POLL SHOWS VERMONT INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT LEADS THE NATION
8% of Vermonters Favor Secession

The 2006 Vermonter Poll recently conducted by the Center for Rural Studies of the University of Vermont indicates that the percentage of eligible Vermont voters who favor secession from the United States of America - 8% of those polled - could very well be the highest in the nation.

Secession is nothing new to Vermonters. On January 15, 1815, less than twenty-five years after Vermont became the fourteenth state, it joined other New England states in signing the report of the Hartford Convention in opposition to the proposal of the Secretary of War to implement a military draft for continuing the badly mismanaged War of 1812 with England. This report was nothing less than a declaration of the right to secede.

In 1928 and 1929 a quirky little Vermont literary magazine known as The Drift-Wind published a series of tongue-in-cheek articles by Arthur Patton Wallace and Vermont Country Store founder Vrest Orton calling for Vermont independence. According to Orton, the purpose of such a movement would be “to constitute an Arcadia for persons of free thought, active mind, high standards, and aspirations and cultural imagination.” Orton even drafted “A Declaration of Independence for Vermont.” Chicago-based economist David Hale, who grew up in St. Johnsbury, also called for Vermont independence in a 1973 piece in The Stowe Reporter, which won the New England Press Association Award.

UVM Professor Frank Bryan and Vermont Representative Bill Mares published The Vermont Secession Book in 1987. Three years later, seven of seven independent-minded Vermont towns, including Montpelier and St. Johnsbury, voted overwhelmingly to secede from the Union following a series of debates between Professor Bryan and Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley. Then on October 11, 2003, the Second Vermont Republic, Vermont's proactive independence movement, was launched in Glover. Two years later it sponsored the first statewide convention on secession since North Carolina voted to secede in 1861. The convention, attended by over 300 people, was held in the House Chamber of the Vermont State House. Currently the town of Killington is trying to secede from Vermont and join New Hampshire.

About Vermont's independence streak, Frank Bryan once said, “Vermont is just obstinate. We'll do anything to be on the wrong side.” But is Vermont or America on the wrong side?

Vermont's idiosyncratic nature came through loud and clear in the 2006 Vermonter Poll. In a statewide random sample of over 600 eligible voters, two-thirds of the respondents expressed the view that the U.S. government has become unresponsive to the needs of individual Vermonters. Nearly twenty percent of those sampled believe that it would be useful for the Vermont legislature to commission a study to evaluate the economic impact of Vermont becoming an independent republic as it was between 1777 and 1791.

How many eligible voters in Vermont actually favor secession from the Union? According to the survey more than eight percent of the eligible voters would opt for secession. If one extrapolates from the survey to the population of the entire state of Vermont, there could be as many as 37,000 voters who are favorably inclined towards secession.

To put this eight percent figure in historical perspective, it is important to realize that when the thirteen English Colonies successfully seceded from the British Empire, only twenty-five percent of the population actually supported secession. Furthermore, eight percent may arguably represent the highest percentage favoring secession of any state in the Union. Alaska and Hawaii, for example, have the oldest and best known independence movements in America. Yet in both of these states the percentage supporting secession is known to be less than six percent. The Alaskan Independence Party was organized by Joe Vogler in 1973. Although he ran for governor in 1974, 1982, and 1986, he never got more than 5.8 percent of the vote. The Alaskan movement has been dormant since Vogler's death in 1993. In most states the percentage favoring secession is probably less than one percent. Few third party movements ever come close to achieving an eight percent support level.

Two and a half more years of the so-called war on terrorism, a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance, the suppression of civil liberties, and a culture of deceit combined with skyrocketing gasoline prices and a precipitous decline in the dollar could easily double the percentage of Vermont voters favoring secession.

Thomas H. Naylor
April 1, 2006