Philip Henderson Hoff, the New Frontiersman whose three terms as Vermont ‘s first modern Democratic governor in the 1960s laid the foundation for turning a solid Republican bastion into arguably the nation’s deepest blue and most liberal state, has died. He was 93.
Hoff, one of the last of the era’s Kennedy-inspired liberals still living, had been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.
A lawyer, Hoff shattered Vermont political tradition in 1962 when he narrowly defeated a Republican incumbent, F. Ray Keyser, to become the first popularly elected Democratic governor. Hoff was 38 years old and had been just a one-term state representative from the scenic college town of Burlington.
A tall, handsome Williams graduate and World War II Navy veteran with a photogenic wife and four daughters, Hoff was the first Protestant nominated by a Democratic party that had gone down to defeat for generations in Green Mountain State gubernatorial elections with nominees who were French-Canadian and Irish-American Roman Catholics.
“He was the single most transformative Vermont politician of the 20th Century,” said Garrison Nelson, longtime political science professor at the University of Vermont. “He was Vermont’s John Kennedy.”
Among elected officials, Hoff was one of the Democratic Party’s earliest opponents of the Vietnam War. He was a strong supporter of civil rights, initiating an effort called the Vermont-New York Project with New York City Mayor John Lindsay that brought black youths to a very white Vermont in summers.
When Hoff was elected, Vermont was a state of faltering hill farms, where yeomen eked out livings milking cows and squeezing sap from maple trees, wood stoves and rolling mountains and valleys where literati summered . The economy was stagnant, yoked to farming, the extraction of marble and granite from the hills around Rutland and Barre, machine shops along the Connecticut River valley, and small-scale manufacturing . Rural communities ruled the state’s politics through a malapportioned legislature. There were no interstate highways. Neither of the eponymous ice-cream makers, Ben or Jerry , nor Bernie Sanders lived in the state.
Hoff, raised in a Republican family in one of Edwin O’Connor’s apple counties in western Massachusetts, moved to attract new industry and began promoting Vermont as a skiing and tourist destination. During his tenure, the state began its long shift from an economy wedded to agriculture to tourism and service industries. Vermont also banned highway billboards during Hoff’s time in office.
A one-man ACLU during his early years as a lawyer in Vermont, Hoff represented UVM professors who balked at taking McCarthy- era loyalty oaths and cared deeply about the less fortunate. In many areas he was far ahead of his time. Hoff advocated a plan to bring Canadian hydro-electric energy to Vermont years before the Arab oil boycotts would make such deals routine. Under Hoff’s plan, the state would have owned the power, which would have made Vermont a major exporter of electricity.
The plan was derailed due to opposition from the state’s private electric utilities. Utility executives argued that a better path was nuclear power, which they boasted would be “too cheap to meter.” Private utilities, of course, owned the nuclear power. After he left office and the Three Mile Island accident occurred, nuclear power was widely derided in Vermont. A later governor, Republican Richard Snelling, would negotiate a contract to bring Quebec hydro power to Vermont and New England.
Hoff was a proponent of education who offered a plan to divide the state into regional school districts. That proposal was a victim of Vermont’s parochialism and tradition of local control. But the initiative would come to fruition in union high schools after he left office. He also pumped more money into state aid to education.
An environmentalist, Hoff favored preserving Vermont’s heritage, Lake Champlain, its trout-filled streams and lakes. Many of his ideas would be enacted under a liberal Republican governor who came after him, Deane Davis, an avuncular insurance executive.
As governor, Hoff also appointed the state’s first commission on the status of women. He supported organized labor in a state with few union members.
Throughout his life, Hoff had a deep compassion for the poor. One of his first moves was to break the link between local communities and control of welfare, moving the state out of the era of “poor farms” and into a modern, state-run system.
“Quite honestly, in some communities, it was shameful the way people in poverty were treated, I mean we had poor farms,” Hoff would say years later.
He eliminated the poll tax and abolished the death penalty, except for the murder of police officers.
The biggest change would be reapportionment of a legislature that was beholden to rural interests. When Hoff was elected to the Vermont House in 1960, each community had one representative –giving Burlington’s 38,000 residents the same clout as rural Victory, with less than 50 residents. Prodded by the U.S. Supreme Court Baker v. Carr decision –the famous “one man one vote” case, Hoff presided over reapportionment that cut the size of the Vermont House from 240 to 150.
That shifted political power in the state from small towns to more populous areas of the state, particularly Chittenden County surrounding Burlington.
In 1999, Hoff told Vermont Public Radio that reapportionment did far more than align political influence to population. “It wasn’t just a shift from rural Vermont to urban Vermont, but it was more importantly, a shift from rather conservative policies to a good deal more progressive policies,” said Hoff.
“So much so, you know, that most people don’t understand this, but I think it is pretty clear that Vermont, if not the most progressive state in the nation is clearly one of them” said Hoff.
After three two year terms as governor, Hoff took a break from politics, then ran for U.S. Senate in 1970 against a lackluster Republican incumbent, Winston Prouty, a relic of the old politics from Newport in the impoverished Northeast Kingdom corner of the state.
The contest drew national attention, with then-President Nixon coming to Vermont to stump for Prouty, who was known for occasionally falling asleep on the Senate floor during debates. Anti-Vietnam War protestors shouted and tossed rocks at Nixon, leading to a New York Times headline long remembered in the state. “Nixon stoned in Vermont,” it read.
But Hoff’s support for civil rights and a drinking problem — that he acknowledged — caught up with him. He went down to a stinging defeat. Later, Hoff would concede that on race, he had gotten out ahead of his overwhelmingly white state. Yet, because it was the right thing to do, he told Burlington Free Press reporter Candace Page years after, he had no regrets.
The 1970 campaign was nasty, as Republicans threw everything they could at the popular former governor. At a well-publicized Republican dinner, cartoonist Al Capp skewered Hoff for bringing “John Lindsay’s rapists to Vermont.”
And a prominent Republican state lawmaker with the nickname of “peanut” criticized Hoff’s drinking, saying the governor had been “plastered” all over the state.
Hoff’s admission of an alcohol problem was courageous at a time when confession was not a societal or political trope. But it clearly hurt him. University of Vermont history professor Sam Hand, who would become a Hoff biographer, quipped that the admission cost Hoff the votes of both drinkers and abstainers.
After his loss, some in Vermont speculated that Hoff would leave the state to gain wealth at law practice in New York or Boston, where he raised liberal money for his campaign. He never did. Known universally as “Phil,” he loved his adopted state and went back to his Burlington law practice, continued his advocacy for those who had less and his mentoring of a younger generation of Democrats.
In the 1980s, he ran for state senate and won. He also served as Vermont Democratic chairman, but brushed away entreaties from liberals who wanted him to wage another statewide election.
He quit drinking shortly after the 1972 election cycle, where he initially supported friend Ed Muskie of Maine, then worked assiduously for his party’s nominee, George McGovern.
He was a kind fellow utterly without pretension. He drove an old Volvo station wagon, stuffed with legal papers and a bag of golf clubs, which he often swung at the Burlington Country Club. He lived in the same house near the University of Vermont’s Redstone campus with his only wife, Joan, who survives him.
Hoff was always available for academics or journalists seeking insight. He could often be seen at breakfast at the Oasis Diner in Burlington, reading his morning Rutland Herald (the most liberal of the state’s two dominant dailies) and chatting with other patrons or diner owner Stratty Lines over coffee and cigarettes, a habit he eventually gave up.
Hoff was a mentor for many Democratic politicians who came after him. He was a supporter of Thomas Salmon, Howard Dean (who was once Hoff’s primary care doctor), Madeleine Kunin and Peter Shumlin, who all won the governorship. Much to the chagrin of conservative Democrats, he supported Bernie Sanders in his improbable 1981 independent upset of the local Democratic machine to become Burlington mayor, which launched Sanders political career. (The local Democratic organization had become so rusty it couldn’t steal a 10-vote election margin from Sanders.)
“Phil Hoff was one of the great governors in Vermont history and one of the leading progressives of his era. History will remember him as a man of great courage who not only helped transform Vermont but was years ahead of his time in the fight for economic, social and racial justice,” said Sanders, now a U.S. senator, upon Hoff’s death.
Vermont’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Patrick Leahy, worked at Hoff’s law firm after graduation from law school.
“(Hoff) had no patience for finger-in-the wind politics. He put people first, and he modernized education, the judicial system and Vermont’s economic vitality in ways that has made lives better for generations of Vermonters,” said Leahy.
The last time yours truly saw Hoff was in 2008 on a glorious September afternoon at Fenway Park. His gait had slowed; his passion hadn’t. After briefly renewing acquaintances, he started to walk away, then turned and blurted, “Obama is going win Vermont with better than 60 percent. You can take that to the bank.”
On election day, Obama captured 67 percent of Vermont’s vote, the highest of any state save Obama’s native Hawaii.
Scott MacKay is political analyst at Rhode Island Public Radio, the NPR affiliate in Providence. He is a former political reporter for the Burlington Free Press. He was educated at the University of Vermont.
