"One hundred and fifty years ago a band of intrepid pioneers imbued with the principles of liberty, and inspired by sentiments of freedom, declared it was necessary for a people so imbued and inspired to assume amongst the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitled them. They further declared that, all men being possessed of a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a proper government must be instituted to insure these inalienable rights, and that any government destructive of them ought to be altered or abolished."
Madison, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers, of course -- who else? Wrong. "By this utterance and this choice the founders of Vermont put a period to the incursions of all such powers, whether in the Province of New York or in the Kingdom of Great Britain. . .
So, in 1929, wrote Vrest Orton. Best remembered today as the man who started the Vermont Country Store in 1946, he'd been a writer long before that, and, after working for H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, was back home by the late twenties. There he became a contributor to, among other journals, The Drift-Wind, a quirky little literary magazine founded a few years earlier by Walter Coates, a former Universalist minister determined to encourage Vermont letters.
Here in its pages, Orton mounted a crusade against those who sought to undermine his state's native character, despoil her natural beauty, and exploit her human qualities for their own profit. Vermont's enemies were those who wanted to "sell" and develop it, turning it into another Florida or New Jersey, and they were to be found in "Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, and allied commercialized snob-organizations in the towns and cities . . . ." Their actions, if not blocked, "would remove. . . Vermont's most delectable charm, which charm lies in its independence, its size and its dissimilitude to other states as well as in its power to resist the degrading influences other states have succumbed to." The state's future, Orton proclaimed, did not lie in turning itself into a summer playground for tired city-dwellers, or a "great booze highway to Canada," or a site for billboards and hot-dog stands. Vermont's high purpose, rather, was "to constitute an ARCADIA for persons of free thought, active mind, high standards and aspirations and cultivated imagination."
So he deplored the lack of leadership that should have come from the state's politicians and clergy (it's unclear what he thought of Governor John Weeks, the Salisbury dairy farmer whose program of highway modernization probably did more to bring in outsiders than anything else prior to Eisenhower's interstate system). By January 1929, Orton had moved into high gear, issuing in The Drift-Wind a proclamation from a Vigilance Committee showing "How to Make Vermont Free" (it's unclear how many committee members there were besides Orton himself)." Here he inveighed against "the Babbitts," intent on turning Vermont into a place where "in a few years there will be nothing but Jerry-built roadside shacks, summer camps, hot dog stands, sub-divisions of towns never to be completed, crazy realtor officers, a crowd of widows and orphans fleeced by promoters, inflated banks whose paper is worthless and whose money is invested in Missouri, amusement parks, cable railways to mountain tops, wide, horribly straight cement trunk-highways, towns of cheap-john houses alike as so many peas, factories belching smoke, crushing the workers and breaking their souls . . ." while everywhere would appear billboards, "massive, gaudy and hideous sign-boards. . ."
Such horrors, he declared, were "basically un-Vermonterish" and should be "squashed in the bud."
But how?
Surely there was only one sensible answer, and it was drawn from Wilsonian self-determination. "We suggest that the State of Vermont secede from the Federal Union! To be explicit, we advocate that Vermont set itself up as a Republic, independent and free from all other governing and social influences." Economics would be a problem, you say? Not at all. Passport fees would be collected from all those wishing to enter: $25 for a man, $.75 for everyone else. "Vermont would soon become a Utopia in fact as well as theory, to which a good admission would be charged. Possibly visas would be raised to $100."
Granted, Vermont's inland position might be constricting. Diplomatic negotiations would be undertaken with New Hampshire to secure a corridor from Brattleboro to the sea. Suppose New Hampshire objected? Easy: conquer it, and then annex it as a colony. Other states would clamor to join, but they would have to be kept out (Massachusetts and Connecticut excepted). "The Republic might, in such an event, achieve a new and more Nordic civilization." (Dismiss that apparent whiff of 1920s nativism; a year later a poem by Orton honored the memories of Sacco and Vanzetti.).
In March, 1929, Coates's magazine carried a full-fledged "Declaration of Independence for Vermont," drawn up by a Committee of Public Safety, of which Orton, of course, was the chairman. That the Union to which Vermont had given its allegiance back in 1791 had failed to make good on its promises, was made evident by a litany of complaints. Washington had, among other things, ignored the constitution, taken away the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press, imposed income and inheritance taxes, and passed the Volstead Act. The vote was no longer apportioned by population, and indeed was "denied to persons because of their colour," while Prohibition was "destroying the moral, mental, and physical health of the people."
But it was not just the federal government that Orton rejected. The enemy was nothing less than American Civilization itself, which "prostituted the Vermont people," imposing on them the "unwholesome uniformity and deadly mediocrity of a machine age." American Civilization devised wasteful economic plans, educational schemes that corrupted the youth, gave outsiders control of Vermont's natural resources, and dispatched droves of tourists "of the most fleeting, transitory, and objectionable sort." The Babbitts were taking over, "forming [themselves] into strong bands they call Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions and so forth, whereby they may wreak an organized and collective destruction and sooner accomplish the ruin of Vermont."
All very much tongue-in-cheek, of course. But behind it lay a larger concern, not just in Vermont, but in the nation as a whole, uncertain and often fearful of the changes taking place as industrialism spread, the cities grew, and immigration threatened the old pioneer stock (Vermont itself in these years saw both a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and a eugenics program to sterilize those deemed unfit to breed).
Though back in 1929 his Committee had promised a constitution in a future issue of The Drift-Wind, it seems never to have appeared. Maybe by then time Orton's energies had been diverted by his work for the Vermont Commission on Country Life, the body of "progressive Vermonters" set up in 1928, whose Rural Vermont (1931) was perhaps the state's first real effort at planning.
Orton himself remained a rock-ribbed Republican, who would later denounce the Communist influence on historians seeking to question the myths of Vermont's heroic origins. Did his ideas of independence die? Not entirely. In 1977, a year after the celebrations of the national bicentennial, he was one of the promoters of Vermont's own equally important bicentennial. Some twenty years earlier, in fact, he had driven to New York in a car proudly flying a green silk flag emblazoned with the term REPUBLIC OF VERMONT, though he imagined no one in Manhattan would either notice or understand it.
"We drew up in front of the hotel, the REPUBLIC OF VERMONT flag whipping smartly in the wind.
"As we stopped the car, out rushed the doorman, arrayed in all the trappings of an admiral's rank.
"He opened the door and very politely said:
"May I be of assistance, Mr. Ambassador?"