When I moved to Vermont in 1970, the state was in the early days of a remarkable political and cultural transformation. The “rock-ribbed Republican” place of the past was now providing fertile soil for progressives like Bernie Sanders, and liberal Democrats such as Howard Dean and Patrick Leahy. As a child of parents whose livelihoods were threatened during the McCarthy era, I became curious about how my adopted state responded to the anti-communist fear that had gripped America just a few decades earlier, culminating in a book, Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946–1960. I learned that even in a relatively liberal state widely acknowledged as avoiding the worst repression and fearmongering of the Red Scare, Vermont experienced a number of red-baiting incidents during this time period. Those incidents are worth examining because they give us insight into the kind of paranoia, repression, and absurdities that characterized McCarthyism.

One of the most complex episodes of that era in the state involved the prolific poet Ordway Mabson Southard and his wife Mary. In the summer of 1950, the Southards set off a chain of events that thrust Vermont into the national news. Only a passing reference in Ordway’s 2001 obituary to their political activities (“Both were highly influenced by Marxist Socialist thought and participated in the Civil Rights Movement”) gives a clue to the events that led to headlines such as the one in the August 3 issue of the Bradford Opinion: “Reds Infest Bethel, Randolph Center, McCarthy Charges.”

Two of the most public and persistent Vermont critics of this “Red Scare” were newspapermen. Each played a vital role in defusing that episode: Robert Mitchell, who had edited the Rutland Herald since 1941 and became its owner-publisher as well in 1948; and John Drysdale, who had published the White River Valley Herald (now the Herald of Randolph) and Bradford Opinion since 1945. In 1991, Drysdale was inducted into the Community Newspaper Hall of Fame; his citation noted his role in discrediting claims that the Randolph-Bethel area was a “hotbed of communism.”