Did You Know? The Snelling Collection - Part 1

The VFC Archives is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England–past and present. This month, as we approach election season, we want to introduce you to an entire collection of interviews of folks who have served in the Vermont state government.

Between 2002 and 2004, on behalf of the Snelling Center for Government, VFC founder Jane Beck interviewed 35 current and former Vermont legislators to explore the culture of Vermont’s citizen legislature and the personal relationships from which this culture emerges. When VFC Staff described the collection, they wrote:

When you talk with each legislator about why they ran, how they learned the ropes, who were their mentors, who were the different personalities, what were the important issues, and what their tenure was like, you get a series of stories that put a personal face on the Legislature. You hear of friendship across party lines, the diverse points of view that fuel the discussion and compromise that molds good legislation, the humor relieving the tension, the time when one vote made a difference. 

The recordings created through the project became the basis of the audio documentary, Under the Golden Dome: The Stories Behind Vermont’s Citizen Legislature, a resource still used today to introduce new legislators to the history and lived experience of Vermont’s legislative body.

In this month's segment, we share stories with you from three legislators about democracy at its best.

Madeleine Kunin began her political career in Vermont in the House of Representatives, ultimately becoming the first woman to serve as governor of Vermont. In this clip, she talks about the diversity of perspectives and personal experience she encountered when she first joined the legislature.

Well, it was very exciting to be elected and to serve in the Legislature. You know, like most people, I had led a relatively sheltered life, you know, where your friends are people who are very similar to you and agree with you on a lot of things. And you read about differing opinions in different parts of Vermont, but in the Legislature, you really experience it. 

Madeleine Kunin

I was very interested in the fact that there was such diversity. You know, not racial diversity, but diversity of opinions and people from the Northeast Kingdom and Southern Vermont. And at first, I thought, well, I’m going to have a tough time in the Legislature. One, because I’m a Democrat and there were very few Democrats at that time. We were a real minority. And the other because I’m a woman and there were very few women. Well, it turned out that my biggest liability was neither of those, but the fact that I was from Burlington, which was the big city! [LAUGHING.] And threatening to these towns. So all of a sudden, I had it all explained to me. I couldn’t be arrogant or uppity or anything like that because that’s what they expected from somebody from Burlington. 

And one of my good friends that I made in my first term, who is still in the Legislature, was [Kola] Hudson. And now I think he’s the Dean of the Legislature....Well, we never agreed on anything. You know, whenever I voted “yes,” he voted “no” and vice versa, but we still could establish a friendship and respect for one another. So that was a great lesson, that you don’t have to agree with everybody in order to like them. And even if you disagree with them one day, you may agree with them the next day. I found it a tremendous, you know, kind of small globe of different opinions, different backgrounds. You know, people who were farmers, people who were realtors. And I think the first couple weeks I probably was totally exhausted trying to absorb it all, not only the people and their opinions, but the process.

Gretchen Morse began her work with the VT legislature in the mid-1970's serving four terms until, in her fifth term, she was appointed by Gov. Kunin to head the Agency of Human Services. Here, she talks about turning a potential opponent into an ally in order to implement state aid for education while serving as the Chair of the Education Committee.  

In order to do it and to make things fair, we also had to raise one percent on the income tax and one percent on the sales tax. It was a complicated systems issue, yet, again, required tremendous support from the committee. You didn’t want split votes.  

Had to work with a Governor that really wanted to go a statewide property tax and to really bring that whole thing along, to say, “We can’t get there yet. We have to take this first step to introduce this quotient, this factor into the assessment of people’s ability to pay and its relationship to the equity issue in towns.” And it also meant getting the Ways and Means Committee, Peter Juliani, to accept a tax that would change the current formula to a new formula that would recognize income. And it was called the Morse-Juliani Plan.  

Gretchen Morse

We were able, through a lot of political maneuvering and support of the Speaker there--Steve Morse really helped us out on that--to get Peter Juliani to think that it was okay to raise a tax for this particular formula. He got his name on it. The two of us went around the State of Vermont; I have never had more fun with anybody in my whole life than going around with Peter Juliani on this one issue. And we got that bill passed. And it was the precursor to things that have happened since then. And it was fun. It was just a great experience. He was definitely a patriarch of the Legislature. A wonderful guy. And I just learned a lot from him. 

And it was one of those things where you really had to size up the issue about staying true and having integrity for your principles that brought you to a certain place. And then really assessing whether those, whether that particular solution was necessary to maintain those principles and was there another way to get there that you either hadn’t thought of or you, it might take you a little longer to get there, but it was in the right direction so that you didn’t look like you were compromising to the point where it wouldn’t work to win. And those were both very serious places where those issues and that thinking process really took place. Not only on my part, but on my part in terms of bringing committee, the committee and other people from thinking, “Well, we’re here. We like this. We can’t get there, but is it okay to be somewhere else?” And I can’t--in both situations, I felt that it came out okay.

Robert T. (Bob) Gannett served in both the Vermont House of Representatives and the Vermont Senate, his service spanning four decades from the 1950's to the 1990's. Here, he talks about legislators working across party lines to institute a land gains tax in order to curb development.

I always felt, as an example of how things can get done and should get done, was when I first went to the Senate. It was in 1973. And Tom Salmon had been elected governor very unexpectedly that fall, so here’s a Democratic governor and the issue on which he’d been elected really was a land gains tax. It was the time when developers were running rampant in the state and Tom’s idea was that if a special tax was imposed on the gains resulting from sales of open land, it would discourage development, particularly in our rural areas, and it was a very popular notion. And I think he would agree, it was probably the issue that got him elected.

Bob Gannett

And when the Legislature convened, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans, and I remember well at the start of that session there were a lot of—not a lot, a number of the Republican Senators who said, well, we’re not going to pass that bill just ‘cause it helped Tom Salmon get elected governor. But there were a number of us who felt it was a very sound idea and was necessary to curb the rampant development that we could see coming if something wasn’t done and I think there was seven or eight of us who got together and worked with the Democrats and we passed the land gains tax statute, which served its purpose. It’s still serving its purpose. 

And it was one of the—it was really a wonderful primer for me, as I came into the Senate, to appreciate better the people I was going to work with for the coming years and to appreciate and see in action the process that can be put in place in that small body with good, important good results. And I’ve often thought of that as a very productive example of how the right thing for the state can be done if people on both sides of the political fence work together constructively.

We'll end with Gretchen Morse talking about the importance of people's participation in a democracy.

Democracy is, in the scheme of political systems, young. And it really does rest on the voluntary spirit of people to participate. And I don’t think the Legislature and how it performs is isolated from the expectation that people have of it. So one of the things that I’ve been very concerned about is how do we make people feel valued as citizens of a democracy in a way that really encourages them to participate? And that, I think, is getting lost in our educational system. When I grew up, we had civics. When I grew up, we had U.S. history that took us beyond 1942. We grew up with an ethic that we weren’t just going to go to work and raise our families, and deal with our social environment, our immediate social environment. We grew up with the expectation that the other piece of that three-legged stool was, in fact, participating in our government. Some way. Whether it’s at local level, state level, through voting, through helping candidates get elected. But we will not survive as a democracy unless people really face up to this issue, that they’ve got to build this into their time and into their lives.

Next month, we'll continue our look into the Snelling Center Project Collection at the VFC Archives, focusing on some different voices in the collection sharing their thoughts about what makes an effective legislator.