SOURCE: "John Dewey in Vermont: A Reconsideration," in Soundings, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 175-98.

In the following essay, Taylor discusses the contradictory nature of Dewey's attitude toward his birth-state Vermont.

John Dewey was always somewhat ambivalent about his Vermont background. At times he praised the "democratic" character of his Vermont heritage and even drew close parallels between the development of his own ideas and the ideas of his teachers at the University of Vermont. At other times, perhaps more frequently, he distanced himself as much as he could from these political and intellectual roots.

For example, in 1929 Dewey delivered an address at the University of Vermont commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of James Marsh's "Introduction" to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids To Reflection—a book of profound significance to the whole university community in the nineteenth century and one that Dewey, as a member of the...