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This story comes from Vermont Public Radio and is an abridged version of its characteristic "Becoming Bernie: His Rise And His Record." Yous tin view the full story here.

Bernie Sanders is an improbable politician. Independent, occasionally irascible, he came from the far left and an urban background to win elections in one of the most rural states in the land.

At present Sanders' rhetoric is on the national stage with his surging run for president. He's made headlines for his staying power in polls and his policy platforms singularly focused on income inequality and curbing corporate ability.

His run for the White Firm has been described as quixotic, and pundits have called his goals unachievable. But Sanders and his policies have struck a nerve in American politics. The candidate who'southward been dismissed and underestimated every time he reaches for new political heights has become the leading challenger to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Listen to VPR'south Special, "Becoming Bernie"

As American voters get to know the 74-year-erstwhile — his wispy white pilus, his Brooklyn accent that's persisted in the decades since he left home, his unyielding focus on economic equality, and his impatience with the gamesmanship of presidential politics — he'due south shared trivial well-nigh what fabricated him who he is.

Sanders deflects personal questions and admonishes reporters who stray from the subjects he considers important, but at that place's no separating Sanders' candidacy from Sanders himself.

And so who is Bernie Sanders? What molded his politics and his convictions? And what can the chapters of his life tell us almost what might come up adjacent?

A Brooklyn Youth

Bernie Sanders was known to teammates as a talented — and sometimes selfless — runner at James Madison Loftier Schoolhouse in Brooklyn. Courtesy Lou Howort hide caption

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Courtesy Lou Howort

Bernie Sanders' athletic strength in high schoolhouse was in long-distance running, according to his teammate Steve Slavin. As a sophomore at James Madison Loftier School in the late 1950s, Sanders was racing with seniors — and winning.

Slavin as well recalls Sanders equally someone who didn't boast near his successes. Years afterwards graduating, Slavin heard a story near one cross-country race in particular in which Sanders allow the second-place runner take the lead, ignoring a tradition that the elevation ii runners join hands at the end and cantankerous the finish line together.

"Only Bernie knew that this other guy had non always won a race by himself," Slavin says. "So when they approached the finish line, the other guy reached out to take Bernie's hand and Bernie sort of nudged him across the terminate line so that the other guy would finish first and Bernie would finish second, and it'south a story that this guy has always remembered."

...

Farther downwards the block from the Brooklyn high school, the area feels more urban, with tan brick apartment houses from the 1920s and '30s.

Bernie Sanders grew upwards in ane such building on East 26th Street. Today, a couple of elderly Russian men are sitting out in front of the Sanderses' old apartment business firm.

"They're only sitting exterior," Slavin says. "That's how they socialize. That'south the manner they used to practice it in the old days too — a lot of adults sitting in front of the flat houses."

Slavin says to the men: "There was someone who lived hither 60 years ago and he's running for president."

Walking into the building'southward bare and dimly lit lobby, it'south clear not much has changed. In that location'south faded paint on the high ceilings, and quondam ceramic tiles cover the floor.

Sanders lived in the 3 1/2-room apartment with his parents and brother, Larry, who is vii years older.

Larry says their begetter, Eli, worked most of his life as a struggling pigment salesman. Dorothy Sanders was a stay-at-dwelling house mother who died young — she was 46 — the year after Bernie graduated from high schoolhouse.

"She played a huge — I may even cry at some point," Larry says. He pauses. "She played a huge part in our lives."

Larry describes his mother as an "assertive and energetic" woman, and he says he and "Bernard," as he calls his brother, grew upward feeling loved and secure — except in matters of coin.

"It was the issue on which our parents had arguments," he recalls. "That they didn't really know whether they'd have the hire the post-obit month. They probably would, merely information technology wasn't sure. Nosotros had what we needed in general, but it was the fact that our parents were arguing that was the problem. And I think what Bernard and I took from that is that financial problems are never only financial problems. They enter into people'southward lives in very deep and personal levels."

Pedagogy for the Sanders brothers was in Brooklyn'southward public schools and in Hebrew school. Larry says he and his brother grew up learning about basic concepts similar justice and equality, "that all people are equal, that people are entitled to be treated with nobility. That justice was something that was meant to be for everybody. Aye, we had a very deep sense of that, of the human solidarity."

Bernie Sanders' education, different his parents', would continue in college, and it would go an education that wasn't solely academic.

Chicago: An Education

Sanders spent the yr after high schoolhouse at Brooklyn College, where he rented a room with his old loftier school teammate Slavin.

Slavin says Sanders didn't make much try to curry favor with his instructors.

"I'thou sure that in class, he didn't say what the professor wanted to hear," Slavin says. "And the professors were pretty decent — I hateful it was, you lot know, open give-and-take. But yet there is ever the feeling that if you lot say what the professor wants to hear this is gonna help your grade. ... And Bernie would accept none of that."

In 1961, Sanders transferred to the University of Chicago, where the bells of the school carillon echoed through Hyde Park on the city'southward Due south Side.

Academy of Chicago students in the early on 1960s were a smart, brainy, precocious bunch.

One of Sanders' classmates at the fourth dimension interviewed students well-nigh their college experience for a documentary chosen The College.

Describing a stone concert at the school, one of the students said: "I see information technology as sort of a reversion to a primitive, pagan rite, you run across the rampant sexuality, and, you know, it's kind of interesting from a purely sociological standpoint."

Robin Kaufman laughs when she hears the prune.

"Yeah, yeah," she says. "There were a lot of us like this. You know, University of Chicago's a identify for nerds, you know?"

Kaufman was active in the same political groups as Sanders — including the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE. Sanders was also involved in the Immature People'southward Socialist League.

"I remember we were more fun-loving than some of the nerds," Kaufman says. "But I think Bernie was pretty serious and I think many of us were pretty serious."

...

In Jan 1962, Sanders and other student leaders asked the administration to immediately integrate the housing.

When the university did non, Kaufman says, well-nigh 35 students marched up to the academy president's office, sabbatum downwards, and didn't exit.

Sanders has said this 1962 sit-in for housing equality introduced him to the power of political activism. Courtesy Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library hide caption

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Courtesy Special Collections Enquiry Center, University of Chicago Library

"My mother was in Boston," Kaufman says, "and a friend of hers called her upwards and said, 'I just saw Robin on TV. You know, you're putting all this money into sending her to college, and she'south out there sitting in!' "

Kaufman reported in the pupil paper that the protesters at the sit-in played span and ate salami and cheese sandwiches. One guy read aloud from Winnie-the-Pooh. Several wore neckties.

Ane of the leaders of the sit-in was a young Bernard Sanders, shown in ane photo sporting a wide-necked nighttime sweater and horn-rimmed glasses, clutching a volume in one hand and gesturing with the other every bit he speaks to the protesters.

"He was a great speaker," Kaufman recalls, "and he was able to convince a agglomeration of other 19-year-olds ... that what was going on was something that was wrong ... and we had the power and the obligation to try to create change."

Sanders has said the sit-in was the event that kicking-started his political activism.

Not everyone remembers him equally eloquent. Gavin MacFadyen says Sanders was no "electrifying speechmaker" but a soft-spoken, intelligent kid who was even so figuring out how to pb.

"If you'd said, 'Is this guy going to run for president?' I think we all would have smiled," MacFadyen says.

Settling In Vermont

Equally a child growing upwards in New York Urban center, Sanders developed a fascination with Vermont past mode of existent estate brochures and a small storefront the state had set up in the city to heave tourism.

Sanders recalled in a June 2022 interview with NPR that he and his brother would pick upwardly the brochures and look at the farms for sale.

After college, in the mid-1960s, Sanders, his so-wife and brother pooled together money and bought a piece of land in Middlesex, nigh 6 miles north of the state capital of Montpelier.

"We had never been to Vermont in our lives; we just collection upwards," Sanders told NPR. "We bought 85 acres for $two,500. How's that? But it was woodland."

Sanders stayed occasionally in a converted maple carbohydrate house on the Middlesex holding. But it was far to the north, in the town of Stannard, that Sanders put downward more than permanent Vermont roots.

...

In belatedly 1971, Sanders was invited past his sometime friend Jim Rader to a convention of the Liberty Union Party at Goddard College.

Liberty Spousal relationship opposed the Vietnam War and was trying to go a viable tertiary party in Vermont. The state was seeing an influx of young people, a demographic shift that afterward became known equally the "hippie invasion."

Sanders wasn't a hippie. Merely he was anti-war and had an intense interest in politics, and so he went along.

Rader says the Liberty Union convention had already selected a candidate for the U.S. Business firm, "and then the question was: 'Well, nosotros don't have a candidate for Senate; is there everyone who is willing to run for Senate?' "

In that location was a interruption, Rader says, and then Bernie Sanders held upwards his hand.

"Bernie certainly surprised me, and I have the sense, maybe fifty-fifty surprised himself, by volunteering," Rader recalls.

Nearly 45 years later, Sanders holds that first part he sought. It didn't come up chop-chop.

Sanders lost that first race for Senate, as well as a 1974 race for Senate and a 1976 race for governor, never breaking more than than 6 percent. In 1979, he broke with the Freedom Union.

In his book, Outsider in the House, he explains why. He says it was a painful decision, but that the small third party wasn't attracting members, energy or leadership.

Though he's shirked political party status since, Sanders' friends say some of the political themes he stressed in his Liberty Union campaigns are elements of his presidential bid.

"I think what motivates Bernie is a passionate desire for justice, and especially economic justice," says Huck Gutman, an English professor at the University of Vermont and one of Sanders' closest friends and advisers.

"[Information technology'due south] non so different from his Liberty Union days, proverb the country is not fair, nosotros've got to endeavour and exercise something through the ballot box."

But in that location is ane primal difference between Sanders the fringe third-party candidate and the political contained who after won races for mayor and Congress.

Garrison Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, says the Liberty Union Party, like many in the counterculture left of the 1960s and '70s, was never nigh winning elections.

"They don't desire to win, because if you win you're gonna take to govern," Nelson says. "And they don't desire to govern. They don't want to exist responsible for annihilation. It'southward much more fun to make the speeches and sit down and have coffee with your buddies."

Richard Sugarman, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont, became friends with Sanders during his Liberty Union days. He says that by the end of the 1970s, Sanders believed the Liberty Matrimony party had run its course.

"I think he realized that ... Liberty Wedlock had exhausted their primary purpose, which was anti-Vietnam War. And it was over!" Sugarman says. "And Bernie, unlike many people on the left ... was never one to be disappointed past a good outcome."

After Sanders left Freedom Union, in the cold wintertime of 1980 and '81, snow piled on in Burlington.

Burlington'south Mayor

Burlington in 1981 was a stratified urban center, geographically and economically. The wealthy neighborhoods sat atop a large hill, with views of the sun setting across Lake Champlain, behind New York's Adirondack Mountains.

In 1981, when Sanders was elected, the poorer of the city's almost 38,000 lived in wood-frame houses clustered at the human foot of the hill, virtually the lake. This, Sugarman remembers, is what led to the plowing problems at the end of the winter in 1981.

"At that time, the plowing always went from the top of the hill to the bottom," Sugarman said. "And information technology would seem to exist income based, frankly, at to the lowest degree to some extent."

Sugarman had noticed that equally a tertiary-political party candidate running for governor, Sanders had done pretty well in the working-class sections of Burlington.

"I always thought he could win it," he said. "But I was the merely i, including him, I believe."

Burlington at the time was a community in transition. A modest town past national standards, it is Vermont's largest city. Major manufacture — including fabric plants — had left the area. Its downtown shopping district was struggling to compete with a ring of suburban malls.

The metropolis is now a cosmopolitan, gentrified enclave, home to a thriving high-tech manufacture. Some native Vermonters like to joke that the best matter almost Burlington is that it's so close to Vermont.

Only ane part of the city that hasn't inverse much in 35 years is Metropolis Hall Park, a small green space with a lawn scuffed bare and seagulls circling overhead.

Sitting on a park bench, former paper reporter Scott MacKay recalls a sleepy college town with a Democratic Party losing its nearly-total control over city regime.

"A couple of things happened," MacKay recalls. "You had a mayor named Gordon Paquette, who wanted a last term. Now there were a lot of younger people in the Autonomous Political party who said he's over the hill; he'southward over. Merely they decided not to challenge him."

Paquette dismissed Sanders every bit the fringe candidate he had been when he ran those quixotic campaigns under the Freedom Wedlock banner.

"They took Sanders for granted," MacKay says. "In that location was one quote, I'll never forget, that Mayor Paquette said, 'Oh, he's nada, he just talks about the Rockefellers all the time.' "

...

"Bernie Sanders ran the city in a coalition with the Republicans," Sanders ally John Franco says. "Yous know, I tell that to people from out of state and they think I'grand crazy."

Sanders worked during his showtime year without key staff to run the metropolis.

"Nosotros had to do ii metropolis budgets with volunteers sitting around a kitchen tabular array in a rented flat," Franco says.

Those budgets got the attention of Republicans, who could appreciate the discipline Sanders brought to the city budget.

"Bernie's fiscal direction and updating of city management and regime had real attraction to the Republicans," Franco says. "The Democrats wouldn't deal with us at all. They were just so mad that we had beaten Gordon Paquette they wouldn't speak to us."

In Burlington, Sanders also learned the value of well-plowed streets and filling potholes. Businessman Pat Robins says Sanders brought a staff of professionals to City Hall.

"And they did a peachy task in fixing the city's finances, which were pretty shoddy at the fourth dimension, quite frankly," Robins adds.

...

Sanders' four terms as mayor of Burlington gave him the name recognition needed for another statewide run.

In 1986, Sanders ran for governor and lost to the Democratic incumbent every bit well as the Republican, Peter Smith.

In 1988, Sanders faced Smith again, this time in a race for Vermont's one seat in the U.South. House of Representatives. Smith won, just the results this time were surprising; Sanders got more votes than the Democrat in the race, Paul Poirier.

In 1990 Sanders challenged Smith over again. This time, the Democrats put up only token opposition, and Smith fabricated some costly mistakes, including support for a ban on assail rifles.

Sanders so won the endorsement of the National Burglarize Association.

"The NRA, the only time I think they e'er endorsed him, said we'd rather have somebody who tells us the truth than somebody who lies to united states of america," remembers Sanders' friend Gutman.

Bernie Sanders Goes To Washington

Smith also launched a series of negative ads tardily in the campaign including one accusing Sanders of favoring the communist Castro regime in Cuba. The strategy backfired.

In November 1990 a gleeful Sanders announced the results.

"Nosotros won a neat victory in Rutland," Sanders said to a auspicious oversupply. "And if you can believe this, our friends in Windham County are giving us Brattleboro 2 to 1."

Sanders — who came of age in the era of the New Deal, overhearing worried parents fighting over money, who'd spent well-nigh a decade in office pushing an calendar of social and economic justice and human rights — was going to Washington.

Once in Congress, Sanders again had to practice some on-the-job grooming. He had never been a legislator, and in D.C., he had no party affiliation. At start Democrats refused to allow him into their caucus. Later on, later on they lost control to the Republicans in 1995 under so-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, they decided they needed Sanders' vote.

Always since, Sanders has caucused with the Democrats and earned seniority in the congressional system, even though he was not a member of either party.

In 2006, when Sanders ran for an open U.S. Senate seat, he pulled in more twice as many votes equally his opponent. In 2012, he was re-elected with 71 percentage of the vote.

An Independent In Congress

Information technology's a hot summer afternoon as Sanders jumps on the hugger-mugger train that connects the Dirksen Senate Role Building with the Capitol. He'southward headed to the Senate chamber to cast a vote on 1 of the many bills he has considered during his career.

In Congress, Sanders has been known for, and worked hardest on, bug that have been close to him since his days in Brooklyn, Chicago and Burlington.

Oft, he has urged his colleagues to address the result of income inequality.

In a 2006 Senate entrada debate, Sanders insisted that his programme to raise taxes on wealthy people was non an effort to penalize the rich.

"It's a question of creating a society in which all of us are in together, in which we take responsibility to make sure that all of our people have at least a minimal standard of living," he said. "Frankly, from both a moral and an economic perspective, giving tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires when so many people in our society are hurting is incorrect."

On December. 10, 2010, Sanders' bulletin of income inequality finally reached a national audience.

At x:25 a.g., he rose to speak on the Senate floor. The target: President Obama's programme to extend the Bush-league-era income tax cuts on everyone, including the wealthy. So many people tuned in to Sanders' filibuster that the Senate's Spider web servers crashed.

He didn't sit until seven p.m.

"We should be embarrassed that we are not investing in our infrastructure, that we're not breaking upwards these large financial institutions, that we're not putting a cap on involvement rates," he said during the daylong speech. "That we are the only state in the world that does non have health care for all of their people in major countries. We should be embarrassed!"

Despite Sanders' lengthy oration, the tax package was overwhelmingly adopted and signed into law by President Obama.

...

Erstwhile NPR Political Manager Ken Rudin now runs the Political Junkie Podcast. Rudin has reported on Congress for several decades.

"The years in the House, from '91 to 2006, he was seen equally a gadfly," Rudin says of Sanders' early years in Washington. "Uncompromising, you know, played to his ain tune. He seems to have done some kind of change since he came to the Senate."

As a senator, Rudin says, Sanders takes a serious arroyo to dealing with issues — different some onetime members of the bedroom.

"They called Hubert Humphrey practicing 'the politics of joy.' There's no happy, at that place'due south no joy with Bernie Sanders," Rudin says. "The issues he cares about — he securely cares almost — are serious problems and he'southward not somebody who merely takes the fourth dimension to just schmooze. ... He doesn't know how long he has to accomplish what he wants to accomplish, and he'southward not about to waste any time."

A 'Political Revolution' Presidential C ampaign

Sanders and his base aren't in agreement on every issue. Nor is their dialogue always civil. Sanders can go touchy with critics — even on the campaign trail.

In Phoenix this summertime, when members of the Black Lives Affair movement disrupted his voice communication, Sanders was visibly irritated and tried to talk through their chanting.

In 2014, after the Israeli government sent troops into Gaza, things got heated at a town hall meeting in rural Cabot, Vt. Some members of the audience repeatedly interrupted Sanders, shouting at him about his opinion on Israel.

Announcing his presidential entrada before a oversupply of around 5,500 people in May, Sanders addressed "brothers and sisters" in the oversupply and invoked "a political revolution." Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

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Win McNamee/Getty Images

Announcing his presidential campaign before a crowd of around 5,500 people in May, Sanders addressed "brothers and sisters" in the crowd and invoked "a political revolution."

Win McNamee/Getty Images

The Burlington-based newspaper Seven Days reported that the meeting became so tense that Sanders' Senate staff called the land police. Country troopers responded and stayed for the balance of the meeting, but their presence didn't put a finish to the interruptions.

Sanders didn't evade questions well-nigh the conflict, though. When i activist pressed him to be harder on State of israel for civilian casualties and considering "State of israel blockades, besieges and bombs a stateless people who are cutting off from the earth," Sanders began to describe the way he sees the situation.

Equally he delivered his respond, someone in the crowd cutting him off, arguing with his label of the state of affairs.

"OK, i second — at present I don't desire to exist interrupted," Sanders said calmly. "The question was asked, it'south a fair question, I'1000 trying to —" Sanders said before again being cut off by shouts from the audience. He tried to respond a few more times, but one man connected yelling.

Finally, Sanders snapped.

"Excuse me, close upwards!" Sanders fired back. "You lot don't have the microphone."

Regina Troiano, who has known Sanders since his visits to Stannard, was at the meeting. She says she had never seen anything like that happen earlier.

"It was very upsetting," she says, "and in that situation the people were extremely rude. Mr. Sanders always takes questions and always answers people and he was speaking and they would not allow him to speak. It was rude."

Sanders' outburst was uncharacteristic — even for a senator with a reputation for being short. But friends and staff know Sanders isn't ever patient.

"Well, I think he is impatient," says Gutman, Sanders' shut friend.

Gutman says he learned long agone that with Sanders, he never has to say anything twice. That'due south because "he'south a skilful listener," Gutman says, "and he gets impatient if I repeat it again."

Gutman says he thinks Sanders' impatience comes with his work ethic.

"He wants to movement forward and get things done and he really doesn't want to hear people say the same matter once again," Gutman says. "That's because he hears it the first fourth dimension. That's my sense."

...

Thirty-iv years after he was elected mayor at the end of a snowy Burlington wintertime, Sen. Bernie Sanders stood under the chirapsia dominicus on a May afternoon at the edge of Lake Champlain.

"Today," he said to thousands of supporters, "here in our minor state — a state that has led the nation in so many ways — I am proud to announce my candidacy for president of the Usa of America."

The words of the spoken language were characteristically energized, and they had that ring of radicalism; he addressed "brothers and sisters" in the crowd and invoked "a political revolution."

The lessons of social justice learned during childhood have stuck for a lifetime. The oratory of Eugene Debs seems to ring in Sanders' ears.

There take been compromises; the longtime independent chose to run as a Democrat. Hillary Clinton would use that, saying she is the "true" Democrat.

Sanders has not lost an ballot in more than a quarter-century, but the 74-year-old still isn't satisfied; the sense of social and economic justice he'south held for so long has pushed him to try to win the biggest race of his life.

Read VPR's total story: Becoming Bernie: His Rise And His Record

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2015/11/03/452912856/becoming-bernie-the-6-chapters-of-sanders-life

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