 My name is Sandy Lincoln. I run the place here, a local bookstore with a bakery aside. And we do always are interested in folks who are writing about our local culture, our local politics, what's happening in our state. And this book that Greg Gouma has done, Restless Spirits and Popular Movements, I have really resonated with me. I really enjoyed the scope of it over decades. So it's a pleasure to have you here, Greg. And welcome, everybody. Enjoy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So let me begin by telling you what I'm going to try to do the next, I guess, hour, hour and a quarter. Is that what we're talking about? Let me introduce myself a little bit of a little bit of relevant biography. And then I'll discuss the book and what it attempts to do, the process that I used to write it, and tell you a few stories from it. And then as a special treat, if there's time, I have a short excerpt that didn't make it into the book to give you a sense of what might have occurred and what might occur in another book if I ever follow it up with something. So I've lived in Vermont since the late 60s, moved here in 1968, fresh out of Syracuse University. I was a student of media, trained to be a writer, director, or something in mass media, and moved to Bennington and became a journalist for the daily newspaper there. And in a way, that was the beginning of my post-graduate education in Vermont. And I was also lucky enough during that same first five-year period when I was in my early and mid-20s to also work for Bennington College at a crucial moment, 1970, 71, when there was a lot of ferment and radical activity going on. So I got to know that part of the academic community and met more people. And then eventually I became a government worker, worked for the Department of Labor as a counselor. And that got me much more deeply into the life of the community and people, poor people, and people who were not treated well by the system. And those three jobs over a period of five years helped to frame my understanding of Vermont and beginning of my understanding of Vermont values. And I'm going to talk a little more about that. I eventually moved to the Champlain Valley area and I did a number of things. I ran a bookstore. I worked for the city government of Burlington. And eventually I became involved in the activism of that period of the late 70s in Burlington. And some people describe me as an activist. I wouldn't say that's my primary definition. I've been an advocate at times, but I've also been more of an organizer of institutions and a manager of institutions. And I've run over the years since then a number of non-profits, including the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington. I moved briefly to the Southwest where I was the director of an immigrant rights organization in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I ran a bookstore also in California for a while. And then eventually years later, the executive director of the Pacifica Radio Network, which is the largest progressive radio network. And so that's sort of the span of my experience and always based in Vermont, but venturing out into the larger world and gradually over the time expanding my understanding of issues based on my own experience and also reading. And so this book, Restless Spirits and Popular Movements has been in formation for 45 years, really, at least 45 years. I could say I seriously began working on Vermont history as a topic in 1975 and 1976 leading up to the bicentennial. And if you recall, whenever there was a bicentennial or some sort of centennial celebration, there's a lot of hoopla about Americanism and what is the country and what is the state and so forth and a lot of us then at that time, I was still in my late twenties then and we felt that it was a lot of hype. We had a more radical perspective. Some of the people who were perhaps more radical than I was ideologically wanted to write a people's history of Vermont. And since I was an editor and writer, I could help them do that and wrote part of it with a group. So the first one would say the first initial draft of parts of this book were developed at that time and we're in an attempt to tell what we call Vermont's untold history. The stories that were not being captured by the establishment's historical writers. And I would say just in passing that history is never a complete story. This history like any other is just one view of the past. It doesn't purport to be the only view or even necessarily a complete view. It's looking at it through a specific lens. And for many of those years, up to and including the time when I first arrived here, history was largely written by establishment and largely Republican people because the Republicans had run the state for 100 years. And so if I submitted an article even to a publication that was more general interest like Vermont Live saying, I think we should have an article on the commune movement. They would say, well, that's not Vermont. We don't want to write about that because we don't want Vermont to be identified with that. And in terms of historical writing, there were certain areas that were just ignored. And so it wasn't until some years later that I really discovered how deep these omissions went. But we were aware even then that there was a certain spin to the history. And so we told stories about the labor movement which was not really being discussed in historical context in any serious way. The women's movement and women in Vermont history and also an analysis of history based on, to a certain extent, class analysis. So a different interpretation of history. And this was issued a couple of editions in 1976. It was a kind of a breakthrough. And it began me thinking about how I could expand on it because I was part of a group then and a lot of this was developed with other people. And I agreed with much of it but I didn't feel it was yet a complete story. I felt that it was driven to a certain extent too much by a specific ideology. And I was a journalist and a journalist and a social critic rather than an ideologue as such. And so I felt that it was necessary to dig deeper and look at other stories and stories that didn't necessarily fit as easily into the right-left paradigm. And so I began to collect these stories as I wrote for different publications. And in Burlington I was the editor of the first somewhat successful alternative weekly newspaper which from Montvangard Press which allowed me to sort of explore some of these issues contemporary as well as some historical issues and develop new material. And then when Bernie Sanders was elected it allowed me to get into the vault at City Hall which had been kind of off limits to most people. And by doing that I was able to look through the minutes of city council meetings, news clippings that were kept with those minutes, files, articles that weren't even in the library that were just in this very literally musty, huge vault with all these handwritten notes. And so I discovered by doing that that there was a whole history of Burlington that had really never been written about since it had happened 100, more than 100 years ago. And it told the story of another progressive movement a progressive movement preceding the Bernie Sanders progressive movement. And at the center of it was an Irish Catholic blacksmith named James Burke who became mayor in 1903 and was in and out of the mayoral office many times until the 1930s. He entered politics in his fifties and he was still in politics in his eighties. And he was really a progressive. He called himself a Roosevelt Democrat. He was a fan of Theodore Roosevelt. So he was against the big capital and the truss. He was for public power, for example, the beginning of public electrical power in Burlington begins with James Burke. He was the one who got it approved and got it started. And many other social improvements at that time. Now, he was conservative in some respects but primarily it showed that there was this other history that had really never been written about. If you look in Vermont history magazine, going back to fifties, sixties and seventies, you just will not find it. And even in some of the histories that have been written since that time, it's really given rather short shrift. And I would say given that Burlington is the largest city in Vermont and that that was a long-term political movement that lasted decades, that it's significant. And so I began to write about it then and got some support from the Historical Society and I've continued to research it since that time. And so that gave me the idea that, well, there are a number of these stories. And so I've continued to do that research and about 10 years ago, I kind of eventually developed the first draft, which I called the Vermont Way, which is here. And I began to publish parts of it in Vermont Digger. There's a number of articles that are kind of early drafts of things that are in the book. When I was working with them, they allowed me to publish some of that stuff. Some newspapers in Vermont published it. And I continued writing. I tried to approach a couple of different publishers who were kind of divided as to... And again, Vermont Historical Society still wasn't sure how they felt about this, this take on Vermont history. And so I kind of worked it. Then Nora Jacobson, who I'm working with again now, was doing her film on Vermont history, the Vermont movie, which I don't know if you've seen, but I would highly recommend it. It's a six-part documentary that was aired on public television at one point and has sort of sparked a whole other new area of Vermont history research. And Robin and I developed one of the segments in that movie, which was about the Green Mountain Parkway, another largely ignored, though not completely ignored, moment in Vermont history that doesn't really fit neatly into a left-right paradigm. And it is about, just to sort of summarize it briefly, is about the idea that a lot of the people who called themselves progressives at that time wanted to see a highway built up the spine of the Appalachian Trail, 250-mile road, right up the center of Vermont. And this was by those who supported it to get Vermont out of what they call the mountain mentality to link Vermont with the larger world so it wouldn't be as isolated. There was a depression, this is in the 30s. And so there was also an economic reason it would create jobs, it would spur other forms of development. And some people thought it was a great idea, but there was also resistance. Some of the resistance was environmental resistance or conservationists, some of the resistance was conservative as well. We don't want to have the wrong kind of people coming up to Vermont. We don't want it to be like the Catskills, which was a kind of a somewhat anti-Semitic slur at that time. And so it became really a cause that divided the state and eventually made its way to the state legislature because they had to approve state funding to match the federal money that was being offered. And the state legislature couldn't resolve the issue either. And so they turned it over to a town meeting vote, which is a little used provision that is permitted by the state legislature. We don't have referendum and recall in Vermont, but we do have the possibility that the state legislature can ask for the towns to vote on a matter of public interest. And that's happened in a number of, a few cases. And this was one of them. And so in 1936, there was a vote on town meeting day and the road was, well, technically it wasn't defeated. It was postponed because they offered two dates, two starting dates, immediately or in five years, but everybody understood that five years meant probably never. The southern part of the state was primarily opposed to it. The northern part of the state was, to some extent, in favor of it. The Rotland Herald was opposed, the Brolin Free Press was in favor. So it divided the state and it doesn't really fit into, again, a simple left-right thinking because some people even today will argue that, well, if the road had been built, then all the ski developments that happened probably wouldn't have happened. They would have been controlled. And maybe that would have been better and other people feel that it would have been a terrible form of development. And so it's a complex issue. It's an issue that divides people in a number of different ways. And some people, some historians feel that it really is a kind of a really good example of both town-meeting democracy and the state's desire to remain somewhat different from the rest of the United States. That people were saying, no, no, no, we don't need this development, even if it does create jobs. So that's one of the stories and that's in a chapter in the book. So I've been collecting these stories for a long time. And I would say that the book also is an attempt beyond telling stories to define a set of values that I believe exist in Vermont and have evolved. I think different states have different core values. That isn't to say that people are all that different, but different states evolve in different ways and they develop different sensibilities, social sensibilities and political sensibilities. And so this book is an attempt through these stories of individuals and the movements that they were involved with to define what I think are a set of core values. And just to list them and you'd have to read the book to sort of see how I explain them is the political values of autonomy and of accountability, citizen government and a local control. These are, I think, pretty obvious and everybody is sort of familiar with how they are reflected. Ecological values, conservation, balance and human scale, which of course is easier in Vermont than in some other places that are larger but that's part of the nature of the state. And social values, the social values of tolerance sometimes expressed in, you don't bother me, I won't bother you. And also solidarity and dissent. And these are, I think, values that have emerged and evolved over the state's history and have been reflected in the various social movements that have succeeded in the state. And so you'll see if you read the book that mixed in with the storytelling is an attempt to examine these values and define them in relationship to the state. So there's also a variety of biographical sketches just to give you an idea of what some of them are. I begin with the revolutionary and even the pre-revolutionary period. I tell stories of some of the Native American lifestyle during the pre-revolutionary period. I tell the story of Matthew Lyon, for example, who was a revolutionary era hero who was an ally of the Allens and who eventually got on the wrong side of John Adams during the Adams administration and was jailed for sedition. The Allen and Sedition Acts were passed by John Adams during his administration because of his fear of dissent in the buildup of hostilities with France, particularly. And but people in Vermont didn't agree with John Adams and while he was in jail in Virginia, he was re-elected to Congress while in jail and eventually participated in the vote critically that elected Thomas Jefferson. He cast the deciding vote in that contested election. So I tell that story. I discussed the Allen family and their influence on the state during the revolutionary period. I discussed some of the religious movements in the state. The Millerites, the noise utopians who eventually moved to New York. Joseph Smith, who founder of the Mormons who grew up here and then eventually moved west and eventually ran for president as well. He was one of the, he was probably the first Vermont native who ran for president and was actually assassinated during his presidential campaign. He was jailed in Illinois because of a, well, people were, had conflicting views about his settlement, Naboo, this community he founded, and he was being attacked for polyamory, multiple marriages and was eventually put in jail. And while he was in jail, they stormed the jail, a crowd of mob stormed the jail and killed his brother and he died jumping from a window while firing a gun. It was quite a dramatic end, that was in 1844. And that set the stage for the rise of Brigham Young, by the way. I talk about the anti-Mason movement which was the first third party movement in the country, really. And this was, I believe, an embryonic anti-monopoly movement. It was a movement against elites and secret oaths. And while in most of the country, it did not rise to success, in Vermont, it did. We had an anti-Mason governor for about four years. Each election was contested in the legislature. They had the multiple rounds of voting to see who would be elected because no one had gotten an absolute majority. But he was the governor of the state, William Palmer. And to some extent, and that set the stage for one of the most significant amendments to the Vermont Constitution, the creation of the Senate in Vermont. We had a unicameral legislature until that time. And after his four or five years in power, they decided that it might be, and to some extent, this was the bankers who decided that we should create a second house, a Senate. So there were constitutional amendments and also the process of amending the Constitution was also changed at that time. And so that had, and it also, the anti-Masons, in addition to that, held the first nominating conventions. A lot of the modern political architecture that frames how we elect people and select people were tested out by the anti-Mason movement, which was a populist uprising against elite power. Secret cabals, you might say, or at least what they suspected were those cabals. And Thaddeus Stevens, who became a primary opponent of slavery and very influential in the Republican Party, started out as an anti-Mason. I discuss feminists like Clarina Nichols, who was influential in passing some progressive state legislation in the mid-19th century, but who was one of these people who found in the end that she had to leave Vermont in order to really pursue her own interests. And there were a number of these people. Matthew Lyon was another. He did what he did in Vermont, and then he moved on to Kansas. So in some states, in some cases, Vermonters have made a great contribution and then have gone elsewhere, or some people have come to the state in more recent years. There are people who weren't born here and have come to the state and have made a contribution. So in migration and out migration is also a theme in the book and the contributions that people make when they're really active in the state. And I bring it up into the 20th century, and as I get into the 20th century, I begin to draw more on my own experiences as a journalist starting in the 1960s. And I include interviews and observations that I made with some of the people who are more familiar to us. I also discussed the contributions of Republicans because Republicans ran this state for 100 years. There was no more Republican state than Vermont from 1860 to 1962 when Bill Hoff was the first Democratic governor elected in 100 years. So Republicans were such a large big tent party that they adopted certain procedures that would allow them to manage power in a more balanced way. They had something called the mountain rule. Someone would be governor from the eastern part of the state and the next governor would be from the western part of the state. And they went back and forth and they had a kind of an order of succession for many years. And then out of that eventually grew what is known popularly as the Aiken Gibson wing of the party. One could say progressive Republicans who broke the mountain rule, they decided enough of that, opposed the marble interests who largely controlled the Republican party. And George Aiken was one of the people who rose to power during that time as governor and then a US Senator and Ernest Gibson. The father was an influential Republican and his son became governor. And they were the people who began to bring Vermont into the modern era and to view Vermont state government's role in a more expansive way. Because prior to that, the role of government had been highly limited in Vermont. Vermont had sort of fallen behind in development one could say to a large extent. And these politicians who were Republicans saw this. They saw the need for a social safety net, for example. Ernest Gibson was, though he did not succeed in all respects, was a person who put that on the table for the Republican party. So the Republicans of the 40s and the 50s and the 60s were not always conservatives. They were tended to be middle of the road. And there was a kind of a kind of Republican that I think Phil Scott actually reflects even to this day who was not bound to ideology of the Republican party but was bound to the nature of the state and to a much more a broader view of the state. To some extent, born of the fact that it would have been a one-party state for so long. So I bring it up to the present date. I talk about Phil Hoff or Richard Snelling. They're a biographical sketches of both of them. And I knew them both and interviewed them both. And eventually we get to Burlington where I was part of what was known then as the Sanders Revolution. And I've written, I wrote an earlier book the day after Bernie Sanders was mayor called the People's Republic that was published 30-something years ago which was the first sort of study of that period. And so I experienced that as the editor of newspaper, as an activist, as a participant in some of the changes that took place. I worked with Robin a lot during that period. And so there's a chapter in the book that revisits some of the material in the People's Republic and then brings it up to date. He talks about how Bernie became a national figure, his races for president, his political philosophy. And I would say just as a side note that it's probably a bit kinder to him than this book is. This book is Bernie Sanders Warts and All. It's really a deep dive into what happened during that particular eight-year period when he was mayor. We knew each other fairly well. We had known each other from his early days in Vermont. It was a somewhat fractious relationship. But in this book, I'm trying to be more objective and less personal. And so just trying to present him as he is without bringing myself into the story. And so that brings up to the present day. I discuss more recent social movements. The book does cover the women's movement and the labor movement at different stages. And it does discuss the evolution of capitalism in Vermont, but in perhaps a less ideological framed way. I tend to be more of a, I would describe myself as a left-wing libertarian. And so I've worked with people, to some extent, who are conservative as well as progressives. And so the writing and the insights reflect all of that. And so I can write about the secession movement, which a lot of people would like to just sort of make believe it never happened, which I think should be on the table again fairly soon. My opinion, if I was projecting forward, I don't know whether it will be called that, probably not, but given the state of the country, it certainly, and the Republicans' desire to turn all power back to the states, states like Vermont, that was defined as the reluctant republic from the beginning, which wasn't part of the original United States, by the way, was an independent republic for 14 years. So I think that that's worth at least mentioning and acknowledging that it is also a thread in the history of Vermont as a social movement. So that's what the book covers. Let me see, I wanna leave some time for questions. What time are we at? 11, 40. Okay, I'm gonna stop in a moment, but I wanted to read you this because the book doesn't, I had to limit it to some extent, I could have written a five or 600 page book, but I wanted to write something that was digestible, that was on point, that was sort of really made the case that I was trying to make it. So you have to decide when you're writing this sort of thing, what to include and what not to include. But I'll just redo this, which is part of the first draft of the Vermont Way, as I originally drafted it. And I thought it would be interesting because it's still controversial in a way. And it's about a moment in history of Woodstock. The Rockefeller influence was felt intensely in Woodstock where Lawrence Rockefeller turned a trading center for local farmers into a Tony destination for tourists and the wealthy. He became the town's largest employer through various corporate subsidiaries and amassed 20 times the capital investment of anyone else. Once Rockefeller came to town, land values and property taxes went so high that most native Vermonters had to leave. By 1971, he had become secure enough to commandeer the entire town for a gathering of one of the world's most influential groups at his Woodstock Hotel and Estate, known as the Bilderberg Group. It had been meeting privately since 1954, according to Prince Bernard, the Dutch aristocrat who promoted it and chaired its sessions for more than 30 years. The purpose of the conference is that eminent persons in every field get the opportunity to speak freely without being hindered by the knowledge that their words and ideas will be analyzed, commented upon and eventually criticized and depressed. The Woodstock meeting convened on April 23rd was billed as an international peace conference. Even though state governments applied 30 men plainclothes to back up a private arm to security force, not to mention the FBI and Secret Service, Vermon officials professed to know nothing about the event at the time. Some disagree with this, by the way. Meanwhile, 150 guards and officers blanketed the small town. Everything had to be safe and secure for the arrival of 85 leaders from around the world. Limousines brought most of them from Lebanon, New Hampshire, where an air shuttle from Boston had been arranged. After his plane touched ground in Boston's Logan Airport, Prince Bernard issued a terse press statement about the gathering. But one participant, Francois Duchéne of the London Institute of Strategic Studies who attended with then British Defense Minister, Dennis Healy, was more candid. America must face the Western Europe and Japan that are more independent, he explained. Apropos, one scheduled topic was a change in the U.S. role in the world. Major Glenn Davis of the Vermont State Police called it a hairy scene. No one seemed to know just who was in charge of what, he said. In the conference room, however, once all the employees had been cleared out of the building, all order reigned. Seated, seating was alphabetical with Bernard at the head of the table. Remarks were normally limited to five minutes with two working papers to focus the discussion. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security advisor, missed the first session but became the main event when he delivered a briefing on U.S. policy. Months later, he was charged by conservatives with leaking plans for Nixon's China trip and the devaluation of the dollar. After the so-called masters of the universe convened in Vermont, banks and major corporations shifted capital out of the U.S., mainly to West Germany and Nixon's China initiative became public information. That December, the dollar was devalued resulting in gains for people who knew enough ahead of time to divert to European currency. Vermont's once prized isolation from the outside world seemed to be coming to an end. So that's a story that's not in the book but I thought would be of some interest to some of you. And this piece of paper is a letter from to the editor of the Vanguard Press where some of this was originally published in the late 70s to the editor of the paper who is saying that this is from Marcellus Parsons who was the anchor of the C.A.X. Evening News at that time who was complimenting the editor on the launch of our new newspaper but wasn't too impressed with my article because he felt that I had been reading the Manchester Union leader. He felt that I was sort of getting involved in conspiracy theories and he spends most of the letter sort of giving his take on what was going on and he ends by saying, I think one extreme is to call them policy-shaping meetings of magnates about to manage the world economy and the other would be to describe it as leaders of all fields, economic, political, journalists. You could just want to sit down for a giant off the record bull session. So that's how he viewed it. Good, well, thank you. So, excuse me. And yeah, so I'd like to thank Greg for speaking here at Sandy's Book and Bakery. I'm Robin Lloyd with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and we're a co-sponsor of this event and we're holding the Vermont Wolf gathering here. Some of you who are readers up and our viewers up in Montpelier might know about the Peace and Freedom, which is our newsletter and I'm leaving some copies here. And so thank you, Greg. And I guess the question I'd like to ask to start a discussion is, so Vermont has never elected a woman to the Congress, to the Senate or the House. And right now we're involved. Some of our listeners here are from Massachusetts so they don't know all of our politics. But could you give your opinion on how that's going? With the current races? Yeah, the current races and... Well, this is a historical book and so I don't know that I feel any more qualified than anyone else to comment on the state of politics in the immediate moment. I think it's long, certainly it's long overdue for a woman to represent Vermont in Congress. I make note of that in the book. Madeleine Cunin is the only woman governor. And I would say without sort of passing judgment on any of the candidates, what it strikes me is I'm certainly enthusiastic about all the women running for Congress. However, I would like to see more women in influential positions in state government. And to some extent, some of the women who are running for Congress could just as easily have run for state office. Of course, Phil Scott is a very popular governor and so that would not be an easy race. Well, there is one candidate running for governor, Brenda Siegel, I believe. Oh, okay, well, that's good. Yeah, so I think that women in Vermont, in the Vermont political system are not well-represented in the local governments. There are very few women actually in positions of power in local governments in Vermont. They have gained a lot of influence in committees and in leadership in the Vermont legislature, particularly in the House. And certainly this is a moment when I think it's probably inevitable that a woman will be elected to Congress. And I would say that's a good step. A related issue, however, is the extent to which the political system is open or not. We have very liberal ballot access laws, which means that almost anybody can run for office if they wish. On the other hand, there is also a very strong political establishment and the fact that Peter Welch seems to be walking into a Senate seat from his house seat pretty easily, almost inheriting it from Bernie Sanders, strikes me as part of the downside of being a small state that the political system is not necessarily as open as it could be. So I think this is a breakthrough, but I think there's more work to be done to make this a system of politics that really does welcome newcomers. I wonder, since two of our guests here are from Massachusetts, it actually Massachusetts is much more woman controlled than Vermont now. I believe, so would one of you be willing to comment on that? I'd be willing to give it a try, but I would very much like to add this, that I truly appreciate you filling in the gaps in history because we badly needed that throughout the United States and all states. And I wonder if you have or will in the future address the people of color issue within the state. Indigenous, the natives who are obviously in state and how their life has been over the centuries regarding legislation, whatever. I am not in Boston area, so I'll pass a lot of the baton regarding the legislation of females in Massachusetts. By the way, I'm Eileen Krakowsky. I'm from Newton outside of Boston and I've been part of ROOF for, I don't know, seven years. I wish I joined sooner. Very, very smart women who are keeping up with issues. What I'm trying to say is that I've been very pleased with the number of bright women who are running in various offices. And most of them in the metropolitan and inter-Boston area. In fact, as you'll find out, the minorities are predominantly the voters in Boston proper right now, which is very exciting and we have a minority represented mayor. I personally find my mayor though in Newton very Republican leaning and not really listening to the anti-war message that we try. She's very politically astute though and she shows up at the right times like when the Ukraine war started. She was there with our vigils on Monday and the special events that the city had. And I truly appreciate that, but it's more tokenism and it's upsetting. But I think Boston is more progressive and so I'll turn the video over to Virginia Pratt. Hi, Virginia Pratt and I just live in Boston. I've been there for since 1976. And I've been a member of WELF for over 20 years. Yes, the tide is really turned I think in the state in many ways. And in the city. We, in terms of Massachusetts, we currently have a very well-liked Republican governor who probably remained Republican governor and held a good standing because he never went along with Trump and just about anything he never, he almost always parted company. We have Maura Healy who's our attorney general who's running for governor and she and Sonia Chang Diaz were both running for governors, Democrats. Sonia Chang Diaz represented many neighborhoods in Boston as a senator and dropped out and she was viewed as more progressive in some ways. But our attorney general, Maura Healy, Maura Healy had multiple lawsuits on Trump. So she's, I mean, I think for national standards she's gonna be viewed as very progressive. Our mayor for Boston, Mayor Wu is Asian-American and worked closely with Senator Warren and Elizabeth Warren who ran for president and was one of her students when she was a law student at Harvard, Senator Warren taught at Harvard and was a bankruptcy attorney and has always been a champion of the working people always trying to take on issues of making healthcare affordable, having consumer protections and also now very active on and outspoken about reproductive rights. We also have Ianna Presley in Boston who is our representative at the federal level and she is part of the people called the squad and when you meet her in person she will say, or you go to events, she'll say my politics or my policy comes from the people with the pain and I have seen that. Like I've seen her at, there was an outdoor event where she was endorsing Ricardo Arroyo who's on our city council. His father was at first Latino to get into the city hall and then running our probate court system and he was the attorney's public defender attorney of the Arroyo and, oh sorry, I'm going too long. So the question, anyway, I think in Massachusetts we're in a good place, particularly with being strong on issues of public fairness and also reproductive rights has just lit the fire for a lot of engagement. Thank you. I just want to make, to respond to your first point about, because this is a history, I don't deal so much with the things that happened in the last 10 or so years but I do give a lot of consideration to the role and treatment of both indigenous people in Vermont historically speaking as well as the Vermont's role in the anti-slavery movement which was actually quite good. Vermont's the first state to abolish slavery. It was in the original Vermont constitution. Its representatives were constantly bringing petitions. It was part of the underground railroad. But on the other hand, there were racist enclave, the Klan did exist here and did make a comeback. Some institutions were very slow to respond and also the eugenics movement played a role in the treatment of Native Americans in the 20s and 30s. They weren't the only populations, also the French Canadians were also affected by this. There was a sterilization program in which hundreds, if not thousands of people were without informed consent were sterilized. And so I write about that in the book. And so I write about Vermont's progressive values but on the other hand, I don't ignore the ways in which it was somewhat behind the curve or backward. And the treatment of women is to some extent the Vermont, even when Vermont, when suffrage was passed in the 20s, the Vermont governor who was Republican at the time wouldn't call a special session to adopt the constitutional amendment. And a lot of women did feel that they just couldn't break through in Vermont, that this was a very patriarchal environment. In some extent that has something to do with the fact where it was a somewhat of a late bloomer in the emergence of women in power, in politics. And so I discussed some of those issues in historical context, but I agree with you that more contemporary research needs to be done. And to some extent I'm kind of trying to do an overview, open up a lot of areas for discussion that haven't really been given enough attention, raise some questions. I don't purport to answer all of those questions or be the last word on some of these things. And I had another point about the political environment that Vermont is in. I sometimes discuss Vermont as being the anti-Texas, that Texas is very aggressive in promoting its values. And right now, the vigilante authoritarian culture, I don't know if it's ground zero, but it's one of those places. And Vermont has a, again, has a very distinct and different set of values. It's a small state, and to some extent that's the reason why it's easy to ignore because people don't come here to campaign that often because you're not going to get very many votes and you kind of already know what the outcome is going to be. But on the other hand, Vermont could be more forthcoming in projecting its values to the rest of the country. And the fact that we've had two candidates for significant candidates for president over the last 20 years is a part of that story. Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders both had a significant and Howard Dean is somewhat forgotten now because his campaign kind of got derailed. You know, to some extent, as I write in the book, by unfair media coverage. I mean, he did make mistakes. But on the other hand, no candidate running for president in that year got more negative coverage than he got. That's a statistically provable fact. So he was targeted because he was considered outside the mainstream of the Republican Party. He was running against the war at a time when mainstream Democratic opinion was still supportive of the war. He run and take back our country. He wanted to mobilize the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. These are the things he said. He didn't perhaps listen to advisors as much and he made some mistakes. But he was a guy who was actually not that progressive but understood the historical moment and took advantage of it and did project some of Vermont's values in Bernie Sanders. Also has projected Vermont's ideas about how the country could be different. And I think that you don't have to be a big state to have a big influence. And if anything, I would think that in a way, Vermont is a bit shy about not wanting, it wants to be, it likes to be different. It thinks it's ahead of the curve. To some extent, it doesn't want to be ruined by too much attention. That's to some extent why it was not one of the first states to legalize POT, for example. One of the reasons that legislators gave that they didn't want to become like Colorado. They want to become a hippie mecca or, you know, they were concerned about this. And so there's a concern about image cultivated, a carefully cultivated image of Vermont, which I think is worth projecting. Right now, it's projected more in vague ideas, projected through popular media and film. Oh, it's that beautiful place you go to get away, to have your romantic weekend. It's the place where Ben and Jerry's is. If you listen to films, watch films, you will see Vermont is often referenced in film in a very positive, almost Shangri-La kind of way. It's the great escape. And the wildfires. That's why some people are coming here, is to escape the wildfires in California. On the other hand, I just saw, a night or two ago, absolutely horrendous portrayal of Vermont on the series, FBI Most Wanted. It was supposedly set in Vermont, not a foot of the footage was actually filmed in Vermont. And what it was about, was about a couple that wanted to start doing recreational marijuana, but were involved with funding, laundering money for the Russian mafia. And so the FBI descends in Vermont. These two people who are sort of vaguely hippie-ish are murdering people. And then, you know, it's just like, it's a kind of Vermont, it's a Vermont YouTube. What is this place? This is not at all, you know, what I would have imagined Vermont was like. Now, you know, we have- Is this a true story? No, no, it's completely fictional. It's completely fictional. I think they just picked the state. It's almost at random. It could have been set in any state. The hook was, oh, Vermont just legalized pot, right? And these people are somehow trying to sort of launch a legit business after being underground growers. But they, in order to fund their project and get their license, which they don't get, they get money from the Russian mafia. So ends up, and they have a Middlebury College professor of languages who is presented at the beginning of the show as being just this lovely meek Vermonter. She ends up being the criminal mastermind and ends up being shot in a warehouse full of pot. I mean, that was the nightmare image of Vermont. This is not the state that we know, but you know, that show is seen by, I don't know, 10 million people, you know? So most of Vermont's image is bucolic. It is somewhat fanciful. Some of it is nightmarish, but I don't think that the state is projecting its brand and its agenda to the extent that it could. If I would say something about the women who get to Congress, I hope that they will do better than the men have done. Because we're coming out of an era where it's been personal politics and everybody building their own brand and trying to sort of find their own specific place. Not so much about the state. And I would say Bernie, though he represents Vermont, is really a national figure and rarely talks about Vermont. Or to some extent, because in the end, he doesn't really think it's different. He would not necessarily agree with the analysis in my book. That his view is capitalism is capitalism, states are states. Pretty much it's all the same. It's the good guys and the bad guys. It's the left versus the right. It's the capitalist versus the people. This is his analysis, which was an easy explanation when I was in my 20s, but frankly, the world is more complicated than that. And I think Vermont's image and way of approaching issues is worth discussing with a larger publish in a more nuanced way. So I hope the women who get elected will do that. Well, there are two issues that are before the state legislature now. One is to make abortion constitutionally legal by putting it into the state constitution. And the other is to refine the declaration on slavery, which allowed some sort of serfdom or people to be put in jail or I don't know whether maybe it wasn't slavery, but it would allow, yes, right, indentured serfdom. Yeah, it allowed indentured serfdom. So that is another issue that's been brought before the state legislature. And I guess it will be in January. And those are two issues that are, those are important changes to make and moving things forward. I think that's great. I'm all in favor of that. I would just go back to saying that Vermont was the reluctant republic. I believe we're entering into an era where we need to raise some fundamental questions about the future of the country, the extent to which it is functionally one country, whether it can be in the future and how issues and values, such as diversity, play into that. And I know this may be provocative for some people even here in this room, but does one side fit all? Do we want one solution for the entire country? Do we believe that there is one core set of values that the country could ever get behind? In the 20th century, in the mid 20th century, particularly it was very easy to sort of you know, kind of gloss over the regional, the very distinct differences in different parts of the country. To my view, the civil war was never settled. The south and the north, or the southern view of the country and the quote unquote, northern view of the country are fundamentally different. And you may be trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. And we may need a new social contract that will involve some fundamental changes that are already in progress. And you know, we might want to change the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court is going in a certain direction and the direction they're going in, although it's overturning precedent, is also based on certain things that are built into the Constitution. This is a confederal system. A lot of power, it does rest with states. Now we may decide we don't want to do that, but is it possible to create an enormous 350 million person, one nation and maintain that for so many years? In Germany, and Germany is not France, there's a European Union, but they have distinct cultures and they have found a way to make that work. I think that Vermont has a different way of addressing problems than other states. Then that I think that issues like nullification are going to be on the table going forward. And that rather than simply resist that, we need to figure out the way in which we can recast the social contract and which has respect for diversity and doesn't force everybody to live life the same way. Now, some people may feel that's not idealistic enough, but I think it's at least worth debating. I don't think Texas is ever gonna be like Vermont. Thank you, very thought provoking. You've actually brought up a lot of issues that are worth thinking about. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. What was the straw that broke the camel's back and changing the Republican position of a Lincoln into democratic thinking? Was there a mansion involved who decided to go against his party and actually inflects into the party to make an intentional change? Well, I mean, the Republicans, see, my family were Republicans, but they were not conservative Republicans. They were known as Rockefeller Republicans. Now, Rockefeller was a big capitalist and we hated him, but on the other hand, he was a liberal and he actually gave a speech at the, just before, I think the Republican Convention in 1964, which was a turning point when Barry Goldwater was selected, warning against what was happening within the Republican Party. The Republican Party was more supportive of, to some extent, civil rights than the Democratic Party. The Democrats were really much more resistant. In a way, ideologically, there's been a flip that's taken place over the last 50, 60 years since I was a kid in the nature of politics. So I would say, nationally, it was a gradual change that the fringe of the Republican Party became eventually the mainstream and that was underway certainly at least 10 years ago. As a backlash, I would say probably to the election of Obama, to a certain extent, and then accelerated by Trump. But up until the late 60s and Nixon's quote-unquote southern strategy, the Republican Party certainly had a liberal wing in it. That's why you could get legislation passed. The bipartisanship everybody looks at to be this thing of the past that we used to make work. Worked because there were conservative Democrats and liberal Democrats. There were conservative Republicans and there were liberal Republicans. They might be different on certain economic questions, but on a lot of social and cultural questions, they were not that divided and there was a majority for a progressive thrust that existed. Now we're in a situation where we make the perfect the enemy of the good. There's no room for nuance. There's no room for compromise. Compromise is a dirty word. And that's true on both sides, but I think the Republicans went there first. And so in Vermont, the political dynamic changed in the 60s. We had in Vermont a situation where even though the Democrats were gaining ground locally, right, and more people were voting Democratic, we did not have one man, one vote. Burlington had one vote in the state legislature and Rochester had one vote in the state legislature. That wasn't fair. And eventually there was a Supreme Court challenge which had forced Vermont legislature to reapportion itself on the basis of one man, one vote. And that gave more power to Democrats and urban voters. And that began the cultural change. And then the second thing that changed Vermont was the patterns of migration. Two major in migrations, one in the 50s into the 60s of ex-urban professionals, you know, doctors, lawyers, people who wanted to make a new start, entrepreneurs who kind of left Boston and New York and Pennsylvania and came up here. And then a decade later counter-cultural people who came up here in large numbers. And in a state that's only 650,000 people, if you have a lot of in migration and you have a somewhat depressed economy, which means that the young tend to leave the state creating an out migration, eventually the social consensus will begin to change. And that's what began to happen in the 70s. And then it was accelerated in the 80s by the rise of Bernie and Burlington, which in the largest city, and he had this megaphone to the entire state. And that also forced the Democratic Party to really move more in a progressive direction. So in Vermont, the social consensus moved to the left, but in much of the rest of the country, it was captured through gerrymandering and other mechanisms by the right. And now we have minority rule in this country. I mean, we really do. And so, I mean, that's my general take on it. And you answered my questions. Thank you. I'd like to ask you something about, maybe you're familiar with Rick Winston's book, Ed Scare and the Green Mountains. Sure. What do you think about McCarthyism? Oh yeah, well, I mean, I didn't get into this because I couldn't tell all the stories I wanted to tell. And I like Rick's book. I actually quoted and referenced it in my book. I used it as a source. The story I tell about that era, because mine is more of an anecdotal history covering a much broader historical period. I talk about the Republican who was influential in stopping Joseph McCarthy. I think he covers it in his book, but his book, Ralph Flanders, yeah. And I really focus on Ralph Flanders as being an atypical person who was really not a liberal. He was sort of somewhat of a fundamentalist even in his religious and spiritual beliefs. He thought it was this great battle going on between the forces of good and evil in the world. But he was a senator who could see through McCarthy's bluster and called him out. He was one of the first people who called out McCarthy, you know, and really ridiculed him in public and sided with the Democrats and helped the Democrats win a majority in Congress in 1954, which kind of began to set the stage for the ouster of McCarthy. And so, you know, I guess I used it to tell a particular story about a person who I felt reflected certain Vermont values, again, going back to my sort of search for values. But Rick does tell a great story about, you know, the influence of McCarthyism in Vermont and how institutions were, to some extent, captured or intimidated by McCarthy, by just a few people who could, you know, get a platform and use cherry-pick evidence, you know, to sort of indict a whole culture. And a lot of people were intimidated. But that's very significant research that he's done. And, you know, I know Rick and we correspond. That's a good question. Oh, please. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was great. Whoa, so glad it came.