By 1968, he was living in Vermont full time. On March 17, 1969, according to records, Sanders bought another property, in out-of-the-way Stannard, with a population of fewer than 200 people, in the rural area of Vermont called the Northeast Kingdom. Four days later, Levi Noah Sanders was born, at Brightlook Hospital in St. Johnsbury, Vermont; according to his birth certificate, his mother was a woman named Susan Campbell Mott.

Sanders had met Mott in New York and lived with her there. He lived with her in Stannard, too, but not for long before moving to Burlington, Vermont’s biggest city. Raised in New York, educated in Chicago, Sanders’ deep-woods idyll was over. Burlington, according to Liberty Union archives and campaign finance records, is where he lived when he started running for office.

Sanders was “not a politician,” he said at the start, but he nonetheless possessed characteristics that would make him a successful one. He could be prickly and yet captivating. He had a way of being somehow simultaneously doom-and-gloom and inspirational. Even though he considered his personal life off limits, he still relentlessly solicited attention, sending to newspapers and radio and TV stations onslaughts of typewritten press releases that could read like screeds. And even though he had little appetite for chit-chat, he still loved to campaign, and he did it tirelessly — traipsing around the state in his drab blue, Bondo-bound Volkswagen bug without working windshield wipers, showing up at newspaper offices and asking to be interviewed, visiting prisons and power plants, talking at schools and churches and inside people’s homes, and talking and talking and talking.

He ran on the Liberty Union ticket for Senate in a special election in early 1972, and for governor later in 1972, and for Senate again in 1974, and for governor again in 1976, never getting more than 6 percent of the vote.

Liberty Union was a ragtag new party — small, anti-war, left-wing — that existed only in Vermont. Some people called it a socialist party, but it had no official affiliation. Sanders and other members had generally egalitarian sensibilities, advocating for the young, the old, the poor and the rights of women and workers. Sanders was more Old Left than New Left, “a 1930s radical, not a 1960s radical,” as Garrison Nelson, a University of Vermont political science professor, would later put it. He was not a hippie. He did not live in a commune. He considered himself a radical, a third-party independent, but he didn’t call himself a socialist. The Liberty Union, he thought, was “a reason to knock on doors,” “a good way to organize and educate people.”

He had, already, the consistency of a piston.

“In America today,” he told the Bennington Banner in late 1971, “if we wanted to, we could wipe out economic hardship almost overnight. We could have free medical care, excellent schools and decent housing for all. The problem is that the great wealth and potential of this country rests with a handful of people …”

“A handful of people own almost everything … and almost everybody owns nothing,” he wrote in the Liberty Union newsletter called Movement in 1972.

From a 1973 radio address by Sanders.

“There are two worlds in America,” he said on a radio show called Vermont Spectrum in 1973.

By 1974, around Vermont, from Rutland to Barre to White River Junction and all the way up to the Canadian border, Sanders was impossible to ignore. His worldview was clear. So was his M.O.

“He’s a unidirectional wind-up — I don’t want to use the word toy, because he’s nobody’s toy, but he’s a growler,” said Denny Morrisseau, an anti-war activist who was a Liberty Union member in the early ‘70s. “Straight ahead, growl. Straight ahead, growl.”

The radio shows. The newspaper quotes. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

“… the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the vast majority in the middle are having a harder and harder time …”

Records from Sanders' Early Years in Vermont The old sugar house in the land near Middlesex a quarter of a mile into the woods off Shady Rill Road. The primitive cabin, which had a dirt floor before Sanders installed wood, was the first place he lived in after he moved to Vermont. (Click to view the documents full size.) Open In New Window The Middlesex property record from 1964. Open In New Window The Stannard property record from 1969. Open In New Window Bernie Sanders' son's birth certificate from 1969. Open In New Window The Middlesex property record from 1970. Open In New Window The property record from 1979. Top photo by Michael Kruse

“… and the situation is getting worse …”

“This,” he wrote in one of his releases in 1974,” is the burning and fundamental issue of this campaign.”

Of every campaign.

***

His message was clear and unwavering. His private life, meanwhile, was complicated and less settled.

He shared custody of his son in an informal arrangement with Mott, according to people who knew them. “She was around a lot,” Nancy Barnett, a friend who lived nearby, told me. Barnett called Mott “a pretty quiet, private person.” Sanders rented a small brick duplex at 295 1/2 Maple Street that was filled with not much furniture and not much food in the fridge but stacks of checked-out library books and scribbled-on legal pads. His son, who called his father “Bernard,” had an upstairs bedroom.

“Pretty sparse,” Gene Bergman, an old friend, said about the apartment.

“Stark and dark,” said Darcy Troville, a fellow Liberty Unionite who lived around the corner and shared with Sanders homemade jellies and jams.

“The electricity was turned off a lot,” Barnett said. “I remember him running an extension cord down to the basement. He couldn’t pay his bills.”

He worked some as a carpenter, although “he was a shitty carpenter,” Bloch told me. “His carpentry,” Morrisseau said, “was not going to support him, and didn’t.”

He worked as a freelance writer, putting intermittent pieces in the low-budget Vermont Freeman, a Burlington alternative weekly called the Vanguard Press and a glossy, state-supported magazine called Vermont Life.

The standards of the Freeman were not strict. “It was always fun to see what came through the mail,” said Jennifer Kochman, one of the editors when Sanders was a contributor. The recent uncovering of something he wrote in an issue from February 1972 created a burst of news coverage. It was a jumbled rant about gender roles that mentioned masturbation and rape, but even in Sanders’ commentary on the sexes he reverted to his central theme of injustice: “Slavishness on one hand breeds pigness on the other hand. Pigness on one hand breeds slavishness on the other.”

His writing wasn’t a living. The Vanguard paid as little as the rest. “It would’ve been not more than 50 bucks,” said Greg Guma, a former editor. Vermont Life? “Our rate was 10 cents a word,” said Brian Vachon, a former editor.