Rick Winston

“Plumley’s record of anti-labor votes was one of the issues that led a forty-year-old professor of political science, Andrew E. Nuquist, to challenge Plumley for the Republican nomination in 1946. Nuquist, from a small town in rural Nebraska, had relocated to Vermont in 1938 after completing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. As his daughter Elizabeth Raby remembered, “When my father arrived in Vermont, his field of interest was international relations. Very soon, however, he became fascinated by his adopted state. Although he always retained his internationalist outlook, he became a specialist in the local and state governments of Vermont.” During his tenure as associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont, Nuquist served on many civic and war-related bodies: he was chair of the Vermont State Chamber of Commerce Committee on Local Finances and Affairs from 1941 to 1943, a public panel member of the Regional War Labor Board from 1943 to 1946, and director of the Town Officers’ Educational Conference in 1946.”
― Rick Winston, Red Scare in the Green Mountains: The McCarthy Era in Vermont 1946-1960

“I took the train to New York, where Bill Sweets put me up overnight. In Philadelphia I roomed with Frank Gentile, Universalist minister from St. Johnsbury. Progressive Party convention, July, 1948 Frank and I read copies of the proposed platform: plank after plank condemned United States foreign policy. Not that we wholly disagreed, in most instances, but the implication was that our policy was all wrong while the Soviet policy was all right. This rubbed Frank and me the wrong way. In the first place we didn’t believe this was true. In the second place, the press had been predicting that Wallace would allow his Communist allies to dominate the thinking of the convention; this kind of platform would support the charge. A mischievous thought occurred to Frank, and I guess to me at the same moment: a resolution putting the convention on record as not giving blanket approval to the foreign policy of any nation would a) satisfy those of us who were disinclined to blame Washington for ALL the world’s ills, b) demonstrate that our Communist friends were not dictating to the convention, and thus c) give us a defense, however slight, against some of the Red-baiting we knew we were all going to be subjected to in campaigning for Wallace and the “Progressive Party,” as we soon voted to call ourselves.”
― Rick Winston, Red Scare in the Green Mountains: The McCarthy Era in Vermont 1946-1960