Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1955

Rick Winston, Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era, 1946-1955. 151pp. Vermont: Rootstock, 2018. $16.95.

This remarkable little book takes us into a world nearly unknown to outsiders and, after all this time, likely little known to Vermonters themselves. It also usefully opens up the idea, by implication more than by claims, that the politics of a certain Vermonter, now the most popular political figure in the US, owe a great deal to a muted tradition of political independence and progressive sentiment.

Author Rick Winston is close to the source of the story. His Preface, “Reflections of a ‘Red Diaper Baby’,” goes right to the point. Not that his parents suffered as badly as many others. Fired as a high school teacher, his father ran an art supply house near the family home in Yonkers, while his mother, named in the waning phase of the Red Scare, managed to hold onto a teaching job. Heart attacks, strokes, divorces and life-robbing stress found other victims, at virtually every level of public and private life, not to mention a political amnesia among many of the children. Their parents had understandably feared telling them “too much,” and besides, a life in the spotlight had cost the family terribly.

Winston himself relocated to Vermont, and this understandably became the source of his historical interests. Too much history of the American Left has been focused on the big cities and English-speaking populations, but it is hard to blame the historians entirely: the available publications point that way, especially for those who cannot read Yiddish, Hungarian, Finnish (!) and so on. Still: even the large and powerful California Left – not to mention so many other places – has a less than adequate scholarship of its history, and of the unique circumstances where a Left grew influential, at least for a while. Vermont has clearly become one of those, with a backstory.

The author of this book does it his way. Throughout, he gives us block quotes from assorted sources, whether histories, interviews and newspaper clippings, or assorted illustrations. Thereby, we get a special flavor for the Left and its obstacles in both Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire, if not beyond. 

He recalls high political drama. The anticommunist crusade was led by politician and Congressional Representative, Charles A. Plumley, destined to be best known for seeking to ban assorted textbooks from public schools. Andrew Nuquist, a fellow Republican but a civil libertarian of the old school, challenged Plumley in the party primary in 1946, bringing upon himself an avalanche of red-baiting before his defeat. Plumley blithely continued in office until 1953, but his attempts to outlaw the supposed Communist threat weakened over time.

Red Scare pinpoints the height of the Red Scare in the Henry Wallace candidacy of 1948, when the savage newspaper attacks and political speeches against Wallace supporters succeeded in creating a distinct persecuted class. Progressives slightly to the Left of the New Deal, rarely actual Communists (never very numerous in Vermont), took the blows. The Roosevelt administration’s own State Department notable, Owen Lattimore, a longtime Vermont resident sympathetic to the Chinese Revolution, fell under particular suspicion, attacked by Nixon among so many others. The Left-leaning Alger Hiss, who spent the warm months in Vermont, found himself similarly assaulted by red hunters (above all Nixon himself) who could invent conspiracies where none existed. Others, like William Hinton, a vigorous writer on post-revolution Chinese society, later occupied the same uncomfortable spot but without the negative limelight, as the McCarthy Era came to an uneasy close.

One has the impression that left-leaning Jews in Vermont often had the worst of it. As usual, anticommunism and antisemitism went hand in hand. Others, with more financial resources, like Monthly Review founder Paul Sweezy and Reverend Willard Uphaus (earlier, when based in New Haven, the “Chaplain of the CIO”) lived pretty comfortably if not so quietly across the border in New Hampshire, where the redbaiting was to go on and on and on.

After much interesting detail, the author closes on an intriguing note. William H. Meyer, whose crusading liberalism is the real precursor of Bernie’s rise to prominence, was elected in 1958 to a Congressional seat held by Republicans for more than a century. Not wishing to be constrained by a Democratic affiliation, Meyer helped form the Liberty Union Party. Another founder was, of course, young Bernie Sanders. If Bernie is now the most popular political figure in the US, then this book is mighty valuable reading for American socialists today.

Paul Buhle
Madison, Wisconsin
Paul_Buhle@Brown.edu