BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) _ From its origins as an independent republic to its modern-day adoption of civil unions for gay couples, Vermont has carved its own path.
"As a state it is our policy to zig when the others zag," says historian Paul Gillies.
On Thursday, Sen. James Jeffords cited Vermont's tradition of doing its own thing as he left the Republican Party and declared himself an independent.
"Independence is the Vermont way," he said.
And history backs him up.
"Independence is our middle name," says Gillies, starting with the 14 years in the 1700s in which Vermont was an independent republic, coining its own currency, establishing its own post offices and leaving George Washington to wonder if he would have to send troops into Vermont to regain the territory for New York.
"Vermonters and Americans everywhere need to understand that Vermont is unlike the rest of the nation," wrote Charles Morrissey in his history of the state.
Its leaders have marched to a different drummer. Like Matthew Lyon, who was elected to Congress in 1796 and then jailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts for criticizing President John Adams. Vermonters continued to re-elect Lyon even while he was jailed.
In making his announcement Thursday, Jeffords listed some of his Vermont heroes: leaders like Ralph Flanders, the first senator in the 1950s to stand up on the Senate floor and condemn McCarthyism, and George Aiken, who served 34 years in the Senate and was once described as "neither hawk nor dove but a wise old owl."
Aiken sent GOP leaders sputtering in the 1930s when he delivered this line in a nationally broadcast speech at the Republican Party's Lincoln Day dinner in New York: "The greatest praise I can give Lincoln today is to say that he would be ashamed of his party's leadership today."
Vermont was once the most Republican state in the nation. For more than a century _ from the early 1850s to the late 1950s _ only Republicans were elected here. Some years in that century found Vermont nearly alone in its support of Republicans. In 1912 only Vermont and Utah supported the presidential bid of William Howard Taft; in 1936 Vermont and Maine were the only states to vote against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The bond between Vermont and the Republican Party was formed out of a dislike for slavery. "Our party was the party of Lincoln," Jeffords said as he detailed why he had spent his lifetime in the GOP.
Vermont's bond with the Republican Party eroded in the 1950s as a new wave of residents began moving into the state, carried in on the new interstate highways and attracted by the growing ski industry and the opening of new industry.
In 1958 the state elected a Democrat to Congress; in 1962 it elected a Democratic governor; in 1974, Patrick Leahy became the state's first Democratic U.S. senator.
The party labels meant little, though. The new leaders were still mavericks. Vermonters rewarded those who went their own way, giving strong support to the independent presidential campaigns of John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992.
Nowhere is that love for the maverick better shown than in the almost cult following of Rep. Bernard Sanders, a socialist who was elected to Congress as an independent in 1990.
Vermont is now considered the most Democratic state in the nation. With Jeffords' abandonment of the GOP, only one Republican holds statewide office, state Treasurer James Douglas.
The Republicans won control of the state House in last year's elections by feeding on discontent with the adoption a year ago of the law granting gays nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage.
In last year's campaign, Jeffords found himself out of step with the anti-civil unions forces. He refused to join them and went out of his way to endorse Republicans who had supported the civil unions law.
"The world is looking at Vermont today for the second time in two years," Gillies says. "The first being the civil unions and now Jim Jeffords shaking up the Senate. They must be wondering what is in the water up here."
(Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
APTV 05-24-01 1524MDT
