Delving in to My Yankee Heritage

Read­ing Free­dom and Uni­ty took a long time and a lot of effort. At times I won­dered if it were real­ly worth it. Thank­ful­ly, the far­ther along I went, the more inter­est­ing it got. Most­ly I attribute that to the chrono­log­i­cal pro­gres­sion of most his­to­ry books, includ­ing this one. The more recent events were ones which I have more con­text with which to relate. I have hazy mem­o­ries of grade-school Social Stud­ies lessons about the migra­tions of Native Amer­i­can tribes pri­or to the arrival of the white man (isn’t it amaz­ing how one guy could cause so much trou­ble?) but none of it reg­is­ters to any­thing spe­cif­ic. I recall some­thing about how New York and New Hamp­shire both tried to claim Ver­mont, but it was always con­fus­ing, as I tried to imag­ine New York’s bor­ders if it extend­ed to the Con­necti­cut Riv­er North of Massachusetts.

Even near the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War I found myself only occa­sion­al­ly inter­est­ed in what was hap­pen­ing in Ver­mont. Of course it was grat­i­fy­ing to read about the influ­ence Ver­mon­ters had in the shap­ing of the Union and in the push for abo­li­tion, but even that did­n’t hold the inter­est that devel­oped for me start­ing toward the end of the Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry. Sur­pris­ing­ly I learned a lot more about Ted­dy Roo­sevelt than ever before. I found the pro­gres­sion of Ver­mon­ters’ beliefs and ideals and the steady diver­gence from the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s plat­form par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing. Per­haps I was­n’t pay­ing that much atten­tion, but in grade school I nev­er got that Roo­sevelt had such a com­plete break with the GOP. The guy was a trust­buster and was sym­pa­thet­ic to unions. He famous­ly believed that trees were more impor­tant than cor­po­rate prof­its, where there could be found a con­flict between said interests.

In the ear­ly Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, the Repub­li­can par­ty took a turn and so did Ted­dy. The Repub­li­cans sure­ly would have won the 1912 elec­tion had Roo­sevelt not split the con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers by run­ning against Taft. Instead we got Wil­son and the rest, as they say, is his­to­ry. 1912 seems to mark a crit­i­cal turn­ing point for Amer­i­ca. I think I’d like to do some more read­ing about that election.

One very enlight­en­ing aspect of read­ing this his­to­ry was learn­ing that many of the names I grew up tak­ing for grant­ed were the names of real peo­ple. The Fair­banks Muse­um in St Johns­bury, home of the plan­e­tar­i­um in which my uncle used to give astron­o­my talks in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies, was pre­sent­ed to the town by Franklin Fair­banks, the younger broth­er of Gov­er­nor Horace Fair­banks and son of Eras­tus Fair­banks, who turned down the nom­i­na­tion for Gov­er­nor and who ran the E. & T. Fair­banks Scale Man­u­fac­tu­ry with his broth­er Thad­deus. The scale fac­to­ry put St Johns­bury on the map. To a lit­tle kid, a name is a name. Was Mis­sis­sip­pi named after Bill Mis­sis­sip­pi? Of course not. Why both­er think­ing about where names come from? But the Fair­banks Muse­um is named Fair­banks for much the same rea­son that the Dis­trict of Colum­bia is called «Wash­ing­ton.» Or «Colum­bia» for that matter.

As I got deep­er in to the book and approached more mod­ern times, these con­nec­tions became more fre­quent and more per­son­al. I learned the ori­gins of Bryants Chuck­ing Grinder, Fel­lows Gear Shaper and the Jones and Lamp­son Machine Com­pa­ny, fix­tures of the small town in which I spent my child­hood. I learned that there was more to James Hart­ness than tele­scopes and the tur­ret lathe. he may not have been suc­cess­ful in his term as Gov­er­nor, but he sig­naled a crush­ing blow to some long-held polit­i­cal tra­di­tions in Ver­mont by, among oth­er things, cam­paign­ing direct­ly to women, many of whom cast their first vote ever for Hartness.

I remem­ber Joseph John­son only vague­ly, but I have the impres­sion that my father held a great deal of respect for him. I remem­ber peo­ple call­ing him «Guvnor» and knew some­how that he had once actu­al­ly been the Gov­er­nor, but again, at sev­en or eight years old, what do these things mean? My father would be too young to have vot­ed for John­son, but he must remem­ber John­son’s time in office.

Ralph Flan­ders passed not too long after I was born, but I remem­ber his broth­er. As I read about Sen­a­tor Flan­ders from Spring­field stand­ing up against Joe McCarthy and the fight that even­tu­al­ly led to McCarthy’s cen­sure, it dawned on me that these were not events in a his­to­ry removed from me. This is my coun­try and the things that I read about are not sto­ries, but a telling of the events that came before me, events of real peo­ple who are not that dis­tant. I knew the broth­er of the man who led the fight to cen­sure Joe McCarthy in the Sen­ate. It of course means very lit­tle about me, except that I’m not as removed from the events in the world or even in our his­to­ry books as I might often think. The news from around the world or even across town becomes abstract­ed and cease to be about real people.

There is a flood con­trol dam in North Spring­field that I vis­it­ed often as a child. I think the road we lived on must have been named for it. It is a huge con­crete struc­ture with a bridge bare­ly wide enough for a car to cross and a con­trol tow­er ris­ing 160 feet up from the reser­voir side of the dam to an entrance lev­el with the top of the dam. As a child I assumed it had always been there. Turns out it’s not even ten years old­er than I am. And it would nev­er have been built if not for the floods in the nine­teen-thir­ties. That set the stage, but the res­i­dents of Spring­field refused the plans in 1946. Then in 1955 two hur­ri­canes came through New Eng­land, and the flood­ing left 87 dead. Many still did not want the dam built, but with the excep­tion of the vil­lage whose land was tak­en, most folks rec­og­nized that delay­ing con­struc­tion at that site had cost lives. Con­struc­tion began in 1957 and the dam was com­plet­ed in 1960. Just fif­teen years lat­er, it was still a top­ic of resent­ment to many res­i­dents, but a part of the eter­nal land­scape to a child that did­n’t know a time before the North Spring­field Flood Con­trol Dam.

All this and I haven’t com­ment­ed on the book’s writ­ing. It’s a clear and most­ly well-orga­nized his­to­ry. Fre­quent­ly I found myself hav­ing to dou­ble-check the time­line, as sequences of events often spanned many decades and then when mov­ing onto anoth­er top­ic, the new sequence might start back where the pre­vi­ous one did. Because of the top­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion, it was not a strict­ly lin­ear telling of events. But the times I was con­fused it was easy enough to back­track and dou­ble-check dates.

I’ve list­ed it as just over 600 pages, but there’s a wealth of ref­er­ence mate­r­i­al in the appen­dices and an excel­lent index that pad the back by anoth­er 100 pages. This includes list­ing of all the state’s elect­ed offi­cials and their dates of ser­vice, cen­sus data, a cou­ple of maps, and oth­er mate­r­i­al suit­ed for ref­er­ence but not for begin­ning-to-end read­ing. It was quite help­ful at those times when I start­ed to get con­fused. I don’t know when the last time was that I referred to the appen­dices and index of a book muilti­ple times as I read it; usu­al­ly such things are strict­ly ancil­lary. But I was quite glad these were there.

All in all, the Ver­mont His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety has done an amaz­ing job with this and I’d rec­om­mend it to any­one inter­est­ed enough in the his­to­ry of Ver­mont to put the effort in to read it. While clear and well-writ­ten, it is a his­to­ry book and as such it sticks to facts and events with­out much sto­ry­telling. It lacks the dra­ma that even many his­to­ries do, but only due to its wide scope and broad time­line. If you’re will­ing to put the effort in, it will reward you.