Thomas Naylor, a retired Duke economics professor, ascended
the podium at an anti-war rally at Johnson State College in Johnson,
Vermont, shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq. His speech was filled with
the usual leftist rhetoric about the evils of the Bush administration. His
solution, however, was far from traditional. It was an idea that he had been
developing for about ten years, but had never spoken about in public. “They
were shocked, bug-eyed,” he tells me, reflecting on the speech. His idea was
the peaceful dissolution of empire, beginning with the secession of Vermont from the United States of America.
Five years later, 11.5 percent of Vermonters agree with him,
according to the 2008 poll conducted by the University of Vermont's
Center for Rural Studies. One out of ten might not seem overwhelming, but
Naylor is quick to point out that only about 25 percent of Americans supported
secession from England.
In the face of much derision and mockery, Naylor has remained resolute that his
idea is possible. His organization, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), has been
joined by frustrated ’60s activists, bohemian radicals, organic yak farmers,
bartenders, college professors, and possibilitarianist puppeteers, all saying
the same thing: Vermont would be better on its own.
While many may be looking to the election of Barack Obama to
right eight years of wrongs, Naylor and his supporters see the new president’s
hope-mongering as just the latest palliative to try to convince Americans that they
have a system worth saving; in the face of economic meltdown, imperialist
foreign policy, and environmental catastrophe, the federal government is not
just in need of reform--it is in need of destruction. But while Naylor may be
the founder of modern Vermont
secessionism, a new generation of Obama-esque activists is threatening to take
over his separatist movement--and actually accomplish something.
A southerner by birth,
Thomas Naylor fled for Vermont from Virginia after having trouble convincing his Polish wife
to stay in America following
a trip across Europe. “We had to find a proxy
for an alpine village in the U.S.,”
he says.
They found Charlotte, Vermont, about 20 minutes south from Burlington. The inside of his house is oddly
nice for someone whose job title seems to be “secessionist.” In a sunken den,
there are two soft leather chairs next to a shiny black piano, a Thai painting,
and a copy of James Howard Kunstler’s apocalyptic World Made By Hand on the coffee table. His soft, cracking voice
almost masks the fiery manifestoes he espouses. Long white hair, round glasses,
and revolutionary rhetoric bring to mind a Ralph Lauren-wearing Ben Franklin.
Vermont, he tells me over a
bitter but delicious brandy Manhattan,
“is like a tiny foreign country.” It is the state that brings us not only the peerless
Shelburne Farms cheddar, but also the red-faced rants of Howard Dean. In Vermont, you can pick up
a shotgun without a waiting period on your way to entering into a civil union
with your gay lover. The capital, Montpelier,
is the only state capital without a McDonald’s. This is where the libertarian
right of fifth-generation dairy farmers meets the libertarian left of
back-to-the-earth hippies that moved here sometime after the 1960s. The
resultant mix harbors a potent distrust in the federal government. There’s a
reason Bill O’Reilly calls Vermont
a “hopeless, hopeless state.”
Naylor likes to remind skeptics that Vermont was one of four states to begin its
life as an independent republic, from 1777 to 1791. Before it became the 14th
star on the American flag, it was the territory
of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain
boys, the alternately famous and infamous paramilitary group that formed the
army of the first Vermont
Republic. The Second Vermont
Republic uses their green
flag as its own.
On that bright, sunny morning when Vermont actually secedes, Naylor imagines it
will happen similarly to the way the eleven southern states did before the
Civil War. The first step is to convince the legislature to call a statewide
convention to consider the articles of Vermont’s
secession. In order to get the national and international credibility they
want, they’ll need at least a two-thirds majority, Naylor estimates. With the
articles signed by the state legislature, they’d take them down to DC and
present them to any member of the federal government that would accept them.
“At that point,” Naylor says, “we pray a lot.”
One of the first goals of an independent Vermont
would be to get as recognized by as many embassies as possible--ensuring that
any kind of military action on the part of the United States would come at a
severe cost to their international reputation. Armed conflict would spell
instantaneous defeat for Vermont, but the
secessionists are banking on the absurdity of the David-and-Goliath situation
to stay the United States’
heavy hand. A much more likely retaliation would likely be in the form of
economic sanctions, cutting Vermont
off from the economy that it depends on. “Thank God for Canada,” is
Naylor’s reply.
Very little escapes Naylor’s savage tongue: For example, he
has gone on record calling Vermont
senator Patrick Leahy a “world-class prostitute.” Naylor’s
drunk-with-a-broken-bottle style of public relations may be abrasive, but it
certainly makes a splash--Fox News, the Washington
Post and The New York Times have
all taken notice. Vermonters are coming around to the cause as well--every
single person I talked to in Burlington
had heard of the secessionists, and about 125 people attended their secession
convention just three days after the presidential election.
But Naylor’s rag-tag
coalition began to crumble last year when a local blogger discovered that
two members of SVR’s advisory board were affiliated with of the neo-
confederate League of the South (LOS), which has been pushing a rightist brand
of separatism for nearly 14 years. LOS claims not to be racist, but the
Southern Poverty Law Center has them on their watch list for hate groups.
Founder and president J. Michael Hill has been quoted as saying, “Let us not
flinch when our enemies call us, 'Racists;' rather, just reply with, 'So,
what's your point?'”
When news broke about SVR's connection to LOS, many Vermont secessionists
started slowly backing away. Naylor, however, refused to condemn the group.
“After that,” says Professor Gary Flomenhoft, one of the University of Vermont’s
most vocal supporters of seccession, “Thomas [Naylor] got rid of anyone who
didn’t agree with him.”
Most gravitated toward Rob Williams, the editor of
secessionist newspaper Vermont Commons,
a sister organization of SVR. At 40, Williams is the youngest leading
secessionist. His North Face jackets, ribbed hats, and sunglasses make him look
as if he’s ready to ski off at any moment. He believes himself to be Vermont’s first yak
farmer on modern record. He sees secession a little differently than Naylor. “Independence, broadly
defined,” he says, is the idea behind Vermont
Commons, which currently circulates around 12,000 copies.
His paper is less focused on taking on all comers than they
are on painting a picture of what an independent Vermont could be capable of. They are not
only committed to political secession, but also to energy independence,
sustainable agriculture, and re-localization of the economy. “I would think
people are more motivated to join something out of a sense of hope,” Williams says.
Vermont
is already a national leader in localization. Town meetings are a fixture in
cities across the state. The Intervale, a cooperative of 13 farms in the Burlington area, has
reclaimed 350 acres for organic production and grows about 550,000 pounds of
fresh produce annually. The Vermont Public Service Board, which manages all of Vermont's utilities, recently announced plans to build 16
new wind turbines around Sheffield, which will
be able to power 15,000 homes.
Building on this movement, Vermont Commons could be called, “Secession we can believe in.”
Among the articles in the winter 2008 issue are “Town Meeting: A Space for
Communal Liberty,” “Vermont’s
Energy Future: 10 reasons for hope,” and “Localvore Living.” Ron Miller, an
instructor of American History at Champlain
College, likes their
focus on building local systems partially because it can co-exist with his
staunch support for Barack Obama. He's inspired by the idea of secession, but
he's just not ready to give up on America quite yet. "Obama
shows that there's a chance here," he says.
Williams doesn't see himself in direct confrontation with
Naylor's hard line--"People have different strategies," he says.
"Live and let live." Naylor is characteristically less understanding,
accusing Williams of trying to “lull people into Utopia.” “Secession,” he
reminds people whenever he gets the chance, “is a radical act of rebellion,
driven by anger and fear.”
The remnants of
Naylor’s youth contingent are in a beer-littered house party at the University of Vermont, where Conor Casey ’09 is
wearing a green t-shirt with a picture of a cow in between the words "Free
Vermont." "We need the peaceful dissolution of U.S.
empire," he tells me, quoting Naylor. Casey has been a member of SVR since
he was a freshman. His coffee table is covered in unopened envelopes scrawled
with green marker in Naylor's handwriting. They contain an assortment of his
essays, on topics including peak oil, the economic crisis, commodity culture,
and the U.S.
government’s loss of moral authority. But Casey doesn’t read them much anymore.
He was recently surprised to find out that he was actually a member of SVR’s
advisory board. At a Naylor speech I attended with Casey, he ducked out early
for a hockey game. In light of recent events, he's given up on Naylor's harsh
worldview: "I'm done with SVR as of Obama's election," he says.
Naylor may have laid the intellectual groundwork for Vermont secessionism,
but the movement has gotten away from his one-man think tank. Numbers and
historical deconstruction don’t seem to be enough to inspire a mass movement,
and anger and fear aren’t bringing Vermont
any closer to secession. The next generation of separatists is banking on a
more hopeful vision. Naylor would be repulsed by the comparison, but it’s the
ethos that propelled Obama to victory.
In the same poll where 11.5 percent of Vermonters said they
supported secession, 77.1 percent said they thought the U.S government had lost
its moral authority, and 48.7 percent said they thought that the U.S.
government had become either politically, economically, militarily, or
environmentally unsustainable. They're not an anomaly: According to a Zogby
poll conducted in July, one out of five U.S. adults believes that any state
has the right to peaceably secede from the union. Eighteen percent "would
support a secessionist movement in my state."
Williams and his supporters are pushing back against that
fatalism. While Naylor remains married to secessionism as an end in itself,
Williams sees it as just the next logical step: As we move towards energy independence,
food independence, and economic independence, why not political independence as
well? For Williams, the Wall Street crash, more than Obama's election, has
emphasized the need for changing the way communities are organized. "The
bottom line is that re-localization is the watchword," he says.
There’s an unspoken question that lies beneath every debate
over different ways of attracting new supporters, economic strategies, the
possible education system of a free Vermont,
the historical imperative to revolution, or whatever else one can find to fill
a symposium: Is Vermont ever actually going to secede?
Williams just smiles when confronted with the implausibility
of seccession. “People laugh and ask, ‘Have you seceded yet?’” he says. “This
is about changing hearts and minds.”
David Thier is a
writer based in New Haven, Connecticut.
By David Thier