At the ripe old age of 84, the political war horse Bernie Sanders is still going strong. The longest serving independent in U.S. congressional history, he has been fixture in American politics since the early 1980s.
He was mayor of Burlington, the biggest city in the state of Vermont, from 1981 to 1989. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1990. Since 2007, he has been a U.S. senator. In 2016 and 2020, he aspired to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Although he lost each time, finishing in second place, he has influenced the leftward shift of the party.
Last month, in an illustration of his outsize influence, he administered the oath of office for New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist like himself.
Sanders’ latest biographer, Dan Chiasson, regards Sanders as “arguably the most influential leftist politician in the modern history of the nation.” And he thinks that his impact on Vermont’s “traditional culture” has been great.
As Chiasson acknowledges in Bernie For Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, published by Alfred A. Knopf, he has been following Sanders’ career since boyhood. “I was nine when Sanders became mayor, seventeen when he left city hall, and nineteen when he was sworn in as Vermont’s sole representative to the U.S. Congress.”
Born and raised in Vermont, he is a professor of English at Wellesley College and the author of five books of poetry. In this dense volume, which runs to more than 500 pages, he focuses on Sanders’ formative years as a Vermonter.
Which is precisely why Chiasson’s book caught my attention. Having grown up in Montreal, a two-hour car ride to Burlington, I have visited Vermont several times over the decades, usually as a cyclist or hiker.
I have never failed to be impressed by the pristine beauty of its countryside, which is dotted with farms and dairy herds, by the unaffected charm of its New England villages and towns, and by its sun-dappled two-lane roads uncluttered by jarring commercial billboards.
Chiasson, a Vermonter of French Canadian ancestry, highlights its positive attributes, but he is unafraid to probe its dark side: “As its manufacturing base died and tourism replaced it, Vermont marketed the image of a Yankee population unchanged by immigration and the modern economy. The Indigenous Abenaki of the Winooski River Valley were displaced and written out of Vermont’s history. Black Vermonters were tokenized and harassed. French Canadian immigrants were marginalized as rednecks and hillbillies. This last population includes members of my own family, who had settled on poor farms just south of the Quebec border …”
Jews, too, bore the brunt of prejudice. Way into the last century, he observes tartly, “Vermont inns and resorts stipulated ‘No Semites’ in their advertisements.”
And Rural Vermont, a magazine that catered to what may have been a somewhat ethnocentric readership, recommended practical steps to strengthen the state’s Anglo-Saxon stock.
Into this closeted milieu stepped Sanders, a Jew from Brooklyn whose father immigrated to the United States from Slopnice, Poland, in 1921, three years before the U.S. Congress passed a restrictive immigration law that favored northern Europeans over southerners, Jews, Asians and Africans.
Sanders’ father, Eli, was a paint salesman. His mother, Dorothy, was a New Yorker. After her untimely death at the age of 47, he fell apart and died just two years later under “tragic and strange circumstances.”
Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968. During this era, a number of Jewish New Yorkers flocked to Vermont. Among them were Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the iconic Ben & Jerry’s ice cream empire.
Vermont also beckoned Madeleine Kunin, its first Jewish and first female governor. A German Jew, she lived in Switzerland before immigrating to the United States. Prior to her stint as a politician, she was a newspaper reporter in Burlington.
Before relocating to Vermont, one of the most rural states in America, Sanders was a volunteer worker on Kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakim in Israel. As Chiasson says, he gravitated toward the kibbutz, founded by Romanian and Yugoslavian socialists in 1935, “to witness socialism in daily communal practice” and live in a “model agricultural community.”
Returning from Israel, he and his partner purchased a sagging white farmhouse near Stannard, a village in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom.
Back then, Vermont was one of the poorest New England states, Chiasson notes. “On drives through Stannard, Sanders saw families barely clinging to the electric grid, their phones disconnected, their boilers running dry as the oil and propane trucks cancelled delivery in the dead of winter.”
Amid the poverty, Sanders earned a barely passable income from carpentry work, newspaper ad sales, and registering people for food stamps. His neighbors recall that Sanders and his family subsisted on “almost nothing.”
Sanders moved to Burlington for good in 1971, leaving behind his son, Levi, and Levi’s mother in Stannard.
These snapshots of a struggling New Yorker are among the most vivid aspects of Chiasson’s narrative, which, far too often, is top-heavy with minutae about his own life. His chapters on Sanders’ participation in local politics are extremely detailed and difficult to digest. A more demanding editor would have cut them down to size.
While campaigning for the mayoralty, Sanders ran under the slogan “Burlington is not for sale.” Chiasson credits him with revitalizing Burlington and converting its Lake Champlain waterfront into an attractive mixed-use district featuring housing, parks and public spaces.
Being interested in foreign affairs, he visited Nicaragua and met its Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega, a critic of U.S. policy in Central America.
Sanders’ net impact on Burlington was striking. Long before he stepped down, it was jocularly known as the People’s Republic of Burlington.
His time in Burlington as mayor prepared him for the leap into the hurly burly of national politics. Chiasson documents this formative period with craft and immense attention to detail, delivering a rounded portrait of a prominent American politician.