Let's Write about Senator Bernie Sanders and the state of Vermont's synonymous relationship

This report is no "puff piece". It includes a good summary about the post World War II Vermont history.

When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills (of Vermont):

Early in his life, Sanders left the streets of Brooklyn for the woodlands of Vermont. What did the man bring to the state—and what did the  state bring to the man❓

Echo book review essay published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jill Lepore.  Senator Sanders arrived in Vermont before the New Leftists did in the sixties, and he stayed after they left. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and hippies but with the working poor.

Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn❓”🍂

It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook❗” he said, and “This tree is my tree❗,” 🌳even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)

Mr. Sanders, who i now eighty-four years old, was Vermont’s sole representative in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2007, and he has served in the Senate as an Independent from Vermont ever since. He has been a notoriously ineffective legislator, having introduced only three bills between 1991 and 2020 that became law, two of which concerned the names of post offices. Yet he has wielded nearly unrivalled influence over American politics of a quite particular and distinctively local character: in his career as the country’s leading progressive populist and the second most successful socialist ever to run for President—beaten only by Eugene Victor Debs, the railman of Terre Haute, Indiana—Sanders has brought to the political stage the view not from the streets of Brooklyn but from the mountains of Vermont, and especially from its biggest city, Burlington, which in 1981, when Sanders was elected mayor by a margin of ten votes, had a population, whopping for Vermont but by any other measure minuscule, of a little under thirty-eight thousand. (It’s barely bigger this winter, at forty-five thousand shivering souls.) 

This past summer (2025), Sanders more or less said that he has no plans to run for President again in 2028. (“Oh, God,” he told CNN. “Let’s not worry about that.”) He has, however, filed papers to run for reëlection to the Senate in 2030, when he’ll be eighty-nine, even though there doesn’t seem much chance he’ll really do that. In short, if it’s not quite time to assess the Vermonter’s legacy, it’s getting close.

Aside from Sanders and Calvin Coolidge—born in Plymouth Notch, in 1872—Vermont hasn’t left much of a stamp on American politics, at least nationally. Notionally, well, that’s another question. Vermont is for many Americans something of a mythical place, a land out of time, and there’s a reason for that: a storybook America, all red barns and covered bridges, black-and-white mottled cows grazing in rolling green pastures, and dried-apple-faced farmers leaning on pitchforks, is how the place sold itself, beginning not long before those two teen-agers from Brooklyn got off the train in midtown. Vermont Life, launched in 1946 to promote tourism in the heady days after the end of the war, when Americans had money in their wallets and gas in their tanks, regularly ran as a full-page ad a photograph of a sugarhouse, steam billowing from its cupola, above a few lines of text:  Something of the ruggedness of the granite and marble has entered into the veins of the people of Vermont. They do their own thinking; they make their own decisions; they stand by their own convictions with the unyielding tenacity of their eternal hills.
—Bruce Barton.

This endorsement appears to have been specifically aimed at New Yorkers, since Barton, a Republican, had represented Manhattan in the U.S. House. Barton helped invent Vermont, even though, as far as I can tell, he never lived there. He wasn’t only a politician; he was also, and mainly, an adman, the longtime president of B.B.D.O., the agency that served as a chief inspiration for “Mad Men.” His contributions to a Rockwellian vision of America included creating the fictional all-American home cook Betty Crocker. Was Vermont ever really Bruce Barton’s Vermont? Rugged and flinty and possessing an unyielding tenacity may be how a lot of Americans would like to see themselves, but in Vermont, a place Coolidge called a “brave little state,” what began as an adman’s pitch to tourists became something of an official state attitude that, among other things, transformed the landscape, or, rather, it committed the state to preserving the landscape for tourists. 

Inevitably, the people who paid the price for that preservation have been the poor and especially poor farmers. Today, you can board Amtrak’s Vermonter at Penn Station, heading north, and I promise you’ll know when you’ve crossed the border into that brave and beautiful and hard-luck little state.

Bernie Sanders crossed that border line just about as soon as he was able. His father, Eli, a Polish immigrant, was a travelling paint salesman; his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, born on the Lower East Side, suffered from congenital heart disease. She died in 1960, at the age of forty-seven. Young Bernard Sanders, who had been a high-school track star, watched her die in a charity hospital of a condition from which she might well have survived if the family had had more money. Two years later, Eli died of an apparent heart attack, having crashed his car outside a hospital emergency room to which he’d tried to drive himself. Sanders vowed to escape New York. He transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago, where he became a civil-rights activist and a devotee of the somewhat mystical and entirely sex-obsessed Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. After graduating, in 1964, mop-headed, bespectacled, and already famously slovenly, Sanders married, travelled in Europe and Israel, spent time on a kibbutz outside Haifa, and then went to Vermont with his wife. “We had never been to Vermont in our lives,” he later said. “We just drove up.” For twenty-five hundred dollars, they bought eighty-five mostly wooded acres, where they spent summers cooking on an improvised Sterno rig—old T-shirts stuck into coffee cans—that Sanders’s friends called Berno.

Vermont was at a turning point. In 1945, there had been twenty-six thousand family farms in the state. Twenty years later, when Sanders bought that patch of land, fewer than nine thousand farms were left, many families having lost theirs because the price of wool and milk was falling, or because the state had seized their land under eminent domain, to make way for the interstate highway, but also because, with all those skiers and second-home owners, including flatlanders like Sanders, property taxes had gone up, and farmers couldn’t afford to pay them. In other states, old farms became suburbs and strip malls, but not in Vermont, where most old farms reverted to forest. (Three-quarters of Vermont was farmland by the eighteen-fifties; three-quarters of the state is now forest.)

Mr. Sanders moved to Vermont, year-round and for good, in 1968, when droves of young people from all over the country headed for the hills. Much of the New Left, disillusioned with electoral politics after the fiasco of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, went back to the land. In Vermont, back-to-the-landers bought old hill farms for dirt cheap. By some estimates, a hundred thousand young people moved to Vermont between 1965, and 1975; by another, they set up more than a hundred communes. They kept the state rural, but they changed its politics. They started food co-ops and opened vegetarian restaurants and founded artists’ coöperatives and hooked up shortwave radios and published papers like the Vermont Freeman, a twenty-cent newspaper that was something of a radical, countercultural counterpart to Vermont Life, and whose editor distributed it out of the back of his VW. Year by year, under the influence of a movement sometimes known as Free Vermont, the stalwartly Republican state, which had voted for Richard Nixon by a wide margin in 1960, tilted further to the left.

Sanders doesn’t much like to talk about his early life, or, for that matter, his later life, and he declined to be interviewed by Dan Chiasson for the writer’s revelatory new book, “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place” (Knopf), but he left behind plenty of clues in Vermont. Between 1969 and 1974, Sanders contributed dozens of articles to the Vermont Freeman. In two pieces from 1969, for instance, he wrote about the wretchedness of city life (“the air is poisonous, the noise deafening, and the streets are dangerous to walk” ) and the hard lives of such “miserable people” as his father, taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan to do “moron work,” packed into subway cars with a faceless mob, then taking the train back at night to “family, dinner, arguments, TV and sleep”: “The years come and go, suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.” Like a miller whetting a stone, he readied his axe for grinding. A 1969 front-page teaser for one of Sanders’s articles in the Vermont Freeman works just as well for all of them: “Bernard Sanders views the ills of our troubled and dying society.” And that line could have served equally well as a slogan for his 2016, and 2020, Presidential campaigns.

Mr. Sanders, as Chiasson argues, considered himself a chronicler of Vermont’s transformation in the sixties, reporting that led him to a pained awareness of its economic costs. “I think Vermont has changed terrible since I was a kid,” a farmer told Sanders, in an interview published in the Vermont Freeman in 1970, a year when one in six Vermonters lived below the poverty line. (Currently, that number is one in ten.) “Vermont was beautiful, beautiful back in them days. And every farmer always paid his bills. He had the money to pay his bills. . . . And now, today, in the State of Vermont, the taxes is driving people right out of the homes that they own.”

Mr. Sanders boned up on socialism during his freshman year at Brooklyn College. But it was in the hills of Vermont that he witnessed the ravages of a particular kind of capitalism, saw families suffering in the hills the way his own parents had in the tenements. In 1971, he moved to Burlington and made his first run for the U.S. Senate, representing the Liberty Union, something of a counterculture political party. “I have only one donor, and he drove me here,” he said at a campaign stop, pointing to a friend. He won 2.2 per cent of the vote. That same year—blocks away from Sanders’s Burlington apartment, which wasn’t really an apartment, just a couple of rooms in what had once been a workers’ cottage, behind an abandoned glass factory—Dan Chiasson was born.

Chiasson, a poet, a longtime contributor to this magazine, and the chair of the English department at Wellesley, had a front-row seat to Sanders’s rise, and his “Bernie for Burlington” is nearly as much a memoir of its author as it is a biography of its subject and, not least, a history of the Green Mountain State. “It is no small irony that hill farms marketed to well-heeled city people piqued the interest of a thirteen-year-old Brooklyn Jew and future socialist who would arguably do more to impact Vermont’s traditional culture than anyone in the state’s history,” Chiasson writes, about the day Larry and Bernie stopped at that Vermont bureau and picked up that brochure. It is also no small irony that a boy who grew up in Sanders’s Burlington, only to leave it behind, would become its chronicler.

Chiasson’s roots in Vermont go back to his great-grandparents, Wilfred and Laura Delorme, French Canadians who met as teen-agers, in 1915, while working in a woollen mill in Winooski, across the river from Burlington. Burlington is so little, and Chiasson’s family history runs so deep, that his kin pop up all over the place. Wilfred fought in the First World War and then went back to the looms, but after the mills closed, in 1954, he began working for the state while also tending his farm in South Burlington. In the early sixties, one of Chiasson’s grandfathers worked on a crew that blasted a route through the Winooski River Valley to bring Interstate 89 up to Burlington.

That highway, along with Interstate 91, made it easier for the skiers and the second-home owners to get to Vermont from New York and Massachusetts, but highways also risked ruining what had become, after the decline of both manufacturing and farming, the chief source of Vermont’s wealth: its natural beauty. In 1968, the state legislature passed what became known as the Billboard Law, banning billboards so that the view from the highway would not be marred, and two years later it enacted Act 250, known as the Postcard Law, strictly regulating development to insure the preservation of the state’s Vermont Life landscape. In 1978, the legislature passed the Use Value Appraisal Act, which lowered property taxes for owners who agreed to maintain their property for agricultural purposes or forestland. (About a third of all land in the state is now enrolled in the program.) Freezing the landscape in time is what the people of Vermont, and not merely tourists, want, but it’s also left residents with a vexed regard for visitors. “Welcome to Vermont,” one bumper sticker reads. “Now Go Home.”

Vermont’s struggle to stay the same—Vermont Life-worthy—even as its population and its politics were undergoing a transformation as big as any state experienced in the twentieth century, shaped Sanders’s view of what politics can do and what it can’t, and what money can do and what it can’t, or ought not to. In the early seventies, when his relationship with the Vermont Freeman began to sour, he briefly published his own alternative newsletter, Movement. It didn’t last long—and published so irregularly that he told subscribers newsletters would appear “when you least expect it”—but it advanced the Liberty Union, which, in 1972, nominated Sanders as its candidate for governor and endorsed Benjamin Spock for President. (More Chiasson-family cameos: when Sanders took a visiting Dr. Spock out for steak, Chiasson’s great-uncle Esau was tending the bar.) By 1973, Sanders had settled into campaign rhetoric that would hold him in good stead to the present day. “While Vermonters are paying outrageous prices for gas and heating oil, the oil billionaires are getting even richer,” he wrote. More of Vermont’s rural poor sold their land. In 1975, when developers were buying up failing farms and building retail shops and restaurants to support ski areas, Chiasson’s great-grandfather Wilfred sold his small farm in South Burlington—“for pennies,” Chiasson writes.

Mr. Sanders, by now a perennial candidate, perfected his craggy, scolding, mitten-waving style. He’d arrived in Vermont before the 1968 New Leftists did, and he stayed after they’d gone. He found his strongest support not with the draft dodgers and the hippies but with the working poor. In 1976, in a bid for the governorship during the U.S. Bicentennial, he complained about corporate ownership of the media: “We should not have a culture where the three major networks are controlled by the Chase Manhattan Bank.” (The premise that CBS, NBC, and ABC lacked journalistic integrity in the seventies is unsupportable, but the charge that corporate ownership corrupts the integrity of news organizations is borne out daily.) Tourism, Sanders argued, was having a “devastating impact” on the state’s economy. Men and women who’d lost their farms and their factory jobs were working as “chambermaids and burger flippers,” while out-of-state developers were getting rich and the skiers at Stowe were driving Porsches and BMWs. Sanders lost in 1976, but he had found his groove.

Mr. Sanders soon left the Liberty Union and started the American People’s Historical Society, a Howard Zinn-style educational outfit that made filmstrips and documentaries about everyone from Ethan Allen to Eugene V. Debs. The material was every bit as polemical and tendentious as Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and Sanders distributed it to Vermont public schools in his beat-up Volvo. He was also a bit strapped. In 1978, he was evicted. The next year, he made a documentary film, titled “Poverty in Vermont,” that featured penetrating and compassionate interviews with people who were displaced by Burlington’s ill-considered urban-renewal initiatives and living in a public-housing project called Franklin Square. By the fall of 1980, the Burlington Free Press was reporting that Sanders, “the historian and film maker,” was “testing whether he can build a coalition of poor people, blue collar workers and university students” in his race for mayor. It turned out he could. In 1981, he was elected mayor, if not quite the Zohran Mamdani of the Reagan revolution (Mamdani won by two hundred thousand votes, not ten), then at least a sty in the Gipper’s eye.

Born: 1971 (age 55 years), Burlington, Vermont

Dan Chiasson grew up as the son of a struggling single mother. He watched Sanders change Burlington, very much for the better, by supporting small businesses, redeveloping the deserted industrial waterfront into parkland and public space, balancing the budget, bringing minor-league baseball to the city, and expanding affordable housing through a municipal land trust. Sanders also established a new culture of citizen participation and engagement. He had a public-access TV show, “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” in which, mike in hand and dressed like a schlub, he interviewed Burlingtonians, especially kids and senior citizens and even the occasional cocker spaniel. It was a program with all the daffy affability of “This Is Spinal Tap.” Chiasson seems to know just about everyone in old clips from the show. He’s the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon of Burlington. When Michel Foucault came to give a lecture at the University of Vermont, where he was to be introduced by Sanders, the postmodern French philosopher sat on an orange sectional in a lounge where Chiasson’s mother had once recruited students to babysit her son. When Jesse Jackson appeared onstage at U.V.M. with Sanders during Jackson’s 1988 Presidential bid, Chiasson, a high schooler, tried, and failed, to get inside. The next year, Sanders’s last in the mayor’s office, Chiasson headed off to Amherst College. On Election Night in 1990, Chiasson climbed to an upper floor of the Amherst library to catch the radio signal from Brattleboro, where he was able to hear that, unbelievably, the socialist mayor from Burlington would become Vermont’s sole representative in Congress. He writes, with astonished and complicated pride, “My guy won.”

Looking back over Sanders’s career in Burlington from the middle of the sixties to the end of the eighties, Chiasson argues that “Bernie did, in important respects, change; and Vermont, in troubling ways, did not.” I’m not so sure I agree with what’s on either side of that semicolon. Sanders has sounded the same for more than half a century, while Vermont has, especially recently, changed a great deal.

 “The Trouble with Harry” movie's plot turns on the question of who killed the poor man, and, as nearly everyone in town tries to work that out, they bury him and dig him up and bury him and dig him up again and finally strip him naked and stow him in a bathtub. Key elements of the mystery include a dead rabbit, a live frog, a pair of loafers, a rifle, a milk bottle, and a millionaire who comes to town in a chauffeured limousine. You could very plausibly shoot a remake in Vermont today, and it would look just about the same. 

Still, it’s a different place, and more different every day. Given the housing shortage that’s afflicted the whole country, the state, in 2024, revised the Postcard Law to allow for more construction, at least in certain areas. Dairy farming has all but vanished, down from more than four thousand farms in 1969, to fewer than six hundred. Fentanyl has devastated Burlington, and much of the rest of Vermont, too, and the prevailing harm-reduction approach has largely, and often spectacularly, failed. The state, which has seen more deaths than births for years, faces a fast-unfolding demographic crisis. In the past few years, it’s suffered disastrous floods owing to climate change; Montpelier, the capital, has been flooded in two of the past three summers.

But Vermont has been buried before, and dug up again, and even brought back to life. Property taxes have risen by an average of forty per cent since 2020, when fugitives made their hopeful escapes from New York and New England, worsening the cycle of rising land values, rising taxes, and bigger bills for longtime locals. Despite the risk of flooding on lower ground, hilly, chilly Vermont is a destination for climate refugees. Other types of farming are replacing dairies. A lot of farmers are growing hops, hoping to make Vermont for beer what the Napa Valley is for wine. The state has about the best rural broadband program in the country, opening doors for small businesses and digital nomads alike. (Even my own scruffy little hill got hooked up last year.) Back-to-the-land movements seem to come in thirty-year cycles: the United States is due for one, and, who knows, maybe a hundred thousand Gen Z-ers, fleeing Brooklyn, will turn up in the next ten years, wearing canvas Carhartt pants and carrying iPads and knitting needles and glossy seed catalogues. More people, in short, are likely to move to Vermont. What they’ll bring, and what they’ll take, is harder to say.

After Bernie Sanders left Burlington for Washington, D.C., he mostly said the same things he’d been saying since the seventies, except louder. “Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public,” he declared in 2024. “Today, we have a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.” It can sound like cant, but it is, unfortunately, true in much of America, if, thank God, a bit less true in Vermont, brave little snowy muddy fierce little mountain state. ♦