John McClaughry was a 29-year-old newcomer in the Northeast Kingdom outpost of Kirby when local leaders — scanning the 1967 Town Meeting crowd for a moderator — hit him with a surprise.
“I was nominated and seconded, there were no other candidates, and I suddenly found the gavel in my hand,” the now 88-year-old recently recalled.
Over the next six decades, McClaughry would serve in the Vermont House and Senate, President Ronald Reagan’s Office of Policy Development and the free-market-promoting Ethan Allen Institute, all while defying critics’ attempts to dismiss him as a stereotypical Republican by being, as one colleague sums up, “an inspired synthesis of libertarian and communitarian, and of liberal niceness and conservative toughness.”
Yet no matter his location or life situation, McClaughry has returned to Kirby’s Town Meeting each March to win reelection as moderator — if history repeats itself on Tuesday, for a 60th consecutive time.
Kirby, population 575, doesn’t have a post office, store or school, just a town hall, a post-gathering potluck lunch and the man believed to be the longest-serving facilitator in state history.
“I came to Vermont, hitchhiking with a knapsack, and knew no one at all, and nonetheless my townspeople made me moderator,” McClaughry said in an interview. “To this day, it’s one of the dearest things I have in my memory book.”
And perhaps the most surprising — both in a world of blink-and-it’s-over TikTok trends and a state more associated with Bernie Sanders and ice cream icons Ben & Jerry’s.
“I make it a point to try and ensure that new people feel welcome,” said McClaughry, who also writes an introduction for the annual town report to hail locals who have retired or recently died, organizations such as the Kirby Quilters, or the importance of grassroots democracy.
Amid change, McClaughry’s approach has remained unwavering — and consistently relevant.
“If solving the problems of our time demands courage, vision, self-reliance, cooperative effort, generosity and decency and faith in the common man, then here is the place for the leaders of our nation to repair to learn again what these simple virtues mean in daily life,” he wrote in 1968 — and reprinted in this year’s report.
‘Vermont’s Republican Radical’
Many know McClaughry as a Republican gadfly who’s penned more than 800 commentaries calling for “limited and frugal government” while criticizing “the progressive juggernaut determined to use its growing legislative majorities to reshape Vermont into the Perfect Little Blue State, no matter what the cost.”
Others recognize him for sparking heated debate about climate change.
“Where are the literally thousands of credentialed scientists who agree that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions must make some contribution to global temperature,” he asked in one commentary, “and who are distressed by contrived, exaggerated, unsupportable and politically motivated climate hysteria?”
But fewer people understand how the former train-hopping Eagle Scout became who he is.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1937, McClaughry was a month old when his mother died, leading him to grow up with his paternal grandmother in Grosse Point, Michigan, and later his maternal grandmother in Paris, Illinois.
McClaughry earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Miami University in 1958, a master’s in nuclear engineering from Columbia University in 1960 and a master’s in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963.
Crossing the country, McClaughry traveled by train — in his case, by stealing rides on freight cars with nothing but a backpack, bedroll and guitar.
“I guess it looks sort of silly now, but it was a natural thing to do,” he recently reasoned of adventures chronicled by the newsweekly Seven Days in a 2018 cover story. “I had no particular way of getting anywhere, and very little money.”
McClaughry figures he rode the rails some 5,000 miles before deciding to plant roots.
“Vermont, East Tennessee and Alaska were my three candidates. Alaska was too cold and far away. East Tennessee was certainly attractive. However, it was connected to the rest of Tennessee, which was segregationist.”
(McClaughry advocated for racial equality long before federal passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)
Sampling the Green Mountain State in 1962, McClaughry liked what he saw.
“It’s small, and local government predominates. I was a Boy Scout, loved the outdoors and wanted a place out in the backwoods. And the farther back you were, the cheaper the land was.”
Enter the Caledonia County town of Kirby. Its central mountain was once impassable in the winter, spurring divisions between its northern and southern hamlets. McClaughry bought property ($12 an acre) atop the middle ground, leading some residents to view him as a potentially impartial moderator at 1967 Town Meeting.
“The other nine-tenths of the people were saying, ‘Who’s that kid?’” he recalled.
McClaughry would serve as an aide to the late Vermont U.S. Sen. Winston Prouty; an associate editor of the former Advance magazine (“the unofficial organ of the liberal wing of the Republican Party,” the Harvard Crimson once wrote); and a staffer for the late Illinois U.S. Sen. Charles Percy, who saw the Vermonter’s civil rights work spur the left-leaning New Republic magazine to deem the young assistant “a remarkable white Republican activist.”
McClaughry also wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan — the latter of whom met the late Rev. Jesse Jackson during the 1980 presidential campaign, only to fail to follow up on a proposed 10-point action agenda.
“One wonders what opportunity was wasted,” McClaughry, who was there, wrote upon Jackson’s recent death.
White House peers had similar thoughts about McClaughry “for such acts as leaving midweek to moderate the Kirby Town Meeting,” the American Conservative reported in a story headlined “Vermont’s Republican Radical.”
‘How do you build municipal spirit?’
In the state, McClaughry held a seat in the Vermont House from 1969 to 1972 and placed third in the GOP U.S. Senate primary against incumbent Robert Stafford in 1982. He then served in the Vermont Senate from 1989 to 1992, lost the governor’s race to Democrat Howard Dean in 1992, and founded the Ethan Allen Institute, a nonprofit public-policy think tank, in 1993.
McClaughry’s central (make that decentral) vision: “A land where power, like the ownership of property, is not concentrated in the hands of the few, but distributed widely among the many.”
Retiring from the institute in 2023, McClaughry continues to lament the loss of local control to state and federal powers.
“The question now is, how do you build municipal spirit where everybody sees themselves as bona-fide neighbors who need a helping hand when times go bad and need to pitch in when their help is required?” he recently said at his home. “Whether we can do that or not, I don’t know. We don’t see each other. We don’t know each other.”
McClaughry’s advocacy for community-based decisions extends to magazine essays and his 1989 book, “The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale,” a collaboration with now-retired University of Vermont professor Frank Bryan.
“We are steadily reducing the scope of local civic responsibility,” McClaughry wrote in 2016. “Before long the Australian ballot will reduce Town Meeting democracy to a remnant, surviving small town public schools will be managed — and many closed — by distant unified districts organized like waste management districts, and town duties will shrink down to maintaining town roads, keeping up the cemetery, and issuing zoning permits and dog licenses.”
That’s why McClaughry is running again for moderator — as usual, with no announced competition.
“I expect we’ll get out in an hour,” he said in advance of Tuesday’s Town Meeting, “unless they’re going to do some award giving for longevity.”
As for the future, McClaughry acknowledges what family and friends have known for several years: He has unspecified and “slow growing” cancer.
Some might think such news worthy of higher mention. But in this year’s town report, the moderator — ever defying convention — instead chose to wait and only hint at it in his conclusion.
“Depending on the progress of my health, the 2026 Town Meeting may be my last,” he wrote. “If so, I will go to my reward satisfied that I honorably, fairly, and conscientiously served my friends and fellow citizens in our little town of Kirby, Vermont. For giving me that opportunity, I am immensely grateful.”
