Why does vermont want to secede

In polls taken over the previous five years, no more than 13 percent of registered Vermont voters had expressed support for the idea. In , nine secessionist candidates ran for state office and were rejected by the public. Their best showing was the candidacy of a year-old college student named James Merriam, who received 14 percent of the vote for a seat in the state house of representatives. Until recently, Williams had published and edited a newspaper, Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence , which at its height in had a print circulation of 12, but was now, for lack of funding and advertisers, only a website.

His network of critical observers briefly did a brisk business in selling the "U. Out of Vermont" T-shirts. The group even had its own silver "independence coin" embossed with a portrait of socialist agrarian Scott Nearing, forebear of the back-to-the-land movement in Vermont.

When the proceedings broke for lunch, I asked Morris Berman, who had been invited from his home in Mexico, what he thought of the conferees and their intentions. I look at what's possible. If Vermont seceded, there would be troops in Burlington in two hours. The Vermonters were reinventing secession. It would not be a mere political revolt, not simply a regional separation, but also, and probably more important, a revolt against the economy of empire, a move toward economic independence.

Capitalism is eating itself alive, but as the system unravels you have all these little flowering buds appear. Vermont's first modern-day proponent of secession was a professor of political science at the University of Vermont named Frank Bryan, who in published a comic account of the state's departure from the union, titled Out! The Vermont Secession Book. The book imagined a covenant, signed in secret by Ethan Allen and George Washington, that suggested Vermont had not joined the Union; the Union had, instead, joined Vermont.

Now, "after two hundred years of bureaucracy, federal mismanagement, and un-Vermont-like actions, Vermont wants out," wrote Bryan and co-author Bill Mares, a state legislator. In , on the th anniversary of Vermont's joining the empire, the legislature gave Bryan funding to travel the countryside with a state supreme court judge to debate the benefits of secession at seven town hall meetings, including one in Montpelier.

The judge took the pro-Union position. All seven towns voted against remaining in the United States. But we're on the northern border with Canada. Who the hell is gonna bother us? In Vermont, Bryan says, there is "a commonality of people opposed to large distant bureaucracies telling them how to live their lives. It's the decentralist commonality of the libertarian right and what I'd call the communitarian left.

The right opposes big government, the left opposes big business. It's really about governing on a human scale. As Bryan notes, Vermont has radical genes, a history rife with alternative thinking. Ethan Allen fought against the British Crown as fiercely as he would fight the Americans. Vermont under Allen produced, in , the first constitution in English to outlaw slavery and allow citizens without property to vote.

Vermont went almost overnight from a right-wing backwater to a leftist mecca that eventually put in office America's only avowedly socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. Another college professor, Thomas Naylor, who in had retired to a village near Burlington after 30 years of teaching economics at Duke University, took up Bryan's idea of secession.

In , he founded a think tank and citizens' network called Second Vermont Republic, its purpose to oppose "the tyranny of the United States government, Corporate America, and globalization. Naylor, who died at the age of 76 last December, was a native Mississippian, raised in Jackson in a family of what he described as inveterate racists. Lamar Society, whose purpose was to promote, as Naylor wrote, a "humane civilization" in a new South that had shaken off slavery, racism, and segregation but perhaps would keep something of the civility, the courtoisie of the Old South-its slowness, its opposition to hurried industrialism and the quick buck.

Their co-edited anthology, I'll Take My Stand , featured some of the South's greatest living writers denouncing the "convulsions of a predatory and decadent capitalism.

At Duke, Naylor was known less as an economist than as co-creator, with theologian William Willimon, of a popular freshman course, "The Search for Meaning. When he arrived in Vermont, he found in the far North what he had loved about the Old South: life "lived at a slower, more deliberate, more casual pace. It was humane. Naylor became the face of Vermont secession.

His friends said that with his longish white hair, his bald spot at the crown, his jowls, red cheeks, and horn-rimmed glasses, he resembled Ben Franklin. On cable news and on NPR he carried the banner. During an interview with the Iranian state television network in , wearing his usual forest-green suit-coat and green dress shirt to honor Vermont as the Green Mountain State, Naylor assured the Iranians, who were glad to hear an American inveigh against the Great Satan, that the U. Once, Naylor attempted to hold a meaningful conversation with Glenn Beck, an experience he described as "mentally debilitating.

He wanted to lead his movement beyond the confines of the political left and right. They are about owning, possessing, controlling and manipulating money, people, material wealth. Bush with a tan and diction and without the smirk. The "socialist" senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is a "prostitute of empire" and a "collaborationist," because he took no firm stand against war and defense appropriations.

National security was a shared delusion in service of homicide. In , after seeing him on Fox News, a fifth-generation Vermonter named Dennis Steele, the son of working-class parents in the state's remote Northeast Kingdom, wrote Naylor that he wanted to join the secessionist cause. Steele had served in the U. S military, was tall and burly and handsome, wore Carhartts, drove a pickup truck, drank maple syrup for breakfast, and hunted deer for his meat.

A master at chess, he had founded a successful website, Chessmaniac. At Naylor's urging, Steele declared his candidacy for governor in the race. Steele polled less than 1 percent. Naylor was embittered and exhausted. Print promotion. Telephone calls. I'm tired," he told me.

At the secession conference in Montpelier, Rob Williams had introduced Naylor as the "reason most of us are in this room. In the summer of , I rented a room at a tiny Vermont boardinghouse called the Gather-ing Inn, in the town of Hancock at the foothills of the Green Mountains.

The proprietor, a mirthful year-old named Kathleen Byrne, had hosted three Vermont independence fund-raisers in recent years. She had a greenhouse for year-round production. It was a modest kind of independence, she said, meaningful because it was palpable. A few days later, during the July 4 parade in Montpelier, I followed about two dozen secessionists-Thomas Naylor and Rob Williams leading the pack-as they carried a banner that said " Years Is Long Enough" and tossed copies of Vermont Commons into the crowd.

Behind the secessionists were the Shriners in their go-karts and funny hats, and in front was a tall red, white, and blue layer-cake truck float representing the interests of Community National Bank, whose employees were dressed as Betsy Ross, Lady Liberty, and George Washington. I asked Washington, whose real name is Steve Gurin, bank vice president, what he thought about the gang of "seceshers" lurking behind him. Gurin laughed mightily, then peppered me with accusatory questions that were by now familiar: Where would revenues come from?

How would we survive? The following year, the center found 13 percent support for secession. SVR never recovered from the combination of that takedown by a respected civil rights group and Barack Obama's election later the same year.

The idea of seceding from a nation that had installed an African American in the White House seemed entirely inappropriate to Vermonters smitten with the promise of hope and change. Naylor died in at age 76 , leaving a leadership vacuum that Williams, 48, has been trying to fill. Williams vows that there won't be any further dealings with the far-right likes of the League of the South.

At the same time, he's taking care not to pigeonhole 2VR politically. Advocates of secession are "neither left nor right — we're decentralists," Williams said. Williams eschewed descriptions of 2VR as a "movement. Such an intellectual approach appeals to John McClaughry of Kirby, a libertarian Republican who served eight years in the Vermont legislature and founded the Ethan Allen Institute. He therefore doesn't take the group's secessionist stance literally, instead seeing it as a prompt for "finding ways to make Vermont a stronger example of the values most of us hold.

Hallsmith, the public banking advocate, offered a similarly nondogmatic view, suggesting that 2VR represents "an exciting thought experiment. Thomason, an Enosburg Falls filmmaker who's making a documentary about Vermont's secessionist movement, likewise has reservations about using the S word. It scares some people, Thomason said, proposing: "If you don't call it secession and focus instead on values, probably 90 percent of Vermonters will support you.

Miller, a Woodstock resident long involved in the search for education alternatives, is the person who called secession a "very, very radical step" — as well as one that is unlikely ever to be taken. The coeditor of Most Likely to Secede said he got involved with Vermont Commons because "the editors and writers were asking such good questions. Miller said he hopes to establish a Free Vermont University that would offer courses and organize forums on general themes of decentralization.

Williams is meanwhile mapping out an electoral route that might enable 2VR to take its message to every corner of Vermont.

Williams also wants to arrange for UVM's Center for Rural Studies to take another sounding of secessionist sentiment in the state. Student researchers at the university are simultaneously studying ways of making Vermont more self-sufficient — a prerequisite to independence, in the view of most secessionists. Some of the main movers behind 2VR suggest, however, that the effort won't get very far unless it's regional. Vermont might realistically make progress toward greater autonomy if its aspirations for self-determination are melded with similar yearnings in neighboring states, he said.

Secessionist stirrings can now be discerned in several states, most notably California, where opposition to Trump's rule may eventually coalesce behind a push for "Calexit.

Asked if he expects Vermont's independence movement to gain traction, McKibben said, "I guess it depends to some degree on what happens with Trump — on whether he turns out to be normally bad or abnormally bad. More Politics ». Showing 1- 8 of 8. Comments are closed. Since , Seven Days has allowed readers to comment on all stories posted on our website. While we champion free speech, facts are a matter of life and death during the coronavirus pandemic, and right now Seven Days is prioritizing the production of responsible journalism over moderating online debates between readers.

To criticize, correct or praise our reporting, please send us a letter to the editor. Or send us a tip. Online comments may return when we have better tech tools for managing them.

Thanks for reading. Seven Days needs your financial support! Give Monthly. Give Now. Switch to the mobile version of this page. View All videos art shows galleries theater shows. We have egineering support from Chris Albertine. Other music in this episode was used under a Creative Commons license:. VPR News. Vermont Edition.

VPR Classical. Inside VPR. Play Live Radio. Next Up:. Available On Air Stations. All Streams. Explore our coverage of government and politics.

Angela Evancie , Henry Epp. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email. Credit Penguin Random House. Credit Aaron Shrewsbury. The impact would be so enormous, particularly on our lowest-income and most vulnerable Vermonters. Jane Kitchel. Milk, maple syrup and apples all day long. For the holidays, everyone's road would receive new culverts and everyone's driveway would receive gravel and a grating because our government would understand that roads and rivers are the lines that man and nature sketch on these hillsides and the water that rushes alongside us is the water that fills our pipes and the water from the sky is the beverage of the plants grown with grim reverence for three short months into the food that fills our pantries and our cellars and our bellies.

Beyond no billboards there'd be no roadsigns at all and the highways that bisected pastures would be returned to pastures and if anyone tried to visit us the'd become lost at once with no cell service or internet service or gasoline service because all our services would be password-protected passed from mouth to mouth by neighbors all necessary information kept to ourselves unless absolutely necessary. And our chest freezers would be our banks where all currency would be kept and kept cold for all goods could be purchased with goods hay for hamburg, gas for green beans, coffee beans for Jacob's cattle beans a half-day's work at my farm for a half-day's work at yours and all the donut grease would be collected for biodiesel and the fields of corn would butt up against the fields of hemp.

And no one would agree on how to fund the cemeteries and no one would agree on how to fund the schools and no one would agree on what to name the new store and everyone would agree to table the issues again until next year when we'd hopefully finally dear god fingers crossed get the right amount of rain and the right amount of sun and the right about of hay and the right amount of corn to feed all the animals and all the people each day of the year.

Amy Kolb Noyes. Amy is an award winning journalist who has worked in print and radio in Vermont since She was a VPR contributor from to See stories by Amy Kolb Noyes. Angela Evancie. See stories by Angela Evancie. Henry Epp. See stories by Henry Epp. Related Content. Peter Hirschfeld. This is the…. And whose voices are missing from the….