George Aiken of Vermont

A learned study, I mean a serious medical study, that's been going on for some time recently put out a series of conclusions announcing that light, as in sunlight, is directly connected with good humour, or rather that it has the capacity to relieve or banish depression.

I'm going to get down to this knotty document one of these days – one of these dark days – but I read far enough to heed one of its warnings. You mustn't infer that the opposite is true, that dashing out at every opportunity and prostrating yourself in the burning sun, when it is burning, is going to give you loads of cheerfulness. A smidge of skin cancer is more likely. Still, it's irresistible to winter, sedentary types like me to grab at the naive belief that going for a walk in the sun, especially in pursuit of a little white ball, will tone up, not only the circulation, but the spirits. If you believe it it will probably happen. I've just done it and the doctors are right.

I believe the thought of this light study came to me because we've had the most extraordinary run of cloudless days with blinding sun, which is rare in November. Cold, mind you, but not January, February, March cold, no 20 below zeros, but what Dickens called 'piping' cold. I don't suppose any part of the country over the recent Thanksgiving was more brilliant and beautiful and piping cold than the state of Vermont, which can be, by this time, a planet of deep snow, but it has had only flurries and Thanksgiving Day itself was, by the Vermonters' lights, marvellously bland.

Maybe 20 degrees of frost, the sun rising in an orange glow and going down, as the song says, 'in blood', but [to] all these bundled-up people driving over the green mountains and bobbing across the valleys to the great American family feast and scads of children ice-skating over the shimmering white lakes, this year's Thanksgiving was special in Vermont for another, a family reason. Strangely, a proud reason. Strange because though the day was glittering and most people outdoors seemed as happy as they're meant to be on that special day, from every town hall and public building throughout the state and hung from the bedroom windows of very many, small houses, the flags were, by order of the governor, at half-mast.

A great man had died, but the lowered flags were more of a celebration than a lament for a man whose life and character moved in a straight line from a small farm in Vermont to the state legislature, then to the governorship, then 43 years ago to the Senate of the United States, where he remained for 35 years, a gathering force for many tough, good things, a funny, independent, Yankee-shrewd, totally incorruptible man who went back to Vermont in his 84th year.

Until a few months ago, his sense and experience were available to anybody who cared to tap them, then he failed quickly and died at 92, Senator George D. Aiken. So, on Thanksgiving Day at the funeral in the small town he grew up in, there was little cause for mourning at the grave.

George Aiken was a type we like to think will be always with us, though when you travel around the country and see, say, a town like Dallas. When I first saw it, it was an interruption on the plain with a couple of hotels and lots of lunch counters and boarding houses and a curtain of natural gas blazing away on the horizon. In those days, they thought that natural gas was a useless by-product. Today, Dallas is a gleaming, skyscraper metropolis with freeways and expressways engulfing it like a spread of concrete spaghetti.

But I must say, if there's one state from which we might expect to see more of George Aiken's type, it's the state of Vermont, a mountainous, landlocked state between New Hampshire and upstate New York, deceptively beautiful, for just beneath its rolling green carpet is very rocky terrain and its farming is pretty much restricted to dairying and fruit growing. Indeed, it's the second poorest farming state in the union though there's less poverty than most places because of its production of fine marble, in which it leads the country, and its industry in the syrup that's tapped from its forests of maples. Because, also, in a state bigger than Wales, there are only half a million people.

The Aikens were among the original English settlers there. The French had settled there sparsely a hundred years before but the first English came in in the 1740s and came for keeps. I go back so far because in 1773 one Edward Aiken, on a journey far from home, was suddenly taken ill. A stranger who took him in got the word, very slowly by mountain scout and stage, to his wife who put herself and her youngest child on a horse and rode just over a hundred miles to nurse her husband. This was the sort of family memory that George Aiken would acknowledge but not go on about.

He was born in 1892 and from babyhood on was brought up in the village of Putney, a place name that shocked the world in the early 1840s when a man named John Noyes started a religious movement he called Perfectionism. It entailed having property in common, households in common and wives in common. He called this idea 'complex marriage'. He's forgotten now but he did earn the dubious reward of a compliment from George Bernard Shaw who described the Noyes experiment as 'one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of Man's blundering institutions'.

Well, complex marriage was too complex for the people of Putney. Noyes fled to New York and the Vermonters blundered on and the Aikens kept their one farm and several children by one wife. George Aiken never got beyond high school. After that, he borrowed a hundred dollars and planted a raspberry patch. Five years later the patch extended to 500 acres and it was all his. Then he went into the commercial cultivation of fruits and wild flowers and he was 42 before he went into state politics, first in the legislature and then on to the governorship.

The governors of Vermont have only two years to leave their mark and most of them, inevitably, are remembered by the locals, so to speak, for the good or bad things they did in the state. Governor Aiken's name, however, attracted much attention outside Vermont, when, during the Depression, he proposed that neighbouring states ought to band together throughout the country to build publicly-owned generating stations to provide low-cost power, for farmers especially.

Naturally, this was taken as a declaration of war against the private utilities and some of those people were shocked that such a proposal should come from a Republican. You could see how, when Aiken got to Washington, the Roosevelt New Dealers welcomed the support of this independent Republican when they launched their offensive against the private utilities and Congress set up the huge public power project of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

But Aiken was no party's captive. For instance, any senator from a farming state, Republican or Democrat, fell gratefully into the arms of President Roosevelt when he started the whole business of subsidising farmers' crops across the board, across the land. Aiken thought it a bad principle that would get farmers into the habit of being subsidised in bad times and good – a habit by now so engrained that even the most free-enterprising Republican presidents are stuck with the system.

In the Senate, Aiken made his mark during his first term but for a long time it was the mark of a professional nuisance. He had this strange idea that one way to keep scrimping families above the poverty line was to have the federal government give away not cash benefits so much as food stamps – a bizarre idea whose time finally came 20 years later.

To many senators and congressmen, George Aiken was an old-fashioned eccentric and an original. Certainly he must have been unique in promptly every year sending to the treasury a cheque for the part of his office allowance he'd never used. Although it's quite proper and normal for a senator's wife to work in his office as a paid assistant – and George Aiken married his administrative assistant – she stayed on in her job but he took her name off the payroll. He not only, like legions of Republicans, believed in thrift, he practised it. He dearly loved his work on the Senate's public welfare committee, but when the senior Republican post on the foreign relations committee fell vacant, he took it because otherwise it would have been filled by a man he quietly detested, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

I wish it were possible to quote from the anthology of dry, wry one-liners he got off in a lifetime of marvellous deadpan speeches, but he never wrote them down. You had to be there when he remarked about Congress that, 'I have never seen so many incompetent persons in high office'.

When he answered the familiar charge against his party that the Republicans were 'me too-ers' – would do the same thing but do it better – 'Let's,' he said, 'let's not be afraid of the "me-too" charge! If a Democrat comes out for better health, I'm not going to come out for poorer health.'

And the time when he lamented all the talk about a very eminent politician who was suspected of dyeing his hair. 'Nonsense!' Aiken said. And then, in a thoughtful aside, 'At the same time, I have to admit that in all my years in Washington, I can't remember another man whose hair turned orange overnight.'

In 1966 when America was beginning to get deep into the Vietnam war, he told President Johnson, 'Declare the United States the winner and get out!' Eight years later, that's what she did. He will be publicly remembered for public power for the St Lawrence Seaway, for bucking Joseph McCarthy, for the Food Stamp Act.

By three generations that knew him, he will be remembered for his upright walk and ways, his shambling clothes and windblown hair, his charm, humour and the fact he could never be bought.

George Aiken of Vermont – not, we hope, a vanished type.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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