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.”
The arrival of the 20th century in Vermont brought with it a new era. The state began to feel the effects of the national Progressive Movement, which aimed to defeat the antidemocratic and corrupt influences seen infecting politics and society at large. Progressivism also sought to bring modern, efficient solutions to an increasingly urban country. Progressive reformers promoted women’s suffrage, primary elections (to prevent backroom deal-making), regulation of utilities, oversight of the banking industry and establishment of the income tax. They also supported prohibition, consumer protections and worker wage and safety regulations.
Reform wasn’t completely new to Vermont. Starting in the 1870s, Vermont had begun to modernize as the Legislature created new governmental entities — boards, commissions and agencies — to help the state govern in a more complex world. But the rate of reform accelerated with the coming of the new century.
The first sign of change came in 1902, during that year’s gubernatorial race. The political parties tightly controlled the nomination process, and in Vermont the only party that mattered was the Republican Party. With an unbroken winning streak dating back to 1854, the Republicans could be sure that whomever they nominated at their caucus was bound to become governor. And for the last quarter century, the Proctor family, marble magnates whose business was based in the town of Proctor, had controlled the Republican Party. Redfield Proctor and his son Fletcher ran a tight ship. Using their considerable political influence, they determined who would be nominated.
But Percival Clement had other ideas. He wasn’t exactly a poor man challenging the rich establishment. Clement was a rival marble magnate and the former mayor of Rutland when he decided to challenge the Proctors’ man, John McCullough of Bennington, for the nomination. Clement campaigned publicly, something that hadn’t been necessary before, and even declared that he would take his case to the people by going “over the heads of the bosses.” Clement ended up losing the nomination, and therefore the election, but his refusal to accept the status quo in state politics suggested that Vermont was changing.
When reforms did come, many of them were actually pushed through by Clements’ rival, Fletcher Proctor. Elected governor in 1906, Proctor apparently realized that it was better to help shape reforms he could live with, and thereby stay in power, than to oppose them and risk defeat at the hands of angry voters.
Proctor backed new railroad safety regulations. Recent fatal railroad accidents in Vermont and a report harshly criticizing the state’s railroads helped create popular support for the measure. From Proctor’s perspective, it probably didn’t hurt that the report had singled out the poor safety record of the Rutland Railroad, whose president was Percival Clement.
Proctor also promoted changes to the state’s Superior and Supreme courts, and its bookkeeping system. He also supported a law requiring employers to pay workers on a weekly basis.
Proctor’s successors backed additional reforms, many of them addressing cruel working conditions. The state division of the National Child Labor Committee and the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont conducted separate studies, and both found miserable working conditions in many of the state’s mills, factories and quarries. The Episcopal Diocese cited the example of a 15-year-old girl who worked for 13½ hours a day, six days a week at a Winooski textile mill. One Sunday, at 2 a.m., five hours after she had finished her latest shift, the girl was awakened by her boss, who demanded she return to work. When the girl refused because she was too tired, she was fired.
The studies spurred the Legislature in 1912 to consider limiting the workweek for women and children to 54 hours over the course of six days. When industry balked, the Legislature raised the limit to 58 hours and passed the law. It set no limit for men.
The Legislature also required factory owners to submit to state inspections and set fines or prison terms for anyone preventing an inspection from taking place or running an unsafe factory.
The Legislature passed still more reforms. Between 1912 and 1915, it established the juvenile court system, passed a workers’ compensation law, substituted electrocution — which was considered more humane — for hanging in executions, set up a labor arbitration board, established farm labor and agriculture bureaus, and created a direct primary system in which all voters could cast ballots, replacing the party caucus system that had promoted insider politics.
Some political reform, however, proved unpopular. In 1915, the Legislature passed the so-called “Carnegie legislation,” restructuring the state’s school system. The law was based on a study by the Carnegie Foundation. The foundation reported that Vermont’s schools — many of them one-room schoolhouses — were inadequate for the times: the curriculum was outdated, teachers lacked sufficient training and even the school buildings were often in disrepair.
The Carnegie Foundation recommended centralizing power by taking it from the towns and local school districts and giving it to larger unions, which encompassed several towns, and to the state. The law crafted by the Legislature increased the power of the state board of education and created 66 supervisory unions. The state board would hire and pay administrators to run the unions. The law also increased the pay of teachers at rural schools, called for teacher training, and lengthened the school year. The legislation promoted school consolidation by having the state defray the cost of transporting children to distant classrooms.
One of the flaws of Progressivism, critics charge, is that many of its proponents had an anti-rural bias. Country people were seen as, at best, less sophisticated than city dwellers and, at worst, less mentally fit. Furthermore, Progressivism had emerged to solve essentially urban problems, so applying its remedies to rural situations didn’t always work.
Mason Stone, former superintendent of education in Vermont (and future lieutenant governor), thought that the Carnegie legislation was one of those times. As a member of the state House of Representatives, Stone pushed to repeal parts of the law, which he thought usurped the power of people to control their local schools. He and likeminded legislators managed to weaken the state board of education and cut its staff. More importantly, it reduced the board’s powers. It would no longer appoint the administrators of union supervisory districts. That power would revert to the towns. And towns would no longer be forced to join union districts. That was still an option, but towns could also choose to remain independent.
Explaining his opposition to what education reformers thought was the height of modern, commonsense efficiency, Stone wrote: “A centralized system, in the nature of its construction, is usually expensive in character and inapplicable to a rural state. It is expensive … and it is inapplicable because it fits a populous and wealthy state rather than a rural state with small wealth and a dispersed population.”
Vermont would change during the Progressive Era, but it would do it on its own terms.
