No Audio No Audio (logo crackling) (bird chirping) (crickets chirping) (crickets continue chirping) (dramatic music) (water crashing) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) - [Mark] It was laid down 400 million years ago.

- [Interviewer] Is that right?

- Yep, most of it, you know, the marble around here was.

It was an ancient seabed, and it was tropical.

You know, it was totally different.

You wouldn't recognize it now, that's for sure.

- At one time, there was five or six different marble companies here, and then there was marble sheds all over the place.

The Irish were here first, so they considered themselves better.

They'd become bosses in the quarry and they would tell the Pole now you've gotta pay attention here, otherwise we're gonna send you back to Poland.

Your first day of work, they'd go down there in sneakers and in 40 degree temperature, you need something warmer than that.

- When you came to the door, you ended up on a face, so you just kept going and you drop down and you keep going, you drop down, and when you get to this side here, it takes an awful jump, the bed does, and it's hard to quarry going up like that 'cause everything would come back at you.

- [Red] Proctor family took over all these small marble companies.

They turned things around and did a great job of it.

- The Proctor family consolidated the industry into one corporation, the Vermont Marble Company, which they really ran like it was a medieval fiefdom.

Redfield Proctor sent recruiters to Sweden in order to bring Swedes back to form management, and Swedes, it turns out, can become Vermonters a lot faster than Italians or Irish can.

They are sober and they're temperate and hardworking and they're Protestant, so what Proctor did was create a buffer between himself and the Irish and French Canadian and Italian workers below them.

- I did ask myself, I said, what the heck you doing in here?

- Every time you blast, that's when you asked yourself.

- That's when you asked yourself.

'cause it really would shake the place up.

- The town was split up in sections where you had a section where the Swedes lived, of course, West Rutlands where all the Polish people were.

- Rutlands used to be one big town at the time, and he went to the state legislature and saw to it that West Rutland was separated from Rutland and that the village of Sutherland Falls, where he lived, was separated into its own town, which he humbly named Proctor, of course.

- [Red] They got in politically in the Mont here.

The Proctors were governors and politically they benefited.

- [Paul] It was said that nothing got done in Vermont unless the Proctors approved of it.

They were a extremely powerful family.

- Marble always starts out as some sort of limestone.

Limestone is a rock made up of the mineral calcium carbonate, what we call calcite.

Calcite forms as a result of some sort of biogenic process where you have either very, very small microscopic or a macroscopic shelled organism, and when the organisms die, their shells then fall to the bottom of the ocean and the fragments start to coalesce into larger crystals, and under the right circumstances, you can wind up with a marble that's very white and very clean looking like the Danby marbles.

- [Mike] Right there in Proctor, they used to have carbon section right there.

That's where they made all them big pillars and stuff.

They would carve 'em.

- The supervisor would teach them how to do it.

It was mostly manual work, and the channeling machine was a simple operation down in the quarry.

It was a series of drills that just keep cutting marble and then the block would be popped out with wedges.

- Marble is not the hardest of stones.

It's actually porous and does start to show the effects of time and weather.

- [Tim] That's one of the things that makes marble such a good stone to be using for sculpture or buildings, 'cause it's very easy to work it and mill it into the shape that you want.

- [Billie] You lay the stone, and you know it's going to stay there and you know it's going to be there and you've made a mark on the world and that's a good mark.

- [Reporter] So how are we doing on healthcare?

- That's what we're working on.

Okay.

Nice train here.

- [Red] I live not far from the marble quarries and that was our playground.

We used to go down in the first quarry, then go down through the tunnels, and come out in the last quarry.

(people laughing) - If you didn't go to college in this town, that's where you went to work.

- [Red] What would the marble company do without these immigrants coming in?

That's why they provided homes for 'em because you know, they needed them.

- Everything was right here, like my grandfather never had a car until he was in his sixties, I would say.

He never needed one.

- [Red] The company store was right there.

They'd buy on credit and the deductions would be made from their paycheck, and the same with the rent on their duplex company houses that they lived in.

- There's good things about paternalism.

The workers were reasonably well taken care of and the Proctor family could feel proud of their tradition of how they treated their workers, but obviously there was a lot of control that they exerted over their workers as well.

- [Red] On one hand, they were very good to the worker.

On the other hand, they underpaid and Marble County didn't provide the protection that they do today.

Hard hats.

No, there wasn't a hard hat down in the quarry.

A piece of marble as big as my hand would kill you.

There were a lot of fatalities there.

The mother would become a widow with five or six kids, and there was no welfare in them days.

- The Proctors had always been extraordinarily opposed to unions.

They'd kept the marble yards free of union influence.

But in October of 1935, some workers in Danby went on strike.

Quickly, the strike spread to become universal within the Rutland region.

- That was a strike that caused a great division in the community.

Like my father, he was a striker and it'd become difficult.

- When the workers went on strike, they lost their housing.

Soon the company had taken to putting machine guns on their trucks so they could get them through the picket lines.

- You know, there was brother turned against brother.

One uncle went to work and the other one was a striker.

And I felt sorry for the children because in school they'd say, "Ah, your father was a scab," you know.

- [Paul] The power lines between Proctor and Rutland were blown up.

The bridge between Danby and Rutland was blown up.

The company, of course, blamed incidences of sabotage and violence on the workers.

The workers blamed the company, saying the company had done them in order to discredit the workers.

- [Red] And they weren't asking for too much, and the marble company was bound and determined that they were gonna break the strike, and they eventually did.

- And it's often said that the strike was so traumatic and ugly that people didn't want to talk about it and would just have soon forgotten it.

- A lot of the families moved out.

Some of the Italians went to Mechanicsville ,New York, our neighbors were the Ganders, they went to Patterson, New Jersey.

Eventually they just closed down the shops, and it's a shame because there's a lot of marble in this area as yet.

- I don't think it'll ever come back the way it used to be, but it's still going strong.

- It's just smaller.

- I mean, we still sell block form to whoever wants it.

- I mean, when you're an architect, you both want your building to sit well on the land and feel connected, and at the same time you want it to say in some sort of subtle way, you know, I'm different.

But then as we looked around and saw the sort of tradition of these white buildings in a green landscape, it seemed as if this white color would be the correct choice for this building.

(birds cawing) (dog barking) - If you go back in time to about the Civil War period, all of this countryside was open field and pasture.

Would've been hard to find the woods anywhere.

- That's why you don't have a whole lot of old growth forest.

It was all chopped right off tight.

It was sheep farming was the main thing, not cattle, why?

'Cause you don't have to milk sheep twice a day.

- But the Portuguese had developed a special breed of sheep called the Merino, and this animal not only created a very ample fleece, but the wool made very fine woolens that were not scratchy at all.

So everyone clamored for merino wool.

It just happens that the US counselor to Portugal was a Vermonter named William Jarvis, and in 1810 he brought the first 4,000 merino sheep into the central portion of New England.

30 years later, at the height of the sheep fever craze in 1840, the region is 80% deforested.

It means about one half of all the forest was clear cut to make way for pasture in a 30 year timeframe.

- The sheep farming was a brief period of prosperity in Vermont.

Then the bottom dropped out when western sheep grazers began to transport their wool more cheaply than they had before.

- And after the Civil War, a lot of farmers were exposed to more of the world than they had ever seen before and realized that there's better land.

- Here, you've got this rocky, crummy soil and a short growing season, and anybody who was really serious about farming left.

- Vermonters were leaving Vermont in droves.

I think by 1860, 42% of the people born in Vermont were living outside the state.

- Vermont lost more people immigrating out than any state in the union.

I mean, it was hard, cold and there was nothing to do.

- [Paul] They all went out to the Ohio Valley via either canal or rail.

- There was a perception that the hill towns at the rural areas were in trouble and that they were losing the best and the brightest and only the people who didn't have any ambition or were too weak or too elderly would stay at home, and all the people who wanted to get somewhere in life would go to Boston and become bank clerks.

- And with the drop in the population density, schools closed, churches fell in disrepair, and there were loads of abandoned farms.

- [Dona] A lot of these farms were not exactly abandoned, but perhaps the kids had gone west or to the cities and the old folks had died.

Nobody wanted to come back and nobody wanted to pay the taxes.

- This becomes a big concern, particularly among state boosters and industrialists and state leaders who wondered what's wrong with Vermont.

- And then we do these lists of numbers of Vermonters became governor and judges and other things in other states, and somewhere around the teens and the 1920s, somebody asked the question, "Well, if for the last 60 or 70 years our best and brightest had been leaving, who are we who are still here?"

- Vermont launched a campaign to try to attract out of staters, to come up and buy these abandoned hill farms and restore them and use them the summer homes.

- [Marilyn] There was a concerted effort to market Vermont beginning in the 1880s and nineties, but at that point it was under the Bureau of Agriculture.

Later, by 1911, it goes to a state publicity board for the first time.

- [Nancy] One of their goals was to develop Vermont for tourism to get, as they put it, a better class of people coming in the summer and settling on these old abandoned farms and fixing up, painting them white, and having these nice villages with white church steeples and little picket fences and the flowers in front.

- And they would be an example to the people that had been left behind of how enterprise was good for them and they would spend money on their old home places and spruce the place up.

- There was a very popular geography book at the time that said, if you go to Vermont, you'll find the true upland Vermonter, the true Yankee, independent, resourceful.

It doesn't mention that Vermont had the highest rate of soldiers turned away during World War I for malnutrition than any other state.

- It was the most rural state in New England.

It had the highest illiteracy rates, it had the highest poverty rates, it had the highest levels of infant mortality, and so the more cosmopolitan elements of the state wondered why is Vermont falling behind the rest of the nation?

- It's very clear that the elite sector of Vermont put out the alarm that Vermont was deteriorating, that ordinary Vermonters are not interested in modernizing, they're not interested in being progressive and keeping up with the latest trends.

They're not really interested in learning about scientific farming and literally that the genetic vitality of the stock of people who lived here was declining in an alarming way.

- So the Vermont Commission on Country Life was put together with a committee of 100 Vermonters, I believe it was called, and it was people that were chosen because they were well-known writers or they were politicians and they were on different committees.

There were committees on water safety, there was a committee on rural traditions and ideals, there was a committee on the quality of the population, the eugenics part of the equation.

- It sort of means wellbeing or to make things better, and so they would breed better cows and better horses.

They wanted to breed better people.

- And it's really all rooted in a sense that these kinds of people are a problem.

The solution to that problem is to try to prevent "those kinds of people" from literally reproducing.

That's the notion of eugenics.

You seek out the genetic traits that you want to encourage and you suppress the ones that you don't wanna encourage.

That's what eugenics is.

- Lawrence Rockefeller's father who funded the eugenics field work, and Henry Osborne, the head of the American Museum of Natural History, all of them shared this kind of a utopian impulse towards "We can shape things just the way we want."

- The man who is associated with the eugenics movement in Vermont is Professor Perkins from UVM, who was part of the movement to bolster Vermont and make sure that the Vermont character, the Vermont tradition, remained Anglo-Saxon.

- I think that Perkins really thought that he was a scientist and he was on the cutting edge of a new science.

He dotted his Is and crossed his Ts, and the 44 boxes of research at the state archives show that.

But he had no idea that this really was a pseudoscience.

- The whole concept of what they used to call "bad seed," "bad genes," "cacogenics."

- [Nancy] A lot of it was very subjective.

What was defective was very subjective.

They had a term, "feeblemindedness," which was catchall for anyone who was a little behind in school.

They did not have any concept of all the reading disabilities, perceptual problems people have, or the fact that many children were taken outta school to work, and so maybe they didn't do as well academically.

- It would always be urban, educated people looking at poor people and saying, "Look how they degenerated from that frontier Yankee stock and look what a mess they are today."

The landscape of poverty is interpreted by these well-meaning do-gooder progressives as biological failure.

They've run themselves out.

It's polluted protoplasm, you know.

- They were progressives who understood themselves as having the best interest of the state and the individual at heart.

- Yeah, well, so did Hitler.

- It's very clear that this is the impulse that in the big picture culminates with Nazism and the Holocaust.

- This really was a movement.

This wasn't something that was unique to Vermont.

- Right, but what Vermont did is utilize that whole pride in heritage and say, some people aren't measuring up.

They're not part of us.

They are not We Vermonters.

- [Dona] The eugenics component of it was, are there pockets in the population that are lagging behind the rest of the state and dragging it down?

Are we paying too much money to take care of the offspring of people who shouldn't be allowed to have offspring?

- Here, they also show a topographical map, and it's very hilly country, reinforcing that in these pockets in the hills, little communities had interbred a very long time, and therefore they had degenerated.

That was the belief.

- [Dona] There were a lot of folks who worked for eugenics who were in the helping professions, and particularly women.

This is the first generation of women who were graduating with doctorates in social work, and there were very few jobs for them.

- The first social worker for the Eugenics survey, the one that did all the pedigrees of Vermont families, was a woman named Harriet Abbott, and what she did is go to her sources, they called informants in those days, her sources were ministers, teachers, overseers of the poor, boards of select people, neighbors, and she'd get testimony about the family and then she'd put it into a very large report.

- So tell me about your next door neighbors.

Are they alcoholics?

Are they child abusers?

And writing all that stuff down.

- Young children have a way of opening their mouth at the wrong time and saying the wrong things, so Dad and Mom were hard on us.

Do not say who you are.

Do not let anybody know you're Native American.

- It wasn't safe to be Abenaki in Vermont with the eugenics movement.

It wasn't safe.

Whole families disappeared.

All right, they were put in like Waterbury.

They were put in institutions.

Kids were taken away from their families, and I know a couple of people that spent most of their childhood in an institution.

- Many of the Abenaki ended in that group and were candidates for sterilization because they didn't want them reproducing.

- Vermont I think was the 27th state to pass a sterilization law.

It was supposed to be with informed consent, but what was informed consent?

You either stay in the institution all your life or you can be sterilized and be free.

- Some people in my family denied it.

Some people in the family said, "Oh, that must be why so and so and so and so never had children.

That explains a lot."

- Women were given a tubal ligation, men a vasectomy.

It wasn't until the 1960s and seventies that the ACLU started bringing state by state cases to throw out the sterilization law, and in our state, it was in the 1970s that they took that eugenic sterilization law off the books.

- People focused on the sensational part of the eugenic survey, the sterilization, and that was very bad.

That was very horrific, no doubt about it.

But there were so many more people that their families were broken up and their children were taken away, and consequently, they never really knew their roots or who they were, and I began to realize that that was their primary goal.

- So the word was out that you may not want to publicize your Indian heritage.

- Even in the military, I continued saying that I was a white person.

- Perkins rarely named Abenaki people, and none of the other investigators ever wrote down Abenaki.

They tended to identify people as French if they identified them at all.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that a lot of the people who got caught up in the institutions that created the captive populations, that those people would be people of Abenaki descent or people of mixed French and Abenaki descent or just poor people.

- You know, it wasn't only used on the Native Americans.

I mean, they used it on the families that had crazy people.

- The mental retarded, or the people that lived in shanty towns, not picket fences and white houses, and you know, that whole view of what Vermont was.

- [Nancy] Scenery.

Scenery was really important to the Vermont Commission on Country Life.

They wanted to really sell Vermont as a beautiful place, and we still do today.

That's probably one of the lasting legacies of this period.

- It isn't the question of whether somebody should have a car or a piece of machinery in their yard.

That's not what the point is.

All we're saying is that we don't feel that somebody's front lawn should be a junk yard.

- People are going to have junk.

I've got junk too.

That's how I make my living, as this man does.

Flat landers don't like it, the hell with 'em.

Go on home, go where you came from.

- Now, please don't call people.

- Let's cut this out, let's have a beat.

- I don't need any advice from you.

They're flatteners.

I am prejudiced.

- [Council Member] All right, fine.

- Yeah, we don't need the highfalutin ideas of cleaning up the whole community.

The taxes are high enough now.

All right, I'll be quiet for now.

- [Nancy] They didn't want any shacks or any tents or any pieced together abode, and they certainly, in Burlington, they wanted to get those darn houseboats off the lakefront, and those houseboats were people's homes.

- These people were still living off the land.

They were still tanning hides in their backyards.

It was their way to adapt and survive just as their people had done for generations before that, and so they might be the people who were running the stills during prohibition or prostitution rings, but they were adapting and surviving the best they could.

- Yeah, local people, they did their share of smuggling.

They were usually just good people who saw prohibition as a way to make extra money.

But then on the other hand, there were serious smugglers who passed through the area.

They'd be driving Packards and Cadillacs.

It wasn't just because they had the money to do it, but it also provided the room for the booze.

But there was another group of people who owned homes or barns along the border, and they would allow people to hide loads of booze inside their barns.

Other people owned buildings right on the border, and they became makeshift drinking establishments.

Legally, you couldn't drink on the American side of that house, but if it straddled the border, you could drink on the Canadian side of the house.

But the one thing you didn't do is sometimes local people didn't understand you didn't double cross the big boys, and some people got hurt.

We had a lot of people getting killed.

We had lawmen getting killed.

We had citizens getting killed.

Citizens who were suddenly labeled as criminals because they either bought booze, sold booze, made booze, or transported it.

But if you dig right down to it, I have yet to find any local people who got rich, but a lot of people went broke because they ended up spending six months in jail and their families had no money to pay the bills.

- During the years of the Great Depression, I think all rural people to some degree, as long as you owned your own farm, probably weathered the depression better than people working in cities with no options who lost their jobs, because there is a subsistence element.

You can go back to eating the potatoes that you grew, but the price of milk went down by 50% during 1932, and Vermont farmers were widely dependent on dairy, so their milk checks went down by half.

That's money they were using to pay their land taxes, to buy the books for their kids to go to school, to pay the doctor's bills, to get by.

- There was quite a bit of affluence in downhill Vermont, Burlington, Bennington, Brattleboro, and this great disparity opened up between who was doing well in Vermont and who was not.

(soft music) Your heart breaks looking at these families.

They are farm security administration clients, the poorest farmers in Vermont.

They were receiving federal aid as part of FDR's New Deal programs, and in order to receive the money, they had to allow themselves to be photographed.

- So it's a myth to think that they were really independent in the way that people might once have been somewhere in the world.

- Vermonters embraced parts of the New Deal because frankly they needed them.

They liked to think that they were opposed to the New Deal and could stand on their own two feet, but Vermont had just had the flood of 1927.

Vermont's transportation infrastructure was destroyed and Vermont didn't have the money to rebuild it.

The Green Mountain Parkway comes along and it's this wonderful opportunity to actually start to rebuild Vermont's transportation infrastructure.

- That's a new way of thinking.

Go right up along there.

- [Driver] Where?

- [Passenger] There!

- It was gonna be very similar to the Skyline Drive in Virginia.

It was gonna run along the spine of the Green Mountains and up to the Canadian border.

- 260 miles.

Beautiful.

And most of the money will come from the feds.

What I need is to get a big picture, give it to your reader.

- [Passenger] But we're just one little paper, and I can't promise.

- Well, here's the pitch.

Number one, jobs, we certainly need them, right?

- It would bring industry and it would get us into the 20th century.

- Route seven, route five, route two weren't even paved.

In mud season, these roads would become impassable.

You just couldn't get around the state.

- [Driver] Two, you've got the beautification angle.

Three, tourism.

- What happened was the National Park Service got involved, and this area where we're standing right now would've been a 20,000 acre national wilderness preserve.

The parkway would've ended, if you could see, not on the summit, but on that saddle between that and the other hill.

- The Parkway was gonna run through 38 different Vermont towns.

- Towns that tended to be near the entrance and exits off it were for it.

They could imagine, I think, restaurants and gas stations and that kind of thing.

- Washington wants it, Chamber wants it, and once they understand, so will most Vermonters.

Check out the map.

- Sir, excuse me, I'm with the Rutland Herald.

Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?

- Yeah.

- Vermont though had a long tradition of people not being told what to do with their land, so from the beginning, the project was very controversial.

- [Reporter] We're doing a piece on the Green Mountain Highway.

What do you think about it?

- Well, I don't know where they're gonna come up with the money to buy all that land and it's gonna have to come from taxes or they're gonna have to borrow it.

- And it was the question of an outside force dictating terms to Vermonters.

- It's just ignorant.

What do people want, to stay isolated?

- [Passenger] People don't like the Feds taking so much land.

- Hey, who side are you on?

- Big boys seem to be in favor of it, but the little guy's gonna get left holding the bag.

- A lot of downhillers, the business elite and professionals, supported the Green Mountain Parkway, but a lot of other downhill folk thought that it was a very bad idea, that it would mar the state's traditional beauty, in that way that it would hurt tourism.

You know what downhillers are like?

People like me.

It was just that kind of issue, very divisive.

- [Reporter] Excuse me, ma'am, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?

- No.

- Well, I'm from the Rutland Herald and we're doing a piece on the Green Mountain Parkway.

Have you heard of it?

- Yes, I've heard of it.

- What's your take on it?

How do you feel about it?

- Well.

- What do you do?

Do you accept federal money and potentially destroy the Vermont landscape?

- It's just perfect the way it is here.

- You know, is that like selling your soul?

This was the question a lot of people are asking.

- Some of the members, the Green Mountain Club Leadership and some of their backers, like Mortimer Proctor, were very active in opposing the parkway.

The Proctor family had owned Vermont Marble, they were very much anti New Deal, and they felt that, well, the Parkway as designed wouldn't bring enough development to Vermont.

- You couldn't have stuff.

You couldn't have Smuggler's Notch.

All these ski resorts couldn't exist as it had been built.

- It's quiet here.

There are no cars and it's great for walking and horseback, and if that highway goes through, it's going to be scarred, changed forever.

- [Driver] This isn't about spoiling anything, it's about optimism, getting outta the mountain mindset and joining the world.

The Green Mountain Parkway, a logical next step.

- I guess I'll have to say I'd believe it when I see it.

- All right, all right.

- [Reporter] Today is the day, the big vote on the Green Mountain Parkway.

You've heard all the arguments, now it's your turn, and WSYB will bring you the results from Rutland and throughout Vermont.

- [Council Member] Special town meeting.

- This year, as you may know, Vermont is in a bit of a fiscal crisis - [Council Member] Referendum to approve the construction of the Scenic Highway to be named the Green Mountain Parkway.

- [Citizen] If you want to do it, it's up to us, but we're not under a federal mandate.

- Because it's up on a ridge, is this correct?

I would like to see.

- [Council Member] It is all along the ridge, it's all along the ridge.

It's not gonna be anymore.

- It's a wonderful, wonderful idea.

- [Citizen] It's a bribe, a bad deal!

- 500,000 acres.

- A quarter of Vermont.

- [Citizen] A federal district.

- [Council Member] Let Mr. Taylor speak.

- It was a quite vexatious and hot debate between the proponents of access via automobile and those that wanted to preserve the mountains in natural areas.

- [Reporter] From what we know, a record number of Vermonters have turned out, and a majority have rejected the federal government's $18 million offer to build a parkway across the state.

- Closing debate ad polling the question, signify by saying, aye.

- [Crowd] Aye.

- [Council Member] Those opposed?

- [Crowd] Nay.

- [Council Member] Nays do have it, and I declare that the motion is defeated.

- [Reporter] People just don't want the national government to become a large property owner and regulator of land in Vermont.

- George Aiken did not take a public position on the parkway.

He said, "Well, it would've brought a lot of jobs to Vermont, and if I were from Lamoille County, I'd probably be for it, but I'm from Wyndham County, where hundreds of families have moved here to buy up second homes for farms or summer residences, and they're opposed to the parkway because they feel it would turn the Green Mountains into something like the Catskills and bring the class of people they came to Vermont to get away from."

What was that class of people?

The Catskills were known as the Jewish Alps.

- You can see Vermont's tourism literature talking about excluding certain ethnic groups or religious groups from hotels or resort towns.

- But the reason that Green Mountain Parkway was voted down was 'cause Republicans voted against it and Democrats voted for it.

Had there been more Democrats in Vermont, we'd have had that highway down the crest line of the Green Mountains.

- But amidst this overwhelmingly Yankee complexion of the state was this little island of ethnic and radical thought in Vermont.

Barre.

Barre sits on top of one of the best loads of granite that exists in North America.

(soft dramatic music) (machinery whirring) - Barre was a very sleepy little village, and right after the War of 1812, there were a couple of veterans who came to the community and decided to see if they could extract some stone, so they set up a small quarry, and from that came products like lentils and doorsteps and also millstones were an important product in the early years.

But the stone in Barre has traditionally been used for monuments, public monuments, and cemetery markers rather than for building stone, and one of the things I think has been so interesting is that so much of the art is really anonymous.

There's no real record of who designed or carved these beautiful works.

- There were businessmen in the Barre area, Yankee businessmen, who were eager to invest in Barre granite, but didn't have the know-how of actually how you extract it from the ground and turn it into a finished product.

But by the 1880s, very skilled Scottish cutters had begun to arrive, so most of the corporations were founded out of a relationship between immigrant Scots and Yankee capitalists.

- [Karen] And they moved the stone in the wintertime because it was a lot easier to transport it when there was snow and ice on the ground and they could use sledges.

Finally, a railroad spur was built and that made it possible to get the stone from the community to markets elsewhere.

- Scottish working class solidarity ran deep, and they brought with them a socialist tradition that ran very strongly throughout Scotland.

They were succeeded by Italians, and the Italians came out of a even stronger tradition of socialist and radical thought.

By the 1890s, it was really just a flood of Italians.

- Some men, of course, left their families in Italy and came over ahead and they saved and then would send for their families.

- By the late 1880s, the granite cutters had already formed themselves into a union.

Within a couple decades, the quarry workers also formed themselves into a union.

And in 1900, the old socialist hall, the Labor Hall was built.

- The hall was built by a group of Italian granite cutters.

Many were sculptors, others were more mundane granite cutters, but they banded together and bought the piece of land on Granite Street where the hall is now located.

- Usually you see one or two people may own a piece of property, but at the bottom of this deed were 46 signatures, and I certainly could understand, even in Italian, the word "co-operativa."

- Co-operativa.

I remember my father belonged.

They would have dances there, they had boxing matches.

- [Paul] It was the headquarters for the Granite Cutters International Union.

- Many people belonged to the food cooperative in the basement, which I believe might be the first food cooperative in Vermont.

- If we needed a loaf of bread and some milk or something, we'd just run down.

My mother would send us down and get it.

- [Paul] It was economic, it was political, it was social, it was cultural.

It was about friendships.

It was about mutual support.

- My dad brought me here in 1961.

He waited until I got outta art school.

But the first three years I took everything from architectural to ornamental, and then I decided to be figurative, you know, sculpt them.

- This is one of the things that set Barre apart from places like Patterson and steel mills and so forth.

The workers here tended to be higher educated.

- Yes, they had to work often in appalling conditions, but in the evenings and in the weekend, there will be songs, there will be plays, there will be earnest discussions.

There would be an alternative culture at work, and above all, it gave them a pride and a dignity, I think.

- What differentiates Barre from the marble industry in Rutland is that in Rutland, the industry was consolidated into one corporation, the Vermont Marble company, whereas in Barre, the granite industry was enormously decentralized.

There were dozens and dozens of sheds.

- In Barre, if you had your tools, you could set up your own business.

- See this, calipers from Carrara, see, and then I got some that belonged to those older Italian, but I got 'em inside the house.

You know what I mean?

- [Paul] Vermont was always a particularly anti-union state.

The marble industry in Rutland had really broken the back of the marble workers, and out in the hills among the farmers, there was generally a great amount of hostility towards organized labor.

And as Barre became the only town with a central labor union, a lot of people around Vermont looked at the town as really a very foreign and unnatural place.

- As early as 1894, there was an anarchist group in Barre, Vermont.

It's one of the earliest anarchist groups in that whole part of America, and we know that Emma Goldman came to Barre in 1899.

- She was hosted by Pallavicini, a comrade who had also worked with her in a textile strike, and interestingly enough, in her autobiography, she describes having been met by many, many activist groups, lots of people who worked in the quarries.

- But she didn't really get to meet any women so she asked her hosts if she could please meet some of the women in the community, so they brought her to the grappa houses.

- She was very impressed by the way in which prohibition was certainly not enforced in the town of Barre, and so she said that almost everywhere she went felt like a saloon, and it's perhaps there where she was able to communicate more directly, including about birth control.

- She's very clear.

She's already been rather controversial in that struggle.

However, Barre as a center of anarchism really springs to light in 1903 when Luigi Galleani arrives in Barre under an assumed name to begin editing perhaps one of the most famous papers in American anarchist history, Cronaca Sovversiva, The Subversive Chronicles.

He'd been shot in a dispute in Patterson, gone to Canada, and came back to Barre to be hidden by comrades and friends.

Galleani's views were simply in some senses straight anarcho-communist.

Put very simply, we are living lives of desperation.

It is awful.

We are living lives of poverty.

We are exploited.

We are not given our piece of the wealth.

But he said something else, he said, "And we bear the blame for it because we don't fight back, because we don't challenge this, it happens to us."

And remember, please, that he's not just writing to the organized working class.

He's writing to the pimps, to the crooks, to the bandits, to the thieves, to the unemployed, to the starving, to the beggars.

All of these would take part in the revolution.

However, there was extraordinary tension between anarchists and socialists.

So much so that in October, 1903, Cortier, an anarchist communist.

was actually shot dead by a socialist at the meeting at the Barre Socialist Hall.

- All the crowd were milling around here on the front steps and in the hall waiting for the guest speaker to arrive when the anarchists and the socialists started discussing politics, always an inflammatory combination here.

Then Garretto who had a gun with him fired two shots.

One hit Vogini who survived, and the other hit Elia Croti, who was taken to the hospital in Montpelier.

The next day, he died after identifying the man who shot him.

- That's how serious it was, that's how tense it was, and it was a speaker at that meeting who would eventually give up Galleani's location and his name to the police.

- They were very violent people, always trouble.

Every Saturday night, there'd be a party and generally ended up in a fist fight.

Like we say, the good people didn't have nothing to do with them.

- [Aurora] After Corti's death, his brother carved one of the most celebrated memorials in Hope Cemetery.

- From that movement, of course, came the two most famous Italian American anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, and both of them, both of them revered Galleani.

(soft music) (word effects exploding) (people yelling) - It was such a violent time in history.

It's almost hard to put yourself back.

- [Paul] King Humbert of Italy was murdered by an anarchist in 1900.

The President of the United States, William McKinley, was murdered by an anarchist.

And of course, anarchists murdered a Serbian prince and started World War I.

- Emma Goldman often had to explain the psychological reasons for violence, for political violence.

- It was a way to fight back and to level the playing field.

- There were no workplace safety laws in most of America at that time, and the risk to your life and your health was simply part of the job.

- My father contracted, got silicosis in his lungs.

He was in the sanatorium across the city.

They took him up there.

He died from that.

- [Joellen] The doctors were calling it tuberculosis in order to hide the fact that it was related to the granite industry.

- You could feel it.

It was all gritty stuff - [Aurora] Took a long time before they understood the risks that they were taking, 'cause they had not experienced this in Italy.

- The sheds in Italy were open.

Here, because of the cold, they were closed.

- I mean, just the stone will eat you up in one day and spit you out, and you'll be so exhausted.

I mean, you should try it, carving for a week straight.

You have to be sort of enduring.

- Both my grandfathers were stone carvers and both died of silicosis of the lungs, and my grandfather, Patrick Leahy, made my father promise him on his dying bed that he would not be a stone carver.

- Men were dying at a very young age, and they were leaving their wives and children behind, and these women were not trained to do any kind of outside work, so they would have grappa houses, or wine houses, what they were called, or houses of prostitution as well.

- They were good women, but they had to eat, and there wasn't much the kids could do to earn a living.

- In those days, no social security.

- So you have kids that are 5, 6, 7, 8 years old out there in the middle of the winter hawking newspapers on street corners.

- My father had left school to support his mother and his sister.

I became the first Leahy to get a college degree.

- It affected the economy.

It affected the way that people viewed the future.

It affected family relationships.

It affected communities, it affected politics.

- My father had a Model T Ford.

He used to love to go sightseeing, go up in the mountains and picnics on weekends.

♪ Freedom ♪ Oh, freedom - The first really large strike of its kind was in 1908, then there was a strike again in 1910, a strike in 1915.

Between 1908 and 1933, there were about 12 strikes in the Barre Granite Industry, which absolutely distinguishes it from any other industry in Vermont.

- [Interviewer] Did your father, was he in the union?

- Oh yes, he was a union man.

Oh, and I remember like the strike of '33.

Now, where I lived on Granite Street was at the crossroads.

- [Joellen] And during that strike, the governor called out the National Guard, and they were there with fixed bayonets and trucks bringing workers down from Canada.

They drove them right into the quarries.

They had housing inside the quarries.

- But what distinguishes Barre from the other strikes that took place in Vermont around this time is that the granite workers won.

They didn't win all of the concessions they wanted, but they won most of them, and most of all, what they were able to do is to reestablish their unions as a strong presence in the granite industry.

- So yes, the socialists and the anarchists are known for arguing with each other.

They had many differences.

But when something came up where people had to band together, they kept solidarity.

- And right about that time, George Aiken, who was the first governor of Vermont to really be sympathetic to labor unions, ordered the Department of Hygiene to do a study of the air quality in the sheds, and discovered that the number of particles per cubic inch of air was well beyond anything imaginable as far as what could be healthy, and demanded that the granite sheds have ventilation devices installed, and that was really sort of the turning point.

After that, labor relations in Barre were very placid.

And by this time, a lot of the Barre granite workers, they're in their third generation.

It was their grandparents who came, and they've intermarried.

They've married Yankee girls and they've sent their kids to UVM, and there's the long term trend of assimilation that takes place.

I mean, in 1903, when Elia Corti gets shot because he's an anarchist, and the socialists are trying to keep the anarchists from rushing into the Labor Hall, and you can imagine the Yankees who live on the farms in the surrounding area being like, what is going on here?

This sounds like, you know, Europe.

I mean, this is not Vermont.

And so what had happened was that the Italians had become Vermonters.

(soft music) But when you look at the nature of the rural communities in the hills that surrounded Barre and were spread across the state, what you see is very similar things to what the Barre workers were doing.

There was complex interconnectedness and mutual responsibility towards each other.

I mean, people were related to each other, people were in debt to each other, people helped each other through childbirths and helped them when they got sick and helped them bring in their crops when they needed help.

And by the late 19th century, the single most important economic driving force for many Vermont farmers is the cooperative.

Cooperative Creameries were social in many ways.

They brought farmers together, but of course, most of all, they were economic.

They were a organization of farmers who came together in order to collectively bargain in their own best interest.

So farmers and the workers in Barre were doing things that mirrored each other.

(soft music continues) (cows mooing) - And you can't understand the history of Vermont without understanding people that raise cows.

You could have the toughest, orneriest, hardass Vermont farmer, but when he walked into his stable, he became a quiet, soothing, gentle man, and that gentleness was key to Vermont, that empathy.

- Vermont at that time was primarily an agricultural state with the dairy industry being the primary form of agriculture.

It was solidly Republican and had been so since 1854.

- I mean, we didn't elect a congressman, a senator, a governor, a lieutenant governor, not one statewide official that was a Democrat.

Nothing for a century, think about that.

Well, 98 years.

- Vermont was one of those states that was rock rib Republican, even in 1936, when essentially the entire country went for Franklin Roosevelt, Vermont and Maine were the only two states that went for Alf Landon.

- But it never was ultraconservative.

It was not the national Republican party of today with its right wing ideology, and it was never a conservative state to the extent that New Hampshire had been.

- I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Norwich, Vermont.

Ike was president at the time, and if I thought about politics at all, I just mimicked my parents.

My dad was a banker and my mom was a stay at home housewife.

Everybody was a Republican.

I mean, certainly everyone in my parents' circle was a Republican.

- Hello, smile, cheese, welcome.

Hello.

- [Interviewer] Now, were you always a Republican?

- All my life, my family were Republican.

- We used to vote what we call the bullet ballot.

All you had to do was put an X on the star at the bottom, and that meant that all the candidates were Republican.

- Vermont, as you may know, has always had these two wings of the Republican party.

- [Rick] My parents reflected the more urban conservative side, but there was a rural progressive wing.

I remember in the sixties that Vermont's George Aiken was the senior Republican in the Senate.

- The Republican party was for a long time split between the Aiken-Gibson wing and the Proctor wing, or the conservative one.

The people versus the big boy interests, the big boys.

He often spoke of the utilities, the power company, national life, the granite industries.

I'm talking about the owners.

- [Paul] Certainly it would've been hard for Aiken to get along well with people like the Proctors.

There was a populism there that Aiken had, and there was a feeling for working class people and small farmers.

- You know what I wanted to know about him?

I wanted to know what life was like when he was growing up in Putney, Vermont, how he got started in politics, and he has a very interesting political history.

He used to sell flower seeds.

He used to sell seeds, and he got to know everybody in his community by selling seeds, and he was elected I guess to the legislature and moved his way up the political line.

- As far as I know, I don't recall ever asking anyone to vote for me, but maybe I did.

Perhaps they got the idea.

Sometimes go and visit with 'em, stay so long they would volunteer their support in order to get me going.

- I remember one of the first times I met him, I was campaigning for governor then, and he agreed to meet with me, and he brought me a box of his own raspberries.

I mean, it was such a touching, wonderful thing.

It was the greatest gift he could have given me.

- You know, he was a Republican, let's not forget that, yet he was, in many ways, a very progressive type Republican.

- You know, he fought very hard for rural electrification, and it really upset him that the large power companies weren't interested in stringing lines to the rural areas because there was no real concentrated wealth there that they could draw.

- The farmers and the other rural people were angry and fed up that they were literally seeing their neighbors down in the village have electricity for 20 or more years, and no one had any intention of bringing it to their homes and farms.

- Life was really hard up in the hills.

Just think about milking a cow when you're in sub-zero temperatures, there's no electric lights, going out and lighting that kerosene lantern and running it along a line cow by cow as you pulled on their udders.

I mean, Aiken knew exactly how hard it was on the farm without electricity, so rural electrification was a very big deal for him.

He felt that once you could get the lines out there, the people should own the place where this electricity was generated and the benefits from it.

- So this is an album of historical records from Washington Electric co-op, and this photograph on top is taken on the day that power actually started flowing to the first 200 pioneering founders of the co-op.

And in the middle flipping the switch is Governor George Aiken.

He was a strong supporter of the rural electrification movement that was part of the New Deal, and everyone else in the picture, his kids and farm families all dressed in their Sunday best, or most of them, and people went home and turned every light on in the house because this was almost a religious experience for them.

- And Vermont went from having about one in five Vermont farms be electrified at beginning of New Deal to at least three in five by the end of the 1930s.

- But there was a lot of controversy because the private utilities, Green Mountain Power and others, did not want the co-op to form, and they actually attended organizing meetings and essentially tried to threaten some of the founders with loss of employment.

But Governor Aiken loved to pick fights with the private utility boys, and the more they politically attacked the formation of the co-ops, the more he enjoyed the stepping into the fray.

- It was pretty clear that voting for George Aiken was not a vote for laissez-faire capitalism.

- But if you look at the rest of the country, a lot of the senators who supported FDR in rural electrification in other parts of the country were also progressive Republicans because there were progressive Republicans then from a lot of the Midwest states and the farm states.

- But Aiken was very crafty in his approach to the New Deal.

There were certain programs that he liked a great deal, but whenever there was something that the federal government wanted to impose on Vermont, Aiken was very vocal in his opposition.

- Aiken with the submarginal lands issue was beautiful.

The federal government wanted Vermont to turn over 51% of the state, which they called submarginal, which means poor Vermont farmers in the hills, to the federal government.

I mean, this wasn't just some pie in the sky thing.

I mean, they had it drawn out.

Aiken describes a beautiful meeting in the Vermont legislature, and he says, "The boys from Washington came to visit again, and we knew they were serious because they came in winter."

Most of the time the boys from Washington didn't come here in winter, but his language is wonderful.

He says, "They came into the room and tried to persuade us into voting for it, failing to realize that 70% or 80% of us in that room lived on submarginal lands," including him, "and if we had sold it, they could very well be relocated.

How do you like that word?

Relocated to the more prosperous valley towns."

Aiken took umbrage at the notion that just because you were a poor farmer in the hills of Vermont, you were somehow retarded socially, economically.

He talks about small town and community and the lights of his, gee, I'm trying, his neighbors twinkling across the valley, and he would sound like a tea party extremist right now, but of course he was so civil and so right.

- [Dona] Vermont developed very quickly a kind of picturesque, quaint reputation as being the last Republican holdout against the New Deal.

- Vermont became sort of an iconic symbol for the nation of what it used to be, as cities grew and industrialization grew and suburbs grew.

Well, lo and behold, Vermont stuck in a time warp since the 1840s, Vermont just looked better and better and better.

- And I think that that perception played a big role in drawing writers and intellectuals to the state.

Not as tourists now, but as summer home people, or as second home people, or simply part-time subsistence farmers.

- Which box do you want to open first?

- [Daughter] Oh, we might as well open this one since.

- Okay, oh, it's going to be difficult.

- [Daughter] Why?

- Well, there's so many layers.

- [Daughter] Mom, that's too heavy for you.

Your back's gonna go.

- It's my psyche that will go.

Corn planting time.

- [Daughter] Oh, let me get that, yeah, just hold that.

- That's 1939.

- It was apple blossom time and he was plowing unless he was seeding, maybe he was seeding.

Sometimes it was hay, sometimes it was oat, sometimes it was corn, and it was all bare, and he was plowing back and forth.

- Oh, this is the best.

Your father shearing sheep.

- Your father fits that framework exactly in the 1930s of urban artists deciding that their best interest would be served by living on farms, particularly on Vermont farms, which somehow had an imaginative aura of a place where you could combine, say, writing with farming.

You know, he didn't move to Nebraska.

- He would dress in corduroy pants, tucked into high boots, knee boots.

Do you remember that?

And a corduroy or a wool shirt with an ascot at the neck.

That was not his working in the woods attire.

That was his going out to cocktail party attire.

- [Daughter] No, really?

- Yeah, indeed, it was.

- Thoreau is the ultimate pre-history of this, because your father, I know, read "Walden."

He probably read it in high school.

- [Daughter] He never farmed with a tractor?

- Never farmed with a tractor, with horses and wagons.

- [Nicholas] Oh, you're getting the background.

- I'm getting the farm.

- [Nicholas] What's left of it.

Not much is left of it.

- [Daughter] Do you regret it?

- No, no I led a very good life.

I didn't lead the kind of life I expected I was gonna lead.

- This is Joe Jacobson, your father's father with his three sons on a Sunday morning on Park Avenue, New York City.

- We were pretty well off.

My father was well off, he was a good businessman, and he'd made a lot of money, and when I was little, I was sort of intrigued by the shirt business, and I used to go down on Saturdays and work in the office.

He used to say he could make more money on Wall Street in an afternoon than he could make in a shirt business in a year, yet he was terribly, terribly unhappy, and when I saw how unhappy he was, I decided that I was never going to try to make money.

And when I was up here farming, he and the chauffeur came up in the 16 cylinder Cadillac, which was enormous, and they came up Bragg Hill Road.

You know where the side road is?

It's called Godard Lane.

16 cylinder Cadillac wouldn't fit on it, so they parked it on the side of the road.

I was living in an old barn that has since fallen down, and I looked up and there was a chauffeur and my father walking over the field to get me.

They hadn't said they were coming up or anything, and I had hayed that field, and I was living there.

- I'm going somewhere and I'm gonna do something different because I can't live my life according to your rules, and it was a secession, it was a personal secession out of one cultural state of affairs into another.

- My father said, "You're disgracing us, you're disgracing us," and your grandmother made such a fuss that I was a farmer and I shouldn't be a farmer.

I loved her because she was my mother, but I did not like her.

Her chief interest was hedonism.

She entertained herself.

- All these back to the land impulses are basically about people who feel spiritually dead or attacked by the mainstream culture.

- And when my father died and he left me with a certain amount of money, it wasn't exorbitant, you know, it was no great fortune, but in those days you could live on it, and I decided that as long as I could live on it, that's all I was gonna do, so I took the money and I bought the farm.

It was enough to pay for the farm.

- [Daughter] How much?

- $4,000.

And then, of course, I put another $4,000 into the house because there was no electricity in the house, and here we are.

- There were still so many poor rural people.

There were people without teeth.

There were people who looked under fed.

There were so many tar paper shacks.

It was really a very impoverished place and people could buy land very cheaply.

- Who's gonna come and take up these places?

Well, ah, well these metropolitan people and they're very, very cosmopolitan creatures - [Daughter] Now who's doing the haying?

- The Luces are haying, Mike Luce and his sons Matthew and Michael.

- Vermonters basically, old time Vermonters, were essentially, and now, dammit, don't you edit this, were essentially lazy people because they knew what real work is like.

- Yeah, like last night I came up here a little after seven and I started baling some of this.

- Real work is not fun.

Real work is something you'd rather not do, but you have to, that's what work is.

- No holidays, no sick days.

Grin and bear it and go, but if you can get family that'll come and help you, then you're kind of blessed.

But you gotta be able to get along with 'em too, you know?

- But these guys had to work to survive and so play farming is not work.

- Well, I worked, I worked very, very hard, all my life, I worked very hard, but I didn't make any money at it.

- He would go down to New York to try to sell his plays, but he would take suitcases full of overripe string beans.

I mean, he was trying to be a farmer and be a writer.

- It's mainly having the space where people can do unorthodox things and have their creativity.

You know, that's why people still come to Vermont - And that there's a community here which is going to value the kind of work that an artist does.

A poet, a painter, a filmmaker, a dancer.

- When we moved up to Vermont, the rural scene was very interesting to me.

Very different.

I was really a city person with the camera focusing on buildings, people, street scenes, and one Easter we just got in our old Tin Lizzie car, which luckily made it up there, and we went to the Nearings.

The Nearings came in 1932.

They were vegetarians, they were pacifists.

Those folks tended to see the salvation of Vermont in bringing more people like them to the state.

- They were very cordial.

We came, we stayed overnight, and had breakfast and supper with them in their particular way of eating, you know, with their vegetables in a wooden bowl.

- Scott was very famous going back to the first World War as a anti-war debater, pamphleteer.

In fact, that's what the federal government took him to court for.

It was a book called "The Great Madness," saying that he was being seditious against the United States of America in the draft.

- All this interested me immensely, not only the Nearings, but all the people that lived up the road, and so the camera was an important instrument in my way of thinking.

- She'd just do a whole wall of stacked up photographs right over each other, so it was just like, bang all these photos together and you're like trying to see what it is.

- This one right here is Helen in her classic kind of dramatic pose and Scott smiling, which they say, "How did you get a picture of Scott smiling?"

'Cause he's always so serious, you know.

- Scott and Helen basically started coming up to Vermont in 1932.

By 1934, '35, between Scott and Helen, they had purchased over 900 acres and their first idea was they're gonna make money selling pulp logs, and in the end, they found out about maple syrup and developed a business from there.

- We had so much syrup, we made 6, 7, 800 gallons a year, and the last year I boiled, I took off a little over a thousand gallons.

It was the hardest work that Scott and I had ever done, and the most enjoyable.

- Scott would go out on his lecture tours, but what was interesting was that afterwards, people would come up and say, "Well this is very interesting, but what are your practical answers to these problems and questions that you're bringing up?"

And he would say, "Well, what we're doing up in Vermont might be of interest to you.

Come up and visit."

And people would.

- Young couples that settled there had young children, and Scott would go out in the garden and there would be sweet peas next to his vegetables and he'd pick bouquets for the kids.

So, you know, it's an aspect of Scott that's kind of tender and sweet compared to his very seriousness.

- You gotta remember, they came up at the height 1931, 19 32.

It's the height of the depression.

Roosevelt's not in yet.

You have Hoovervilles across the United States.

Things are looking incredibly dire.

And a lot of the leftists, and Scott was part of that leftist milieu, were believing that this was the collapse of the capitalist system.

and there was an idea of going back to the land.

Scott even calls it, it was our cyclone cellar waiting out the final collapse of western civilization, and when that had finally all collapsed, there would be these small nodes of community.

- Every year we would take a family trip to visit them, actually a couple times a year in the summer, and then during sugaring at some point, because I remember being there while they were collecting sap or firing up the big evaporator because they made serious maple syrup.

That was their cash crop.

- It was not known whether the French taught the Indians or the Indians taught the French how to make maple sugar, and from the historic records I could find that the Indians taught the French.

- The first book they wrote together was "The Maple Sugar Book."

Obviously Scott's going to do the section on the financial end, how to build the business up, but Helen obviously has done all this historical research, so Helen's gonna take care of writing the history.

- And finally, in the end, we didn't know who had written which, although all the erudite parts were his and the simplistic parts were mine, but still, it was a mixed, it was a mixed book.

We wrote it that way together.

- The second book that they wrote and it came out in 1954, they self-published, was called "Living the Good Life."

It is a very practical step-by-step plan of what you have to do to be successful as a homesteader.

- Their life was so orderly, Scott and Helen's, there was these simple rules by which they lived.

When you were there, there were more hours in the day and you got more things done, and yet there was time in the evening for, you know, while you were shelling peas or putting up rose hips or whatever, to ask questions or to read aloud.

They would read aloud.

- Disciplined life, people would come and ask them, "Well, what do you do for fun?"

and Scott would just laugh and say, "Look, I go out and weed my onions."

- They weren't strict and like, you have to do this, but simply, this is how, you know, we do it.

Four hours of bread labor, four hours of social, you know, work with other people, and then four hours of creative sort of solitary work.

- This is where they would have their Monday night meetings.

Scott would talk, and what's really beautiful is that of course is just the view right up onto Stratton there, and there used to be a wall, and this was Helen's bedroom, and even when they traveled, they always had separate hotel rooms.

- It was very long winters, and I heard one year that there was wife swapping.

- Free love.

It was part of the radicality of the group, and Scott didn't talk about it a lot, but he was part of the mix.

He was part of the experimentation, let's put it that way.

- [Interviewer] And what about Helen?

- Helen would've been very happy being one-on-one with him, and it was very tough on her.

There was a point where Helen was getting on and she really did want to have children, and Scott said, "Fine, find yourself a nice young man, get married, settle down, and have children," and she's, "No, I want to be with you."

And he's like, "I have gone through the householding phase of my life.

I wasn't very successful and I'm not repeating the experiment," and so she stayed with him.

- They would see me with my camera and I didn't wait until they got themselves posed.

I would just take it very quickly.

- There's this one here of a woman picking raspberries in her pearls.

That's Helen Nearing's mother.

- There was this whole New York, urban New York element to the thing, which was very foreign to somebody like my mother who was brought up in Vermont.

- I think she found it very difficult.

I think the romance really wore thin when you had four kids.

- The Nearings were in a lot of ways financially stable and a lot of these younger couples came in and they were really living by their bootstrings.

- I think there was an element of hypocrisy there.

They had much more money than anybody else.

They really did not live on what they made.

- Well, as far as I'm concerned, I prefer to have nothing to do with a credit account.

We don't owe anybody a nickel.

We prefer to pay as we go.

- The Nearings always said, "Pay as you go."

The one thing they didn't address was where do you get the money to start it?

Scott came up to Vermont around the time he was 50.

At that point, he had been paying money on four insurance annuities, which at age 50 started paying him back for the rest of his life.

Scott spoke to a lot of working men's organizations, unions, but he really felt that the people who were in a, quote, "more financially privileged position" were the ones that could actually start developing new social structures, and even going back to say 1913, 1914, Scott was saying that really the back to the land movement is a middle class movement.

It's not a working class movement.

- This was like the center of our community and it's such a ramshackle place, and this isn't 20 years later, this is then, you know, this was what it looked like, and we used it and danced in it and had potluck suppers in it.

- Those photographs reminds them of a time that is no more.

- The roads haven't been paved yet, the Stratton Resort has not been developed yet.

It's a Vermont subsistence hard scrabble community, and so there was a mingling of two very different groups of people, - But people on the road were frightened of the Nearings.

They said they were communists or they were anti-American, and then there was a rumor that Scott had arms somewhere up in the hills, you know, that he was a Russian spy or he had affiliations.

This is what they thought.

- My father kept all the papers from that era, and so we'll start with the bottom.

Yeah, here's the real old stuff.

The Red Scare 1950s.

That was probably the most memorable time in all the time my father was here as a newspaper editor.

- Reds Infest Bethel Randolph Center, McCarthy charges.

- My father always liked to use an active verb in the headline if he could.

Infest was a good one.

- There was somebody who lived in Bethel named Lucille Miller, taking the names of everybody.

It says here in the White River Valley Herald, 1950, says, "Go to Randolph Center and take out your butterfly net.

The place is crawling with reds."

She was feeding information to not only Westbrook Pegler who wrote for the Hearst papers, but other Hearst reporters.

- There were in fact a couple of people who had been quote, "admitted communists" who had bought summer places in Randolph Center.

There were some other people who were from the Louisville side in Bethel, one of whom had sold his house to somebody who may or may not have been a communist, and most people thought it was nonsense, but they didn't necessarily dare to say so, and my dad took a very strong stand in saying that what was going on was not fact-based and it was very bad for the community.

- What was almost a reign of terror in this country when people were terrified to stand up to Joseph McCarthy with reputations being ruined of people acting almost like they were in a totalitarian nation.

How do I spy on my neighbor?

How do I point the finger at my neighbor?

Because they may have thought something or read something or said something that disagrees with the norm.

- This was the period when things were tightening up and people were beginning to be suspicious of other people, and the taxi driver informed on your father.

- What do you mean he informed?

- He called the FBI and said your father was a dangerous radical.

- I was minding my own business, fixing the fence because it was early in the spring and the cattle weren't out yet and they flashed their badges - And he had had this history in Vermont before I came of some sort of Marxist study group.

- I was questioned by them several times.

Once I was working in the library all day, I guess I was doing research and I came out of the library and they were waiting there for me and hit me with a subpoena.

Yeah, the House Un-American Activities Committee, but that was the New Hampshire Un-American committee.

Vermont didn't have one.

They didn't think they could catch any communists.

It wasn't worth spending money on, but New Hampshire did.

- One interesting difference during this period between Vermont and New Hampshire was that New Hampshire Attorney General Louis Wyman saw himself as kind of a junior Joe McCarthy, rooting out communist influence, so he created a state committee to look into communist infiltration in New Hampshire.

- I think Vermont first and foremost has a sense of integrity.

People by and large know when to mind their own business.

I look back in the Senate and a senator I admire is Ralph Flanders.

Ralph Flanders from Vermont was the man who introduced the motion of censure, Joseph McCarthy.

- The senator from Wisconsin goes into his campaign against communism within and what does he come up with?

He comes up with the scalp of a pink army dentist.

- Ralph Flanders was about as rock ribbed a Vermonter as you are liable to get.

He was an industrialist from Springfield, very well respected, but McCarthy's unfair accusations really riled him.

- I think if we have lost our sense of proportion and our sense of balance.

- None of the big state senators, nobody else had the courage to stand up.

He was the same party as Senator McCarthy, both Republicans.

- It was ironic that it took people from McCarthy's own party, and we should not forget to mention Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, to be the ones to say, "This can't go on anymore."

- So why was I a communist?

It seemed the logical answer to capitalist exploitation.

And now of course you'll know that it isn't just capitalist exploitation, it's human exploitation.

The trouble with the communist party was that they posited that people could be good.

Robert Frost always used to say, he used to say it to me, "You can't change human nature."

- Nature is always more or less cruel and the woods are all killing each other anyway.

That's where the expression came from a place in the sun, a tree wanting a place in the sun that it can't get.

- I hoped that the world would be attracted to my door, but it didn't.

If you make a better mouse trap, Emerson said, "The world will beat attracted, or even if you live in the middle of the wilderness."

But I found out that that was not so, not to me anyway, I didn't build a better mousetrap.

- Whose woods these are, I think I know.

His house is in the village, though.

He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year.

Gives his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sounds, the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep.

- So then in, when was it?

The late eighties, we couldn't pay the taxes anymore and we sold our woodlot.

Then we divided three 30 acre lots and sold them to a heart surgeon, to state rep Margaret Cheney and her new husband Peter Welch, and then the third lot we sold to a college president and none of them do any sort of farming whatsoever except for Peter Welch who at least cuts brush and burns it.

- I'm a full service congressman.

Burn piles, social security help, whatever you need.

- But now for the past 10 years or so, young people are beginning to farm again and they're raising pigs and goats and doing organic dairy and vegetables, so there's this whole new growth and it's very exciting.

It's wonderful.

- God could a kid have ever had a better world to grow up in?

I mean, no one posted the land.

We wandered the hills and the valleys.

Here is this green, relatively untouched little northern paradise, and I believe that word's as close to it as you're gonna get.

(soft acoustic music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) ♪ I'll tell you if you ask me ♪ About the payroll robbery ♪ Two clerks were shot in the shoe factory ♪ ♪ On the streets of Old Brain Tree ♪ ♪ I'll tell you the prosecutor's names ♪ ♪ Cadman, Adams, Williams, Kane ♪ ♪ And them and the judge were the best of friends ♪ ♪ Did more tricks than circus clowns ♪ ♪ Two men's lives are gone ♪ Sacco and Vanzetti are gone (soft music) ♪ Lord have mercy on my mind ♪ Mercy on my memory ♪ I'm lying 'neath the same Virginia sky ♪ ♪ Where she lay 'side me, biding time ♪ ♪ Trying to buy me ♪ Every night when the night was long ♪ ♪ She was clinging to me ♪ Told me twice that her love was strong ♪ ♪ Stronger than your love and all the love songs ♪ ♪ She was singing to me ♪ Oh ♪ Shenando ♪ 'Cross the rolling water ♪ Oh ♪ Shenando ♪ Where's your restless memory