U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will deliver the John Findley Green Foundation lecture at Westminster College in Fulton, joining the list of world leaders including Winston Churchill, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan who have traveled to the small college to make a major speech on world affairs.

Sanders’ unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 left a legacy of political activism among young progressives and he is viewed as a potential contender for the 2020 nomination. In an announcement broadcast on Facebook, acting Westminster President Carolyn Perry called Sanders “a leader who shook up the country’s political climate in 2016 during his bid for the U.S. presidency.”

Sanders will lecture on American leadership in a time of global crisis, Perry said.

The lecture is scheduled at 11 a.m. on Sept. 21 as part of the Hancock Symposium, a two-day gathering at Westminster for discussion of global affairs. Tickets will be limited to students, staff, faculty, alumni and invited guests, said Kurt Jefferson, director of the symposium.

Sanders, 75, is a Vermont independent elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after 16 years in the U.S. House. A socialist, Sanders won his first major office when he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., in 1981. In his presidential bid, Sanders fought eventual nominee Hillary Clinton all the way to the Democratic National Convention. In the March 2016 primary in Missouri, Sanders lost to Clinton by 1,574 votes.

While economic policies including universal health care and free college were major draws for Sanders’ supporters, he was outspoken about the need for the United States to seek allies against terrorism and to exercise restraint in the use of military power.

He will emphasize those themes in his speech, spokesman Josh Miller-Lewis wrote in an email to the Tribune.

“Senator Sanders will lay out his vision of a progressive American foreign policy, one that defines power and leadership not primarily through the use of force but through the building and mobilization of international consensus, that prioritizes human dignity and well-being against the depredations of unaccountable government and corporate power, and that sees new opportunities for cooperation around shared challenges like climate change, authoritarianism, wealth inequality, and terrorism,” Miller-Lewis wrote.

The Green Foundation is named for a St. Louis attorney who graduated from Westminster in 1884. Established in 1936, the foundation provides for lectures designed to promote understanding of economic and social problems of international concern. It further provides that "the speaker shall be a person of international reputation."

The most famous lecture of the series was the “Iron Curtain” speech delivered on March 5, 1946, by Winston Churchill, who was prime minister of Great Britain through most of World War II but who lost his office when the Labor Party won an election in 1945. In his speech, Churchill warned of the increasing power of the totalitarian Soviet Union.

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent,” Churchill said. “Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

Gorbachev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, when the Soviet state collapsed in the year after the Iron Curtain fell. He delivered a lecture at Fulton in 1992.

Reagan, who was president when Gorbachev led the Soviet Union, came to Fulton in 1990, a little more than a year after he left office. Reagan spoke at the dedication of the sculpture "Breakthrough," created from pieces of the Berlin Wall by Edwina Sandys, Churchill's granddaughter.

rkeller@columbiatribune.com

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