Vermont State Government Since 1965 edited by Michael Sherman.
Burlington: The Center for Research on Vermont, The Snelling Center for Government, University of Vermont, 1999: xvii + 668 pp., charts, appendices, index; clothbound, $49.95.

"As Maine goes, so goes the nation" was a hoary axiom of American political culture from 1888 to 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt won all states except Maine and Vermont in his re-election campaign against Republican Alfred M. Landon, thus prompting chairman James A. Farley of the Democratic National Committee to quip, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont." After reading Vermont State Government Since 1965 this reviewer is tempted to reconfigure the familiar saying again so it echoes its earlier rendering: as Vermont goes, so may go the nation. This book can serve admirably as a model for public historians and allied professionals in other states who aspire to assemble a collaborative portrait of how their state governments have functioned since the 1960s--even though the Vermont model is embedded on specific antecedents not similarly rooted elsewhere.

The genesis of Vermont State Government Since 1965 lies with Andrew E. Nuquist, a native Nebraskan who arrived at the University of Vermont (UVM) in 1938 to start teaching political science while finishing his dissertation on "Chinese Legal Codes as Causation and Effect in Chinese Legal Thought" for his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Despite his scholarly interest in Sinology, he was soon enticed by the executive director of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce to assist Vermont communities in composing town reports and teaching workshops for town officers. From 1942 to 1952 he directed UVM's Government Clearing House. His 1964 manual, Town Government in Vermont, evolved from seventy-six newspaper articles he wrote for the Rutland Herald about local governance. He and his spouse, Edith Wilson Nuquist, produced Vermont State Government and Administration --twenty-five chapters filling 620 pages--in 1966 via UVM's Government Research Center. As retired historian Samuel B. and of UVM notes in the Introduction to Vermont State Government Since 1965, the volume by the Nuquists "for the better part of three decades remained the most authoritative work on the subject" (p. 1).

By the 1990s, of course, the volume Hand praises as "a classic in its own time" (p. 4) was outmoded by multiple changes that have vastly transformed Vermont and altered the workings of its state government. A sequel was needed, and Vermont State Government Since 1965 is the result--twenty-six essays filling 627 pages of text.

The best way to describe this book is to say laconically in terse Vermont fashion that "It's all here" in terms of the panoply of addressed topics. These vary from Vermont's structural framework--the Constitution, the Legislature, the Executive, the Courts--to state agencies with particular purlieus--taxes, corrections, education, health care, and many others. External constituencies get equal treatment-political parties, interest groups such as business and labor, lobbyists, the media. Intergovernmental relationships are covered by the chapters, "The State and Local Government" and "The State and the Federal Government." The essayists occasionally plod as if treading through the "mud season" of springtime Vermont, but scintillating passages, most notably by Frank M. Bryan and Brendan J. Whittaker, enliven the bureaucratic prose. Frank Smallwood, a former state senator and retired professor of government at Dartmouth College, contributes an excellent overview in the concluding chapter.

Almost all of these essays are written by specialists who are closely identified with the functions they explain and assess, yet the only instance of inflated claims lies in the chapter centered on the Vermont media, co-authored by two ex-journalists. Cohesion of focus, style, length, and commendable constraints on excessive boasting or defensive demurrals are the result of superb editing by this book's dogged unifier, Michael Sherman, former director of the Vermont Historical Society and currently the editor of its journal, Vermont History. The reader rarely encounters muddled verbiage, and this reviewer detected only one factual error--George Perkins Marsh, the Vermont-born progenitor of America's environmental protection movement, lived from 1801 to 1882, not, as stated (p. 486), from 1809 to 1882.

Threaded throughout this book, however, is an important subtheme that appears occasionally in brief but tantalizing allusions to Vermont's distinctive character among the fifty states. "Based on a nationally conducted exit poll taken during the 1996 general election," says John H. Marshall, "it is the nation's most liberal state" (p. 560).

This status contrasts strikingly with the Vermont that beckoned Andrew and Edith Nuquist. In 1937, the year before the Nuquists arrived as a faculty couple at UVM, the Vermont volume in the series produced by the Federal Writer's Project, Vermont: A Guide to the Green Mountain State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company) remarked: "In recent years ultra-conservatism has distinguished this region from other parts of the country where progressive tendencies have been, for a generation, on the increase (p. ix). Clearly the Sherman-edited essays deserve a companion book explaining how America's most steadfastly Republican state, 1855 to 1962, now elects and re-elects a liberal Democrat and the Senate's most liberal Republican to the Upper House in Washington, and an ex-socialist Independent to the House of Representatives. Vermont State Government Since 1965 cannot be faulted for not scrutinizing this amazing transition from rock-ribbed Republican allegiance because it prudently centers on the dynamics of ts subject, aptly stated by its title.

But the astute way in which this book has been conceptualized, and ably brought to fruition, suggests its broad usefulness. Other states, particularly in the Sunbelt, parallel Vermont in experiencing dramatic shifts in political culture. Volumes like this one and others modeled on it would widen public knowledge of historical transformations at state levels. In effect, as Vermont goes, so other states can also go.