How 1975 sparked the state Vermonters are in today

When 82-year-old George Aiken retired to his Putney, Vt., home in 1975 after a lifelong political career as a state representative, speaker of the House, lieutenant governor, governor and U.S. senator, the man who chose green for the color of Vermont’s license plates and coined the term “Northeast Kingdom” dismissed all the accolades.

“The nation will survive,” the now late officeholder dryly told the Rutland Herald upon his return that Jan. 3.

But historians, knowing Aiken held boyhood memories of a turn-of-the-20th-century horseback rider hollering that President William McKinley had been assassinated, knew it was the end of an era.

And the beginning of another.

“My birthplace has been torn down, and there’s a $7 million marker over it — call it Route 91,” Aiken told this reporter in 1982. Harboring no ill will, he proclaimed at its Putney opening in 1961, “We’re on the verge of the greatest development Vermont has ever seen.”

A half-century after Aiken’s retirement, the slow, steady caterpillar of a state he knew has experienced a metamorphosis.

“Vermont’s national political image was that of ‘Silent Cal’ (the nickname of President Calvin Coolidge), its literature was that of Robert Frost, and its music was represented by ‘Moonlight in Vermont,’ ” longtime journalist Chris Graff recalled at a recent Vermont Humanities talk. “Today its political image is that of Bernie (Sanders), its literature is that of Julia Alvarez, its music is represented by Phish, Grace Potter and now by Noah Kahan.”

“It’s my belief,” Graff summed up, “that no other state has changed as much as Vermont has in these 50 years.”

For those not around in 1975, newspapers of the time chronicle how people plugged into television (“Wheel of Fortune” debuted that Jan. 6), movies (“Jaws” premiered in June to beget the “summer blockbuster”) and landline telephones (both rotary-dial models and, as New England’s then-sole provider unveiled that fall, push-button ones).

Few paid attention to reports that a 19-year-old named Bill Gates had just dropped out of Harvard University to join a friend in creating a seemingly sci-fi micro-computer software company they’d call Microsoft, or that the journal Science had sprung a new term in an even more headshaking piece titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”

Graff, for his part, would graduate from Middlebury College that spring, then take a $120-a-week journalism job to begin a three-decade career reporting for such statewide outlets as the Associated Press and Vermont Public Television. He remembers when, with the final sections of Interstate 91 under construction, the old adage “you can’t get there from here” was about to be put out to pasture.

“Vermont is closer to the world today than it ever has been,” Graff said. “We are still small, we’re still rural, but we’re no longer completely divorced from the rest of the country. We’re no longer at the end of the pipeline. The interstate brought Vermont closer. The internet has completed that change.”

This new year, history reveals, may be the start of another new era.

‘Watching and waiting’

Jan. 1, 1975, began with big political news: The New Year’s Day convictions of former President Richard Nixon’s onetime attorney general, chief of staff and domestic adviser for covering up the Watergate political scandal that forced their boss to resign the year before.

“This moves us close to the final chapter of this unhappy episode in American history,” Senate Watergate Committee Vice Chair Howard Baker was quoted on the front page of the next day’s Burlington Free Press, then Vermont’s largest paper.

The Free Press and its main competitors at the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus expanded their Monday-to-Saturday coverage 50 years ago by launching Sunday editions, all which previewed the state’s 1976 introduction of a March presidential primary.

“The presidential hopeful seen most prominently thus far in Vermont has been former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, whose strategy of building an early lead in the Democratic presidential race is keyed to winning in early primary states like New Hampshire, Florida and perhaps Vermont,” the Herald and Times Argus reported Nov. 2, 1975.

For its part, WCAX, the state’s largest yet once-limited television station, added a southern transmitter that year to beam into Bennington County (and, tapping cable, into Windham County in 1983). But Vermonters weren’t necessarily eager for more ways to learn how the future would unfold.

“A University of Vermont psychologist sees this nation at the beginning of a new year ‘watching and waiting, not knowing in what direction it is going,’ ” the Free Press reported Jan. 2, 1975. “Americans, said Dr. George W. Albee, former president of the American Psychological Association, ‘sense that the world is drifting, that things are out of control and no one knows what must be done to fix them.’ ”

Aiken’s successor in the U.S. Senate understood that sentiment.

“I find that people have very much the same concerns no matter where they live in the state of Vermont, no matter what their political affiliations are,” Patrick Leahy said in a 1974 campaign film. “They’re not satisfied with the way Congress has been acting. They feel the economy is getting out of hand and it’s hurting people.”

Leahy, then 34, was the first Vermont Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate, winning a dozen years after Philip Hoff claimed the same distinction as governor. Residents today may think of the state as a seedbed for progressive politics. But before Hoff and Leahy, it was the only one in the nation to have supported the top of every Republican ticket — Nixon included — since the Grand Old Party’s founding in 1854.

“The bond between Vermont and the Republican Party made a lot of sense at the time,” Graff said. “It was formed out of a dislike for slavery and a belief in the sanctity of the union of states. Vermonters stood firmly behind the party of Abraham Lincoln, and over the years that commitment, cemented by the Civil War, was strengthened by a belief that the Republican philosophy meshed well with small-town, rural life.”

But that loyalty changed after Watergate and the arrival of back-to-the-landers with more liberal views. Graff would move to the state capital of Montpelier to cover the GOP’s eventual loss of its legislative majority when Democrats won the House in 1986 and the Senate in 1996.

“We think of Vermont as now this dominant Democratic state,” the journalist said, “but that’s really pretty recent for those of us who actually have a longer perspective.”

‘This statistic should not be surprising’

The state’s image over the past half-century has changed in other ways. Take the story of Sabra Field. In 1975, the then 40-year-old aspiring artist received a big break when the Vermont Bicentennial Commission, preparing to mark the nation’s 200th birthday the next year, selected one of her posters for exhibit in Washington, D.C.

Field, set to celebrate her 90th birthday this April, didn’t know her prints depicting red barns and blue skies would go on to become synonymous with the Green Mountain State, landing on the cover of Vermont Life magazine, an annual namesake calendar and, most famously, nearly 180 million postage stamps.

Childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield can tell a similar tale. The two, born within four days of each other in March 1951, went their separate ways in 1975 when Greenfield met his future wife, according to the book “Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop.” They didn’t know they’d reunite two years later, split the $5 tuition for a correspondence course in ice cream making and create what’s now heralded as a “multibillion-dollar” company.

Or consider the even longer, stranger trip of Sanders. Fifty years ago, he was a thirtysomething also-ran who had lost a 1974 bid for U.S. Senate under the banner of the alternative Liberty Union Party. Leahy, his opponent, felt so unthreatened, he encouraged his son to babysit Sanders’ 4-year-old during one debate.

As Leahy wrote in his 2022 memoir: “In the thick of a campaign, it was one of those rare genuine win-wins: competitors, never enemies; just two dads coming up with a solution that, coincidentally, would make the little ones in both families happier for avoiding having to fidget and sit through 90 minutes of politics.”

Sanders would join Leahy in the Senate in 2007. But in 1975, the onetime fringe candidate (bagging just 4% of the vote the year before) explored legal action against WCAX for not granting his party airtime to rebut Democratic and Republican messages.

“Bernard Sanders,” the Bennington Banner reported that Sept. 25, “called the denial ‘grossly unfair,’ and said he has asked the Federal Communications Commission for clarification of the so-called ‘fairness doctrine’ governing equal time on controversial issues.”

Unable to respond on television, Sanders turned to letters to the editor.

“According to the latest study done by the Federal Reserve Board,” he wrote in one published by the Banner that Dec. 9, “90% of all state and local tax-exempt bonds are held by the wealthiest 1% of the population. This statistic should not be surprising in light of the fact that 2% of the American population owns one-third of the nation’s wealth and 80% of all publicly held stock.”

Sound familiar? Not all thoughts of a half-century ago have aged so well. The University of Vermont released a report in 1975 that called the nearly completed interstate “overbuilt and underused,” researcher Benjamin Huffman wrote in “Getting Around Vermont.”

“The volume of traffic per mile of Vermont interstate highway,” Huffman continued in a Herald and Times Argus commentary that Oct. 12, “was only one-third the national average and one-fourth the New England regional average.”

Since then, the state’s population has risen 35% from a 1975 count of 479,713 to a current estimate of 648,493, according to the U.S. census — an increase second only to the 242% leap Vermont saw in the five decades after its founding in 1791.

“When I look back at this half-century, what stands out for me is the surge of development — and the state’s response,” Graff said. “Throughout this 50-year period, we’ve seen governors grapple with this tension between economic development and environmental protection, really trying to find that point of how much development can we handle?”

The question, he said, still awaits an answer.

‘What the solutions would be’

Finally, there’s the story of the former seventh-grader forced to go to the bureaucratic bore of Montpelier at the start of 1975 to see his father elected Vermont’s first Democratic speaker of the House.

Back then, I wasn’t interested in the significance of Timothy O’Connor winning in a chamber with a shrinking Republican majority, or the selection of my dad’s fellow legislators (and future governors) Richard Snelling as GOP leader, James Douglas as his assistant and Madeleine Kunin as Democratic whip.

As a reporter 50 years later, I’m now witnessing the once-new infrastructure of my youth overwhelmed by an unprecedented flood of demands, be it for state education funding, health care, stormwater drainage or safety nets for people struggling with poverty, mental health, alcohol or drugs.

Plainfield, Vt., Town Clerk Bram Towbin summed up the situation after record rain in 2024 destroyed an estimated $1 million in local property — or about 10% of the town’s grand list: “The system is not designed for this.”

Graff, now retired, acknowledges the deluge of challenges.

“There’s a reason all of this hasn’t really been solved,” he said in an interview. “It is incredibly difficult.”

Many residents are looking to the Legislature, set to convene this month, for some sort of fix. But Graff notes that advances such as Vermont’s first-in-the-nation civil unions (the 2000 precursor to same-sex marriage) came only after the state Supreme Court ruled that everyone was entitled to the same rights and protections and ordered lawmakers to make it happen.

“Throughout Vermont history, there have been a number of issues that have been so controversial that action only came when the courts stepped in and forced it,” he said.

The state’s relatively small number of residents adds to the complications, as Graff notes the count is about the same as that of Portland, Ore.

“We have a population that’s equal to a city and yet we’re required to do everything a state does,” he said. “How do you do all this when you don’t have the financial base to do it?”

Graff cites a quote from life coach Tony Robbins: “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”

“I think there are answers,” Graff said, “and the answers are painful. You reach that tipping point when seeing the homelessness, the school inequities and the infrastructure problems that are out there becomes more painful than what the solutions would be — which, in many cases, are going to be additional taxes.”

Even so, Graff holds out hope. The journalist remembers covering his first Vermont gubernatorial inauguration a half-century ago when he spotted the chief executive set to take office, Thomas Salmon, walking to the Statehouse.

“What surprised me,” Graff recalled, “was there was no entourage.”

This month, newly reelected Gov. Phil Scott is set to follow suit in exactly the same way. For all its growth and change, Graff said, Vermont remains “of human scale.”

“I think that’s the greatest thing we have going for us,” he concluded. “We have neighborhoods. We have communities. We have a better chance than anywhere in the country to still forge solutions.”