Before Congress, Bernie Sanders was asked to leave a Vermont commune
In 1971 a young writer visiting a Vermont back-to-the-land commune was told to go after three days. His offence was talking politics instead of doing farm work; one resident said nothing got done unless people were pulled away from him. That visitor, Bernie Sanders, became the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Sanders was born in Brooklyn on September 8, 1941. His father, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who arrived in 1921, sold paint, and many relatives who stayed in Poland were murdered in the Holocaust, which Sanders credits with drawing him to politics early. The family always had food and clothes but not money for extras such as a rug. At high school he captained the track team and lost his first election, coming last of three in a race for student president run on aid for Korean War orphans. His mother died when he was 19, and his father two years afterwards.
At the University of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1964, he was an indifferent student but a busy activist. He chaired the campus branch of the Congress of Racial Equality, and in January 1962 joined a sit-in at the president's office against segregated university housing; the university ended that segregation in the summer of 1963. He attended the March on Washington and was fined $25 for resisting arrest at a protest against school segregation. He later said he read everything except his assigned coursework.
After jobs as a preschool teacher, psychiatric aide and carpenter in New York, he moved in 1968 to Stannard, a Vermont town of 88 people, and made educational filmstrips. Running for the small socialist Liberty Union party, he lost races for governor and senator through the 1970s, taking just 4% in the 1974 Senate contest. He quit the party in 1977 and made a documentary about the socialist Eugene Debs.
Breakthrough came in 1981, when Burlington elected him mayor as an independent. He moved to the US House in 1990, co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus the next year, and won a Senate seat in 2006, the first non-Republican to hold it since a Whig in 1850. He finished second in the Democratic presidential contests of 2016 and 2020.
Source: Bernie Sanders
