I have written about Vermont’s change from being one of the nation’s most Republican states to being one of the nation’s most Democratic states, and some of the answer lies in demographic changes in the state (Bernie Sanders is a New York City transplant, for instance) while some of the answer lies in change in political leadership and how Vermonters saw themselves. The old orthodoxy in Vermont can best be seen as a rugged Coolidge-like conservatism; one of the six senators to vote against Social Security was from Vermont, and the state had numerous conservative figures representing it in the early 20th century including William Dillingham, Redfield Proctor, and Frank Greene. The state was one of only two to not once vote for FDR. Today I will focus on a figure who has great responsibility in moving the state to other places, and that was a Republican named George Aiken (1892-1984).
Aiken in numerous ways challenged Republican orthodoxy in Vermont, and ultimately played an outsized role, along with Ernest W. Gibson Jr., in transforming the state party. He was part of a traditionally Republican Vermont family and like his parents, was a horticulturalist. He won his first election in 1920 to his town’s school board. In 1930, Aiken ran for the State House of Representatives and won. There he became known from the start as a maverick, as he fought private power companies and he quickly gained popularity. In 1933, despite the conservative establishment’s wishes, Aiken would be elected speaker. As speaker he was instrumental in the passage of the Poor Debtor Law, a protection for those who had trouble paying off their debts. His one term as speaker was a springboard to being elected lieutenant governor in 1934. That year was a challenging one for Republicans, even in “safe” territory such as Vermont. Senator Warren Austin, a staunch anti-New Dealer, for instance, came within three points of losing reelection that year.
Aiken’s term as lieutenant governor was yet another springboard for higher office, and in 1936 he was elected governor. As governor, he shifted the state of politics towards the center and supported some aspects of the New Deal while opposing others, such as flood control policy. Aiken was also a trust-buster, but also proved fiscally conservative enough to reduce the state’s debt. On the national level, he was dissatisfied with the standpat inclination of the national party, holding in a February 12, 1938 speech at the Waldorf Astoria for Lincoln’s birthday that, “To represent the people one must follow them. Lincoln did. The Republican national leadership today does not” (O’Connor).
The Senate
In 1940, Senator Ernest W. Gibson dies. Aiken appoints his son, Gibson Jr., with the understanding that his is a temporary spot as Aiken wants the Senate seat and in a special election, he wins with 61.6% of the vote. This will be his most challenging election.
Aiken starts his Senate career as a staunch non-interventionist, opposing Lend Lease and delivering his first Senate speech against it. He also opposes the extension of the peacetime draft, and arming merchant ships. Aiken is in truth quite a contrast from his fellow Vermonter, Warren Austin, an interventionist who opposed the New Deal. By 1945, however, he has gone down the Vandenberg road like Charles Tobey in neighboring New Hampshire and changed to internationalist. Aiken proves one of the most accommodating Republican senators to the new President Truman. In 1946, Aiken votes against the Case Labor Bill, which is vetoed by Truman, which he finds too harsh on labor. Starting in that year, he and Ernest W. Gibson Jr. start cultivating more moderate to liberal people in the GOP, and among their progeny included future Senators Robert Stafford and Jim Jeffords.
In the 80th Congress, he is among those who push back against Senator Robert Taft’s (R-Ohio) agenda on domestic issues. Aiken votes for tax reduction but then upholds Truman’s veto of it, and he supports the Taft-Hartley Act but is one of the few Republicans to oppose the Bulwinkle bill, which exempts railroad joint rate agreements from anti-trust laws if they were approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission. Aiken also backs the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. In 1950, he is one of the six Republican senators to join Margaret Chase Smith (R-Me.) in her “declaration of conscience” against the methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin but also votes for the anti-communist McCarran Internal Security Act, providing for registration of communist organizations with the Attorney General. In 1954, Aiken voted for the St. Lawrence Seaway, a project he had long supported despite much oppositon to it coming from the east coast, including from his Vermont colleague Ralph Flanders. That year, he opposed the Bricker Amendment, which if adopted would have added to the Constitution that treaties could not supersede the Constitution.
Although overall supportive of civil rights, Aiken sponsors with Senator Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.) a restrictive amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which strikes any implementation of the 14th Amendment from the bill. This is a change that although is backed by many conservatives, it is opposed by the Eisenhower Administration. It is one of two amendments, along with the jury trial amendment, that renders the law as little more than a base from which other civil rights laws are built from.
Aiken and the Politics of the Sixties
Senator Aiken votes against Kennedy’s public works program and votes in 1959, 1962, and 1964 against Medicare while backing job training programs, foreign aid legislation, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and guaranteeing credits to the USSR for grain purchases. He also supports the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the flagship legislation for President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Aiken also proves strongly supportive of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and consistently votes against weakening amendments. During this time, he has breakfast daily with Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), a practice one can hardly imagine would happen with Chuck Schumer and any Republican. Aiken was so personally popular that he barely had to spend money to win reelection. In 1962, he spent around $14. In his his final bid in 1968, he spent $17.09 to win both the Republican and Democratic nominations and to put himself on the ballot. His only opposition was in the primary from a conservative who derided Aiken as being supported by communists, but he wasn’t a serious threat and faced no opposition in the general election.
The Johnson Presidency
After the 1964 election, Aiken changes his mind on Medicare, and opposes deleting it from the Social Security Amendments in 1965. He backs rent subsidies and opposes repealing the Taft-Hartley Act. Aiken also votes for constitutional amendments on legislative reapportionment and school prayer. In 1965, he sponsors with Representative Bob Poage (D-Tex.) the Poage-Aiken Act, securing water and wastewater systems in rural regions. Aiken had throughout his career supported aid for rural areas.
A Vietnam “Owl”
Senator Aiken was one of the elder statesmen that President Johnson consulted with on the Vietnam War, and it was in 1966 that he allegedly dispensed his famous advice of “declare victory and get out”. What he actually said was, “The United States could well declare unilaterally … that we have ‘won’ in the sense that our armed forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam,” and that such a declaration “would herald the resumption of political warfare as the dominant theme in Vietnam. It may be a far-fetched proposal, but nothing else has worked” (Elder). Aiken himself would endorse “declare victory and get out” as the gist of his words.
Aiken was said to be an “owl” rather than a dove or a hawk on the Vietnam War, as he neither supported the “hawks” or “doves” 100%. He did vote in 1970 for the Cooper-Church Amendment blocking funds for deploying U.S. troops in Cambodia and in 1971 supported Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s (D-Mont.) proposal for a nine-month withdrawal from Vietnam contingent on POW releases. Aiken, however, opposed more extreme measures, such as the McGovern-Hatfield “End the War” Amendment in 1970, which would have required a ceasing of all operations in Vietnam by December 31, 1970, contingent on POW releases.
The Final Years
Aiken maintained his independence during the Nixon Administration and in 1973, similar to his advice on Vietnam to LBJ, he said on Watergate to either impeach Nixon or get off his back. That year he was interviewed for a magazine called Vermont Life by a freelance journalist named Bernie Sanders, who at that point had been the socialist Liberty Union Party’s 1972 nominee for the Senate and the gubernatorial race. In this interview Aiken recounted how he had in 1909 met and shaken hands with President Taft, and Sanders brought to him the following topic, “There’s been some discussion lately about the state of Vermont being, in a sense, dominated or over-run by out of state interests. For example, a lot of the large Vermont industries are selling out to out-of-state corporations”, to which Aiken responded, “We do hate to see the old home-owned, home-grown industries fall into the hands of a giant corporation. But it’s something we can’t stop and it’s a worldwide situation. When you can’t stop it — you’ve got to guide it. I used to say that if you stand on the track and see a train coming down you can do one of two things. You can stand still and get run over, or you can hop on it and try to control it” (O’Connor).
By 1974, Aiken was 82 years old and ready to hang up his hat. That year, he votes against a federal death penalty, for a treaty on the prevention of genocide, for consumer protection legislation, for ending presidential monitoring of the economy, and against campaign finance legislation (although he voted to end debate on it). In his final speech, he made what he thought of as a “confession” as to his legislative behavior. He stated, “During the 34 years of my tenure as U.S. Senator, I have committed many sins. I have voted for measures which I felt were wrong, comforting myself with the excuse that the House of Representatives, the conference committee, or, if necessary, the chief occupant of the White House would make the proper corrections. At other times, I have voted for measures with which I did not agree for the purpose of preventing the approval of other measures which I felt would be worse” (Schlafly). Aiken was a moderate but also, he had seen himself as a pragmatist, and this speech appears to have been him having some regrets about his approach. His successor is currently himself serving in his last year in the Senate, the state’s first Democratic senator since the foundation of the Republican Party, Pat Leahy. Bernie Sanders would say about him in 2006, “I can’t say I have based my political work on his, but Aiken has always been a name and a person I’ve respected and admired. What I liked about him and what made him successful was his straightforwardness, his common sense, his down to earth-ness. He was clearly a man of the people” (O’Connor).
References
Aiken’s Costs Up — to $17. (1968, September 13). The New York Times.
Retrieved from
https://www.nytimes.com/1968/09/13/archives/aikens-costs-up-to-17.html
About George Aiken. The University of Vermont Professional and Continuing Education.
Retrieved from
https://learn.uvm.edu/aiken/about-george-aiken/
Elder, R. (1966, October 20). Aiken Suggests U.S. Say It Has Won the War. The New York Times, pg. 1.
O’Connor, K. (2016, January 17). The stories about Bernie: Following in someone else’s footsteps. VTDigger.
Retrieved from
https://vtdigger.org/2016/01/17/the-stories-about-bernie-following-in-someone-elses-footsteps/
Schlafly, P. (1975, February 4). Aiken’s Explanation. Phyllis Schlafly Report.
Retrieved from
Mad Politics: The Bizarre, Fascinating, and Unknown of American Political History 
Regarding Aiken’s willingness to agree to Clinton Anderson’s proposal to cosponsor the bipartisan amendment removing Title III from the CRA 1957 (LBJ pushed Anderson to co-sponsor the amendment with a Republican in order to gain additional GOP support that would ensure its passage), I wonder if his moderate progressive background had any motivations. The “old” progressive wing of the GOP from the 1910s-30s included prominent members (particularly William Borah and George Norris) who frequently opposed federal civil rights efforts more or less on Jeffersonian-esque states’ rights grounds. (of course, the “old” progressive wing of the GOP seemed to have died out drastically in the post-WWII era, when U.S. politics and metrics for left-right designations changed compared to previous decades) And it wasn’t exclusive to the GOP; the other weakening amendment to the CRA 1957, the jury trial amendment, was introduced by Western Democrat Joseph O’Mahoney, whose staunch populist/traditional progressive viewpoints contributed to an advocacy of jury trial rights against perceived government court infringements. According to Robert A. Caro in “Master of the Senate,” the economically populist, pro-labor, anti-Wall Street cause in the West traditionally resented the use of court action that ruled against strikes, and thus the idea of jury rights, as opposed to large amounts of power wielded by judges, carried a strong resonance.
As for the Eisenhower Administration’s positions, from what I read in Caro’s book, Ike himself expressed less of a concern over Title III and instead placed an emphasis on the importance of Title IV. (p. 927) The stronger opponent of the Anderson-Aiken amendment within the administration probably would’ve been Herbert Brownell, who was more pro-civil rights than Ike was.
That phenomenon is interesting, old progressive positions becoming overtime and in changing contexts “conservative”. Support, for instance, of a more aggressive stance on World War I was characteristic of Teddy Roosevelt and conservatives on the eastern seaboard. Rural progressives were against such a push, with William Jennings Bryan being one of the most prominent figures here. With FDR and his policies regarding World War II from 1939 to 1941, this changed. The non-interventionists were now the conservatives. There were a minority of conservatives on the Republican side in the east who pushed in favor of intervention, including James Wadsworth of New York, Warren Austin of Vermont, and Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. The shift on the right that didn’t come from former progressives were from staunchly anti-New Deal Representatives such as Dan Reed of New York, Robert F. Rich of Pennsylvania, and George Tinkham of Massachusetts, who saw intervention in World War II as part of Roosevelt’s continuing push to expand his power. Some Republican progressives who had been having second thoughts on the New Deal thought the same.
For Aiken, I would say no to his joining Clinton Anderson in Title III’s removal being a continuation of a Borah-Norris style progressivism given the regional differences of him from them, rather I think this was a manifestation of his propensity to compromise, possibly because he thought that the bill would have not passed at all if Title III had been kept. But then again, he voted against the jury trial amendment which also might have resulted in the bill’s defeat had it not been included.
Hmm, that does sound about right, and it’s interesting how Aiken’s pragmatism extended to supporting the effort to nix Title III though not Title IV. Had the jury trial amendment failed, the CRA 1957 would’ve probably been defeated. The Southern bloc agreed with Johnson’s proposals to not filibuster if the bill was sufficiently weakened to being toothless, so if the voting rights provisions in Part IV were not rendered meaningless by an expansion of jury “rights,” there certainly would’ve been a filibuster for which cloture would fail. Staunch Western progressives like O’Mahoney who forged a temporary alliance with Southern Democrats under the Hells Canyon/anti-civil rights agreement (engineered by Johnson, unsurprisingly) possibly would’ve ended up opposing passage efforts if the jury trial amendment failed under the Southern/Western agreement.
LT Makes A Lot Of Sense… Wild Bill Langer Used To Filibuster Judicial Nominations IN An Attempt To Put A North Dakotan ON The Court! Thanks From Dave IN TEXAS.
Langer was certainly quite a character; when as governor his removal from office was ordered by the state Supreme Court, he initially declared martial law in defiance and barricaded himself in the governor’s mansion. From what I gather so far, his colorful inclinations in some ways seem to be more of the norm rather than outlier for North Dakota politics in the pre-WWII era, which also elected mavericks Lynn Frazier and William Lemke to Congress.
Yeah Langer was a strange one, and possibly the most out of place senator after World War II. Although he was quite a domestic progressive, if one could be called an “isolationist” in the Senate, it was Langer. He was one of only three senators to oppose United States participation in the UN and liked to rail against Winston Churchill. Also, Langer BOTH strongly supported civil rights legislation and promoted a proposal for blacks to be paid to resettle to Liberia at the request of blacks who agreed with Marcus Garvey.