Editor’s note: This commentary is by Garrison Nelson, who is the Elliot A. Brown Professor of Law, Politics, and Political Behavior Emeritus at the University of Vermont and senior fellow at the John McCormack Graduate School of Public Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston. He is the author most recently of “John William McCormack: A Political Biography.”
[D]uring my 50-year career as a faculty member at the University of Vermont, I also had a 40-year career of giving interviews to various news outlets. Most were in Vermont, but others were elsewhere in the United States and in Europe. In 2007, when I turned 65, I had four major manuscripts to complete and I chose to cut back on my Vermont-related interviews. I was running out of time and I needed to complete these four books (which I did). However, I made an exception in 2015 when U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders chose to make what I believed would be a quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination for president.
Bernie is not a Democrat. He had campaigned against Democrats in all four of his elections as a Liberty Union candidate in the 1970s, all four of his successful campaigns as an independent for mayor of Burlington, and in his earliest campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives. However, his continued success led Vermont’s Democrats to grudgingly embrace his candidacies and he delivered with eight victories for the U.S. House and three for the U.S. Senate.
It was Sanders’ presidential campaign that got me out of semi-retirement, when I gave close to 100 interviews to reporters in the United States and foreign countries. American reporters were mostly interested in horse-race questions — How well will he do? Can he win? I found those questions tedious and repetitious. It was the international press that had the most interesting questions: Reporters from Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Japan, China, South Korea, and even Brazil were fascinated by Bernie’s candidacy. Since many of these countries had socialists in government, the question asked by most was about his commitment to democratic socialism. “What kind of socialist is he?” they would ask. And I generally responded, “Bernie is a vanilla socialist with a major focus on the concentration of wealth at the top and income inequality for the rest.” Bernie’s agenda had no far-reaching five-year plans. Collectivized agriculture and nationalized industry were not part of his program. This was quite dissimilar from the socialisms of many other countries. They seemed perplexed that Bernie’s mild socialism would be so controversial in the United States. My answer was simple: During the Cold War socialism was seen as the “gateway drug” to communism, the philosophy then espoused by our mortal enemy — the Soviet Union.
I came up with this designation due to my personal history as the son of a union organizer and blacklisted author, Truman Nelson, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party 1936-1946, the last year when he and my mother were a married couple.
Bernie Sanders first encountered me in the mid-’70s in the UVM library. It was during his time as a candidate of the anti-war Liberty Union Party centered in southeastern Vermont. Bernie was one of the candidates put forth by Liberty Union’s founder, Peter Diamondstone, to challenge Vermont’s major political parties. Bernie had learned of me during my efforts on behalf of one-time UVM professor Michael Parenti. Parenti, a well-published, Yale-educated professor had joined UVM’s political science department in 1970 after a tumultuous one-year appointment at the University of Illinois. The invasion of Cambodia in May 1970 set off campus demonstrations throughout the nation, the most notable being Ohio’s Kent State University where four students were shot to death by the Ohio National Guard. At Illinois, Parenti got into a bloody altercation with a policeman during that campus’ reaction to Kent State. Word of Parenti’s arrest for resistance to police authority led some UVM trustees to protest our extending a teaching contract to him. Defending the university’s right to do this was conservative Republican Gov. Deane C. Davis, a lawyer who contended that a contract is a contract and must be honored.
Parenti and I connected early as he was impressed by an anti-war article that I had written for The Progressive, a left-liberal monthly publication, entitled “Nixon’s Silent House of Hawks.” Published in 1970, more than 30,000 reprints were sold as anti-war pamphlets against members of Congress. It was of little avail and a 90 percent re-election led to the House remaining as hawkish as ever.
Parenti’s first year at UVM was a positive one; his classes were full, his students were engaged, and he published a major article in one of our more prestigious journals. He did get into some trouble with a returning veteran who confronted Parenti at UVM’s student union, then known as the Den. Ultra-conservative William J. Loeb, publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader also published the St. Albans Messenger. Following the confrontation, seven articles were devoted to the Parenti episode in one issue of the Messenger’s Sunday newspaper. It was clear that Parenti’s stay at UVM would be watched closely.
During the summer of 1971, UVM administration chose not to include a raise for Parenti’s upcoming 1971-1972 salary. Michael had a two-year contract with a third pre-tenure year. Members of the trustees chose not to renew Michael Parenti’s third year, which would lead to his termination. The campus erupted, Ira Allen Chapel was filled with voices of protest and outrage, and several of us chose to challenge the trustees’ decision.
I volunteered to be the treasurer of funds raised to sue the university trustees to retain Parenti. I was only 29, in my third year at UVM and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Not only did I not have tenure, I had yet to complete my doctoral dissertation. I was as vulnerable as anyone could possibly be. It was a courageous but foolhardy decision on my part.
Ultimately, we raised over $17,000 in cash, checks, and pledges, from UVM and close to 30 other colleges and universities around the country. The Chronicle of Higher Education saw the Parenti case as the most winnable of that year’s academic freedom battles. We hired former Republican Lt. Gov. Tom Hayes to represent us against the trustees.
Four of us met with the accrediting board to urge them to delay UVM’s accreditation until Parenti was reinstated. My belief at the time was less about Michael than about the likely fate of fellow faculty members who had allied themselves with us in the name of academic freedom. These other faculty members, mostly junior, did not have either the teaching experience or the publication success of Professor Parenti and were clearly expendable. Ultimately, seven of them would lose their UVM jobs.
Michael became bored with the case. UVM gave Michael a full year’s salary and he dropped the case. There would be no legal precedent to protect others. He came to my office requesting that I manage his 1974 campaign for the U.S. House. When I explained that I needed to complete my dissertation and I would be jeopardizing my position as the treasurer of his defense fund, he stormed out the door and our relationship diminished.
Michael did very well in that 1974 contest against Jim Jeffords for the open House seat, even better than Bernie Sanders did in his contest against Pat Leahy for the open U.S. Senate seat. It was after that 1974 contest, when Bernie sought me out in the library. I listened for a while but when Bernie launched into the left-wing playbook of worker’s rights, corporate monopolies, income inequality and the various other crimes of capitalist America, mostly focused on the Rockefeller family, I excused myself. Having heard most of these complaints at my father’s knee I felt no need to revisit this litany of outrages.
Thanks to Academic Vice President Alfred B. Rollins, who reviewed books for The Progressive, UVM extended me tenure in 1975.. A year in Washington with freshman Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office and a stint at the Brookings Institution, and I was now a newly-minted scholar of the US Congress. In the Leahy office, I became friendly with Press Secretary Jack Barry. Jack and I returned to Vermont the summer of 1976, a presidential election year, and we began a lengthy radio and television relationship that lasted until Jack’s death. With Jack Barry as my broadcast partner, and my former student Scott MacKay, then of the Burlington Free Press, as my print-partner, I became a regular commentator on politics in Vermont. I later shared that role with professor Eric Davis of Middlebury College.
Bernie left Liberty Union in 1976 after his four races and moved to Burlington. In 1981, Bernie challenged five-term incumbent Democratic Mayor Gordon Paquette. Also in the race were Dicky Bove, who owned a local Italian restaurant on Pearl Street, and Joe McGrath, a vague relative of Mayor Paquette.
Election night, I was on WJOY with Jack Barry when Bernie Sanders made political history by defeating Mayor Paquette by only 10 votes. In January 1981, Ronald Reagan, the nation’s most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge was sworn in, yet two months later, Burlington, the largest city in the nation’s most Republican state, had just elected a socialist for mayor. The juxtaposition of the two successes made it a national story.
It was then that I was added to national and international rolodexes as an authority on the Sanders candidacy. Some of the calls were quite alarming, feeling that Burlington had been captured by godless, atheistic communists and that the Strategic Air Command base across the lake in Plattsburg might be called upon to carpet-bomb the city. However, my personal experience as a child of a card-carrying Communist made me less convinced that the fate of the Republic was endangered by the Sanders victory. I made a regular point to disabuse any of the more anxious reporters of that belief.
I watched in fascination as Bernie went on to win three more contests for mayor and to resume his statewide career in a failed 1986 campaign for governor against Madeleine Kunin and his close contest for the U.S. House in 1988 with ex-Lt. Gov. Peter Smith. Bernie’s race in 1990 was the only national race in Vermont that year; it was not a presidential year and neither Senate seat was up for election. Bernie’s narrow defeat two years earlier and Peter Smith’s electoral vulnerability made this contest one to watch. So much so that David Broder of the Washington Post, the nation’s most influential political reporter, came to Vermont to see for himself what the Sanders candidacy was all about. Broder and I had communicated earlier and I asked him, “Are there other candidacies like this around the country?” He replied “There is no other candidacy like Sanders’ anywhere in the country. And there is nowhere in the country other than Vermont where it has a probability of succeeding.”
As always, Broder was right. Bernie won election that year to begin his 29-year career in Congress — longer than any president had ever served in that body, including Lyndon Johnson. Now, as I work in my UVM office on a book detailing the oft-tumultuous relationships between presidents and speakers of the U.S. House, I no longer expect the torrent of interview requests that gobbled up much of 2015-2016. Others have chosen to be experts on the Sanders candidacy and I wish them well.
But he’s still a vanilla socialist to me.