Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
It is hard to imagine Vermont being called soft on anything in 1950, especially by Republicans. The state was as solidly Republican as they came. Vermont had been run by members of the GOP ever since the Grand Old Party was formed nearly a century before.
But during the early 1950s, the state repeatedly found itself accused of being insufficiently vigilant against the dangers of communism. Critics claimed Vermonters were allowing communist sympathizers and Soviet spies to live, work and, worst yet, teach in the Green Mountain State.
The first accusation came from the national politician after whom the era would be named, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy made headlines in February 1950 when he delivered a stunning speech in which he claimed to possess a list of communist sympathizers and spies embedded in the federal government and other positions of power. In retrospect, it seems likely no such list existed, but McCarthy was off and running.
In July, McCarthy revealed what he said was a plot to pay off the top Soviet spy in the United States under the cover of an innocent-looking land sale in Vermont. The alleged spy was Owen Lattimore, an adviser to the State Department on Chinese affairs, who co-owned a farm in Bethel. Lattimore and other Asia experts were already under investigation for supposedly aiding the communists’ rise to power in China.
When those earlier allegations arose, Lattimore had hired a lawyer and wracked up enough bills that he had to sell his stake in the Vermont farm to pay them. After signing the sale contract, Lattimore learned that the buyer had once run for office as a Communist, which is why McCarthy decided to investigate the deal.
McCarthy and other anticommunist crusaders were already suspicious of Vermont. An influential columnist for the Hearst newspaper syndicate claimed that several sympathizers owned vacation homes in the Randolph-Bethel area. In addition, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official recently convicted in connection with allegations he had spied for the Soviets, summered in Peacham. In announcing his investigation into Lattimore, McCarthy explained that the farm was in the “Hiss area” of Vermont.
The Burlington Free Press scoffed at implications that the state was rife with communists. “Now that Senator McCarthy has pointed his accusing finger at a land deal in Vermont,” the paper editorialized, “… perhaps some Vermonters will start looking under their beds at night for lurking Communists.”
When Lattimore denied under oath that he was a communist sympathizer, he was charged with seven counts of perjury, all of which were eventually dismissed.
During the fall of 1950, Vermont again faced claims that communists were infiltrating the state. This time the charge came from a veteran Vermont politician. Having retired months earlier after a 17-year career in Congress, former Congressman Charles Plumley warned that communists and communist sympathizers were working in the state’s schools and teaching children with anti-American books. “Nobody doubts that Vermont was selected and that Vermonters were chosen as a bunch of guinea pigs on which to experiment,” the 75-year-old politician told a gathering of state Republicans.
Plumley called for the establishment of a state censorship board, with members appointed by the governor. Under his proposal, citizens would be able to submit to the board any schoolbook they thought was disloyal to the United States or promoted the interests of a foreign country. If the board ruled the book should be censored, it would contact the local school board, which would be required by law to remove the book from the school.
Teachers at a state convention called on Plumley to identify the books he believed must be censored. The former representative declined to name any.
Plumley had trouble rallying Vermonters to his cause and the state’s newspapers editorialized against his suggestion. Many Vermonters voiced concerns that a state censorship board would seize control from local communities.
Plumley persuaded his neighbor in Northfield, state Rep. Charles Barber, to propose a book-censorship law. To promote it, Plumley asked to address the state Legislature. When the Senate said it could not hear him before 9 p.m. on the date in question, Plumley understood he was being snubbed and refused to speak. When the House finally voted on Barber’s censorship bill in March 1953, lawmakers rejected it, 202 to 11.
Despite the lopsided vote, some Vermont leaders feared that communists lurked in their midst, as Alexander Novikoff was about to learn. In April 1953, Novikoff, a cancer researcher at the University of Vermont’s medical school, refused to answer questions from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. The panel wanted to know whether he had been a member of the Communist Party while teaching at Brooklyn College in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
UVM President Carl Borgmann came under intense political pressure to fire Novikoff, even though the professor had been granted tenure. Borgmann appointed a six-member committee to review Novikoff’s actions and make a recommendation. The committee found that the professor was no longer a Communist, if he had ever been one. Noting that he had taken the school’s loyalty oath and registered for the military draft, the committee voted 5-1 to retain Novikoff.
But Gov. Lee Emerson, a member of the UVM Board of Trustees, pushed through a motion anyway to suspend Novikoff, withholding his pay and giving him a deadline by which to answer questions. Exasperated by this strong-arm move to force the professor to talk, Novikoff’s lawyer said, “Dr. Novikoff is charged with the Fifth Amendment.” When the deadline arrived, Novikoff maintained his silence and UVM fired him.
Looking for work, Novikoff got help from America’s most prominent scientist, Albert Einstein, and landed a job at the just-forming Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, where he became a prominent cancer researcher. Perhaps Einstein was sympathetic to Novikoff because only two weeks before the UVM professor contacted him, McCarthy had labeled the famed scientist an “enemy of America” for criticizing the anticommunist hunt.
U.S. Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont believed the real threat to the country was McCarthy himself. Flanders agreed with McCarthy that communism posed a danger to America, but it was international communism led by Russia and China that worried Flanders, not exaggerated claims of communist infiltration in this country. To Flanders, McCarthy’s tactics were a distraction from greater threats.
“(W)e are being diverted, and to an extent dangerous to our future as a nation,” said Flanders in a speech in March 1954. He saw the Iron Curtain of communism advancing in Korea and Indochina and communists gaining power in Europe. Flanders feared he was seeing a recurrence of the fall of nations at the start of World War II.
The speech received muted praise. President Dwight Eisenhower sent a two-sentence note thanking Flanders for his comments.
Flanders’ words had no effect on McCarthy, who continued his crusade. For two months in the spring of 1954, the senator conducted what became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings, claiming the Army was rife with communists. The spectacle was broadcast live to the nation, giving Americans their first view of McCarthy’s bullying tactics. (Most Vermonters had to rely on newspaper and radio accounts; the state’s first television transmitter would not be erected until that fall.)
McCarthy’s performance outraged Flanders, who called on the Senate to remove McCarthy from his controversial committee. The Republican Senate leader, however, buried Flanders’ resolution in committee. So Flanders filed a second resolution in late July, this time calling for senators to censure McCarthy for his conduct. With an election looming, Republican Senate leaders managed to delay the vote.
Finally, a month after the election, senators voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy. Flanders and George Aiken, Vermont’s other Republican senator, joined 20 Republicans and 45 Democrats in voting against McCarthy.
A legislative rebuke might seem an unlikely way to stop a political heavyweight like McCarthy, but it did the trick. After the censure vote, senators suddenly felt free to take on the senator, or to ignore him. Thanks to a resolution pushed by a Vermont senator, President Eisenhower was able to joke that McCarthyism had just become “McCarthywasm.”
