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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 two is here.

It was 1979 and Bernie Sanders was, as he so often would be for the next forty years, in the middle of a fight. But the target of his ire was, uncharacteristically, not a major corporation or one of its political allies — it was the state’s public broadcaster. The thirty-eight-year-old Sanders had seemed to exit gracefully from electoral politics in 1977, having run four times under the Liberty Union banner since 1972, twice each for governor and Senate, coming a distant third each time. Charging that Liberty Union had broken promises to stay active in the “struggles of the working people against the banks and corporations which own and control Vermont and the nation,” Sanders had left the party after his best ever showing, turning his focus toward elbowing his way onto the airwaves. Sanders had been many things since moving to Vermont for good in 1968: carpenter, freelance writer, and, for a time, unemployed. With election campaigns in the rearview mirror, he decided to try his hand at filmmaking, co-founding an educational nonprofit and driving all over New England in sleet or snow, selling cheaply produced film strips directly to schools. By 1979, he had moved to video, producing his magnum opus: a half-hour documentary about socialist Eugene Debs, the twentieth-century union organizer who won a million votes from prison in the 1920 presidential election. There was just one problem: Vermont Educational Television (ETV) wouldn’t show it. ETV claimed its decision was made on quality grounds. Sanders viewed that as a cover for ideological objections. In the face of its obstinacy, Sanders and others formed Concerned Citizens on ETV, pressuring management to show more locally made content and hand greater say over its programming to the public. Before long, ETV caved on the Debs film. Before long, ETV caved on the Debs film. More importantly, it formed a board made up of community groups like farmers, feminists, artists, and the poor to make decisions about public television. But Sanders’s film still didn’t air — he refused to let it run while ETV production workers were on strike, calling the idea “an insult to [Debs’s] memory.” The Debs film eventually did run, once the strike was over. And Sanders would make more films for the broadcaster, including a no-frills look at poverty in Vermont he hoped would show people “the need to stand together, to organize, and to fight.” None of this was exactly the resume of a typical politician, even one with his eye on running a small city of 37,000. Yet within two years, the four-time also-ran and socialist documentarian who complained that the airwaves were inhospitable to “anything that deals with class conflict” would be in exactly that position — Mayor of Burlington. And the cycle of setback, persistence, and eventual victory that characterized his battle with ETV would be transplanted to Burlington’s City Hall.

A Change is Gonna Come On its face, 1981 was a strange year for a self-proclaimed socialist to take power anywhere in the United States. The previous year had closed with a landslide presidential victory for Ronald Reagan, a movement conservative weaned on proto-libertarian Austrian economics and rabidly anticommunist literature, who wanted to “make America great again,” and had once been considered too right-wing to be electable. Under Reagan, the GOP’s platform read like a wish list for the radical right, emphasizing above all slashing taxes and government spending. In his convention speech, Reagan had warned of the danger of government and “its great power to harm us,” even as he proposed a more aggressive anti-Soviet policy and massive increase in military spending. Planks opposing affirmative action, busing, the Equal Rights Amendment, legal abortion, gun control, and the penalization of segregated schools by “IRS bureaucrats” won him a notable admirer: Bill Wilkinson, Imperial Wizard of the militant Klan group The Invisible Empire, who gushed that the platform read “as if it were written by a Klansman.” Reagan’s election was the culmination of a decades-old conservative movement bent on rolling back the New Deal order put in place by President Franklin Roosevelt half a century earlier. Fueled by untold amounts of corporate money and an army of grassroots activists that gradually engineered a virtual takeover of the GOP, the movement meshed easily with the party’s use of increasingly race-based appeals to the country’s mostly white, conservative suburbs. Combined with a seemingly never-ending economic crisis that persisted through the 1970s, these created fertile ground for a rejection of New Deal liberalism, reaching a milestone with the 1978 Taxpayers Revolt in Reagan’s home state of California. Wrought by a coalition of business leaders and conservative suburbanites, the revolt inspired imitators around the country and signaled the approaching turn away from the liberal politics of the post-Depression era, while saddling the state with a disastrous fiscal straitjacket to this day. Conservative, overwhelmingly rural Vermont seemed an unlikely state to buck this trend. Reagan easily carried the state, which in the 132-year period spanning 1856 to 1988 had voted for a Democrat for president a grand total of once. When Roosevelt first ran for reelection in 1936, Vermont was one of only two states to vote against him. It hadn’t even put a Democrat in the Senate until 1975. But Vermont had been changing. Starting in the 1960s, the state saw a thirty-year-influx of out-of-state migrants. By 1963, its people outnumbered its cows for the first time. Newcomers comprised nearly a third of Vermont’s growth that decade; by the 1970s they were responsible for 60 percent of it. The first wave had been young professionals, who quickly made inroads into the state’s political and business ranks; the second was a countercultural wave, much of it from New York and Massachusetts: hippies, radicals, lefty activists, and others, fed up with the rot of city life and looking to go back to the land or engage in communal living. This influx, political scientist Garrison Nelson later said, became “the driving force” behind the state’s impending political transformation. Suddenly, Vermont was teeming with “outsiders,” many of whom settled in Chittenden County, home to Burlington and already by far the largest county before out-of-towners came pouring in. From 1960 to 1980, the share of Vermonters born out of state jumped from less than 20 percent to more than 33 percent. In the next 10 years, Chittenden County as a whole grew by 77 percent. “You would go to the city council and if you raised your hand, the first question they would ask you is ‘How long have you lived here? Where are you from?’” recalls Greg Guma, an expert on local and Vermont politics. Having arrived in Vermont as part of that wave of countercultural migrants, Guma straddled the overlapping lines of journalism, activism, and electoral politics over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, authoring the The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution, a personalized account of the Sanders mayoral administration. Vermont’s political landscape got a face-lift, too. In 1962, the governor’s office went to Phil Hoff, the first Democrat to win statewide office in more than a century. From 1973 to 2011, no governor would be a native-born Vermonter, and by 1984, for the first time in history, the majority of its Senators weren’t either. While around 90 percent of Vermont voters voted in Republican primaries into the late 1960s, by 1985, the electorate was roughly evenly split between Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. But change was slow to come to Burlington. We called them, or they called themselves, the ‘Republicrats.’ “By the time I got here in 1974–1975, it had been run for a couple of decades by a Democratic machine, which had united with the Republicans,” says Guma. “We called them, or they called themselves, the ‘Republicrats.’” This local political elite was organized less by party and ideology than by family lineage. The city’s bureaucracy and payroll were peppered with relatives of its ruling elite. And its ruling Democrats, by 1981 significantly more conservative than party members in other parts of Vermont, tended to share the French ancestry that survived in names like Desautels, Blanchard, Niquette, Charboneau, and Paquette. The latter was Mayor Gordon Paquette, the five-term incumbent who had held some form of elected office since his 1958 election to the city’s board of aldermen. Paquette had risen through the ranks to become mayor in 1971, maintaining a stranglehold on the office for the next decade. Having first won by promising some modest progressive reforms, Paquette instead presided over the stagnation of the city’s services and living standards, largely due to his inability to stand up to the city’s business interests. “He didn’t feel in control of things,” says Guma, who worked for some time as a contractor for Paquette’s administration. “He said, ‘I’m being blackmailed by the big money people, by the department store people, by the real estate owners, and they’re saying to me that if I don’t give them what they want they’re moving out of Burlington.’” The urban renewal projects Paquette ended up supporting displaced communities and, combined with the county’s exploding population, raised rents and shrank the pool of available housing. Meanwhile, as the city’s finances grew tighter, Paquette opted to cut services and fight demands for better pay and benefits from city employees. The kind of poverty and urban blight newly christened Vermonters had sought to leave behind now manifested itself in Burlington. Topping it all off was an increasing statewide reliance on regressive property and sales taxes, as local governments heaped tax breaks on businesses, worth $81 million by 1970. By 1975, around 85,000 Vermonters were living near or below the poverty line. Michael Parenti — a former University of Vermont (UVM) professor and one-time Liberty Union candidate for the House — charged that “the poor [in Vermont] subsidize the rich by working for low wages and paying high prices and by carrying a disproportionately greater share of the taxes.” As time wore on, it became increasingly clear that popular resentment of this status quo was bubbling — and so was resistance.

Candidate Sanders With life getting tougher in Vermont, and politics at the national level seeming to regress, the influx of mostly young out-of-staters contributed to a flowering of protest and activist movements in the state. While in the 1960s radical Vermont had been defined primarily by the antiwar movement and a commitment to environmental protection, the 1970s saw a plethora of forms of radical activism: antinuclear, gay rights, and the women’s movement, eventually finding a capital-P political expression in the Liberty Union Party. Co-ops, fairs, and communes sprung up around the state. Burlington, straining under the squeeze of growth and development, saw a proliferation of neighborhood and advocacy organizations dedicated to matters like urban renewal projects, traffic, and tenant and welfare rights. Sanders was part of the wave of migrants who made up the backbone of these movements, first moving to Vermont in 1964. Perhaps inspired by his formative months volunteering at an Israeli kibbutz after graduating college — “a utopian form of existence,” Sanders had reportedly said — he and his then-wife bought eighty-five acres of rural Vermont for $2,500, turning an old sugarhouse into a cabin with no running water or electricity. “He was sort of a back-to-the-lander,” says Terry Bouricius, who would go on to become one of his key political allies. “He settled in the most rural part of northeast kingdom to try and do farming and stuff. It didn’t work out.” Sanders was, he recalled, the opposite of a typical candidate: untucked shirt, wild hair, and a thick Brooklyn accent “more typical of a New York street vendor selling soft pretzels than a Vermont politician.” Bouricius, who had moved to Middlebury for college, first met Sanders in a lecture hall in 1972 during the 1972 gubernatorial campaign. Sanders was, he recalled, the opposite of a typical candidate: untucked shirt, wild hair, and a thick Brooklyn accent “more typical of a New York street vendor selling soft pretzels than a Vermont politician.” By this point, Sanders had departed Vermont for a spell, divorced, sold his stake in the property to his ex-wife, fathered a son, and settled in Burlington. The two wouldn’t cross paths again until a few years later, when Bouricius joined Liberty Union. In 1976, as Sanders embarked on what would be his final campaign for the party, again for governor, Bouricius split his time between running his own race for state senate and working on Sanders’s run. They crisscrossed the state in Sanders’s beat-up Volkswagen, Bouricius at the wheel and Sanders drafting speeches and press statements on one of his many stacks of yellow legal pads, going from town to town and doing interviews at local radio stations. It was on these trips that Bouricius witnessed Sanders’s ability to connect with voters, whether shopkeepers, farmers, or hippies, and Vermonters’ surprising affinity for the socialist ideas he espoused. In one case, the two sat in the squalid living room of a New Haven plastics factory worker. As he told them about the wretched conditions he worked under in the non-unionized, unventilated plant, Sanders, Bouricius recalls, “put his arm around the guy’s shoulder and made a real human connection.” At a hippie commune on a former dairy farm, the local denizens agreed to register to vote for Sanders, partly because they were convinced his star sign presaged good fortune. The unsuccessful campaign began what would become a lifelong friendship between the two radicals; Bouricius calls Sanders “as close to a selfless person as there is.” Sanders would meet another future ally during these years: attorney John Franco, an antiwar activist who was between college and law school when he met Sanders at the Liberty Union convention in Burlington in 1974. “Bernie was speaker, and he was very impressive and very charismatic, everything that attracts people to him, very articulate,” Franco, now a Burlington attorney, recalls. “He put together a lot of things people were thinking and feeling into a coherent narrative.” At the time, Franco recalls, energy-driven inflation was a pressing issue in the state, owing partly to the oil crisis then engulfing the world, and partly to the local utility regulator’s decision to grant rate increase after rate increase for local utility companies. Drawing on a US Senate study of corporate ownership, the two would plot out press releases and press conferences on the issue in Sanders’s apartment, arguing the utility companies should be forced into bankruptcy. “We just had a field day with the owners of these utility companies in Vermont getting bailed out by these rate increases,” says Franco, who would later run alongside Sanders for Lieutenant Governor in 1976. “That Senate study, man, that was just the gift that kept on giving.”