Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State

Epilogue

Epilogue N o individual deserves more credit (or in the view of political rivals more blame) for the transformation of Vermont than Philip Hoff. Many of the changes would have occurred eventually, but they wouldn’t have been as rapid and thus not as dramatic. In the years before Hoff, Vermont had been seen as a small and sleepy rural state where change came about only slowly and grudgingly. In the years during and after Hoff’s time as governor, Vermont became known for social ferment and rapid change, and for cutting-edge initiatives in the areas of social policy and the environment. Far more than most of his predecessors, Hoff was an activist governor, pushing new ideas, concepts, and programs and challenging the idea that Vermont governors should be caretakers in the way that Arthur, Emerson, Johnson, Stafford, and Keyser had been. As Bill Kearns put it, “He wasn’t afraid of the past.” Hoff very much believed that government was and should be the primary force in bringing about social change, saying, “Every significant decision of our time is going to be made in the governmental arena.” He was quick to support efforts to modernize government operations that he considered obsolete and inefficient. At times he was incautious, as was seen when he raced in to support the Kerner Commission report while President Johnson was trying to bury it and many other governors were trying to ignore it. And even his wife, Joan, reprimanded him for his hectic pace, once complaining that “we hardly get used to one idea when you throw another at us. It’s more than we can take.” But his influence on the state was profound and long-lasting. At the time he left office in January 1969, the Rutland Herald predicted that “it will be impossible to turn back the clock to the political era of caretaker governors.” And in the four decades after Hoff left office, Vermont in fact had governors who were considered liberal, centrist, and conservative , but none of whom tried to retreat into a caretaker role. Even the most conservative of them, Deane Davis, oversaw aggressive state involvement in restricting developments that threatened the water quality, 180 philip hoff soil erosion, aesthetics, or scenic beauty of an area, or that threatened to impose an undue burden on its schools. Hoff himself left office believing that his six years as an activist governor had finally “got Vermont off the dime.” Bill Kearns put it more bluntly, saying that Hoff had “picked up the state by the back of the neck and gave it a damned good, much needed shaking.” One of the key factors that allowed Hoff to do what he did was unprecedented population growth. The state grew by 54,ooo residents during the ’6os, and those newcomers tended not to be locked into traditional Republican ways. As early as 1952, well before this influx of newcomers, Democrats were gaining voters, as the success of the Robert Larrow and Bernard Leddy campaigns had shown. Hoff’s victory in 1962 had come about with the help of the Vermont Independent Party, which allowed Republicans to vote for Hoff without having to do it on the Democratic line, since there still were many Vermonters who simply couldn’t bring themselves to vote Democratic. Keyser, as was noted earlier, in fact received more votes on the Republican line than Hoff did on the Democratic line, and it was the Vermont Independent Party votes that pushed Hoff over the top. But by 1964, Vermonters not only were electing a Democrat as governor but supporting a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since the Republican Party had been founded in 1854. They also were electing an entire state Democratic ticket of lieutenant governor, treasurer, auditor, attorney general, and secretary of state. Hoff had been Vermont’s first Democratic governor in 1o9 years, but in the 4o years that followed him, three other Democratic governors would serve for a total of 22 years. Hoff never had a Democratic majority in the legislature and never had a totally free hand in running state agencies. The Senate and House remained safely Republican all through the Hoff years. But the newcomers helped make the state much more culturally and politically diverse and helped elect people of both parties who were less resistant to change. They didn’t transform Vermont into a Democratic stronghold (voters gave majorities to Republican presidential candidates from 1968 through 1988), but they did...