George Aiken: Vermont's $17.09 Senate Race and the Vietnam War Owl

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George David Aiken was born in 1892 in Dummerston, Vermont, and grew up in Putney, where his father farmed and served on the school board, select board and in the legislature. In 1912 Aiken borrowed $100 to plant raspberries and built it into a 500 acre operation with a nursery and a pioneering wildflower business, writing Pioneering with Wildflowers in 1933. After 17 years on the school board and a lost 1922 race, he entered the Vermont House in 1930 and became Speaker in 1933 against the party establishment, passing a poor debtor law to halt Depression-era collections. As lieutenant governor he put the Senate's seven Democrats on nearly every committee, and as governor from 1937 he backed rural electric cooperatives against utility monopolies.

After a failed 1940 presidential bid built on attacks on the Republican National Committee, Aiken appointed Ernest W. Gibson Jr. as a caretaker for his late father's Senate seat, then won the special election and arrived in Washington in 1941. His 1945 food allotment bill laid groundwork for food stamps. He opposed the anti-union Case Bill but voted for Taft-Hartley in 1947, and voted for the 1957, 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act while frustrating the NAACP with amendments. He retired in 1975 as dean of the Senate after 34 years, succeeded by Patrick Leahy.

• His final reelection campaign cost a total of $17.09.
• In 1950 he was one of seven Republican senators to sign the Declaration of Conscience against Joseph McCarthy's tactics.
• The press called him an owl on Vietnam, neither hawk nor dove.
• He never said "declare victory and go home"; his 1966 proposal was to declare U.S. military objectives achieved and shift to diplomacy.
• Aiken and Leahy held the same Vermont Senate seat for more than 81 years combined.