Before the Revolution

Loping through the streets of Burlington, Vermont, in the late 1970s, Bernard Sanders was hard to miss and impossible to forget: the mop of thinning, windswept hair, the intense stare behind horn-rimmed glasses, the raggedy clothes. Born and raised in Brooklyn, never able to shed the accent, Sanders—or “Bernie,” as I’ll call him, too, following Dan Chiasson’s example—was known throughout Vermont as the guy who ran for everything, the “perennial candidate” and constant canvasser who wouldn’t take no for an answer. That’s how Chiasson, a poet and professor of English at Wellesley College and a Burlington native, first encountered him. When, on a cold day in January 1981, the perennial candidate showed up, clipboard in hand, outside 258 Colchester Avenue, Chiasson’s childhood home, no one wanted to speak with him. “Don’t open the door—it’s Sanders!” Chiasson’s grandfather yelled. Upstairs, from his second-floor window, nine-year-old Dan watched as Bernie made his way over to the next house.

The episode, re-created in Bernie for Burlington, is emblematic of Chiasson’s method throughout this marvelously rich account of Bernie’s early years. We see Bernie from the outside, the way young Dan, a shy boy who kept “a close eye on things,” saw him then and the way he sees him today. As it turns out, the two viewpoints are remarkably similar. Chiasson treats Bernie as a literary phenomenon, not as a specimen to be dissected. He makes no attempt to wheedle his way into the inner recesses of Bernie’s brain, and while he interviewed some political allies and rivals, friends and family members, he never sought out Bernie himself. He did cross paths with him a few times, back in Burlington, but such encounters were insignificant, involving little more than “a nice backslap.”

Unfettered by the restraints of traditional biography, Bernie for Burlington morphs into a sprawling narrative epic, with three equally prominent protagonists: Bernie himself, of course, the unlikely three-term socialist mayor of Vermont’s most populous city; Dan Chiasson, an impressionable kid with literary aspirations from a modest French-Canadian family; and then the city of Burlington, grim and somewhat dull and then again transcendently beautiful. When Burlingtonians went for swims in the lake, the Adirondacks beckoned in the distance even as turds from the city’s sewers floated past them in the water.

Chiasson is magnificent at conjuring an image of his hometown the way Bernie would have known it: the contrast between low-income residents packed into tenements at the waterfront and the stately homes further uphill, between the greasy spoons where patrons mumbled into their coffee cups and political hangouts like the Fresh Ground, which served carrot soup and ratatouille. The newly arrived hippies, transplants from the rural communes, were eyed warily by the older residents, who had voted Republican for generations. But everyone mingled cheerfully at Bove’s restaurant on Pearl Street, where you got lasagna and meatballs like nothing you tasted before. Chiasson got his literary education at one such establishment, Sneakers in nearby Winooski, where he bussed tables and “quizzed the cerebral line cooks” about Günter Grass. 

His adolescence darkened by his grandparents’ calcified Catholicism, Chiasson vividly recalls the visits from Father Baffa, later outed as one of the Burlington priests credibly accused of sexual abuse. The ashes from Baffa’s cigarette dropping on his bare arm made it into one of Chiasson’s later poems, “Father Tom.” (Occasional quotes from Chiasson’s works grace his narrative, to great effect.) Raising her son on her own, Chiasson’s mother worked a variety of jobs, including as an ambulance dispatcher, but didn’t make enough to move them out of the grandparents’ home, a fate similar to that of Bernie’s parents, who never exchanged their rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment for that much-desired “private house.” 

But Chiasson doesn’t rely on accidental parallels to connect his different story lines. A case in point is the wonderful description of Burlington’s Battery Park, the hub of the city, where Chiasson says he has been “every age”—staring down the mouth of the park’s War of 1812 cannon as a kid and, 40 years later, lifting his sons to help them ride on it. Using the park’s viewfinder as a narrative device (who doesn’t remember these contraptions, scratched up and filthy from too many hands, from their own family outings?), Chiasson lets the reader first gaze at the city itself, focusing on the divide between the impoverished waterfront and the downtown area gussied up for the tourists. Then he pivots back to the lake, home to the legendary underwater monster “Champ,” captured once in an amateur photo. In his poem “Vermont,” Chiasson compares his home state to a showgirl ruined by her beauty, and this passage seems as if written to support that image. But its real point emerges at the end when Chiasson reveals that Bernie’s first apartment in the city was right next to the park, straddling the seam between the two Burlingtons.

And such straddling proved to be the secret of Bernie’s political success in Burlington. Even as he continued to proclaim his progressive views, he usually found a way of mediating between the old and the new, the rich and the poor, the right and the left. In his early years in Vermont, Bernie was, as Chiasson puts it, certainly “hippie-adjacent.” He had no income to speak of, hitchhiked his way to debates, owned no furniture, and mooched electricity off his neighbors. A follower of the antiauthoritarian pedagogue A. S. Neill, Bernie was a “free-range” parent to his son, Levi (which, in practice, meant that the boy had to sit through endless political gatherings). But Bernie also knew the difference between choice and necessity. He understood, for example, as did all low-income Burlingtonians, what lack of proper health care really meant. His mother’s congenital heart condition was treated too late to save her, and his father died two years later, of a heart attack, having crashed his car near the hospital emergency room, a few feet away from the help he never got.

Bernie’s frugal lifestyle became the source of many anecdotes. Some of the best come from Bernie’s onetime roommate Richard Sugarman, a religion professor at the University of Vermont, a character straight out of a Saul Bellow novel. A six-foot-four orthodox Jew, Sugarman kept a kosher household but also smoked large quantities of marijuana. Once, he spotted a $20 bill in a bed of tulips outside city hall. Bernie, who was with him and had the “better angle,” lunged and grabbed it. When he seemed unhappy about sharing the prize, Sugarman offered to buy his friend a beer “from my half”—only to discover that Bernie hadn’t ever been to a bar in the city.

In Burlington, Bernie could learn from the best: Sadie White, for one, a septuagenarian former mill worker and Democratic activist who controlled the city’s “sick ballots,” harvesting votes from the elderly in hospitals and nursing homes. Or the “wild-eyed” anarchist Murray Bookchin, who would strut around Burlington with a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit strapped to his belt. Plenty eccentric himself, Bernie cared little what people thought of him. And he wasn’t—and arguably still isn’t—a particularly charismatic speaker, making up in belligerence what he lacked in rhetorical refinement. His harangues, peppered with angry references to the oligarchs and the concentration of corporate power, often bypassed his audiences. Thus, he would tell a group of Vermont high school students that they should stop being “docile idiots,” ending up in their good graces only when he called for the legalization of all drugs.

“Sanders does not have a special personality reserved for the elderly,” writes Chiasson (one of the book’s funniest sentences!), after watching a video of his hero getting into an argument with residents at a retirement home. But Bernie has been perfectly capable of directing such irony against himself. One of my favorite examples comes from his 2016 post-campaign autobiography, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, where Bernie notes that, after winning 2 percent of the vote in a special election for the U.S. Senate, he got 1 percent in the general election six months later: “I was on the move, just in the wrong direction.”

As mayor of Burlington, initially elected with the smallest of margins, Bernie had the sidewalks and streets of the poorer neighborhoods plowed, got cable TV for the elderly, raised the pay of police officers, brought a minor league baseball team to town, issued fines to University of Vermont students whose partying kept their neighbors up, invigorated the city’s cultural life (Chiasson vividly remembers an Allen Ginsberg reading), and rebuilt the waterfront. In downtown Burlington he established 242 Main, a youth center complete with a mosh pit, where young Dan, even then a devotee of button-down shirts, would watch his punk-identifying classmates slam into each other.

Yet, as Bernie for Burlington makes clear, Bernie’s primary commitment, from the beginning of his political career, has been to the working class. Sometimes that has put him at odds with his allies. When it was discovered that the GE plant outside of Burlington was producing weapons for the government troops in El Salvador, Bernie sided with the plant’s workers rather than with the protesters. He reluctantly joined a march through Burlington, but appeared “sullen and distracted.” Chiasson has the photograph to prove it: a sour-faced Bernie, biting his lips, sits by himself, looking like he has just been slapped. (The photos in the book—only a few of them formal portraits—are a delight, showing people in constant motion, talking, arguing, running, hugging, playing ball, living their lives.) As it happened, even some of the GE workers agreed with the protesters: perhaps also one of the results of the Sanders era.

Dan Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington breathes new life into a genre often straitjacketed by the “and then” approach to telling someone’s life. An unconventional politician deserves an unconventional biography. And although Chiasson ends his account in 1990, with the perennial candidate’s successful run for a seat in the House, it helps us understand Bernie’s stubbornness today. (One hopes for a second volume, “Bernie Unbound,” about his two presidential campaigns and his tenure as the longest-serving independent member of Congress.) 

As Chiasson demonstrates, Mr. Sanders went to Washington well prepared, having presided over a successful social experiment in Burlington, “a one-of-a-kind, historic inquiry into the possibilities for human happiness.” The sources for that experiment may be found in Marx, of course, notably the conviction that workers should enjoy the fruits of their own labor. That said, I’m intrigued also by Chiasson’s references to an enormous set of Freud’s Complete Psychological Works, a gift from Bernie’s brother that he lugged around with him when his other belongings fit into a duffle bag. This makes perfect sense. Both Freud and Bernie, aside from their low tolerance for stupidity and hypocrisy, share the same belief—that humans are bound to be miserable if all they do is struggle to stay alive (Freud to Martha Bernays, August 14, 1885). Yet precisely that has become the reality for millions in the U.S. today, the country with one of the lowest life expectancies among the rich nations of the world. High time, as Bernie would say, to start a campaign.

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