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A self-described socialist in the seat of executive power. A campaign of obstruction meant to destroy him. A riled-up activist base determined to enact change. A moribund Democratic establishment clinging to power. This is not a vision of 2021. This was Burlington, Vermont, forty years before, when a thirty-nine-year-old Bernie Sanders created a local political earthquake by becoming mayor of Vermont’s largest city, and attempted to forge a version of his “political revolution” at the municipal level. Through interviews, archival documents, and newspaper accounts of the time, Jacobin retells the story of Sanders’s years in Burlington, where his political ascent began, and where his vision of change was first tested. Part one is here, part two is here, and part three is here.

It took less than a day for the FBI to come asking about the new mayor. On the morning of April 7, a federal agent strolled into the office of Vermont’s secretary of state, wanting information about Bernie Sanders’s past political affiliations. He was carrying out a request by an assistant US attorney in New York, then representing the government in a lawsuit launched by the Socialist Workers Party. In context, the visit was less sinister than it appeared. Though Sanders had only ever served as an elector for the party, its national secretary had incorrectly identified him on the stand as its candidate. The defense, looking to test the secretary’s credibility as a witness, wanted to verify this. It was, as far as FBI visits went, all pretty benign. The US attorney in Vermont even called Sanders in advance to tell him he wasn’t under investigation. “After one day in office, I am proud to announce that, like the mayors of San Francisco, California, Miami, Florida, and Montpelier, Vermont, I, too, am not under investigation by the FBI,” Sanders joked. Sanders may have taken it in stride, but others didn’t take the air of menace suggested in his joke as lightly. The visit was “reprehensible” and went “too far,” read an April 16 editorial by the Burlington Free Press , demanding an apology and charging it called to mind the McCarthy era. The federal judge overseeing the case chided the FBI for its heavy-handed approach, reminding them that “the mere flashing of a badge in connection with some public official . . . could get very badly misinterpreted.” In the scope of Sanders’s mayoralty, the incident was a blip, just another colorful story to add to the twists and turns of his unlikely tenure. But for someone like Sanders, keenly aware of his government’s long history of repressing people with his convictions, it could never be just a joke. It was less than a year earlier that he had commented to the Free Press about how the US left had been harassed and disrupted through job discrimination, ostracism, and, of course, FBI surveillance. In some ways, it set the tone for Sanders’s first one hundred days as mayor of Burlington and beyond. In his first three months alone, Sanders would face resignations, a ticking fiscal time bomb, and a campaign of obstruction never seen in Burlington before or since. By the end of his term, he would be ticketed for parking in his own parking space and have his mail stolen by his own staff. Sanders and his allies were about to learn that beating the city’s establishment would take more than winning one election.

A Hard Month Burlington’s major newspaper wasn’t optimistic about the new mayor’s tenure. “To say that many Burlingtonians view the new administration with suspicion, apprehension, and dread is a classic example of understatement,” read one Free Press op-ed, one of two criticizing Sanders on the first day of his mayoralty on April 6. The other warned him not to be “an obstructionist” and allow the city projects that were already under construction or had been approved to go to fruition. They were swiftly disappointed when Sanders met with Vermont’s lawmakers at the statehouse in Montpelier and chewed them out for neglecting the poor and serving the interests of big business and lobbyists. It quickly became clear where obstruction would come from. “Aldermen plan to dig in their heels and oppose Sanders’ nominations, saying city department heads are not policy-making positions and never have changed with administrations in the past,” the Free Press reported the day before he took office. Only “ten citizens decided we needed a change” in city politics, one alderman said on inauguration day, defiantly nominating an ally of former mayor Gordon Paquette to the board’s presidency. Barely a week later, claiming the proper procedures hadn’t been followed, the board voted 8-3 to fire Linda Niedweske, Sanders’s campaign manager-turned-secretary, which Sanders called “an insult” (one Democrat voted with Sanders’s allies, deciding the issue was too small to “make it the stand” against the new mayor). City residents called both aldermen and Niedweske to, respectively, complain and express support. Aldermen made clear they would next go after Sanders’s appointment of ally and low-income advocate Richard Sartelle, who Sanders had unofficially hired and was paying out of his own mayoral salary. “I will never forgive, and never forget, the first board of aldermen’s meeting, where my secretary was fired,” Sanders would say months later. “It kind of set the tone.” (He would eventually be allowed to rehire Niedweske.) Several longtime city employees resigned in the days after inauguration. The press reported about the “new informality” in Sanders’s and his allies’ clothing at City Hall. After criticizing a businessman and former Medical Center Hospital trustee whose construction firm was now heading the hospital’s $64 million expansion, with Sanders charging his 1973 defeat of a union had hurt wages and therefore public health, the paper urged Sanders to “temper his remarks.” “Whether correct or not, [they] served only to further the mistrust many in the business community have of the new mayor,” it stated. Toward the end of April, Sanders suffered a defeat when voters rejected by four to one the fair housing commission plan he had supported. Put forward by tenants’ rights organization People Acting for Change Together (PACT), the group had stepped up its efforts after Sanders’s election, and he had endorsed, and campaigned door-to-door for, their plan, which would have allowed tenants to appeal rent increases. This time, the establishment won: its opponents, many of them businessmen, had spent nearly $10,000 on a sophisticated campaign complete with bulk mailings, advertisements, copious manpower, and a professional consultant. Several Democratic aldermen celebrated with them at the after-party. So did treasurer F. Lee Austin, once viewed as a potential ally by the incoming administration, and city clerk Frank Wagner, who Sanders had been urged to fire by a Republican state representative. All the while, Sanders’s fledgling administration looked for a solution to the city’s budget crunch. After winning the election by railing against Paquette’s proposed 65-cent property tax increase, on April 24 Sanders put forward his own tax hike proposal to be voted on in a special June election. After seven weeks of going through “every single line item” in department budgets, Jennie Stoler and the rest of Sanders’s advisers settled on the “politically palatable” figure of 25 cents. The resulting budget would see no layoffs and salary raises for city workers, but would also mean no new programs, equipment, or hires, and relied on higher parking fines and city permit fees. Admitting it was “quite as regressive, in fact, as any other in the past,” Sanders urged its adoption to “allow our city to function at roughly the same level as we did last year.” He planned out a second, more austere budget in case the hike failed. Yet even getting the proposal to a vote would prove an uphill battle. First, Republican aldermen tried halving the increase to 13 cents, eliminating the Civil Defense Department in the process. Then, when city union chiefs, department heads, Sanders’s advisers, and members of the public all gathered for a discussion of the tax raise at an aldermanic meeting, the eight Democratic aldermen voted as a bloc to delay talks. “I honestly don’t know what’s going on,” Sanders said, calling it “an absolute insult.” “It was no big deal,” Maurice Mahoney, one alderman then positioning himself for a mayoral run, told the Free Press . “I’m sorry if he feels bad about it,” said William Blanchard, another Democratic critic on the board. “It’s part of the procedure. It is legal to table.” He didn’t understand, Blanchard said, why Sanders had “vented his anger.” Though admitting he hadn’t informed Sanders about the delay, Mahoney told the press it had been a “foregone conclusion,” blaming the mayor for holding news conferences instead of talking to aldermen. The Free Press asked Sanders if he would cooperate with the board. “It is not a proper thing to cave in on everything and do their bidding,” he said. “I will go the half mile. They have got to also.” Sometimes, Sanders made unforced errors. At the close of May, Sanders nominated longtime resident Henry Allard for the position of fourth constable. Allard was a one-time president of the board of aldermen, and had served as city constable for fifteen years, during which he sometimes abstained from collecting fines from poor residents. He also happened to have been dead for two months. “It was silly, just dumb,” Sanders said later. “He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s coming apart at the seams,” said James Burns, a Democratic alderman. As reporters scrambled to get in touch with the mayor, Niedweske, now reinstated, informed them he’d had a “hard week” and asked to be “left alone” for the weekend.