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

1 Political Baptism

Chapter 1 Political Baptism P hilip Hoff arrived in Vermont in June 1951 with his pregnant wife, Joan, his young daughter, Susan, and all their family possessions squeezed into a two-door Dodge coupe, including a washing machine that was lashed into the trunk. In terms of mileage, it wasn’t a long trip. His hometown of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, was barely twenty miles south of Brattleboro. But he had come by a circuitous route that had taken him first to Williams College, then into the navy’s submarine service in the Pacific during World War II, and then through Cornell Law School. He had driven east from Ithaca to Burlington, where he had been offered a job with the law firm of Black & Wilson. Boone Wilson, himself a graduate of Cornell, had contacted a faculty member about his need for another associate and then had phoned Hoff just as he was about to be interviewed for another job. It was a phone call that, in ways neither of them could have imagined at the time, would have an enormous and long-lasting impact on the state. Vermont was still a bastion of Republicanism in 1951, and politically ambitious newcomers almost invariably joined the Republican Party. Boone Wilson, Hoff’s new boss, himself was a Republican and was active in local Republican politics. Hoff’s decision to identify as a Democrat was a rare exception, and it was a break with his family history as well. Many years later, when asked why he had done so, he facetiously suggested that it probably was because his parents, Olaf Hoff Jr. and Agnes Henderson Hoff, had been such rock-ribbed Republicans. His move to the Democrats may in fact have been at least partly a gesture of independence . But he also said, “I came out of World War II convinced that our country was going to go through tumultuous change . . . [and] I wasn’t sure the Republican Party could deal with these changes. I wasn’t sure the Democrats could either, but I thought they were the best bet.” Philip Henderson Hoff was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1924. The family home was in nearby Turners Falls, but Greenfield was where the regional hospital was located. He was the third of four 14 philip hoff children, the younger brother of Dagny and Olaf and the older brother of Foster. He grew up in a politically activist family. Both parents served on the Turners Falls Republican town committee. His father also was a member of the Republican state committee and served three terms in the Massachusetts General Court, the state’s legislature. Both parents had graduated from Cornell University in 1913, and after his father’s service as a lieutenant in World War I, they had moved to Turners Falls, where Olaf Hoff Sr., a Norwegian-born, highly successful engineer, had helped provide the financial backing that Olaf Hoff Jr. needed to set up a castings factory. In addition to running a household with three sons and a daughter, Agnes was a commentator on local radio and a newspaper stringer for the Greenfield Recorder Gazette. Turners Falls was a small blue-collar town (Hoff later would compare it to Winooski in size, character, and ethnic mix), with streets of nineteenth-century brick row houses that had been built to house the cotton, cutlery, and paper mill workers. Located at a steep waterfall on the Connecticut River, it had been named for Captain William Turner, who in 1676, during King Philip’s War, had led about 15o men and boys in an attack on a sleeping Indian encampment there, killing not only the warriors but also many women and children. Turner’s men had butchered the Native Americans—maybe as many as two hundred of them— while most were still in their wigwams, the attackers themselves initially suffering only one casualty. But the attack had alerted other nearby Indians , who came rushing to the site and managed to kill at least forty of the attackers, including Turner himself, during what became a wildly disorganized and panicky retreat. All four of the Hoff children attended Turners Falls public schools, where—despite the “Turners Falls Massacre,” as it was called in the history books—the high school sports teams were known as the Indians. During the Great Depression of the ’3os, Olaf was forced to close his factory and become an insurance salesman. His son said that while selling insurance provided a decent living...