Editor’s note: This is the third of a five-part series of stories to appear weekly until Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses Feb. 1.
[N]ew York Times reporter Adam Nagourney eyed the hundreds of people spilling out of an Iowa school auditorium with a sense of déjà vu.
“To many in this state with the first nominating contest of 2016, it was a familiar scene: a candidate from Vermont challenging the Democratic Party status quo with a lusty if slightly cantankerous presentation — and drawing huge crowds,” Nagourney wrote last summer. “In 2004, it was Howard Dean, the doctor and former governor of Vermont, who commanded his party’s attention with booming rallies and displays of populist passion; this summer, it is (Bernie) Sanders, a candidate with a similar pedigree who seems to be playing off a similar script.”
The Times story wasn’t alone in linking the two New York natives turned Burlington transplants who “avoid talk of themselves or their biographies, and display irritation with many of the conventions of the way campaigns are conducted and covered.” But for all the journalists making the same connection, few if any have mentioned the current “democratic socialist” candidate’s resemblance to another Green Mountain political legend — and a well-entrenched Washington Republican at that.
At the time, the contrast couldn’t have been more striking: a young Brooklyn-born revolutionary conversing with a lifelong Putney horticulturist turned political leader — Aiken first ran for state legislator in 1930, speaker of the House in 1933, lieutenant governor in 1934, governor in 1936 and U.S. senator in 1940 — who chose green as the color of Vermont’s license plates and coined the term “Northeast Kingdom.”
Today, the two men are both known as frank, wild-haired figures who won election to Congress by embodying the common man. Historians and political scientists recognize each for building strong grass-roots bases. For championing the working class. For challenging political party machinery.
Consider this stinging quote: “To represent the people one must follow them. Lincoln did. The Republican national leadership today does not.”
Sanders didn’t say that — Aiken did, speaking to a national radio audience Feb. 12, 1938, at a Lincoln’s birthday gathering at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. (You can find the entire address on Sanders’ Senate website.)
“I can’t say I have based my political work on his,” Sanders told this reporter in 2006, “but Aiken has always been a name and a person I’ve respected and admired. What I liked about him and what made him successful was his straightforwardness, his common sense, his down to earth-ness. He was clearly a man of the people.”
And a fellow Vermonter with firsthand knowledge of the opportunities and challenges of presidential campaign press.
‘Who is this guy?’
Until his death in 1984 at age 92, Aiken liked to sit outside his Putney Mountain home and talk about his agrarian past. Born in 1892, he raised and sold plants before his 1920 election to the town school board sparked a half-century career in public service.
“My birthplace has been torn down, and there’s a $7 million marker over it,” Aiken would say. “Call it Route 91.”
Sanders’ roots are further afield but lead to the same place. Born in Brooklyn 74 years ago, he settled in the central Vermont town of Middlesex in 1964 before moving to the Northeast Kingdom hamlet of Stannard in 1969. Two years later, he moved to Burlington, the state’s largest city, and soon, taking a friend’s suggestion, sat in on a meeting of the alternative Liberty Union Party.
Sanders didn’t know anyone in the roomful of people at Plainfield’s Goddard College. But he understood the peace-oriented ticket had a problem. Vermont’s junior U.S. senator, Republican Winston Prouty, had just died, and the state was about to elect a replacement.
Sanders, raising his hand to speak at the meeting, offered his opinions on education, the economy and the Vietnam War. When no one else volunteered to run, he was unanimously nominated as the Liberty Union’s U.S. Senate candidate.
Sanders soon went on his first radio talk show. The young candidate was so nervous that the microphone picked up his shaking.
“Who is this guy?” one caller asked.
Sanders wouldn’t join Aiken in the Senate that year. Republican Robert Stafford won the election; Sanders reaped only 2 percent of the vote. But the campaign gave him a chance to talk about his most pressing concerns: economic and social justice, peace, and health care for all.
“My political opponents in Vermont often accuse me of being boring, of hammering away at the same themes,” he says in his recently revised and reissued autobiography, “Outsider in the White House.” “And should we ever achieve economic and social justice in this country, I promise that I’ll write some new speeches.”
In the meantime, Sanders struck the same familiar notes when he ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor in 1972, the U.S. Senate in 1974 (this time, he was trying to replace Aiken, who was retiring) and governor again in 1976. He won a personal high of 6 percent of the vote in that last election.
Between campaigns, Sanders worked as an itinerant carpenter and freelance journalist. In 1973, he persuaded Vermont Life to pay him 10 cents a word to interview the elder statesman.
“I used to earn somewhat of a living doing writing, but I did not have very much money,” Sanders recalled in 2006. “I remember a very large portion of my bank account went into buying a ticket to Washington, and the remainder went into a brand-new tape recorder.”
Aiken was affable, talking about his childhood — as a high school senior in 1909, he shook hands with President William Howard Taft — his career and how the state had changed.
“Sanders: There’s been some discussion lately about the state of Vermont being, in a sense, dominated or over-run by out of state interests. For example, a lot of the large Vermont industries are selling out to out-of-state corporations.”
“Aiken: We do hate to see the old home-owned, home-grown industries fall into the hands of a giant corporation. But it’s something we can’t stop and it’s a worldwide situation. When you can’t stop it — you’ve got to guide it. I used to say that if you stand on the track and see a train coming down you can do one of two things. You can stand still and get run over, or you can hop on it and try to control it.”
But even hearing words similar to his own, Sanders couldn’t relax.
“I was scared to death about the tape recorder working,” he recalls. “Here was a guy who did politics the old-fashioned way. He started off at the grass roots — selling seeds. I liked him because he represented a lot of the best values of the state of Vermont — not to mention his populist views. And I think he enjoyed thinking back.”
‘How the heck’d you get elected?’
A year after Aiken retired from politics in 1975, a 31-year-old Sanders left the Liberty Union Party and built a small business that made educational films. One chronicled the life of Eugene Victor Debs, founder of the American Railway Union and American Socialist Party.
“If you are the average American, who watches television 40 hours a week, you have probably heard of such important people as Kojak and Wonder Woman, have heard about dozens of different kinds of underarm spray deodorants, every hack politician in your state, and the latest game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees,” it begins. “Strangely enough, however, nobody has told you about Gene Debs, one of the most important Americans of the 20th century.”
Sanders, seeing his video aired on Vermont Public Television and sold to colleges nationwide, thought about producing a series on other radical thinkers. Instead, in 1981, he made history himself.
Sanders decided to run for mayor of Burlington after a friend showed him some eye-opening figures. In his last race in 1976, Sanders won only 6 percent of the state vote — but 12 percent in the city and up to 16 percent in two working-class wards.
Five-term Democratic incumbent Gordon Paquette felt so assured of victory that he campaigned for a property tax hike. Sanders, for his part, rallied low- and middle-income workers, college professors, the city’s police association, environmentalists and conservatives worried about rising taxes.
“Mr. Mayor, let’s be candid, okay?” a radio announcer was pictured saying in a subsequent Doonesbury cartoon. “You’re a socialist. You’re a Jew. You’re from New York. So how the heck’d you get elected?”
The people of Burlington, Sanders replied, wanted a change.
The Democrats and Republicans who controlled the city’s Board of Aldermen had other ideas. They blocked Sanders from the get-go. First they fired his secretary. Then they rejected all his administration appointees. But that didn’t stop the new mayor. Supporters formed what today is Vermont’s Progressive Party and, within a year, began to win seats on the board.
(An unprecedented action? Hardly. In 1946, Sen. Aiken and newly elected Gov. Ernest Gibson, frustrated with the conservative “old guard” of their Republican Party in Vermont, encouraged more moderate candidates to run for the Legislature and other state offices. The group soon grew into the Gibson-Aiken wing of the GOP, prompting the national magazine Collier’s to announce “Vermont Goes Radical.”)
With Sanders as mayor, Burlington became the first municipality in the state to adopt an alternative to the property tax — in this case, a 1 percent rooms-and-meals tax. The city launched an annual jazz festival, a First Night celebration for New Year’s Eve and services such as a Women’s Council and Youth Office.
Sanders hired Jane O’Meara Driscoll as the mayor’s Youth Office director, and the two were married in 1988 at North Beach.
The intra-office nuptials mirrored Aiken’s, as seen in this July 1, 1967, news report:
“FT. MYERS, Va. — U.S. Sen. George D. Aiken, R-Vt., Friday morning married Miss Lola Pierotti, his chief aide for the past 30 years. Then he fired her. The new Mrs. Aiken will continue to work for the Senate Republican dean as an unpaid employee.”
Jane Sanders kept both her Burlington seat and her salary (although she has aided her husband in his congressional office without pay). She also got to travel with her boss: Her honeymoon was a trip to the industrial center of Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union, where her husband finalized a sister-city relationship with Burlington.
‘Making History in Vermont’
Sanders was re-elected mayor three times before leaving office in 1989. For all his local acclaim, he remained a questionable commodity statewide. In 1986, he lost a bid for governor against Democratic incumbent Madeleine Kunin and Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Smith. But that didn’t deter Sanders from running against Smith in 1988 for the state’s lone congressional seat, or from trying again two years later after the Republican won.
Sanders’ 1990 campaign slogan was “Making History in Vermont.” Adding farmers, women’s advocates, veterans and senior citizens to his base, he won 56 percent of the vote to become the first independent elected to Congress in 40 years.
Today, Sanders is the longest-serving independent ever in Washington. But winning hasn’t been easy. Sanders labels himself a democratic socialist who supports the type of government-funded social programs embraced by most of Europe. Opponents, for their part, liken him to the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
(Aiken endured red-baiting, too. In his last re-election campaign in 1968, Aiken faced a primary challenge by a conservative who despised the moderate Republican. Two years earlier, Aiken had made the most famous speech of his career, a 12-minute message that reporters summed up simplistically with: “President Johnson should declare victory in Vietnam and get out.” The challenger charged that Aiken had the support of “Communists, radicals and other left-wing extremists.” Aiken went on to beat him with nearly 75 percent of the vote. Ten days later, he filed a state campaign finance report showing he had spent $17.09.)
Steve Terry, of Middlebury, a former journalist, was working for Aiken when Sanders arrived in Washington for his 1973 Vermont Life interview.
“My job as Aiken’s aide,” Terry recalls, “was to take the very long-haired Bernie to lunch in the ornate U.S. Senate dining room in the Capitol.”
For Terry, the similarities between Aiken and Sanders are startling. He knows both men for:
- Feeling more comfortable with blue-collar than white-collar crowds and building statewide political bases at the grass-roots level (in Aiken’s case, he started with 10,000 customers who had purchased his trees and plants).
- Distrusting big business and oil companies.
- Promoting humane health and social welfare policies, helping farmers and veterans, favoring food and electric co-ops, legislating wilderness areas, and supporting federal school meal and food stamp programs.
A check of their respective writings shows the past and present U.S. senators could have penned many of each other’s speeches. (So much so, Sanders has posted several of Aiken’s on his Senate website.)
Which man, for example, noted that Vermont had prohibited slavery in the first article of its 1793 constitution and that the state was the first to adopt a public school system from first grade through college?
“I could go on enumerating examples to show that as a state we have been progressive,” he wrote. “Let those elected and appointed to public office adopt the policy of seeing how much they can do to restore the functions of government to the people, and not how much authority they can acquire unto themselves by which means they may exercise control. Let their actions in legislative halls and executive chambers be governed by the dictates of conscience and not by the counting of votes. Let men elected to public office forget they are working for the party and devote their energies to bettering the welfare of the people.”
It sounds like vintage Sanders. But the above words come from Aiken’s 1938 book “Speaking from Vermont” — written in the days when the Great Depression was giving way to World War II, and national media heavyweights like The New York Times were proposing the Republican as a candidate for president.
Aiken wasn’t interested in his party’s 1940 nomination — just the public platform it provided. Three decades later, the Vermont Life interview capped his career, then resurfaced briefly when Sanders won his Senate seat in 2006. This election cycle, only Boston Globe Washington bureau chief Christopher Rowland has mentioned it, and simply to note that he found a copy in his late grandfather’s Vermont farmhouse.
“I hoped to interview Senator Sanders about it,” Rowland wrote, “thinking it would make a fun footnote — kind of meta, in a time-warp sense: the future senator, then still a fringe character, interviewing his legendary predecessor. I put in a call to his office and after a few days, word came back from his spokesman. No interview. The senator would prefer to focus on issues and policies affecting struggling Americans.”
Good thing for Sanders, the young freelancer, that Aiken thought differently.
Coming in part four: Bernie Sanders often says, “I am the longest-serving independent in the history of the United States Congress.” So why do so few national profiles of the Vermont senator turned Democratic presidential candidate detail his quarter-century career in the House and Senate?
