When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City Music Hall. The Green Mountains beckoned! Under a shop sign that read “VERMONT,” a wide storefront window exhibited seasonal dioramas that trapped pedestrians like chipmunks in a sap bucket. Inside, you could find out about snow conditions and fishing holes, inspect a woodstove, get advice about the best time to go leaf-peeping, pick up a train schedule, and buy a jug of maple syrup. A year after the center opened, Alfred Hitchcock went to Craftsbury, Vermont, to shoot “The Trouble with Harry.” People in that little town, population seven hundred and nine, brought the crew blueberry muffins and found a 1913 Buick for the production to use, on the condition that no one drive it more than forty miles an hour, which is about as fast as anyone could drive on those roads, anyway. The trouble with Harry is that he’s dead, flat on his back on a hill outside town, on a patch of grass carpeted with red-edged golden oak leaves, near a fallen log on a spot with a sweeping view of mountains blue and green and purple and glorious. In an interview with Vermont Life, Hitchcock said, “If one has to die, can you think of a more beautiful place to do so than in Vermont in autumn?”
It was in the autumn of the “Trouble with Harry” shoot that Bernie’s brother, Larry, nineteen, brought the thirteen-year-old future mayor of Burlington and two-time Presidential candidate on a subway ride from their three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment, at 1525 East Twenty-sixth Street, Brooklyn, where they took turns sleeping on a bed in the hallway (versus the couch), to Rockefeller Center. Wandering around, they stopped at Vermont, the bureau, and returned home with a brochure titled “Vermont Farms and Summer Homes for Sale.” Somehow, miraculously, Bernie Sanders would eventually own one such property, a stretch of woods in the tiny town of Middlesex, population seven hundred and seventy. “This brook is my brook!” he said, and “This tree is my tree!,” even if he didn’t altogether believe in private ownership. (“I am not a capitalist,” he once told the talk-show host Phil Donahue.)
Sanders, now eighty-four, was Vermont’s sole representative in the U.S. House from 1991 to 2007, and he has served in the Senate as an Independent from Vermont ever since. He has been a notoriously ineffective legislator, having introduced only three bills between 1991 and 2020 that became law, two of which concerned the names of post offices. Yet he has wielded nearly unrivalled influence over American politics of a quite particular and distinctively local character: in his career as the country’s leading progressive populist and the second most successful socialist ever to run for President—beaten only by Eugene Victor Debs, the railman of Terre Haute, Indiana—Sanders has brought to the political stage the view not from the streets of Brooklyn but from the mountains of Vermont, and especially from its biggest city, Burlington, which in 1981, when Sanders was elected mayor by a margin of ten votes, had a population, whopping for Vermont but by any other measure minuscule, of a little under thirty-eight thousand. (It’s barely bigger this winter, at forty-five thousand shivering souls.) This past summer, Sanders more or less said that he has no plans to run for President again in 2028. (“Oh, God,” he told CNN. “Let’s not worry about that.”) He has, however, filed papers to run for reëlection to the Senate in 2030, when he’ll be eighty-nine, even though there doesn’t seem much chance he’ll really do that. In short, if it’s not quite time to assess the Vermonter’s legacy, it’s getting close.
Aside from Sanders and Calvin Coolidge—born in Plymouth Notch, in 1872—Vermont hasn’t left much of a stamp on American politics, at least nationally. Notionally, well, that’s another question. Vermont is for many Americans something of a mythical place, a land out of time, and there’s a reason for that: a storybook America, all red barns and covered bridges, black-and-white mottled cows grazing in rolling green pastures, and dried-apple-faced farmers leaning on pitchforks, is how the place sold itself, beginning not long before those two teen-agers from Brooklyn got off the train in midtown. Vermont Life, launched in 1946 to promote tourism in the heady days after the end of the war, when Americans had money in their wallets and gas in their tanks, regularly ran as a full-page ad a photograph of a sugarhouse, steam billowing from its cupola, above a few lines of text:
