[C]hristopher S. Wren retired more than a decade ago as a New York Times reporter in such places as Beijing, Cairo, Johannesburg, Moscow and Ottawa. But as readers are discovering, the current-day Vermonter is still asking questions.
“You’re all familiar with Ethan Allen?” he recently inquired of browsers at Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore.
People who know the hulking, heroic statue in front of the Montpelier Statehouse tend to nod affirmatively. That’s when Wren — author of the new book “Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom” — gets them shaking their heads in a whole other way.
“I think Ethan Allen was a loudmouth opportunist,” the writer says, “who couldn’t be trusted to keep his mouth shut.”
Wren pauses when loyal locals respond with shocked silence.
“Is that unkind?” he’ll ask.
Wren isn’t trying to be. Instead, the 82-year-old, moving to the Upper Valley town of Thetford a dozen years ago, simply wanted to learn more about local history during the era his 1784 farmhouse was built.
“As a journalist, I’ve covered stories across time zones,” he recalls. “I wondered, could you do this across generations?”
Before Vermont was Vermont, it was a British territory fought over by such figures as Allen, who helped form the American Revolutionary War militia known as the Green Mountain Boys.
“In today’s popular imagination,” Wren says, “he could do no wrong.”
But as the reporter started researching, he learned Allen wasn’t as revered then as he is now. Flip to page 245 of his book, for example.
“He could be loud, impetuous, and self-serving,” the author writes. “He was a bully with a soft spot for the downtrodden. He was a clumsy military leader but a masterful propagandist who inspired, or coerced, settlers to throw their lot in with him. He withstood for 32 months the harshest treatment that his British captors could inflict, to prove himself their equal. Yet half a decade later, Vermont’s favorite patriot vowed to do everything in his power to make it a British province.”
The 320-page Simon & Schuster hardcover goes on to explain the real story behind Allen, the Green Mountain Boys and their role in the American Revolution.
“You always hear about flags and drummers,” the author says, “but this was guerrilla warfare.”
Wren, who has worked on the book for 10 years, figured his assessment of Allen might turn him into a target.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to take some flak for this.’”
But reviews so far have been kind. Publishers Weekly calls the book “engrossing” while Dartmouth College emeritus president and history professor James Wright says it “shatters legends and longstanding Vermont creation myths” by telling “a masterful story.”
Wren is set to share his work May 30 at the Norwich Bookstore. There, he’ll be happy to answer how, over the decades, the complex figure of yesteryear morphed into the celebrated one of today.
“Hard times would spawn a belated nostalgia for a legendary Ethan Allen that never quite existed in his raucous lifetime,” he writes. “He re-entered history as the most celebrated of Vermonters.”
