Dan Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington reveals how Bernie Sanders, an outsider with a Brooklyn accent, won Vermont’s mayoralty four times (1981–1989) in a struggling immigrant city—first by 22 votes—shaped by mill closures and urban decay. His socialist roots (Einstein’s Why Socialism?, Marxist influences) clashed with rural libertarian values, yet local support propelled him to near-victory in 1988’s House race before defeating NRA-aligned Rep. Peter Smith in 1990. Critics like Diane in Florida accuse him of hypocrisy (private jets), while supporters praise his anti-establishment stance, though Chiasson notes his pragmatic waterfront deals and delayed progressive terminology. Sanders’ early career underscores his lifelong push for third-party politics to address systemic inequality, a theme still resonant today. [Automatically generated summary]
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And now in the Washington Journal, we want to introduce you to author Dan Chasen.
Dan is also the chair of the English Department at Wellesley College, and he has written this book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
Dan Chasen, what sparked the concept of this book?
Yeah, thanks so much for having me on.
I grew up in the city of Burlington during the eight years of Bernie's time in City Hall, and I was aware at the time, and as it's grown my sense that I was part of some kind of kind of wacky American experiment in Burlington, Vermont.
We called it the People's Republic of Burlington.
And, you know, as a low-income kid living right in the city, I was kind of a witness to this experiment, but also a bit of a, you know, beneficiary of it.
Sanders and his team in City Hall had a lot of outreach to people in the city, particularly teenagers, actually.
So it was a transformative time in my life.
And, you know, I went on to be a writer and realized that I was sitting on a pretty good story, having been a witness to this early days of Bernie's career.
Did Bernie Sanders, Mayor Bernie Sanders, transform Burlington, Vermont, or was it transformed already and just waiting for him?
Well, I really feel that he transformed the city.
You know, it was small measures, you know, bringing in artists and writers and starting a youth office and giving kids something to do, training teenagers to do carpentry and remodeling of properties.
He started a community land trust for low-cost home ownership.
There's a long laundry list of things that he did.
Some of these measures were inexpensive or free.
You know, we're staring down another big blizzard here in Boston as the whole East Coast is.
And I see that Mayor Mamdani in New York City just called on his residents and citizens of New York to get out their snow shovels and pitch in.
And that reminded me of something that Sanders did in Burlington, which was called Operation Snow Shovel, which we were all given shovels and told to go shovel out the old ladies in their homes.
So that was a non-political measure that Sanders designed, and it just built a lot of community richness and trust, I think.
Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, 1980s?
That's right.
He was elected in 81 by a margin of initially 22 votes, narrowed to 10 on recount.
And he was elected to four terms as mayor.
He left City Hall in 1989, took a year in the wilderness, and came back to successfully contest the incumbent Republican and go off to Washington as our only U.S. Congressperson.
Vermont has only one seat.
And we'll get to that in just a minute, but tell us a little bit about Burlington.
Sure.
Well, Burlington was an immigrant community.
I'm from a French-Canadian and Irish background, and those were the two main immigrant groups.
There had been manufacturing in the city in the 20th century.
Those mills closed in the 50s, and large groups of former mill workers and their families fell into discouragement in the city.
So there was a very large underclass, including members of my own family, on the one hand.
On the other hand, you had the University of Vermont, which was kind of a separate almost principality up on the hill.
We all benefited from things that the university brought in, great hockey and great art museum and concerts and so on.
But it was a little bit removed from the daily life of ordinary Burlington.
The city had been transformed very negatively by urban renewal in the 50s and 60s.
So when Sanders got to Burlington to live there full time in 71, there were still open construction sites and just empty lots where an old neighborhood had been and had been taken down.
So it was a place that was really, you know, Bernie says at one point in my book that it wasn't a place that was optimal for a leftist politician.
It wasn't like Berkeley, California or Ann Arbor, Michigan.
It was really a much more mixed population, I think.
And we're going to put the numbers up on the screen.
We're talking with author Dan Chasin about his new book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
Of course, it's Senator Bernie Sanders that he's talking about.
You'll see the numbers up there on the screen.
There's a fourth line set aside for Vermont residents.
Mr. Chasin, what is the population of Burlington, about 40,000?
Yeah, it's been around 40,000 for just about ever.
And it's the largest city in Vermont, isn't it?
It is by some measure, yeah.
How did Brooklyn Bernie Sanders get to Burlington, Vermont?
Well, we have to back the story up a little bit.
In the 50s, I was told by Bernie's older brother, Larry Sanders, who was a great source for me, that he and his little brother took the subway into New York City and went to a little shop in Midtown Manhattan called Vermont.
It was a simulated cottage right in the middle of, right next to the Radio City Music Hall.
And it was put there by the Tourist Bureau of the state of Vermont.
Larry and Bernie went into this little shop and picked up brochures full of farms for sale, Vermont farms for sale.
So Bernie and Larry went back to their little apartment, a very tiny apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn, and poured over these catalogs.
Finally, when Bernie got to Vermont at first in 1964, you know, he was dreaming, as many were at the time, of a kind of back-to-the-land existence, a simpler life.
He'd graduated from college and kind of wanted to start over in a new place without any rules or restrictions.
But when he got to Vermont, he found really grinding, almost Appalachian poverty.
So I think of Sanders as having a kind of utopian dimension to his politics, but also a brutally real dimension.
And they were both in play in the 60s.
He eventually began to run as the kind of superstar of a third party called Liberty Union.
They were an anti-Vietnam party that ran some somewhat successful races in the 70s.
And Bernie ran for various offices, governor, senator, and so on.
But he never got above, say, 5% or 6% statewide.
There seemed to be some kind of a cap for him.
So eventually when he moved to Burlington, a friend of his named Richard Sugarman, a guy who considered himself to be a hobby political strategist, went down to City Hall and saw that Sanders had outperformed his statewide totals in the city of Burlington by quite a bit.
He'd gotten 20, 30% in Burlington, when statewide in those races, he'd gotten only 2% or 3%.
So the idea occurred to Sugarman, well, I'm going to ask, see if my friend, who at that point had retired from politics, he said, see if my friend will stage a campaign for mayor of Burlington.
Was he working, was Bernie Sanders working in Burlington?
Now, did he move up there without a job?
Did he move for a job?
So all through the 60s, he was a freelance writer and he kind of had pickup carpentry jobs and kind of improvised life.
But by the late 70s, he'd actually started a pretty successful small business.
He was producing historical film strips for schools.
He noticed that his son Levy would come home with his worksheets from his school day, and the worksheets that corresponded to his history classes had nothing about labor history, nothing about leftist history, nothing about kind of the people's history.
So Sanders and some friends put together this little film strip business in his little apartment.
They scripted them, they recorded them, they produced them, and then they drove them all around New England.
And they apparently did pretty well with these film strips.
Maybe some of them are still in some supply closets somewhere in little libraries or schools across New England.
Now, Dan Chase, Bernie Sanders has a pretty noticeable Brooklyn accent.
Yes, he does.
Did that play well in Burlington?
And wasn't there a pretty strong GOP establishment in Burlington at the time?
Yes.
Well, so statewide, Vermont was considered the only one-party Republican state into the 70s.
Political scientists and sociologists actually studied Vermont's political culture.
It was a really established Republican political culture.
And the only Democrats in Vermont really were in cities.
So the city of Burlington was a Democratic stronghold.
There was a Democratic machine in place there.
And the mayor of the city, Gordon Paquette, had been in for five terms.
He controlled the entire board of aldermen and web of city commissions.
So it was a kind of a daunting prospect to break into that machine for Bernie.
And of course, he was the consummate outsider.
You know, he had the real urban guy, the thick Brooklyn accent that has not diminished over the years at all.
There was a lot of anti-Semitism in the city at the time.
It was a very interesting moment in the city because, you know, we were just becoming aware of outsiders, quote-unquote, flatlanders, starting to really come in and transform the culture of the city.
Ben and Jerry's played a role in that moment as well.
But these were all people who were, you know, sort of on the margins.
It was very shocking for Sanders to kind of break in to such an existing political hierarchy.
When did he start using the label socialist?
That's a really good question.
He discovered socialism in his one year at Brooklyn College.
There was a table set up in the sort of auditorium or gymnasium with all the various student groups, and he met some, he said, real live socialists.
Around that time, he was also introduced to a pamphlet that was published by Albert Einstein called Why Socialism?
It had a really big influence among college kids in particular.
Einstein was probably the most respected person in the world, and he put out his own political broadsheet calling for socialism.
So that was a really impactful experience for Sanders to discover that literature.
And then at the University of Chicago, where he transferred, he read a lot of Marx, and he developed really his idea of himself as a socialist, I think, there in the early 60s.
So, Dan Chase, and Bernie Sanders is probably well known as well for having a flinty, sometimes, you know, aggressive personal style.
How did that play in Burlington, Vermont?
That's a great question.
You know, the classic Yankee Republican of the type that you would find in the state's hill regions and countrysides was a very flinty, stubborn, you know, tenacious character.
And the politics of that individual were nominally Republican, but we would recognize a lot of progressive strains in that form of Republican thought.
And Sanders made a really very effective and persuasive appeal to those voters when he started to run statewide for office.
So, you know, he talked to them about economic insecurity.
He talked to them about the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
A lot of those folks were watching their farmland, neighboring farmland get bought up by wealthy out-of-staters.
And there was a fear of development.
There was the fear that Vermont was going to somehow lose what made it special.
And I think Bernie and others in his generation who moved to Vermont really only wanted to preserve it as they found it.
So he had a really surprising appeal, actually, to those kinds of folks.
He also had a strong, I think to this day, still libertarian strain to his thought.
He would tell folks in Franklin County in Vermont that he was against gun control, period, in the 70s.
He wanted there to be absolutely no laws banning drugs, for example.
So he had a strong libertarian strain underneath his socialism that appealed, I think.
Has that been consistent throughout his congressional career, first in the House of Representatives and then, of course, as senator?
I think so.
I think primarily just in his insistent independence throughout his career.
You know, after he left Liberty Union, this sort of fringe anti-Vietnam party in the 70s, he never once again joined a political party.
He ran as an independent in Burlington, and he ran as an independent, you know, statewide and was elected to the House as an independent and remains an independent.
So I think that strain of strong Yankee independence just goes into sort of the basics of his career.
Yeah.
Phil Scott's Independence00:08:05
Dan Chase, and this goes a little bit beyond your book, but Vermont has had a Republican governor for years and years, and he gets re-elected all the time.
Jim Scott, I believe is his name.
Yeah, Phil Scott, yeah.
Yeah, Phil Scott.
But Vermont, 65% votes for the Democratic nominee for president, entire congressional delegation, Democratic.
Where's the dichotomy there?
How does that happen?
Well, it's one of the great paradoxes, and it's true across New England, that some of the most progressive states tend to hold the governor's chair for a Republican, as though almost maybe to balance out the politics of the state at large.
You know, what I would say is that the Republican Party as a whole in Vermont has collapsed.
It collapsed in the 80s and really has never gotten back on its feet.
So when we see these Republican governors like Phil Scott, we're watching real political independence and talent play out.
He's a widely loved guy.
He was a stock car racer.
He speaks with a thick Vermont accent.
The other thing is that Vermont Republicans are able, as Phil Scott has shown often, to break from the National Party and show themselves to be real independents.
Whereas if you're running as a Democrat in Vermont, you know, you're basically in line with the Democratic Party in Washington.
So those Republicans are able to be kind of maverick.
And I think that they do appeal to the average Vermont voter, where I think what Bernie and somebody like Phil Scott have in common is that they're viewed as very independent politicians, not beholden to any kind of a party structure.
Well, let's work some calls in.
Dan Chason is our guest.
He is chair of the English department at Wellesley College outside of Boston.
And he is the author of this new book, Bernie for Burlington, The Rise of the People's Politician.
Our first call is coming in from Alaska, Bettlesfield, Alaska, independent line.
Mike, an early good morning to you.
Oh, yes.
Good morning to you, Peter and Dan.
Thank you for taking a call.
Sure.
Yeah.
You guys, you know, I grew up down in Southern California during the late 50s and early 60s.
It was glorious.
I was 12 years old.
Yeah, I was 12 years old.
I mean, Mattel Toys was a mile away.
We used to sneak in and jump into the trash can to get our Hot Wheels back in 1958 when they first came out.
I had a thousand Hot Wheels at least.
But anyway, I would hitchhike to the beach when I was 12 or 14 with my small surfboard.
I'd surf all day.
My dad would get home from his construction company on Olympic Boulevard in L.A., and he'd pick me up after fishing at McGono Beach on the rocks and take me home.
Every day like that.
Nobody at the beach.
Just fantastic.
Ideal.
So, Mike, tie it into our conversation about Bernie Sanders.
I'm trying to tie this in real quick.
Okay.
Gone.
John Kennedy, gone.
The assassination era gone.
Yeah.
There goes my happiness.
The Democrats get in and take over.
Communism takes over.
The civil rights movement takes over, which was bogus.
My dad had a 15-man black concrete crew, the best concrete finishers you ever saw.
There was no racism, in my opinion, back then.
It was manufactured by the CIA, like all the assassinations from Joseph McCarthy on.
I think the Democrats have destroyed America and the Republicans, too.
Thank you, Mike in Alaska, calling in with that comment.
Dan Chason, has Bernie Sanders been a consistent politician in both his policies and his actions?
To a fault, perhaps.
It was amazing in the 70s, even before there was a lot of broadcast attention on Sanders that it would be reported from village to village as he would campaign across Vermont.
People would compare notes.
They would say, did you see this guy, Bernie?
Can you believe his appearance, his outfits, his voice, and his politics?
There were the same phrases and fixations repeated over and over.
It was millionaires at the time, but now it's become billionaires, and it's the same critique.
In 1974, when Nelson Rockefeller was confirmed to be the vice president under Gerald Ford, he had to have these Senate hearings.
And Bernie went around saying, we can't have a billionaire in the White House, you know, and people thought, well, that's paranoid and he's being alarmist.
And who is this crazy Marxist?
But in fact, it was very prescient that we have now a guy who's enriching himself daily from the public coffers.
So he has been consistent throughout.
And there is an element almost of prophecy in some of the things that he's been saying since the early days because we've seen them very depressingly come to fruition.
Dan Chase, you have write a vignette in your book about Bernie Sanders purchasing a home from a Republican.
What is that story?
Yes, well, he bought a house in Stannard, Vermont in 1968, the first home, the first year-round property he owned there.
And he moved there full-time.
And that was a completely Republican village, only about 200 people.
A few of the hippies were starting to move in.
But the key takeaway from that time is that, you know, Sanders was traveling around to the communes as a freelance writer.
He was doing some reporting on all these communes that were springing up and countercultural young people were coming to the state of Vermont to kind of start over and make a new civilization.
Sanders was very impatient with their scene.
He would go and visit them and take some interviews and talk to the folks, but he would quickly get out of there and go back to Stannard, where he was much more impressed by the kind of overall weave of a Yankee Vermont village, which was very tolerant, actually, of these, the few outsiders who were starting to show up.
As long as they could, you know, help plow the driveway and, you know, show up for the 4th of July picnic and all the things that you do in those little communities, they were accepted.
And so there was wonderful reciprocity in rural Vermont.
Still is.
You can't have a political beef with the guy who has the snowplow in town.
You can't have a beef with the guy who's the, you know, the obstetrician in town.
If you want your baby born or your driveway plowed, you got to work with people.
So I think he was very impressed by that.
Is it really a case in Vermont in many areas that everybody knows everybody?
Well, I'm finding that.
Setting out to write this book, I was no more than one degree apart from really anybody I needed to interview.
And so that was a great convenience and benefit to me.
And then as I've been traveling around Vermont, reading from the book and discussing it, if you're not in the book, your cousin's in the book.
And it is quite amazing.
You know, it's a state of only about 600,000 people.
It's one of the least populated states in the country.
I tell the story in my book, how that is really by design.
The state has taken great pains to remain rural, which is very surprising since it sits so close to some of the big population areas in our country.
Peter Smith's Vermont Insights00:07:33
Richard is calling in from Augusta, Georgia, Democrat.
Richard, you're on with all Dan Chason.
Please go ahead.
Good morning, Dan.
Hey, Richard.
I'm an Army veteran.
I'm 70 years old and I enjoy listening to Bernie Sanders and I support Bernie Sanders 100% because one thing Bernie Sanders has done in recent times is he has addressed my issue that I brought on C-SPAN in April of 2024 that we were going to have a dictator in the White House.
Jim, you hosted the show that day with Mr. Cohen.
And I tell you, here we are with premonition, if you're going to call it that.
Yep.
That's what we had.
And I love Bernie Sanders' politics because he was for people of all nationalities, genders, race, whatever.
And that Europeans' surveys have shown that they are the most happiest people in the world compared.
The United States was down like 17th or 19th.
Bernie Sanders speaks the truth.
All right.
Thank you, Richard and Augusta, Georgia.
Dan Chason, any comment for that caller?
Well, I agree.
And it's just, you know, it's good to hear people calling in from all over the country, you know, kind of testifying to that, you know, to that position.
Yeah, it's great.
Well, C-SPAN has literally hundreds, if not thousands, of Bernie Sanders' videos in our archive.
c-SPAN.org.
Type in Bernie Sanders, not only the Senate, but also all his campaign stops that we've covered.
You can just go to c-span.org if you have any desire to watch a Bernie Sanders speech.
You can compare for yourself whether or not you think it's consistent and whether or not you think it's effective.
But it was in 1988 that C-SPAN first interviewed him.
Here it is.
To recognize that in our nation today, we have an extreme disparity between the rich and the poor, that elections are bought and sold and controlled by people who have huge sums of money.
So my first concern is to have a president who has the courage to look reality in the face and say that we need some radical changes in this country so that every American can have the opportunity to have a decent standard of living and live a decent life.
I also, when we talk about presidential politics, I always have a little bit of a problem because I'm not a Democrat and I'm not a Republican.
In Burlington, Vermont, we have, I think, the only three-party system in the United States of America.
My dream would be that we would have a strong third-party movement in the United States composed of working people and minorities and women groups and all of the people who are presently disenfranchised.
Well, that doesn't exist right now.
So my options are somewhat limited.
But essentially, I would like to see somebody who speaks for the underdog, for the people who don't have decent health care benefits, somebody who understands that in America today, 50% of the people don't even vote anymore.
And the vast majority of that 50% are poor people and working people who have given up on the system.
So essentially, I would like to see a candidate who has the guts to have a vision that America could be a land for all people, not just the land controlled by the super rich.
And that was Bernie Sanders in 1988 when he was the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
By the way, Dan Chason, who is the mayor of Burlington today?
Her name is Emma Mulvaney-Stanek, and she is a progressive.
So the progressives who got their start under Bernie, he never joined them, interestingly.
He always was an independent.
But the Progressive Coalition formed during his mayorality, and they still hold City Hall today.
I did want to mention that I believe the clip you just played, it was during that broadcast on C-SPAN that Sanders announced that he would be a candidate for U.S. House in 1988.
There's a chapter in my book that discusses that, in part, that broadcast that you just played.
So that was really cool.
And did he won in 1988, correct?
Or he lost that one?
No, so it's fascinating.
He decided, just to back it up for a moment, he decided to try his hand.
He was very popular in Burlington, almost non-political by the mid-80s.
He had a 65, 70% approval rating across a lot of different groups in the city of Burlington.
And he thought, okay, well, let's try to scale this up.
And in 86, he tried. unsuccessfully to run for, he ran for governor, and it was a very unsuccessful campaign.
He got about 15%, total disappointment.
And in the interim, he worked on his statewide organization.
In part, he used Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition as his organizing framework.
And in 1988, he announced he would run for U.S. House, and it was a three-way race, and he came within just a few percentage points of winning.
Peter Smith, sort of the last liberal Vermont liberal Republican, was sent to Washington.
And Sanders licked his wounds and, you know, kind of went into the wilderness a little bit and staged a rematch in 1990.
And that's when he won by a pretty significant margin.
And the rest is history.
And you tell the story in the book of Peter Smith campaigning to get reelected with George H.W. Bush coming up on Air Force One.
That's right.
Peter Smith, and I spoke a number of times.
He's a wonderful person and a dignified man and a person I respect very much.
But when he went to Washington in 1988, he had pledged to the NRA that he would support no legislation putting any kinds of controls on any kind of weapon.
He got to Washington and almost immediately there was a horrific mass shooting in Stockton, California.
And Smith told me he looked at himself in the mirror when he was shaving one morning and said, you know, if I'm going to like this guy the rest of my life, I want to do something about this.
So he signed a bill with a bipartisan bill with a Democrat to ban certain types of assault weapons.
This enraged the Vermont NRA and they pledged to defeat Peter Smith.
They didn't like Sanders much better, but they hated Smith.
And in fact, that might have been the difference between the 1988 and the 1990 campaign.
It's a great irony, of course, because this, you know, kind of prince of progressivism, Bernie Sanders, you know, one of the factors that sent him to Washington was that he was seen as better by the NRA than the Republican that we had.
Diane in Port Charlotte, Florida sends in this text.
It was hysterical watching him fly around with AOC in a private jet, complaining about oligarchs, complained about millionaires until he became one.
Is that a fair criticism in your view, Dan Chasem?
It's completely unfair, but such things have been said, of course, from the very beginning.
You know, his house was, that he had a house was, you know, some kind of hypocrisy.
Why Sanders Owns a Home00:02:06
When he wrote a book that made a little bit of money, he bought a very modest camp up on the lake in the islands of Lake Champlain.
And people decided, oh, he's got a vacation home.
So the idea that he's a total hypocrite, because how could you be a socialist and own a car or, you know, a home?
It's absurd, really.
We're not put on this earth to be completely consistent in our beliefs at every moment.
And we live within a capitalist society.
I think Sanders just simply feels that socialism should have a seat at the table.
And I will say that when it did have a seat at the table in Burlington, it turned out to be a very effective negotiating position.
So it's possible to be a socialist and own a home.
What's your critique of Bernie Sanders?
Of Bernie?
Well, in the book, there are decisions he made in the city of Burlington that I think were potentially not great.
He was very involved with developing the waterfront.
People don't know that.
In the end, we got a lovely public park, but he had backed something that was much more extensive and would have put much more of the waterfront in the hands of private homeowners.
As a national politician, just in terms of his stylistic moves as a politician, I've always felt, and it's one of the reasons I wrote the book, that he should speak more biographically about his own background and family and past.
He comes by his, for example, his positions on socialized health care, because his own parents suffered so terribly because they were not able to access medical care.
So some of my critiques would be stylistic.
I thought he was a little late coming around to name the Gaza genocide.
I think many people on the left felt that about him.