When I came to Vermont in 1986, the only job I could get, even with multiple master’s degrees, was running a cash register at a gas station and convenience store in White River Junction for $3.25 an hour. I worked 14 hours on Saturdays and 14 hours on Sundays at that register. On weekdays, I was an apartment superintendent (custodian, yard man, toilet fixer and rent collector) at Faith Hope and Charity in Randolph for $90 a week. Monday through Friday evenings I worked at a gift shop for $3.10 an hour.
These three jobs gave me plenty of time to make small talk with people. I discovered there were two passionate topics of conversation, especially among men: freedom of speech and four-wheel drive.
You can have any opinion you want and it’s your own business. And there’s a million ways to appreciate four-wheel drive on Vermont roads in winter and mud season, also a favorite cash register topic at the gas station. Shifting the conversation in that direction seemed an effective way of cooling down Vermonters whose freedom of speech got a little too hot.
An example of freedom of speech stood out for all to see up the road from where I lived, in South Royalton, near Vermont Law School, on the route to Tunbridge. An 80-year-old man still had a big sign on the side of his house — it was a small billboard, in fact — that read “Impeach Earl Warren.”
Vermont had passed an anti-billboard law, but grand-fathered those already in existence, and this guy’s was one of them. When he died, the billboard remained up until the property was sold.
But the message behind it did not die with him: Impeach the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, whose court integrated American schools. It wasn’t exactly hate speech. It was more, “Don’t tell us how to run our schools in Vermont.”
This thinly veiled racism is sourly ironic in Vermont, which as an independent republic in 1777 outlawed slavery in its constitution to become, as a recent article in The Atlantic put it, “the first place in the Western hemisphere to outlaw slavery.”
Sourly ironic, but not surprising.
You can outlaw slavery but you can’t emancipate attitudes from bigotry. You can end segregation in the schools but you can’t end segregation in the mind.
Now, 34 years after I first saw that billboard, I find myself reading about a controversy in Windsor in which a school principal has been put on paid leave for writing a Facebook post saying she resents the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has put her in the position of having to choose a particular race over the human race.
It seems Vermont’s conversational focus has shifted from “freedom of speech and four-wheel drive” to “politically correct speech.”
My experience with that “Impeach Earl Warren” billboard is that its expression of narrow-mindedness actually broadened my own thinking. I admired Vermont both for passing an anti-billboard law and also for letting that old man continue to express himself, even if it made his house an eyesore.
I don’t think freedom of speech has been abandoned in this Windsor controversy. A committee of concerned citizens, including members of the American Civil Liberties Union, have signed a petition standing up for the principal’s right to be as narrow-minded or as broad-minded as she wants, as long as her opinions are not hate speech. Vermont’s Republican governor declared that he was troubled by “the freedom of speech issues” raised by the principal’s treatment and added that the debate may be headed for the courts. Indeed, the principal last month filed suit.
Students and all of Vermont’s citizens may soon get a modern lesson from the birthplace of Vermont’s Constitution: All lives matter, including those of people who voice unpopular opinions.
Four wheel-drive isn’t quite as hot a topic these days in Vermont as it was at my cash register in 1986. Freedom of speech, however, is just as prominent. Back then, we saw it when a man in South Royalton used the side of his house as a billboard to protest a Supreme Court decision. In 2020, we see it when a school principal in Windsor has her life turned upside down because of her digital billboard about free speech.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.