Editor’s note: In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places.
[P]eter Diamondstone has been nothing if not steadfast, and biennial.
Every two years for the past 46, he has run for office in Vermont under the banner of the Liberty Union Party: governor this year; attorney general, lieutenant governor, congressman or U.S. senator in past years.
Want a metaphor? He has been a pebble in the shoe of the “establishment,” a burr under the saddle of mainstream politicians.
Or, as he says from his bed at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital: “I choose to be ‘the dandelion on the manicured lawn of the wealthy.’”
Diamondstone, 79, a founder of Liberty Union, the inveterate socialist, the unapologetic fighter of the good fight, may have just finished his last campaign. His health is poor.
As in past years, this fall he was interviewed by reporters and appeared at candidates’ forums. What he didn’t do, and never does, was spend money except for gas.
This year, though, with a pacemaker and an artificial hip, he nearly didn’t make it through the election. With acute pain from leg sores, he wore summer shorts during October appearances.
Two weeks ago he entered Brattleboro Memorial with an infection that had become life-threatening. And now, he confesses: “I really don’t know,” when asked if will ever seek office again. He hastily adds: “My belief in socialism is unshakable!”
The late U.S. Sen. James Jeffords in his memoir once called Diamondstone his “colorful opponent,” a polite and reasonably accurate characterization. Diamondstone, for example, has been arrested “three or four” times for disruptive conduct on campaign trails.
Painting him “colorful,” however, seems a tad patronizing as though Diamondstone’s core message – that capitalism doesn’t serve everyone – is not valid.
Diamondstone’s voice lambasting the free-market system has been loud, but not widely heard, at least judging by election returns. “I think 6 percent one year,” he says, when asked his highest vote percentage ever. In this past election he received 1 percent.
Through the years, he has denounced the military, corporations, banks, both the Republican and Democratic parties and the health-care system. He’s the quintessential protest candidate, a choice of those who dislike most-of-the-above.
“We are the terrorists, and the world needs to be armed against us,” he once declared in his inimitable way during a political debate.
“I am a non-violent revolutionary socialist,” he proclaims proudly with his legs propped on a pillow in Room 311.
Through the years, he has denounced the military, corporations, banks, both the Republican and Democratic parties and the health-care system. He’s the quintessential protest candidate, a choice of those who dislike most-of-the-above.
This notion that the world would be a better place with wealth sharing has been part of his mindset since boyhood.
“I went to ‘commie-camp,’ a place called Camp Woodland in the Catskills at age 10, and I had Pete Seeger as a music counselor,” he says rather casually. “We still get back there for reunions.”
He explains that he grew up in Queens, the son of a dentist father, a socialist, who was a friend of Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party candidate for president. “My father would give free dental care in keeping with (the Marxist maxim) ‘From each according to ability; to each according to need,’” he says.
“Later, I learned my father had attended Communist cell meetings.”
Among the books he found formative, a gift from his parents when he was 12: “The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches.” It was a volume that critically analyzed the 1930s anti-Semitic and anti-communist rants of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest and national radio broadcaster,
Diamondstone went to Queens College and the University of Chicago Law School, graduating in 1960. Along the way he married Doris Lake, whom he had met at his 19th birthday party. The couple moved to Brattleboro in 1968, with Peter taking a job with Vermont Legal Aid.
(Doris, who spends hours caring for Peter at the hospital, herself once sought political office, the U.S. House seat in the 1972. “A reporter for the (Burlington) Free Press asked me about my favorite recipes,” she says, with an eye roll.)
The couple and about two dozen others founded Liberty Union in 1970 during an historic gathering at the farmhouse in West Rupert of former Congressman William Meyers. The Vietnam War was raging then, and the small party of activists (Diamondstone had been a Eugene McCarthy backer in ’68, the “last capitalist I supported”) had abandoned all hope Democrats or Republicans would end the war, protect the environment or change the economic system.
Diamondstone makes no apologies for his behavior over the years; he and Doris, in fact, look back on things with pride.
They recall a trip to Washington with their three kids, their oldest then 7, (another to follow) to help “levitate” the Pentagon during the famous October 1967 Vietnam War protest, a gathering of 70,000; they mention a People’s Party Convention in 1972 in St. Louis when their kids attended a “children’s caucus” and had their photo appear in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; they mention Dr. Benjamin Spock’s stay at their home when the People’s Party candidate campaigned for president.
Their employment choices have verged on proletarian, though Diamondstone has been a landlord.
“I have worked as a Legal Aid lawyer (He was fired once, rehired, fired again for his inflammatory language defending the poor.); I picked up drunks for rehab, and I delivered newspapers,” Diamondstone says. Doris worked at an eyeglasses factory and as a secretary.
One of the more noteworthy episodes in his life of controversy came in 1975 when the town accused Diamondstone of running an illegal junkyard, because he had 40 old autos at his home. The issue dragged on seemingly forever until Diamondstone, representing himself, finally won what became a legal case five years later in the state Supreme Court.
And those arrests?
Well, one of his more memorable encounters with the law occurred in 1980 in Windsor before a debate among U.S. House candidates on Vermont Public Radio.
“I came late to the studio because the muffler fell off my car. I was dirty and greasy because I had been under the car. I went in, and the guy doing the broadcasting said I could not participate because I was late — even though I had the deal with Jeffords to be permitted to participate — so I wouldn’t move, and I stayed glued to a chair, and the broadcaster started playing music and called police.”
“The cops came and very gently arrested me and took me away.”
Lest one think Diamondstone is all crankiness, consider the show of friendship from scores of people after he and Doris lost their home of 45 years, and belongings, to a fire two summers ago.
“They came – more than 100 altogether at various times – to help clean up,” explains Diamondstone. “We could not thank them enough. Some people even sent money.”
And lest one think Diamondstone doesn’t take his anti-capitalist commitment seriously enough, consider that he chose not to take prescription painkillers for his leg ulcers – because that would be selling out to what he calls “Big Pharma,” the pharmaceutical industry.
“When we cooperate with capitalist health care, we put money in stockholders’ pockets, and the prices just go up and up,” he says.
A small gesture, but another way for Diamondstone to protest corporate America.
Gestures? Is that what his campaigning was about all these years?
“With me being on the ballot, people get a chance to express socialist views on that ballot, and that’s important,” he says.
“I don’t know … I have lots of stuff in my head and heart, and I want to share it.”
Columnist’s Note: A quote in the above column was revised to make clear that Peter Diamondstone does not believe that the late James Jeffords wished to have him barred from a political debate in Windsor in 1980, a radio debate during which Diamondstone was arrested.
