![]() ![]() He once ran an extension cord from his “sparse,” “stark” apartment to get electricity from a downstairs neighbor. After the essay resurfaced in 2015, his campaign said it was a “dumb attempt” at satirizing gender roles.įor most of his 20s and 30s, he lived “just one step above hand to mouth,” according to a longtime friend, barely paying his bills as an intermittent carpenter and freelance writer. ![]() In 1972, he published an explicit essay in a Vermont alt-weekly in which, among other things, men and women fantasize about rape. He never got more than 6 percent of the vote. He ran on the Liberty Union ticket for Senate in a special election in early 1972, and for governor later that year, and for Senate again in 1974, and for governor again in 1976. On October 23, 1971, at a meeting in Vermont of the small, anti-war Liberty Union Party, Sanders, 30, raised his hand to run for U.S. He was too old to be drafted when his number was called. In the mid-’60s, his first jobs included stints in New York City as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.ĭuring the Vietnam War, he applied for conscientious objector status, but his application was denied. It had no electricity and no running water. The summer after he graduated from college, in 1964, he bought, for $2,500, his first house, a dirt-floor sugar shack in the woods outside Middlesex, Vermont. He was arrested in August 1963 on the South Side of Chicago while protesting racial inequality, charged with resisting arrest, found guilty and fined $25. He penned a 2,000-word manifesto in The Chicago Maroon, the university’s student newspaper, defending sexual freedom and attacking administrators for policies aimed at preventing students from having sex. He was a so-so student but spent hours in the library, reading psychology, sociology and history, and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, too. He went to Brooklyn College for a year before transferring to the University of Chicago, where on his way to earning a degree in political science he joined the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Peace Union and the Young People’s Socialist League-the official youth arm of the Socialist Party. “I always,” he would explain, “had good endurance.” He was a co-captain of Madison’s track and field team and as a junior finished third in all of New York City in the indoor one-mile race. He was cut from his high school basketball team-“one of the major disappointments of my life,” he once said-but he also was a star runner. He came in third in the election, but the school took up his cause, anyway. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”Īt Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, from which he graduated in 1959, he ran for student body president on a platform that included raising money for Korean War orphans. “I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” one of his closest friends once said. It’s not “the sole reason that I’ve developed the politics that I’ve developed,” he has said, but it was a formative disappointment. ![]() He was a fan as a boy of the Brooklyn Dodgers and remains bitter about the baseball team’s move to Los Angeles in 1957. “Being Jewish,” he has said, even though his parents were not particularly devout, “has greatly influenced my intellectual and emotional development.” He was acutely aware, too, of the excruciating toll of the Holocaust, retaining vivid early memories of going through albums of pictures of members of his father’s family who were “murdered by the Nazis.” His father came to America in 1921 at age 17 from a small village in Poland southeast of Krakow, speaking Polish and Yiddish but next to no English. ![]() He grew up in a rent-controlled, 3½-room apartment in Flatbush, the son of a paint salesman and a homemaker, the younger of two brothers who at times shared a small bedroom and at others took turns sleeping on the living-room couch. ![]()
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