1985. And we discovered that his leading advocate on the Senate, in fact, in the faculty Senate, but at UVM, the person who actually recruited him for the job at UVM, his friend Arnold Shine. And Arnold Shine was so thrilled to get an invitation to come to our conference. He was still boiling that his friend Alex got treated so badly. So he gave a great panel and that was one of the highlights of our conference. So anybody recognize this person? This is a caricature by David Levine. And somewhere around here I have a wonder about him. Yes, it's underneath the shade. This is Henry Wallace. Watch your wire rig. Thank you, George. Dangerous technology. So Henry Wallace, who is Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt, then Roosevelt's Vice President from 40 to 44, and then Truman's Secretary of Commerce. And he's a very admired person in his time, but as he started disagreeing with Truman's foreign policy, he started going more and more and more to the left, especially at Truman's belligerent attitude towards the Soviet Union. So Wallace actually ran for president on the progressive part to take up 1948. And there is the news article with the first meeting of the group in Rutland. And shortly after this, the Wallace group was really, really attacked. This was a very bad time to come out publicly to say we shouldn't be enemies with the Soviet Union. They had just marched into Czechoslovakia and taken over that government. So it was a very, very unpopular state of being. This man is Luther McNair. He was the assistant dean of students at Linden State College, and he was a member of the Wallace for President Committee. He gave a speech in favor of Wallace at UVM, and this is how it was headlined the next day. I'm sorry for this copy. U.S. strength, not on the side of people who seek freedom, asserts Dean McNair at UVM. What he was saying was that the war is over and now we're supporting the French and Indochina. We're supporting the Dutch in Indonesia. We're supporting the right wing, Hunter that took over the Greek government. We see ourselves everywhere helping reactionary forces. So at this time, there were two papers in Burlington. There was the Free Press, and then there was the Burlington Daily News that ended their publication sometime in the 60s. And then the publisher was William Loeb, and people assume that Loeb is from New Hampshire, where he ran the union leader for so many years. But his first paper was actually the St. Albans messenger, and then he bought the Burlington Free Press. So for a whole week, he ran front page headlines, editorials. This man should not be allowed to have a position where he can influence impressionable minds. So he kept this drum beat up all week, and at the end of the week, McNair resigned. He was not fired, but his son told me later that he felt a lot of sympathy for the president of Johnson, didn't want her to get into any trouble. So the official line is, I have taken care of my ailing parents in Cambridge Mass, so it's a good time for me to leave my job. So I wondered, whatever happened to Luther McNair, what did he do once he got to... Well, I found out that he became the head executive at the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. He did that for 30 years, and now there's an annual award for him. Anyway, another chapter in the Wallace for President involves a well-known artist at the time, Rockwell Kent. I don't know if that's a really good name, but there's just a great exhibit of his stuff at the Fleming Museum last year. Anyway, he lived outside Platsburg at the time, so he accepted an invitation to come to speak to the UVM students for Wallace. And he was not exactly a politic guy. He had very strong opinions. And somebody asked if the Wallace campaign would accept help from the Communist Party. And he said, well, why shouldn't they accept help from the communists when Harry Truman and Thomas E. Dewey are getting help from every gangster in the U.S.? So that was the headline in the free press the next day. He was, I guess, the modern version of being ridden out of town on a rail. So Richard Hathaway and Michael Sherman said, well, the most headline-worthy event during those years was the downfall of McCarthy himself, which was engineered in large part by our Republican Senator Ralph Flanders. So Flanders had been a very successful businessman in Springfield and had a tool and die factory there. And there he is in later years. And he had served on the Armed Forces, Armed Service Committee with McCarthy, took incredible personal dislike to the guy, and said, you know, he just did not like his bullying tactics and felt, this is from the conservative Republican point of view, that McCarthy was really damaging the Republican brand by making these accusations and turns out, Flanders wrote in his memoir years later that he felt that he had tacit approval from Eisenhower, who was not going to get his hands dirty. He says, but if you want to go after McCarthy, you know, you feel free to do it. So here's a famous, this is an Associated Press photo of Flanders announcing what he's going to do. Flanders on the right, McCarthy on the left. And who's that in the middle? Can you see, make it out from here. It's McCarthy's 25-year-old aide, Rory Cohn. And if anybody wants a more obvious connection between then and now, just think about this. 25-year-old Rory Cohn was McCarthy's protege. 50-year-old Rory Cohn was Donald Trump's mentor. Oh, wow. And when Donald Trump wanted to leave the insular world of Queens and become a real player in Manhattan real estate, his father said, ghosty Rory Cohn, can't do anything without Rory Cohn. And so I think it is for Rory Cohn that he learned, you know, attack early, attack often, never apologize, demean your enemies. And that was Rory Cohn's playbook. Anyway, two of our guests at the conference talking about this whole episode is Flanders. One was Robert Mitchell, who is the editor and publisher of the Rotlin Herald. And the other was Kendall Wild, who at the time was the editorial page editor of the Herald. You know, there's an office to aspire to. Right. I love it. Anyway, so they both came to our conference. Mitchell had been upset that the Springfield Gazette, which was so much a Springfield reporter, excuse me, so much a smaller paper than the Rotlin Herald, was getting scoops when Flanders would come back for the weekend. They'd always get an exclusive story from Flanders about what he was going to do. So Mitchell sent Wild, who was at that time just 25 years old, and said, I set up, you're going to go over to Flanders' house this Sunday morning. So the result was that Kendall Wild got the scoop that was on the front pages. At the same time, the Army McCarthy hearings were going on, and McCarthy was already in big PR trouble for his slimy tactics during this investigation. But here's the headline that was in the Rotlin Herald the day after Kendall Wild's meeting with Flanders. So Robert Mitchell said at this conference that he thinks that you may have written more editorials about McCarthy during that eight-year period than maybe any other subject. It's pretty amazing for a very Vermont-based paper. So there it is, Flanders sees threat for McCarthyism every day. There was something on the front page of the Rotlin Herald for months. Senator Flanders speaks out. Whatever Flanders did, it had it. Robert Mitchell's full approval on the editorial pages. And Mitchell wasn't the only one. There were other papers in Vermont who were kind of mainly on the traditional Republican side where we're taking Flanders side. So this just kept going on all summer long. This is another Herbal Cartoon. The movie High Noon had just come out. And if you remember the plot of High Noon, he was a sheriff. And he can't get anybody to help him fight the bad guys. And Flanders was having the same problem. Flanders was the sheriff he had. And people like Senator Nolan, don't look at me. High Noon in Washington is the name of that cartoon. So the only one who is in favor of McCarthy here was William Loeb, the brilliant free press. Wire the old gent. And his tack was poor Senator Flanders. He's losing it. He shouldn't be in the Senate anymore. He's just gone around the bend with senility. Send him a telegram saying he should spend his time better elsewhere. So finally McCarthy was censured. And his career was basically over. He died three years later. So Richard Hathaway was, his big topic was Vermont exceptionalism. It doesn't exist. And he said, we have to have a panel on the difference during this era in the experience of Vermont and the experience of New Hampshire. And we got one big difference was New Hampshire had an attorney general in Lewis Wyman who fancied himself, a local McCarthy. And he had persuaded the New Hampshire House to give him investigative powers and powers to say, you know, if you don't come across with questions, you know, you can be held contempt. And there's William Loeb. As soon as Wyman had a target in his sights, Loeb would put it on the front page with this guy as a suspected communist. So one person who came to our conference was a target of Loeb and Wyman. His name was Paul Sweezy. And he was mainly known as being one of the founding editors of the once-learned New Independent Socialist magazine. He was a part-time New Hampshire resident and had been active in the Wallace Fair President New Hampshire committee. And he refused to answer questions in front of the committee. But knowing that he was probably going to get into trouble, he already lined up his friend at the law school, Thomas Emerson, to defend him. He said, we're going to take this to the Supreme Court, which they did. It took five years for Sweezy's case to work its way to the Supreme Court where it was ruled that, you know, it was none of their business to know to... So they ruled in Sweezy's favor. He was facing five years in jail for not testifying. What happened was there was a very popular professor at UNH and Gwynn Daggett, who would invite outside speakers to his class. And one of them was Sweezy. And Wyman had made an offer to a student, you know, you want to earn some extra money, go and sit in on this class and take notes and tell me what Sweezy said. So that's what they did. Daggett was also threatened with the loss of his job. But unlike at UVM, he had a very sympathetic head of the college. So Daggett was able to keep his job. So there was a whole chapter in this book about that difference between Vermont and New Hampshire. So that was the conference. And those were the panels of the conference and they formed the basis of the book. But then I said, you know, I just kept staring at this cover. And I said, there's one headline in here that we just never, ever followed up on. And it was that one. And this was actually the first chapter that I wrote. I wrote it as a piece for Vermont History Journal. And at one time I was actually tempted to make the whole book this chapter because it turned out to be such a fascinating story with so many interesting players. So I'll see if I can describe it concisely. The center of the story is a couple. His name was Ville Hallemore Stéphane-San, originally from North Dakota, Icelandic heritage. And he had been starting in 1895 to about 1910, a very well-known Arctic explorer. He'd like done six different expeditions up there. And he was living in New York City when he was done with all that. He had an enormous Arctic library. And his secretary noticed that he was just complaining all the time about the summers in New York and how miserable he was. And she said, well, you know, every summer I rent this place up in Vermont. He would have come up and take a look around. So he and his wife, this fascinating character in her own right, Evelyn Baird Stephenson, they bought some property in Bethel. And over the years they had become very good friends with a Far East expert named Owen Lattimore. And Lattimore was very well known at the time. He had been Roosevelt's personal emissary to Chiang Kai-shek in China. And he was one of the people who after the war was arguing, says Chiang Kai-shek is completely corrupt. He doesn't have any of the support of the Chinese people. You can, we can talk to these revolutionaries in China. They're not like the Russians. We can, you know, we can deal with them. All those people who made that argument got themselves into trouble within a few years. And they were all weeded out of the State Department. Lattimore was not in the State Department. He was teaching Asian studies at Johns Hopkins. We'll get to that. They were very good friends. Lattimore spoke fluent Chinese. He spoke fluent Mongolian. He was very concerned about his friends in Tibet whose lives and livelihoods were being threatened by the Communist Chinese takeover. So he wanted to get as many of the Mongolians who the Chinese were clearly going to set up a puppet government in Mongolia. He wanted to get some of his Mongolian friends out of Asia. And he had the idea of starting a, what he called a center for Asiatic studies in Bethel or not. And Stephenson said, well, you know the land right next to me is up for sale. So why did you buy it? So Lattimore did buy it. There was the summer of 1949. They started construction on the school, the Mongolians. So you look at the White River Valley Herald in those days. And there are articles about the Mongolians and their finery on the main street in Bethel treating the little kids to ice cream columns. It was quite a novelty. But Lattimore, because of his attitudes on China, was already kind of in the sights of the FBI. So people were following, people were noticing the license plates. They were steaming open the letters that came from him for him in 1949. And McCarthy kept hinting that I am going to name the head spy at the State Department. And when he finally did, it was Lattimore. And Lattimore was completely flabbergasted because for one thing he didn't even work in the State Department. But he knew that he was going to be incurred really big legal bills. And he very reluctantly gave up his place in Vermont. Stephenson said, I will sell it for you. And Stephenson put an ad in the magazine that doesn't exist anymore, the Saturday Review of Literature. And only one person answered the ad, a former anthropology student who was a, had been a follower of Stephenson's life and career. And it turns out this man, his name was Mason Ordway Sousard, was an actual communist who had run for Governor of Alabama on the communist ticket in 1942. His wife had run for Attorney General on the communist ticket. So in the meantime, there was this kind of unhinged woman who lived in Vessel named Lucille Miller. And she was telling anybody who wanted to listen that there were communists all over the place in Vessel and in Randolph Center, including some people who had been in the Roosevelt administration who were friendly with Alger Hiss. So Lucille Miller became an informant for this very popular right wing columnist at the time, Westbrook Pegler, who was kind of the Rush Limbaugh of his day. And he's quoting the informant, Lucille Miller, he's saying, the secret of communist success here has been charm and money. They have given farm jobs and contract jobs and washing and ironing work to the people. So Lucille Miller kept saying to her contacts that the Boston Herald, which is a William Randolph first run paper, you should come up to Vessel and Randolph and see when it's happening. And finally a reporter came and discovered this bland sale. This is John Drysdale, who was the editor and publisher of the White River Valley Herald. And he was really scared that this story was going to explode because all you had to do was walk down to the Vessel Town clerk and see the land transfer. And you'd know that Lantemore took an incredible loss on the steal, but meanwhile McCarthy was claiming this is how the communists are raising money to go into their coffers. So John Drysdale, he said, I only got as a weekly paper with a miniscule circulation. He prevailed on his friend Robert Mitchell with the Herald and John Hooper at the Brattleboro Reformer to chip in and hire an investigative reporter from New York City who would come up and spend a month there. And this was a six-part series that was on the front page of the Herald and the Herald and the Brattleboro Reformer for six whole days. You know, one day they're getting the whole story straight to the land sale. So within a few weeks, the story had completely disappeared. But unfortunately, Lantemore never returned to Vermont. He had been suspended from his job at Johns Hopkins and his troubles were like only beginning. Stephenson was very bitter about what had happened with him in Vermont. He moved to Dartmouth to Hanover and donated his whole library to Dartmouth. So I was just about done with my book and I read it to my friend Andrew Newquist in Montpelier. And he said, gee, did I ever tell you at the time that my father ran against Charlie Plumlee and got red-vated and lost that election? And I had, you know, my first teller was, wow, what an interesting story. And then, oh my God, I'm going to have to write another chapter. And Andrew said, I've just donated all my father's papers to UM. So there it was in a box. You know, I could go through this campaign every day. If you've ever been to Northfield, Vermont, you know the name Plumlee. The Plumlee Armory at Norwich University. There's the Plumlee this and the Plumlee that. He had been president of Norwich. He then was in the State Legislature that in 1932 he was elected to Congress. And in 1946, he was about to start his eighth term and he started being seen, well, he started not being seen in the House. He was absent a lot of the time, falling asleep in the House, being seen publicly inebriated on several occasions. So a bunch of Republican businessman came to Young Professor Newquist at UVM and said, we need a fresh face to run against Plumlee. How much do you think you would need? And the answer is pretty laughable in today's terms. $500. So you have to remember, no Democrats were elected in those days. All the action was in the Republican primary. So there's the announcement both for Andrew Newquist and way down at the bottom, sober consideration of all legislation for those who like an in-joke. So the campaign was going really well but then all of a sudden the story kind of emerged and nobody knows how this happened but supposedly the 20-odd member delegation of the very Communist Party endorsed Newquist for governor, for a representative. I was never able to find out whether this actually happened. Evidently Professor Newquist didn't either. He said in his denials the first I've heard about it. So he lost the election. Plumlee won yet another term. And Plumlee's hobby horse towards the end of his congressional career was Communist-tainted textbooks. And students are being taught that the people who founded this country were slaveholders. Bad stuff. And even after he retired from the House, he got in the 1953 legislature in Vermont, he wanted to come and speak to a joint session of the House and Senate in Vermont. And they were lame. So it was a very interesting thing and an article by the author Darcy Camfield Fisher at the time was pointing to this as saying even conservative Vermonters know when a real line has been crossed. So the last two chapters we're going to talk about are two in a kindred spirits. This is, his name is Bernardo Shea. And newspapers in Vermont generally fell into three categories. Traditional Republican like the Rev. Harold. More conservative Republican like the Burlington Free Press. And right-wing Republican like the Burlington Daily News like the St. Albans Messenger. One Democratic paper in the entire state. Run by Bernardo Shea and his wife Sheila. Swampin' way up the last town you hit before the Canadian border. The O'Shea's had been both Navy officers during World War II and had been stationed in the South Pacific when they were doing atomic tests at the Bikini et al. And they both came back, committed pacifists, committed Quakers. They lived in Northampton last but saw this opportunity to buy this small town paper. This is 1950 they took it over. Published to inform the public honestly and intelligently. So the Swampin' Carrier and the White River Valley Herald were two of the only newspapers when I was doing my research where you could actually sit at a table and turn the pages of the real newspaper. This is up in the Swampin Historical Society. They had issues going back who knows how long. So I got a real chance to get familiar with this paper in many respects. Your typical Vermont small town newspaper. Here is the Little League Scores. Here is the bake sale that's happening for the library. Here's the new construction. This is the select board meeting. Except the editorial page. And that's when O'Shea, the O'Shea's really went to town. This is a sample. He was constantly reading papers from other places. In this silly hysteria he read in the Madison, Wisconsin paper that somebody took a clipboard and put on the Bill of Rights and took it around town to see who would sign it and nobody would. Often papers in those days have... Here's what other editors have to say. Well, his other editors were Norman Cousins from the Saturday Review. He was the only paper that came out against the firing of Alex Novikoff of UVM. Guest editorial by Dorothy Day, editor of the Catholic Worker and Peace Activist. Often A.J. Musty, who is a hero of O'Shea, would be quoted in the paper. Every once in a while, you know, it was the fifth anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. So there they reprinted from a magazine, from a Quaker magazine, a firsthand telling of what it was like to live under the bombing of Nagasaki. Every once in a while, O'Shea would have an editorial. The controversial Dr. Hansi. So in this editorial, O'Shea said, whatever contributes to understanding is good and we believe can see his rears of research have a definite contribution to make. Readed people, you might learn something. And another editorial I couldn't help noticing. I was driving around Swanton the other day and I saw a really unusual sight. I saw a truck that had a Confederate flag flying on it. Now what can this possibly mean? So 1952. So O'Shea was often a sacrificial lamb in electoral politics. Nobody was going to beat George Aiken in 1956, but he felt somebody should run for the Democrats. So he ran for the Senate. He ran for the House. He ran for governor. He remained a political activist until he died in the late 80s. But he found a great politician to support and that was William H. Meyer. And Meyer was a forester from a teeny, teeny town. I don't know if anybody has ever been to West Rupert near Bennington. But William Meyer became the first Democrat in 104 years to be elected to Congress. And he ran on a platform of abolishing nuclear weapons, admitting China to the U.S. And then once he got into Congress, really continuing his peace work. And it was kind of a fluke election because there was a very contentious Republican primary and that kind of the least popular guy won. And so there were reasons that Meyer got elected. But 58 also was not a presidential year. 60 was. And that's why Robert Stafford, who was then governor, said any good Republican can beat Meyer. And that good Republican turned out to be Stafford himself. He announced he wasn't going to run for governor. He was going to run against Meyer in 60. And even though Meyer got more votes than he had in 1958, he was beat because it was a presidential year. And although it's funny to think about it now, Vermonters turned out in great numbers to elect Richard Nixon. So Meyer himself ran again for, he ran for Senate in 1976 and he ran for the House in 1978. And with each loss that he had, he got more and more dissolution with the Democratic Party. And especially as the issue of the Vietnam War came to the fore. And in 1970, he basically said, I've had it with the Democrats. And it's time for a third party in Vermont. And he announced that issued invitations to 15 people he knew to come to his house and form the Liberty Union. And one of the people at that meeting was Bernie Sanders. And if you get Bernie in a quiet moment, he will acknowledge that Bill Meyer was really one of his heroes in Vermont. And he really helped make Bernie's career possible. So that's where I kind of end the book with the 60 defeat of Meyer, but also tracing the rise of Bernie that really came out of Meyer's experience running as a Democrat in those years. And this transition from being such a stereotypically rock-ribbed Republican state to 25 years later, Howard Dean and one of the most progressive states in the union, the roots of that change are to be found in the 50s, and I think in the resistance to the McCarthy era. So anyway, happy to answer any questions. And then I'm also happy to show you some books. They're $15. I'm curious, there were many times you were talking about someone who was being interrogated and refused to answer. And was it where they refused to answer questions about other people, refused to answer questions about their political beliefs, or was there this broad range of things? Yes, yes, this is a very interesting topic. Because you could say, I refuse to answer it, I don't recognize your authority. First Amendment rights, freedom of speech. That would take you a contempt citation. You could say you don't have any authority, but I am taking the Fifth Amendment, my right to prevent self-crimination. That would probably get you fired. That would have to involve some criminal charge being potentially acquittal, right? Yes. But being a communist, per se, was not, or was it criminal? No, but that was a tricky thing, because if you were a communist official, you could, in 1950, they passed what was called the Smith Act, vague wording. If you were in an organization that was dedicated to the overthrow of the government, that was illegal. But here's where it gets tricky. The people who say, I will tell you what you want to know about me, but I won't name anybody else. That's also risking a contempt thing. As soon as you answer one of their questions, you have to answer all of them. And there were people in Hollywood who really wanted to take that stand, and they were going to get fired no matter what they did, unless they named other people, which was so ludicrous, because the committee already had those names. And it was a question of performative. You had to prove you were a good American by informing on your colleagues. Did anybody do that? Yes, people did. No matter what variation, somebody actually did it. In fact, there are musicians in the audience, but there were references to, you could take the augmented fifths or the diminished fifths. And I think telling a factor self, but not refusing to name other people, was a version of the fifths. John Houston, the movie director, he wanted to, what he wanted to do, his advice to the writers who were getting subpoenas, was refuse to answer any questions, and then go out onto the steps of the building and say, yes, I'm a communist, and I don't care who knows it, but I'm not going to tell them. And lawyers, where the writers said, no, no, no, no, no. Lawyers wanted to kind of thread a needle. The writers were, they didn't want to give the committee. In those days, the fifths was very much identified in the public mind with gangsters, people who really had something to hide. So they didn't really want to take the fifths, which is why they all, the Hollywood 10, all got contempt citations because they actually refused to answer any questions with no, didn't cite any grounds. So it's a fascinating history. And I could see that when my mother was called before the New York State Board of Education Investigating Committee, which had subpoena power, that there's a very fine line that she had to thread saying, she knew that even if she said, I'll tell you about me, but I won't name anybody else, they could still find reasons to fire her. But that particular case was working its way through the, to the New York State Supreme Court at the time. Yeah. Why did Dr. Navikov come under suspicion? Dr. Navikov at UVM, why did he come under suspicion? Yeah, he had been a member of the Communist Party when he was teaching at Poco College. So there was a notorious guy who was on the faculty at Brooklyn College who wanted to keep his job and just gave the names of everybody who he had been at meetings with, and all those people got called, including Navikov. And so his activity was at Brooklyn College in the 40s, forming a union among the professors, but it didn't catch up with him until he was called in 1953. Thank you. I was curious about that Center for Asian Studies in Bethel, Vermont. What was the name of it? I think that's where... Center for Asian Studies. Is there any remnants of that anymore? No. And here is the great irony that the FBI suspected that Lattimore was going to have something to do with setting up a figurehead, a communist figurehead government in Mongolia when, in reality, he was afraid of what was going to happen when the communists took over and was trying to save all these sacred texts that his religious friends had accumulated. So, how do you spell Lattimore? L-A-T-T-I-M-O-R-E. A very distinguished family. I said, Lattimore, that name is familiar, and then I realized his son, Richmond Lattimore, was the one who translated the Iliad and the Odyssey that I had originally. So, would anybody who was Russian were targets, or how about anybody who's Chinese would be targets? Well, you know, this is one of the themes of this book. And in the last night of the telegram club, if you were Chinese and you were working in atomic energy or science, you were very carefully dead. But you look at some of the news articles about Novikov at the time, and quite a few of them will say, the Russian-born Novikov, Russian-born, like, till he was five months old. Yes, so people, you know, people were definitely under suspicion. I mean, look what's happened after 9-11 and what's happening today. It doesn't take much for people who are fearful to, you know, do the blanket thing of these people already not worthy of being trusted. So, definitely a lot of that. A lot of people changing their names, especially if they were very identified as having a Jewish or Russian name. And then George. What year was it that Harvey... Matuzzo? Yeah, implicated your father. 53. So you were a couple of three years old? I was six. And did he ever apologize to him? Not that I know of. I think I would have heard about that. Well, he apologized in print, right? He apologized in print on mass. Apologized in print, a blanket apology. Yes, and he's a guy who... Look him up on Wikipedia. He reinvented himself like 10 more times after this. He became a big hippie. He went to England and became a kind of rock star. Crazy. And he actually died in Vermont. He died in a traffic accident. Yeah, crazy life. Did you have another question? Yeah, so I'm curious. Was there a migration of people from Boston or New York or whatever when there was a sweat scare to get out of the city and move to Vermont? Like it became a haven for those people. Well, I had... I could have predicted this would happen as soon as the book was printed, I would find other chapters to write about. So I went to... Anybody ever been in Belmont or Mount Holly? It's near Ludlow? A cute little community there. And somebody came up to me and said, you know there was a kind of a left-wing enclave here in the 50s. Turns out that there was somebody whose family went generations back in Belmont named Randolph Smith. And he was the headmaster of a leading progressive private school in New York called Elizabeth Irwin. And he would summer at the family place in Belmont. And one after another, various faculty people and parents would come up to visit. This was before Okimo and Land got incredible in Ludlow. They'd say, is that really $200 for that house of ten acres down there? And so Randolph Smith's son Peter, who's my age and still living in Belmont, he said at one point they counted 25 families. Mainly during the summer, but some of them became year-on people who came up and bought land and one of them was Robert DeCormier, who ended up being the coral director of the group Counterpoint. I have a friend who went to Tsar Camp on a lake in Cabot. And she said she found out only years later that the counselors there had kind of picked that camp to be counselors at, because it was close to the Canadian border. In case they got a subpoena to appear in Washington, they could leave quickly. So I think the answer is yes. You're a question. In certain areas, yeah. George. Why the doctor in Overcroft who was at UVM, and he left there in 1953, why would it take UVM 35 years to recognize that they've made a mistake? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think some of it had to do with the public pressure because this was an episode that was forgotten and that there was a new generation who was kind of looking into this. And I saw a very interesting letter in the Burlington Free Press when I was looking at the coverage for this. If anybody has heard of a Ramon Poe at New James Hayford, a wonderful, very homey poet, sort of a minor league frost, but even the high minors. Anyway, Hayford had been very active in the Wallace campaign and he wrote a letter to the Free Press saying, I see that Professor Novikov has gotten a recognition and an apology and I think the Free Press also deserves him an apology. Deserves an apology to him. And I'm still waiting for an apology for the Free Press for how they treated the Wallace for President campaign and who went into detail about how they got slimed for their political opinions. As it turned out, Wallace only got like not even 1% of the vote in Vermont that year. It was like Lowe was bringing out the big cannons for this killer mosquito. Yeah. Did other papers print the articles that Flanders had printed in the paper that he was working for? In other words, did other papers make up his articles that he was writing? You mean Mitchell? Oh, I don't remember. I can't read my notes. Mitchell was Flanders' big defender on the roll. But other papers definitely picked up Wallace. So they were able to, even though the other papers were more on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, they would still print the articles that looked interesting. And was the St. Albans Messenger and the Swanton Courier in competition? They were sort of in competition. That's right, next door. Yeah, yeah. In fact, there was a funny exchange when something went wrong at the presses in St. Albans and they wound up using the Swanton Courier presses. Yeah. But there's no love lost between those two people, these two papers. Have you read the book by Glenn Frankel called By Noon Day? I sure have. That's a good one. That's a very good one. Yeah, Glenn Frankel is a reporter for the Washington Post, political reporter, but he was really interested in movies. And he wrote one whole book about the making of John Ford's The Searchers. Yep. And then another book about the making of High Noon and how High Noon was really effective by the Blacklust extent that, you know, everybody just watches it, oh, western and, you know, gunfights and sheriff. But it was a real, it was a parable about McCarthyism. Well, thanks everybody. And read the books if you, okay, take what's under here. Thank you all for coming. Yeah, thank you so much.