 For our launch, for the newest publication by the Modern Historical Society, we keep believing Vermont is the paradise of development of the 20th century. If you have not already gotten your copy, please, I'm sure you can grab a copy and have Paul sign it for you today. We are really delighted to publish this book, which is a follow-up to Paul's previous research. This previous book was called Two Vermonts, I'm going to make a episode of the short. J. R. Ray and I did it in 1865 to 1910. I was missed the years a little bit. Which is, in my whole opinion, definitely one of the better Vermont history books in recent years to analyze some often overlooked sort of schisms and tensions within the history of Vermont that really still exists in Vermont today, if the past never really leaves us in that sense. Paul, if you're not familiar with him already, is a professor at Northern Vermont University where he teaches history. He used to be a doctor from New York University. And if you Google his name, he's quite a prolific speaker on the Center for Research on Vermont's YouTube channel as well as a number of other places. So if you're fascinated by his work today, you can go home with his book. You can find quite a bit more of his scholarship. I also want to mention before I let Paul speak about his work, that we're very pleased to be spending the summer promoting this book and talking about its themes. Sponsored by Greg, who's sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council. We're going to be traveling all over the states, St. Albans to Bennington to Brattleboro to St. Johnsbury and having a book available, having Paul speak as he will today, a little bit about the book. And I'm really using the lessons learned from the book, the lessons learned from history, to start community conversations. Take those lessons from the past and talk about what should our community look like in the future. How long we have these conversations with each other that may be difficult but are sort of crucial to thinking about how your community should move forward into the 21st century. So we're really excited to spend the summer using the lessons in the past to start conversations with the future. So if you want to learn more about that programming, if we're also offering some work sponsoring these programs, we've written a program guide and I'm making it available for anyone from any other library or historical society that wants to have that program and do it themselves with the program guide to download. So check out VermontHistory.org if you want to learn more about that programming series and the work that your community can do in the summer. I'm really excited to get in there and have some really substantive conversations using the lessons from this book. It's a very long cramble but it's my pleasure to introduce Paul who will speak to you today about the work coming. I will. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Thank you all so much for coming on this beautiful day. I'm really flattered. And I actually, as Amanda knows, I'm going to try out some of the material I'm going to take on the road. You know, just sort of like a rough draft of the talk that I'm going to be giving around the state. And it's going to be a little truncated because I have a lot of thank yous. But maybe about, we'll see the timing. I thought it would be about 20 minutes and then 10 minutes of thank yous or something like that. And when I do go out on the road to hold these sessions that Amanda was talking about, I think that like my main goal is to try to get people to understand why in the late 1940s and the 1950s that the chair of the Development Commission, which was responsible for stimulating the state's economy, was a back to the lander guy who hated change and didn't want any development. And that's kind of hard, I think, to kind of wrap your brain around. Like why would you have that guy be the guy who's supposed to stimulate the economy? But I need, before I get to that, give people the big picture. And the big picture is that when I was a graduate student, I saw the people who were the Vermont historians. And I was like, that's what I want to do. I want to be one of those. And so now I consider myself very, very lucky to be able to teach Vermont history on the university level every spring. And I think it's reasonable for people in the Vermont history community to come to me. And I don't think they don't actually do this, but it's reasonable that they should to say, okay, well, you have this incredible luxury. You get to teach Vermont history every year. What have you learned? What do you have to say? Do you have anything original to say? And the answer is not really in the big picture. I don't actually have that much original to say. The big picture of the book is, as Alan named it, the paradox of development in Vermont, is something that, I mean, I've known since I really thrust myself into Vermont history. And if I could say it as succinctly as possible, the paradox is that making Vermont look natural takes a lot of work. Making Vermont look, and this is what people in the 20th century discovered. If you want Vermont to stay the same, you need to change it a lot. You need to make, if you want it to look natural, that is going to take a lot of work. And it's going to cost you some of the state's traditions. You know, that's the process that Vermont has found out in the 20th century. And that goes not only for the physical landscape that if you want Vermont's physical landscape to stay the same, then you need to change it. But it also goes to the human landscape, which is just as important. And then so out of that paradox of keeping Vermont natural takes a lot of work, come other paradoxes, preserving Vermont requires innovation. You need to be a dynamic and creative society so that you can stay the same. And certainly preserving some Vermont traditions necessarily means you have to sacrifice others. And that's the general paradox. And what Sam Ogden was trying to say was this thing that had developed by the early post-war period, which was this concept of the Vermont way of life. And the Vermont way of life, as he understood and other people understood it, was not just about a beautiful scenic landscape, but it was about the human landscape too. It was about, and the political landscape. It was about small, beautiful towns with really strong communities and local politics that really mattered so that that would encourage civic engagement. All those things combined in order to create the Vermont way of life, which people like Sam found so attractive, and he wanted to save it. And of course then in the process of saving it, he changed the state. You only need to look any farther than his 30-year war against billboards. He thought what he was doing, and it's reasonable, was saving Vermont, preserving Vermont. But it wasn't a matter of him keeping Vermont looking the way that it already looked. What he wanted to do was make the state look like what he thought it should look like and operate the way he thought it should look like. So in the process of preserving, he changed things. And this is not by any means a revelation that this is the paradox, making Vermont look natural, takes a lot of work. When I first plunged myself into reading as much Vermont history as I could, I came across this all the time. I would recommend to you Frank Bryan, who taught political science at UVM in 1974, he wrote, what the world needs is the community axiom, which promises a return to the good old days, traditional American values, to a simple life interpersonal relations where individuals still control events in society generally, and government as well. But if people move to Vermont, they'll be disappointed, because the community axiom is being taken over by the system axiom. And it's like, yeah, well, you know, there's a reason why the system axiom is coming into place. He said what will happen is Vermont will be heavily taxed, isolated by choice, and spiteful to outsiders. And it's like, yeah, but the system axiom, what we just learned was that we need the system axiom in order to, because big problems require big solutions. And, you know, we don't want to destroy Vermont's glorious traditions of local control in strong communities, but large problems require large solutions. In 1990, Joel Sherman wrote Fast Lane on a Dirt Road, and he wrote, from having been a remote world of small mill towns and hill farms only 30 years before by the 1980s, Vermont now found itself within a day's drive of 65 million people. Tax subsidies were needed to prop up agriculture as a livelihood and as a visual backdrop. For tourism, the state was laced with a plethora of environmental and social programs that required steadily increasing revenues, along with a large bureaucracy to implement it. And looming over the state and the times was yet another painful paradox. Growth threatens Vermont's special sense of place, but maintaining that sense of place with its pastoral look open places and small towns threatens to make Vermont elitist, an upscale gateway for the rich. And it's like, yeah, well, people don't want Vermont to become a mecha-playground for the rich people. That's not what the goal is, but it's really complicated, all these trade-offs that need to be made. How do you negotiate these paradoxes and dilemmas is hard. And I think that the nature of this paradox really, for me, hit home in, like, 1999, 2000 when I saw this movie. And I was at UVM and I was watching every Vermont movie I could possibly watch they had in their collection. And I ran across one called The Inheritors. And it states these things, the paradox very well. I thought I'd show you two little bits of it. And here we are. This first talks about tourism. In 1911, the Vermont Legislature established the first state-run government to deal with the well-being of the country. The state-run of the capital for the 20 years of the state's farms and summer homes. The values of the big farms and summer communities. To this moment, there is a systemic force for the grand scheme that has to be able to have the fields whose interests are not throughout the state to collect the location of the farms. You've already seen this week, one of the concepts of the winter meeting. Yes. By the way, quick. But I'm starting to get distracted by the little aspects of the local state. I understand the great economy. And there's only the same great economy where this is an actual land scheme. So I would try to go there as well. So that's, like, here's your paradox, which is that the grazing land scheme is created by farms. And then that's where we attract the people who live outside the state. So they move here, but they're not farming. And so then the lead was to change the landscape that attracted them in the first place. And that's a paradox, to say the least. And so I was watching this movie, but I wasn't really watching it very closely. It goes into the history of my agriculture and extracted the streets. And then, basically, it was made for farms to try to explain them how they should adjust to the future. And so I was like, we'll come on that. And I was kind of glancing at it and had headphones on. And then I got this part, which really, for me, is the stories about how you can hear it. How you can hear it, so here. Different beings that are on farms can cope with changing their economy. How dairy farms are growing up, and now maybe you should do sheep courses instead. When was this made again? Not today. The number of people on the operating wasn't their own relation with you. Because some of the animals were in intensive, dashed, hormonal trends. But some breeding forms are the same. Where as far as the region of operating is at that level, the right form. Because the small person with that number of animals can feed the world. And people laying in the herd here are just more than able to do attention. So all of a sudden, not too far from the region of the people which are at the level of the region, not too far from the region of the house. They can lay in places like this, where as far as the region of the house, you don't want to lay in it. Sometimes you can lay in the road. It was like pencil, pencil. Very far away from the region of the nation. And I was like, getting farmers understand the need for long-term planning. That's going to be hard, you know? And I went home that night. I told my wife this. She's like, don't forget the same thing. But how's it going? And, but, you know, that was surprising to me. Like the problems that the state is going to have trying to get all the farmers to go along with the fact that the community is coming into being at such a great extent. And, but the part that perceives that is about a dilemma which is that farmers create a beautiful landscape and people want a piece of it and then they commonly buy it out and then the carbon landscape is diminished. And it's not that people who move here want to diminish the carbon landscape. They run the carbon landscape. But that won't happen. And that's the problem. I wrote a manual to, you know, to Vermont's right. And that was about two teams. Team A and Team B. And Team A wanted this and Team B wanted that. And maybe that's accurate for the not-to-century, but the 20th century the conflict's not between people. It's within people. And that's the thing. It's a conflict that exists within people. And it took Vermont a while to get there. And so the book starts with the state leaders having contempt for the rural landscape and for the people who live there. It's so much though that they wanted to engineer the human landscape. And if you could engineer the human landscape and replace the losers with better people then you could have a more prosperous economy. And the landscape would look different. But of course Valentine did a lot to kick off tourism. The Barrett of Agriculture decided well we can't sell them as farms. We can sell them in summer homes. And by the time you get to the Bureau of Publicity the last thing which is that the Bureau of Publicity, the people Walter Crockett, those people they thought that the loss of the conversion of farms to summer homes was great. It was wonderful. And it goes all the way up through the Vermont Country Life Commission in 1929 and 30 Walter Crockett's like well you know 20 years ago we only had eight farms available in these three towns to have for people to buy summer homes. But now it's great well yeah but the loss of every single farm that's a tragedy for some family. That's a tragedy for a farmer who thought he'd be farming forever and couldn't. That's a tragedy for their kids who thought someday they'd inherit the farm and now it's bought by someone from somewhere else. And there was so little recognition that this is a tragedy. At least it's a tragedy for some people and not others. This indifference to the human landscape was amazing. And that's where Sam Ogden comes in. And Sam Ogden when he arrived and there are some people who really get the change that tourism brought both to the physical landscape and also to the human landscape the cost of that as far as strong communities go. Because community is shared experiences. It's not physical it's about long term shared experiences and relationships. And it diminishes community when you replace the people with newcomers. And so what happened was that Sam wrote when he arrived that he loved the people who lived there. He thought it was, you know, these wonderful amazing people. He said all of them were peculiar some more peculiar than others but he thought that the people who lived in Landgrove were just amazing, wonderful people. All really interesting people. And then he launched himself into his project and he rehabilitated the village and he attracted all these people who were artists and architects and puppeteers to have be a part of this Landgrove experience. And the people who he attracted replaced the people who lived there who he fell in love with when he arrived. He wanted the people who lived there to stay. He wanted new, interesting people to come and join him in this experiment and he wanted the town to stay the same size. And something had to give. You know, either you're going to grow or you're going to replace the people who lived there. But he wanted to save that Vermont way of life as he understood it. And there's this book called by Earl Newton called The Vermont Story and he writes about Sam Ogden when he became the chair of the Development Commission. Sam Ogden first served as member of the Vermont Development Commission in 1947 became its chairman. He has no vast plans to lure great industries into the state nor to promote a great wave of indiscriminate tourist travel. He represents the wise synthesis of the native and the newcomer in his desire to see the state develop along progressive lines without a sacrifice of his individuality and it's more or less unique way of life. So he's going to develop along progressive lines but keep it the same. And I mean that's the problem. I mean he, what kind of a Development Commissioner doesn't want any industries. And so that's kind of the thing that I have to convey to people when I go out on the road. And what makes the Vermont way of life possible Earl Newton in that book is really clear about it. Life in rural communities in Vermont offers the newcomer and his family opportunities for participation in the affairs of the community to an extent not possible elsewhere. In the city's interest in the community affairs has practically disappeared. The growth of large centers of population absorbs surrounding towns and villages and the gathering together of rootless thousands, the impersonal and the natural apartment houses have all contrived to bring about the complete disappearance of community spirit in those places. Well, probably an exaggeration. But this is not true in the country. In the country the individual is called upon to participate in the affairs of the community in which he lives. The key being, it has to exist on a small scale. It's something that Lewis Mumford, a historian of the city said around the same time, that it has to stay on a small scale. And so he was the Development Commissioner who didn't want development. And so as part of the the Development Commissioner, he authorized money he spent on some movies. And one of them is called The Back of the Living, which is a wonderful movie. I'll show you two parts of it. No means always measured in money. The waters are open to holiday makers with yachts. They're open to those who like to dive and swim and bask on the hundreds of beaches. Recreation may be as active or as restful as the age and disposition of vacationers may prefer. Although there is ample evidence that in Vermont years seem to do little to a beta youth possessed in living. Some visitors enjoy the facilities of family resort centers. While others choose the more rural Vermont of apple blossoms signaling spring and hillside orchids. Some prefer summer horseback trips over miles of little traveled roads and woodland trails. Trails which turn to red and gold when autumn shimmers northward through the mountains. And of course there are the famous mountain slopes where snow lies crisp and deep throughout the winter. What can Vermont mean to you? Well, if you're an artist like William Chaldec it will mean an infinite variety of subjects for your brush and canvas. To Sam Ogden it has meant the creative satisfaction of restoring a once abandoned community to vigorous life largely by the work of his own hands. Okay. A couple of things going on here. First of all, if I was a development commissioner and I offered some movies I would totally put myself in. You know, you can't blame Sam for being like, well I'll give you the money but only if I could get it. Number two, nothing says development when senior citizens play a role. And number three, it requires yachts. It's probably measured in money. And the whole thing there is a story that leads to it though where this fellow here and this is the part here is a real estate agent and there's this family that wants to buy and sew this house. And they're very white and very middle class and by the way this specific house has a change but this is basically not as it's listed first of all. So anyway, there's this family and they have this custom estate agent and he totally is checking the knowledge they have in the community and yeah, and so there's all sorts of skiing scenes. You get Norman Rockwell talking about how wonderful the place is and this kind of thing has to be a place of it a place for it and a place for it. Right. It's all about the Vermont way of life. It's not just about a view of the land's the church on the permanent so I mean that's that's the transition which is in the 1920s to be able to see so Vermont to be of the land's America. Switzerland Vacationland I'm slow Vermont. It was about the landscape but it wasn't about the human landscape so much it wasn't about the Vermont way of life and how the technical report community is today and Vermont has this for its other places in Boston which brings us to the final scene here the community agent you know sometimes folks call me crotchety and stubborn yes they do but the way I feel about it, this isn't the big town and we don't have room for those that don't fit in but you folks do and I want you to know you're going to have that house if I have to sell it to you which is weird, like was that a thing where the community decided to best live in town was that really a thing and clearly the message is okay so here's this heterosexual white middle class family if you are do you need to know that and I don't know because you're just going to find a real estate agent who will humiliate you by refusing to sell your house there's no body to help and so that's weird was that what do you think were real estate agents that choose to best live in the town or should crowd but there's something else here that I think is really important which is this yes they do the way I feel about it this is the big town we don't have room for whoops we got the idea there but we don't have room for people to look at yes they do the way I feel about it this is the big town the boy the girl when they're 18 they're going to bail right they're not going to stay are they and I have no problem at all with middle class white families and children buying houses in small towns in Vermont but you can't have just that it's a total turnover she's out of there at 18 she's going to go to UVM she's out of that town if you have this constant turnover of people the very community the development commission was selling is going to get lost and so that's really the central paradox you know by the the last part actually this part here so they come up to the house here and they go in the new house takes down a sign and the guy says look at the view and the home owner he's like hey I didn't know you felt that are they I said no this is natural force money so you're not going to have to change the order you're not going to throw the natural force so that's the thing and so you know say what I love people you're caught in this thing about trying to save Vermont but not to say I'm changing through the 60s Vermont was like what are we going to do and Sam Ogden served as the head of the scenery committee commission in order to advise the Hoff administration on what they should do about Vermont's landscape and he said what we need is a giant statewide land use commission with lots of zoning and lots of rules and lots of regulations and you could not possibly pass that as long as you had the one town one vote legislature and then so what happened was they reapportioned in 1965 and we got act 250 and Sam Ogden got the law he wanted and he thought reapportionment was the worst thing that ever happened in Vermont and it's like you can't have it both ways there's always you know I mean it's a bit of a zero sum game but what the the commission what the studies that the Hoff administration did were summarized in their 1968 vision and choice about Vermont's future it was a state framework for how to move forward it was called rejecting the inevitable this statement is offered as a contribution to public discussion critically needed of the fundamental choices facing the people of Vermont such an effort is required if Vermont its state and local government and its people control the destiny of the state and after identifying some challenges it ends Vermont has an opportunity and an obligation to the nation to pioneer in the search for new ways to achieve a harmonious and creative society it needs to change because that's the only way it can stay the same and so to this day you know the tension between preserving the physical landscape while changing and preserving the human landscape which is just as important while still improving it with new people causes Vermont to be a really conflicted society at once we embrace progress and on the other we worry about forces that often come from far away places with strange sounding names like Pennsylvania and it isn't the 1910s it's not a century ago we're not so completely indifferent to the importance of the personal sense of the human landscape alongside the preservation of the physical landscape but the question we want to ask I think when I go on the road is well how are we doing at it do people feel like we're negotiating this complex path well you know the physical and human landscape so that's is that pretty much Alan is that pretty much where I want to go with that when I go on the road it's pretty much what the book's about right would you say okay well if you have anything to say to me about the what I've just said I would be grateful but I do want I probably run over I don't have a clock on me to say that this has been a long project I think it's been eight years and just so you have a sense of how long eight years is Peter stand up he was in kindergarten when I started this project he was in kindergarten and I always taught the story of the Swedes because I run across it in my first book to my students in Vermont history and always the punchline was they all moved to Minnesota and then I thought I really don't know the story so I started to look into it and then of course I discovered that the Swedes had settled at least some of them had settled in Landgrove and so then after I was going I wrote an article about it I began to interact with the people in Landgrove Priscilla Grayson in particular and the people in Landgrove are wonderful people and helped me so much with this project after the article was done I decided what I wanted to do was I could write a history of 20th century Vermont through the lives of the Swedes and their descendants and then I drove around the state and interviewed people who were descendants of the Swedes and it's an amazing thing about life where it's nice to be reminded about how good how nice people can be and how open and giving and generous they can be. Three of the people I interviewed aren't alive anymore so I'm very grateful that I did research when I could I want to thank Michael Sherman for editing that article much of what you read at the beginning of the book is Michael Sherman's Handiwork so then after I worked on it for like five years I had this moment where I was like okay I have enough of a manuscript and then I had to call Alan and be like Alan I've been working on a book for five years you're going to publish it right? because I never wanted anyone to publish it except for the VHS press I think the VHS always does an amazing job with these books and I'm so lucky with my first book UPNE is a different organization I have no problem with them but I mean they approved the book then they sent me the manuscript back I fixed it up, sent it to them they decided on the title and the cover and everything they was printing and near the end of this process Alan was asking me what color do you want your name to be on the cover and you know at that point I was like oh Alan I don't know just publish it please I mean the amount of close attention and care and detail and love that Alan gave this book is staggering it was really amazing and now and then I really predict would be how much the VHS would get behind the book unlike if I've done it with another press and it's been amazing I'm just so flattered and I'm going to take this book out on the road and obviously I'm really grateful to Amanda and I'm looking forward to working with her all summer and beyond hopefully James Brisson did a great job with the book I think it looks really beautiful the VHS Publications Committee I'm very grateful to them for approving the book Eileen Corcoran and Lisa Angel if I said that right have been a big aid to the book as well and I also am grateful to Joy Warland from the Vermont Department of Libraries for helping with the book tour that's coming up and also the Vermont Humanities Council who have gotten behind the book too so now I've introduced the book to you now let's take it out on the road what do you think Amanda let's take it as a take this this circus on the road so I don't actually have any concept of whether I've talked for 15 minutes or 45 but do you think I'll be able to get people to be engaged with this concept of the balance of trying to preserve the physical landscape and the human landscape and trying to maintain the special sense of community that Vermont is the Vermont way of life yes please my opinion is Vermont's going to look 100 years from now like it looks now a rural entity and it's due to the Vermont Land Trust if you take a look at how many easements have been granted so far you know there isn't going to be much land left out there that's not covered by these easements the second thing is Act 250 which is the punchline of my book so if you have an economic benefit for development you've got to go to Act 250 and some people would say it's not supportive of new stuff so at the end of the year we have education and health care in local government that's where the jobs are and we're losing people so again supporting my opinion good luck I've got my courses we're good they're just not going to be able to overcome what's in place yeah to say that it's going to look 100 years from now like it looks now the backdrop to this whole book is that there was an old economy and we've evolved around dairy farming extractive industries like lumber and quarrying and small-time manufacturing and where there's this Vermont way of life in this world the same argument other people wanted to save that old economy died and then the question was what do we replace it with and to a great extent the answer was tourism was our creation and so that's where we are now and you think we'll be there in 100 years still like this yes the ski industry just reported for the last 37 years the number of skiers has been constant for the last 37 years and golfing is a distressed industry so if you wipe up your golf and ski we're looking at industries that are not going to grow that much so what are we going to do a lot of our kids need assistance food assistance and in our school systems here we feed a lot of kids lunch and a lot of people in this state don't have enough food to eat and we're coming to the rescue by a thing with a Vermont food bank so how long will we be able to hang on like this this is one of the questions in the mid 1930s the planning board did this thing called the graphic survey and it was the first comprehensive kind of look at the economy like that and what they should do and they said well dairy farming is going out courting and timber are going out the only industry that shows great possibilities for growth is recreation and the state to a great extent put its eggs in that basket and I want to ask people was that a good idea was that really a good idea yeah please I moved here in in 1969 and married into an old farm two things I heard then that impacted hugely the economic development of the state were Phil Hof's declaration of necessity of refrigeration instant refrigeration of milk which shut down a lot of the small farmers and then the arrival of IBM and IBM has changed to the county to a degree that is not applicable in any other part of the state and its decline is going to have more impact over the state as he strikes me over the next 30 years than anything else I lived in Essex for 10 years I lived in Essex and yeah the economy is going to evolve and people need to figure out what's next I don't know to what extent we're sort of in that stage but I think there is a consensus of mine that needs to be consistent with the preservation of the physical landscape you know but yeah well they do have a Costco which is really nice you know and there were really nice things about living there but Essex is the second largest town in Vermont and when IBM arrived it was a farming community and obviously if Sam Ogden was here he'd say why reapportionment was the worst thing to happen in the state because Chittin County gets everything it wants Chittin County calls all the shots in the state now and they get all the resources they get all the attention from the state which I think is something to that someone over here wanted to oh yeah one really important thing in this whole discussion is climate change and in a couple of different ways I think one is the ultimate changes which probably will occur with things like the skiing industry even the loading and pollution on the lane so on speaking of the recreational industry and tourism and another is that I can see a day maybe not as far out as we would hope when Vermont has become kind of an area of refuge for other parts of the country I mean people have been coming up here for 50 or 60 years to get away from the city anyway and pretty soon when the waters are lapping the shores of Manhattan and Boston there will be more of that and we've also warped our agriculture or even buried into more value-added products and vegetables and so on we may be growing food for New England simply because we're not under water and meanwhile other industries like the maple industry will be moving towards the border so I think those forces are well-invested and really important to bear in mind and we'll still be even more when we're dealing with this problem which is okay if you go around with people from Vermont and say do you want to have a more dynamic economy do you want to have more jobs do you want to have more industry do you want to be able to keep young people do you want to raise the tax base and say yes sure do you want the state to change do you want your time to get bigger oh no I don't want my time to get bigger and probably climate change is going to heighten that paradox do you think so Bruce yeah please speaking of paradox Governor Davis who I think was the environmental government made several speeches one at the beginning of the 1970 session with the legislature and he said this if we do these things promoting the passage of act 250 because the gift commission had just been delivered to the legislature we could have development without destruction and I find that paradoxical because development generally in one way or another does involve destruction of local ecosystems that was interesting listening to the real term you know I'm chair of the state library board I've spent a lot of time researching Dorothy Cantfield Fisher for the last two years and she was perhaps the premier spokesperson for Vermont in the 20s and the 30s but she also spoke in language similar to his you didn't find it she spoke about the kinds of people she wanted she didn't want people who were too rich but college professors, professionals not people who are accustomed to handling money but she she promoted what the Rutland Herald called selective immigration there's an echo of that and then Arthur Wallace Peach chaired the committee on traditions and ideals Norrish professional later executive director of Vermont in society they were also promoting that idea of the kind of people we want at the same time the committee on summer tourists summer economy they were promoting development more attractive very interesting arguments even with them I think the commission on BCCL there were arguments I think within that body itself because although there were only about 250 people or so they had diverse points of view yeah yeah Dorothy Cantor Fisher in the late 30s for the Bureau of Publicity wrote a pamphlet about Vermont summer homes for sale and it was mostly houses that Sam fixed up Sam's house is in there and Rockwell Kent's house is in there and all these people are artists and college professors they're intellectuals I think with their brains and it's like the sort of thing well that's the Landgrove that's the model, right talented artistic people who live there and it's staying the same size too and it's not becoming like Cape Cod or Florida where it's over overdone you know but the only way you can keep it the same size and if you attract those people is to chase away the other people and there wasn't a whole lot of recognition like on Dorothy Cantor Fisher's part that that's a problem she didn't really choose something take the uneducated people bring in the educated people it would be a much better state was Basin Harbor in any of these movies do you know the Basin Harbor Club the Beech the Beech family I do know it all white faces here and the tourist industry was particularly against Jews and blacks and this Senator Stafford told me the stories rather than sort of sad and humorous at the same time but I've not been able to find the transfer Mr. Beech was sued by a New York president who was Jewish because he was denied entry into Basin Harbor Stella Hackles husband who was a lawyer Stella was Vermont State treasurer for a while and they got him on the stand and Beech's lawyer said Mr. Beech are you anti-Semitic and he said no I just can't stand Jews I mean just interesting I mean what kind of a development commission's policy is if you're not white middle class, married heterosexual we don't want you here we're gonna exclude what 90% of the population whatever if you're gay don't move here we don't want you here you won't fit in what way to stimulate the state economy to go about it like that but that was what where we found ourselves by the 1948 you know hopefully we it's better but that's if you don't fit in don't come here yeah the full of that eugenics movement wasn't just localized to here yeah that was pervasive around yeah yeah yeah yeah but it has that sort of the whole concept of saving the Vermont way of life and saving strong communities and that communitarian because Vermont is what America used to be Vermont's on a small scale Vermont has local government and civic engagement and all these wonderful things that it encourages all these things which are wonderful but you cannot turn over the human landscape 100% or whatever and then keep it the same it's not gonna be the same community and they were very little recognition of that back in the 40s and 50s lower before that but there was a lot of that yeah Alan please do you think Vermont has something like a career development policy to pay how would you what passes as strategic planning development policy where we are right now well as a historian I'm very reluctant to say about where we are now it's not what I study but I would tell you that the an economics professor at UVM who I admire very much and I'm just his name just gave me anyway he calls from ticking time bomb it's a ticking time the economy is a ticking time bomb there aren't enough young people there isn't, Vermont has put in place a lot of strategies and plans and zoning and management and all these things that make it so it's a beautiful place to live and a wonderful place but as the population ages and you don't replace the young people that generation that creates all the wealth between ages that say 30 and 60 that cohort we're losing in the population's aging and at some point we're not going to be able to we're going to spend all our money on health care you know and so I mean if you were to talk to him it's like this doomsday scenario where like everyone in Vermont is going to be in their 70s and there won't be any young people and the economy will collapse and we'll all live in caves or something like that and I am not I would take his word for it how are we going to support schools when health care is going to be such a huge expense um so art yeah wolf sorry if he was here he'd be like I'll answer that question Vermont's in terrible shape I guess when I when I at the state level in the legislature auditorial administration seems to me it's there's concern what we do some people would say how are we going to keep our farms higher how are we going to cultivate small scale manufacturing but it all seems pretty peaceful it doesn't seem and it's hard to but it doesn't seem like the state has made a lot of progress putting in place where you can articulate ways to actually support the kinds of constructive changes that people want to see in terms of cooperation for the ability to keep our people in space and like I said I think it's always hard to do yeah we would say Vermont's done a better job of managing the physical landscape than it has the human one right I think that's one of the interesting things that comes out of the book is that the policy makers and legislators come up with these ideas and these policies and strategies there's a lot of that in the consequences and that's probably the point is that there doesn't often seem to be enough or a lot about what might this actually do to certain groups of people in our community if these kinds of changes get put in place yeah I mean living in Danville the town is unimaginable without the long term families the families that arrived in the 1790s and 1830s those people are really really important Tim you can live in Danville when you go up absolutely not which is fine I know of course you're not you can but I know you're not going to and it's nice to have a mix of those kinds of people but I mean everyone in town benefits enormously from the people who are really invested so that's the community the community is not a building you can see that tree well one time there was a dog stuck in that tree I don't know how the dog got up in the tree but then the dog stuck out and that's how your grandmother made a grandfather that tree that's community and so managing the human landscape in a way that you preserve that is a big challenge a very strategy because they should consolidate schools so that many small communities would lose their schools and that's going to be very bad for the community mmhmm yeah I mean do you see how many people come to Danville high school basketball games I'm from Philadelphia it's not very good basketball it doesn't really matter I mean that's community and it's your grandfather played for the team and now you play for them you know that's community yeah please I feel I feel reminded that you after being described in your earlier quote has become commuter reminded me we had probably two hundred towns that had no industry and not any jobs so people commute to the next town and this has a lot of impacts mmhmm we only have thirty nine town meetings left all those commuters even though they live in the town they have a limited attachment to the town and their interest is likely to be in the town where they were even though they don't live there mmhmm yeah and civic engagement was the wet attack in Sam Ogden to the town so much and what was what you know is really dependent on people being really invested in their town and how well the town is doing and you don't think that there's enough of that, that spirit certainly you think people commuting out of the town to work works against that yeah and the impact it's gradual but the impact on the physical landscape of that is dramatic people want the rural Vermont landscape but if people aren't farming if you know one farm after another it's converted to someone's house and the land doesn't work the biggest difference in land growth at the end of the book I didn't even have to spell it out in some ways the community in land growth is very much like the community that was in Dorset in the 1870s and in some ways it's really radically different and probably the chief way I'd say it's really radically different is that land growth is not a working landscape it's a visual landscape it's not a working landscape people don't work the land and that's a really big difference and too many towns become like that then well it's a problem I think Amanda wants us to wrap up is that about three o'clock it is about that time thank you so much thank you now you can all go outside and play